Never Show Fear to a Competent E-5 with Time on Their Hands

I never really understood the term “Love Hate Relationship” until I had to stand watch.

You hear the phrase standing, setting, or relieving the watch quite a lot in the military, especially in the sea going services. There’s deck watch, fire watch, reflash watch, OPCEN watch, detainee watch, ATFP, JOOD/QMOW, flight follower, among many, many others.

Then you start getting into schedules your vocabulary gets even weirder sounding to civilians; doubles, one-in-five rotation vs one-in-six, four to eights vs mids, late sleepers and mid-rats, pass down, chow relief, roving vs post…

Lastly are the various “officers” that are responsible for the watch. Deck watch officer (DWO) or Officer of the Deck (OOD), is typically the poor jerk put in charge of everything while the unit Commanding Officer (CO) goes off to do CO things. Endless paperwork I’m told. Shore units will have a Command Duty Officer (CDO) but their function is largely the same. DWO and CDO aren’t always commissioned officers either. The Coast Guard is so shorthanded that DWO/CDO rotation almost always has enlisted personnel. Sometimes they’re as low a rank as E-5 if the poor non-com in question has proven themselves capable… or if the unit loses half their qualified people and they need bodies with room temp IQs. The Petty Officer of the Watch is the enlisted guy they stick out on guard duty, usually unarmed, and barely trained on what to do if someone does attack their post.

If none of that made sense, good. It means you’re still sane. If did make sense, well it’s too late for you, welcome to the family.

At MFPU Kings bay I stood behind a machine gun for a year or two then sat at the console for a remotely operated cannon. I was watching for anyone dumb enough to take a poke at the ballistic missile submarines we were escorting. The Russians showed up a few times to see what they could see then moved on. The Brits came to party and test fired a missile with a dud warhead. I just watched.

Good times.

The only tense moment I had was when a bass boat came out of the marsh right into the middle of the escort package. It was low tide, so all the vessels were compressed into the narrow channel. The bass boat was completely hidden by marsh grass until it popped out of the creek directly in front of my M2 machine gun at point blank range. Thankfully the driver had the presence of mind to slam the motor in reverse and back down. Both he and his passenger put their hands up as the expensive fishing rig grounded itself in a mud bank. Not only was I watching I was yelling at my radio, the boat driver, my loader… pretty much everyone. Not such a good time.

Aboard the cutter I stood watch in the OPCEN dividing my attention between a radar screen and a chat stream on our secure channel, watching for contacts, watching for instructions, watching the ocean through a grainy low resolution thermal camera. Target orders almost always came during the mid-watch between 0000 and 0400. Sometimes the chat servers would go down we had to crank all the radios to near max volume just in case someone decided to call us that way. Four hours of listening to static and solar radiation playing hell with our HF comms. When we did eventually get orders, I had to plot a course and time to intercept from our position then, call our OPS Lieutenant to let him know we’d been tasked.

Often I sought relief from the boredom by playing with the radar console. I figured out I could put training contacts on the bridge display without OOD knowing it wasn’t real. When on radar watch you are supposed to be looking for CBDR (Closing Bearing Decreasing Range) contacts that might breach the two nautical mile perimeter the captain laid out in his standing orders. If a contact gets too close or looks like it will, the DWO is supposed to wake the captain.

So, knowing the ensigns were afraid to wake the “old man” I would set up a medium sized contact on a high speed CBDR course. About 500 yards out from the perimeter I’d drop the contact from the screen then listen to confusion and frustration on the bridge directly over the OPCEN. The deck plates were thin and on quiet nights I could almost make out their conversations. About 30 seconds later the panicked Ensign would call down to ask if I’d seen the contact. At which point I’d play dumb and sleepy.

I did this for months before they caught on. I was called many unkind things, refused to apologize to any of the junior officers, and promised to do much worse at the first opportunity. If you are in a military leadership role, never show fear to a competent E-5 with time on their hands. They were put there by God to test you.

I also stood JOOD/QMOW (Junior Officer of the Deck / Quartermaster of the Watch), which is a navigation watch on the bridge of a cutter. Its almost always a Boatswains Mate that stands in that position but anyone can be trained to do it. You stand at chart table and plot a position fix every thirty minute the old fashion way with paper charts, compass, dividers, graphite “pens”, and all the other nautical accoutrement you see in stock photos of boat things. You plotted a fix, called it out, made a course change recommendation, which the OOD ignored, then logged it. Only to do it again in 30 minutes making sure to check the weather at the top of the hour.

During the day in calm seas it could be quite relaxing, almost zen. At night, I had some of the weirdest conversations of my life with shipmates just to stay awake. I’d scratch lines on well-worn charts in lurid red light while staying tucked behind a black out curtain like the Wizard of Oz.

In rough weather, day or night, I alternated between catching stuff falling off shelves and table, and vomiting into a bag, all while balancing because my hands were too busy to hold on to a wall. The horizon was a line I only caught glimpses of in the windows as it passed by on its way up or down with the heaving ship. That high up in the bridge all the motion is exaggerated, like being in the top of a tree on a windy day. Yet somehow, there were days in rough weather where I still got bored with it all. You can only dry heave so many times before it gets routine.

In port we stood Quarter deck watch, which was a good time for studying and introspection. I preferred the four-to-eights. Nothing really happened between 0330 when you relieved the watch and 0730 when you were relieved. In the afternoon, everyone had gone home at 1330 and you had time to get in a PT session between your relief at 1530 and evening chow. I watched a lot of pretty sunsets and sunrises while reading or listening to the radio.

Overall, I hated standing watch because you were stuck in one place with little to do but… watch. If everything went to hell in a handbasket you were expected to stand that watch until it became physically too dangerous.

I also weirdly, secretly, loved it too because that’s when things happened. Sometimes you came a breath away from turning a bass boat and its passengers into a cloud of fiberglass dust and bologna mist. Other times you were seasick for days while you tracked your course through the Graveyard of the Pacific, praying the next wave didn’t punch in the windows. Or maybe you got to be on the quarter deck when your drunk shipmates staggard back to the ship holding one another up and telling you stories you knew they’d regret in morning.

Most times though, you just watched.

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This first appeared in The Havok Journal on May 8, 2024.

K.C. Aud has made a career of being lucky and has managed to find something positive in nearly every poor decision he’s ever made, even if it was only a new perspective on how not to do something.

Enlisting in the U.S. Coast Guard in 2010 he became an Operations Specialist (radio and navigation) and did his first tour in Georgia guarding submarines from drunk fishermen. In 2014, tired of the heat and the bugs he transferred to a 210-foot medium endurance cutter in Washington state. The cutter then regularly deployed to the hot and buggy west coast of Central America to hunt down drug runners. Aboard USCGC Active he traveled 94,194 miles and personally handled enough cocaine to keep a small country high for a decade. Somewhere in there, he learned to write, if not spell.  

Three years later, daunted by the prospect of spending the rest of his career in a windowless command center, he separated from active duty. After 13 different jobs ranging from beer brewer to dairy farmhand, to machinist, to Navy civilian contractor, he reenlisted in 2020 as a Coast Guard reservist, changing rates to Maritime Law Enforcement Specialist. When not helping the Navy assets in the Puget Sound troubleshoot radios, he’s on drill in Seattle doing water cop stuff and or flailing away at his keyboard. Though married and now a father, he misses the mission. 

As the Voice of the Veteran Community, The Havok Journal seeks to publish a variety of perspectives on a number of sensitive subjects. Unless specifically noted otherwise, nothing we publish is an official point of view of The Havok Journal or any part of the U.S. government.