The Corpse of My Esprit de Corps

“The service will never love you as much as you love it.” – Unknown.

I can’t find the source of that quote, and I’ve heard it used in the Coast Guard, other military branches, and first responder agencies. It’s said in other ways like “serve at the needs of the service” or “they’re called orders, not requests” or something similar.

My earliest memory of hearing it was in 2011, it was a first-class petty officer (E6) at MFPU Kings Bay, down in Saint Marys Georgia. Though he’d never admit it, he was rather disillusioned and burned out. It made an impression on me as a brand new third-class (E4) with less than a year in the service. To be graphically blunt, it dragged my enthusiasm and esprit de corps out onto the parade ground and shot it in the head.

A little over a year later that first class was gone and I got to attend the retirement ceremony for a BM2 (second class boatswains mate, E5) who asked if everyone could show up in civilian clothes. He was the only one there in dress blues. He was being forced out at 20 years as a second-class petty officer because the service was in the middle of an “up or out” campaign. He stood there with tears in his eyes and told us that if he could get up every day of his life and keep putting on the uniform he would do so until he died. The decaying corpse of my espirit de corps stirred a little but didn’t get up.

Years later after turning my career around, getting some perspective, and realizing the Coast Guard was never going to give me a shot at an officer’s uniform, let alone flight school, I walked away with pride in what I’d accomplished and in the skills I’d learned. I eventually joined the reserves in a rate that better suited my temperament. I can still feel some accomplishment in not being too proud to start over as non-rate (E3) at 35.

I didn’t love the service, but I didn’t hate it out right either.

Betrayal hurts the most when it’s by someone you thought you could trust

The events of this spring and summer have beaten down the quiet pride I managed to cultivate. Hatred is back on deck for potential deployment.

If you haven’t read up on Operation Fouled Anchor (OFA) the short version is that Coast Guard Investigative Service (CGIS) spent years digging into decades of sexual assaults at the Coast Guard Academy, and then into the cover up of those assaults by academy staff. The investigation concluded in 2020, the same year I reenlisted in the reserves. Congress didn’t hear about it until CNN broke the story in 2023. As a Victim Advocate, I wasn’t surprised by the investigation or reports of sexual assault. I was shocked into silence when I learned how extensive the cover up was and how the victims were dealt with; specifically, the illegal non-disclosure agreements used to suppress their testimonies. Where the hell was the Honor, Respect, and Devotion to Duty? Didn’t they hammer those words into recruits and cadets until we were muttering it in our sleep? What the FUCK was going on up there at the highest levels of command?

I naively thought, hoped, that now it was out in the open, our first female head of a U.S. Military service would take steps to correct our course and make hard changes. I wrote about my experiences as a Victim Advocate, got that pain and anger off my chest. A year passed and the news cycle washed OFA down the line. Ukraine was still at war and Trump was making headlines.

May of this year an anonymous email was sent to all of Coast Guard District 8 from a person calling themselves Whistler McGee. In the email they outlined, in graphic detail, the way the command staff at Sector Mobile, in Alabama, essentially suppressed the report of sexual assault at the unit and told the victim to keep quiet. To put that in perspective McGee emailed everyone from the Admiral in charge of the entire district all the way down to the newest recruit. Also included in that email was the Commandant of the Coast Guard, Admiral Linda Fagan, among other senior leaders at the highest levels of the service. W. McGee named names, describe what they did to the victim, and how leadership did its best to keep the whole event off the radar. The email was deleted within an hour of it being sent.

Hours later a Facebook page for Whistler McGee was created where the email was posted in full. In an interview W. McGee said they’d planned on creating the Facebook page and just leaving it up. Soon sexual assault victims from across the Coast Guard started sending in their testimonies for W. McGee to publish. More names, dates, units were posted for the world to see. The testimonies talked about how the service drummed the victims out while allowing their attackers to stay in, or simply sidelined their careers to make them give up.

Not long after another page titled The Pettiest of Officers was created to publish even more stories of assault, abuse, and cover ups. Since its creation that page has expanded to publish stories from the other branches as well.

The W. McGee email came on the heels of the Reserve Master Chief of the Coast Guard being relieved of his duties. The details about his 40 year career long history of sexual abuse of his subordinates eventually came to light through yet more testimonies.

I don’t know if it was morbid curiosity but I read through story after story hoping and praying I didn’t find a name I recognized. I don’t know what would have been worse, finding a victim I knew and worked with, or finding out someone I’d called a shipmate was a rapist in their spare time. At some point I just closed my laptop, feeling hollow and sick to my stomach.

June of this year, almost on the anniversary of the CNN story, the lead Sexual Assault Response Coordinator (SARC) at the Coast Guard Academy, Shannon Norenberg, resigned from her position and made a public statement titled,  “The Coast Guard Used Me to Lie to Victims of Sexual Assault at the Coast Guard Academy as Part of their Operation Fouled Anchor Coverup. I Can No Longer Be Part of this System.” It was another bombshell event for the service. High level civilians quit all the time, but they didn’t set their desks on fire as they walked out the door.

I went through the Victim Advocate training back in 2016 and worked closely with the district SARC out of Seattle on a couple of cases. I was always impressed at how dedicated the SARCs were to their mission and victims they helped. To have the most visible SARC in the entire service up and quit with a public statement on how the Coast Guard failed, and broke the law… it was like learning in your thirties that a beloved family member was a child molester that never got around to you. I debated leaving the reserves the next time I reported to drill.

I check the social media pages devoted to the testimonies from sexual assault victims every few days now. The victims were brave enough to put their names and experiences out there, someone needs to read them. It is the least a shipmate can do. They need to be heard. Hell they need to carved into stones to build a monument to their survival on the front lawn of the academy. Each one I read is like a punch in the gut. I still haven’t recognized any names yet.  

Love and lost, or never loved at all

Should a service be loved? If so many terrible things were going while you blindly plowed forward, can you still take pride in that service, in the missions? I spent my entire time on active duty trying to become an officer so I could fly helicopters, be a leader out there on the edge. The entire time I bitched and moaned about my Officer Candidate School applications being denied, my change of rate applications being denied, and complained about how much I hated being a comms guy… all while senior leadership was committing atrocities left and right with no consequences, while victims were silenced and drummed out.  

I just don’t know any more. I feel like an accomplice by association. Love will never be an option again, and pride is a non-starter. Should I hate it instead? Hate the service because it allowed monsters to achieve positions of power and leadership? I am sick with dread knowing many of the perpetrators of the atrocities are still serving unpunished; that many more will get away with it before this is all over.

The Coast Guard is like a ship that’s gone too long between drydock intervals and the rust has gotten into its bones. You peel back the cladding on pipes and insulation on bulk heads and you can’t see the valves or bolts or seams for all the crystalized, flaking, red brown metal.

Between active duty and the reserves, I spent a year working for a launch company in the Puget Sound. Most of that time was in the shipyard holding a needle gun blasting away rust or a paint brush covering up what the owners were too cheap to fix. Sometimes we’d find so many pockets of rust in a hull section or structural piece we’d have to cut away several feet of steel until we found enough solid metal to weld to. We put those boats back in the water knowing full well we didn’t find all the rust.

I feel like all these testimonies and accusations are like that needle gun chasing the rust pockets, looking for a few inches of good metal worth saving. A crew might have loved their ship for a time, but somewhere along the line they end up with more patches than ship. She’s not seaworthy anymore. No matter how much they might care, at that point it is time to tow her out to deep water and turn her into a reef.

Right now, I want so very badly to just write the Coast Guard off as a loss, sell off the assets, and give the various missions to partner agencies. Yet the idea of sinking the ship, of scuttling the entire Coast Guard as a whole, goes against my damage control training like a rasp being pulled the wrong way over an axe blade. “DON’T GIVE UP THE SHIP” is printed in big bold letters on our damage control sign-off packets.  

I can’t give up the ship knowing there is still potential for something positive; there may be enough good metal left in the hull and frames to save it.

In reading about all events over the last three months I came across a reason for hope. Dr. Kimberly McLear, a retired Coast Guard commander, testified before congress in 2019 on racism, sexual violence, and hazing within the service. Since then, she has created a coalition call Right the Ship to try and effect positive change in the Coast Guard. If you have the time, go look up her story and mission. It has motivated me to I am to go back and recertify as a Victim Advocate for my unit next year.

I’m not going to lie, things are bleak right now. Given how things have been handled so far I don’t have a lot of faith that the victims will see justice, or even closure. That said, I will be supporting Dr. McLear and keep hoping that all this misery will be the start of something better.

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This first appeared in The Havok Journal on August 14, 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.