Rescue Warriors

by David Helvarg

  The morning after their arrival, the fifty-six new recruits are marched onto the second floor of Sexton Hall, named for Charles Sexton, a Coastie medic who died after trying to administer first aid aboard the fishing vessel Sea King when it capsized and sank near the mouth of the Columbia River in 1991. The Coast Guard’s “Core Values”—“Honor, Respect, Devotion to Duty”—are painted in black letters on the room’s white walls. The recruits are still in gray tees and blue sweatpants. They won’t get their blue ODU (Operational Dress Uniform) work clothes for another day. They won’t get to eat at the galley till tonight, after they’ve learned how to march and eat Coast Guard fashion.

  Chief Dougherty, who’s in charge of Sexton Hall, makes sure the recruits are given bag lunches and fruit drinks. He holds up a drink.

  “Take these beverages and put them down and then sit down,” he orders. “Sir, yes, sir!” they shout, lining up at tables where questionnaires are being handed out.

  “Take these forms, write your name, last name, and middle initial, put your age, weight, your company is K17S. Again, eyes on me! When we come around you will stand behind your bench. You will then have the bench pushed in with your dominant hand out and fingers spread. I’ll give you your wrist size and you will line up for your weight and height. When you get to this aisle—this break in the tables—you will take your shoes off and step on the scale. You will put the shoes down next to the scale before being weighed. You will then put your back to the bulkhead and you will stand tall and proud for your height measurement. Sit down.” There’s a loud shuffling of benches. “Put your bag lunch in front of you [swish, swish]. Start eating until I come to your table.”

  As he gets to each table, the recruits rise and march to the petty officers waiting at the scale. “Put your pen in your left sock,” one of them orders a young recruit. “We do not want you to hurt yourself falling with a pen in your hand.”

  While it can seem like unnecessary harassment to the new recruits, they’re actually entering a highly structured program designed to get them fit, focused, and team oriented in a relatively short period of time.

  Week one’s indoctrination is followed by a complex pattern of recruit qualification standards to be learned (like time management for your average eighteen-year-old), required knowledge (drills, CPR, nautical terms), incentive training (including physical fitness), remedial instruction, classroom instruction, and exams. This will keep recruits busy from five in the morning till ten at night, every day for the next two months. They’ll join one of seven or eight companies housed in Monroe, Healy, and James halls, also named after Coast Guard heroes. In recent years, new towers or wings have been added to house female recruits so that mixed companies remain in close proximity.

  I end up spending most of my time with Lima Company, which, in its fourth week, is halfway through the training cycle. Their company commander is Chief Petty Officer Louis Bevilacqua, a bullet-headed thirty-seven-year-old, about five-nine, trim, with dark glasses, the big Smokey the Bear hat, and the rough look of an ex-felon, though he’s actually spent the last fifteen years in the service, most recently inspecting lighthouses off the coast of Maine.

  He’s assisted by Petty Officers Second Class Craig Faw and Dave Knapp, both in their late twenties. Dave is a former Army reservist married to another Coastie.

  The company has seventy-five recruits and is over 20 percent female. Like every class, it has to meet certain physical standards. Guys have to run 1.5 miles in 12 minutes 51 seconds or better, females in 15:26. Males have to be able to do twenty-nine push-ups and thirty-eight sit-ups, females fifteen and thirty-two. Everyone has to swim five hundred yards in under five minutes and tread water for five minutes in the center’s big fifty-meter pool (where they also have to don Mustang survival suits in two minutes and float in them for ten). Each week about 25 percent fail their requirements.

  “This generation is in terrible shape. We get people off the bus who can’t hold themselves up in push-up position,” Faw complains. We’re watching Lima’s recruits run around the outdoor track past a flock of disinterested Canada geese in the cool drizzle of a leaden afternoon.

  Inside the gym, a recruit comes up to Petty Officer Knapp wanting to go to the clinic for an ingrown toenail soak he’s missed. Another requests to run to the commissary for a razor. He’s told no candy or soda, “and don’t try to drink it outside real fast.”

  Another has gashed her head on a changing room locker (a small gash) and is holding a paper towel to the cut. An EMT team arrives with a gurney. One of them suggests she not cough into the wet paper towel and then reapply it to her head.

  Faw is tracking his recruits’ scores. Mustafa did thirty-two push-ups, Naavercut one, Williamson nine, Woods thirty-five, Kissinger twenty . . .

  Next, they’re marched off to class, where the other Petty Officer Knapp (Dave’s twenty-one-year-old wife, Samantha) will coach them for their midterms on topics such as service missions, chain of command, and ranks. The classes are geared to an eighth-grade comprehension level.

  D

  ave has returned to the third floor of James Hall, where Lima lives. He’s searching for “scoosh” powder (an abrasive cleaner). He knocks on the door of one of the female towers. “Male on deck,” he announces before entering the empty squad bay with its six double bunks. He finds the powder in a cleaning closet and goes into their head (bathroom). Taking orange pump soaps off the metal shelves, he unscrews the tops and starts splashing the goopy liquid across the mirrors and sinks. He throws paper towels into the sinks and turns on the taps to soak them. He then tosses the soaking paper towels around, shakes the scoosh powder in the showers and toilets, and toilet papers the stalls like it’s Halloween.

  “When they live aboard a boat and live like pigs they’ll get sick. This will help educate them.” He grins. “And hey, I’m not gonna lie. It’s fun to do.”

  We move on to one of the male heads that is less well kept, with water stains on the sinks, toilets less than spotless, and underwear hanging on towel hooks. “Typically males are a lot dirtier than females,” he admits, splashing the liquid soap around and trying to bomb the shower room with a plastic container of powder that fails to explode the way he’d like. He attempts to finger-paint CLEAN ME in orange liquid soap on the mirrors. He looks out the window and sees CC Bevilacqua bringing the recruits back. We rush to trash the other two squad bay bathrooms before they return.

  “They were supposed to be gone half an hour. Unfortunately, that doesn’t give us time to destroy their squad bays,” Dave explains regretfully.

  We return to the quarterdeck, the racetrack-like central hall with its glass-enclosed stairwell, bulletin boards, and CC offices. The recruits are run up the stairs and back to their bays.

  “Do not transit my quarterdeck with a pen in your hand,” Chief Bevilacqua warns one of them.

  “Smith! This is not college. Do not walk around with one strap of your rucksack on. You have two straps. Use them both,” Faw warns another.

  “Weygand,” Dave Knapp barks.

  “Weygand, Weygand, Weygand,” the recruits in the bays repeat till we hear her shouting, “Female transiting,” as she fast-steps through the male squad bay and braces in front of him. She’s in charge of one of the squads cleaning the area.

  “Weygand, explain why the tops of these bulletin boards are dusty.” He runs a finger above one and shows her the evidentiary smidgen of dust. “Is this acceptable?

  “No, PO Knapp.”

  “Are we going to correct this?

  “Yes, PO Knapp. Aye, aye.”

  “Well, let’s do it.” He then shouts to let them all know they have twenty minutes to undo his “White Tornado” trashing of their heads. It’s also one of the remedial instruction drills every company gets to experience in the third or fourth week.

  A recruit braces and asks permission to go to the clinic for an appointment.

  “Why?” Bevilacqua asks.

  “They removed . . .�
� He begins to point to his cheek.

  “We all understand English. You don’t need to point,” he’s told.

  “They removed a tumor from my cheek and wish to do a follow-up exam, Chief Petty Officer Bevilacqua.”

  “Fine. Sign out and go directly to the clinic.”

  I wander back to one of the bathrooms to find a dozen recruits scrubbing and cleaning away as a team.

  Back on the quarterdeck Faw tells me Recruit Salinas is having “sign-in and sign-out problems.” Bevilaqua has her braced against the wall.

  “I did this remedial last week,” she says.

  “I don’t care. Shut your mouth!” he screams into her face. Speaking out of turn is strongly discouraged among the recruits.

  “Jeckel,” Knapp calls out. “Jeckel, Jeckel, Jeckel,” the call reverberates through the bays.

  Jeckel has to fill out a page of forms because he wrote over the line. He has to fill one line (taped to the chicken-wire-embedded glass of the stairwell), then run around the racetrack and fill out the next line till he completes the sheet. Recruit Lowe has to do fifty laps around the quarterdeck because he was late to formation.

  Dave Knapp is now in his office playing tapes of Army Airborne cadences. “I just try to learn them and then use Coast Guard words when we march,” he explains.

  On the quarterdeck four recruits are reading out loud from the Coast Guard Manual. In one of the adjacent squad bays they’re passing web bags full of laundry.

  “We just like to have a kind of controlled chaos.” Dave smiles.

  “Why’d you fail your push-ups?” Faw asks another recruit.

  “My arm cramped up.”

  “Is that what you’re going to tell the parents of some kid who died, who you were supposed to save from drowning but he died and you’ll tell them, ‘Sorry, I couldn’t rescue him because my leg cramped up?’ ”

  A squad leader named Herder approaches Faw. “Petty Officer, we found a gun casing in the squad bay.” He hands over a casing from a 9 mm round.

  “Someone probably took it back from the range as a souvenir and then left it in their clothing when it went to the laundry,” Faw postulates after the recruit leaves.

  In week six, Dave tells me, they’ll take the recruits to the Cape May Boat Station and let them tour the 210-foot cutter and the 87-footers. “Week eight we’ll give them pillow talk, talk to them in our civvies and answer any questions they may have about life in the fleet.”

  Another group of recruits is now writing zeros with slashes through them in boxes formed by the chicken wire embedded in the stairwell glass.

  I

  wander down to the Seamanship Center close by the boat docks, where they have helm control simulators. Poles on the ceiling lower down so the recruits can practice knot tying. Outside there is a raised platform like a wooden dock with dolphins (metal stanchions) to practice heaving lines and tying up ships.

  I head off to dinner in town. I love beach towns on gray rainy evenings like this when they’ve shut down for the season and begin to take on a slower pace determined by the tides and the weather. The Guardian is playing at the old Beach Theater down by the waterfront dunes.

  “We all went to see it on our liberty day,” Samantha Crane, a twenty-year-old recruit graduating basic this week, tells me. “It was cool, seeing the movie and then looking down and seeing myself in a Coast Guard uniform. I had tears in my eyes, and I wasn’t the only one.”

  W

  hen I return to James Hall, I find another company conducting night drills out front. They’re snapping to with their “pieces”—old M-1 Garand rifles that have had their rods pulled and barrels filled with lead so that they now function as 9.5-pound ceremonial props. “Port arms, shoulder arms . . . one mike, two mike, three mike, four.”

  Inside, Dave Knapp and Craig Faw have taken charge for the evening. A recruit is doing push-ups on the floor. Another is braced against the wall with his piece held out arm’s length in front of him. On the far side of the quarterdeck, several recruits are staring at pictures of a ship taped to the glass. “Keep your eyes on the boat, shipmate. Shipmate, keep your eyes on the boat . . .”

  “Mustafa, give me article 6.”

  “Yes, PO Knapp.” Mustafa recites a pledge of loyalty to God and country.

  “Do you believe that?” Knapp asks.

  “Yes, PO Knapp.”

  “Because Coasties go to war every day. We never know when that container ship we’re boarding will blow up or some fisherman will pull a gun on you and you have to disarm him. That’s a pretty scary moment, looking at that gun as it’s pointed at you. You think you’ll be ready when something like that happens to you?” (Later Dave confesses that it wasn’t him but his wife this actually happened to.)

  In the squad bay to my left, recruits are sitting around polishing their boots. Others are working on their locker spaces under their mattresses.

  “Can I ask you a question?”

  The recruit’s eyes dart toward the hall.

  “It’s OK with the POs,” I assure him.

  “Yes, sir?”

  “How much space do you have in there?”

  He starts explaining the different compartments. “It’s about ten square feet,” his shipmate interrupts.

  “We literally have to fit our entire seabag in here,” the first guy grins.

  Squad leader Herder requests to speak privately with Petty Officer Knapp.

  “This is as private as it gets around here. What is it?”

  Herder tells him a shipmate’s wife is pregnant with their second child and wonders who he should contact about family reimbursements. Knapp tells him but also warns that the recruit shouldn’t expect he’ll get to call her.

  “He’s in boot camp now and has to keep focused on that,” Dave explains to me. “If he doesn’t pass, he won’t be in a position to provide for his family.”

  Recruit Kissinger is called on the quarterdeck to recite his piece nomenclature. He has memorized his gun’s parts but keeps falling asleep during the day.

  “How old are you?” Knapp asks him.

  “One niner.”

  Dave pulls a copy of the Navy Times from his office. “Here’s this Army PFC Christopher T. Blaney. He is just nineteen years old, and now he’s dead in Iraq. He’s never calling home. He’s never talking to his mom or dad again. He’ll never get married or have kids. Maybe he never had a drink. How does that make you feel? Are you going to stay awake?”

  Kissinger’s eyes are tearing up.

  “Why are you about to cry?” Dave asks curiously.

  “I don’t like to hear about people dying, Petty Officer Knapp.”

  “Me neither, but he did it, right? And he did it for his country, and you have to ask yourself, am I ready to die for my country, to die for some fisherman or some kid who you don’t know but is depending on your sacrifice? Are you willing to die so that others can live?”

  Meanwhile Craig Faw is explaining to Recruit Vallejo why she’s standing with a felt pen drawing slash marks through zeros on a glass window.

  “In the U.S. Coast Guard you slash your zeros. So if we want to find people lost in ten thousand square miles of ocean we don’t have to worry, ‘Did she say o when she meant zero?’ ”

  Dave goes into the port-side squad bay and stands up on a double bunk. All the recruits brace. “All present and accounted for,” he’s informed. Then they recite the Pledge of Allegiance louder than I’ve ever heard it said before.

  T

  wo days later, I’m talking with Louis Bevilacqua while his recruits are taking their midterms. “Last night we had a kid who snuck a cell phone in and they reported him, so that shows they’re starting to understand integrity,” he says. “We confronted him, and first he said he’d found it in the stairwell. We said we weren’t born yesterday, tell the truth. So he did and he’ll get a reversion [be set back] for one week. Otherwise, if he’d lied, that’s more serious, and he would have gotten probably three weeks.
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br />   “Another kid complained of a stomachache. We sent him to the clinic, and now he’s having his appendix out today, so he’ll start with a new company when he recovers.”

  He expects about 80 percent of the company will pass the open book exam. For those who don’t, there’s a makeup on Sunday. If 93 percent pass, they get to put a pennant on their company stick (banner pole).

  Before lighthouse tending, Bevilacqua sailed aboard the Polar Sea, an icebreaker. He traveled from Antarctica to the Arctic Circle and to Japan and Singapore. He’s sailed to Jakarta, Haiti, and New Caledonia with the Coast Guard, and also on a buoy tender on Long Island Sound. He did a tour on the Rush, a High Endurance Cutter doing fisheries patrols in the Bering Sea. He was on a boarding team that helped rescue a crew and then found out they were illegal migrants and busted them. “With fishermen and the Coast Guard it’s a love/hate thing,” he admits. He has a wife and three young kids but still comes across as a total hard-ass.

  I’m in the classroom as the recruits turn their exam books in to PO Samantha Knapp. The first two rows then report to the back of the class for cleanup detail. The others head off to gym for their Cybex weight machine class.

  Later, when I run into Louis Bevilacqua and Dave Knapp, they’re looking pleased. They tell me all their recruits passed the exam, with six or seven scoring 100. The lowest score was an 86.

  I talk with a couple of Lima recruits about why they enlisted and how they feel about boot camp.

  Andrea Salinas is twenty-three and from Detroit. “I wanted to save lives is why I joined. I was doing odd jobs and construction work and woke up one day and decided I had to change my life. My dad’s best friend was in the Coast Guard, so I knew they did valuable things. Basic training is difficult for me because a lot of times I know the information but I lose it with all the stress, so that’s frustrating.”