Rescue Warriors

by David Helvarg

  Amber Nethercutt is eighteen, a wide-eyed blonde from North Carolina who says she joined for the adventure. “It’s the hardest service to qualify for, and I like the fact we don’t kill people, we save people. Don’t tell the POs, but I expected basic training to be a lot harder than it is.”

  “I think boot camp is harder for older recruits,” claims Michael Ryan, who’s twenty-six. “I realize the purpose for all this stuff, even as they yell at me, like left shoulder to the bulkhead will mean something trying to get through the narrow passageways on a ship, passing a shipmate. Still, basic’s been going on a lot longer than I thought. I mean, the weeks do seem to fly by, but the days are excruciatingly long.”

  “But you’re still having fun?”

  “Smiling is not really allowed.” He smiles at me.

  “I was working for Southwest Airlines and going to school and had what’s called an epiphany. I was just working to go to school and I didn’t know why I was,” says William Parker, a twenty-one-year-old African American who’s also breaking the smiling rule. “I want to be a firefighter and use the Coast Guard for my training. I’m a military brat and know how the other branches can . . . stretch the truth with what they promise. I had friends who joined the Marines and thought they were going to get to play basketball at the service academies and were sent to Iraq. The Coast Guard is more honest. As far as basic, I didn’t expect to be in class so much.”

  Mark Herder, the twenty-seven-year-old squad leader, has a more apocalyptic sense of mission. “I was the elite as a machinist for ten years making surgical tools for heart operations, and I began reading about peak oil. I was looking at what that means if, say, the Iranians cut off the Straits of Hormuz and our oil supply dries up. I want to be one of the ones who are able to respond, and the Coast Guard proved during Katrina that in the worst climate they’d be second to none.”

  L

  isten up, Lima Company. Your squad bays look like crap, so what I want you to do is bring all your seabags and rucksacks and everything you have loaded up onto the quarterdeck because we’re going to change squad bays,” Dave Knapp shouts to his charges back in James Hall. “If you lived like this on a ship it would get nasty. Gear adrift sinks ships. Pack everything you own. Bring your rucksacks and ditty bags. Pack your linens in your seabags. Leave your pillows where they are. You have ten minutes.”

  Recruits begin scrambling, flipping up their beds and emptying out their rack drawers. He goes back to his office and plays loud music, then pulls out a bullhorn and begins hitting the button that produces siren wails. “Oh-seven minutes,” he announces. He walks into the starboard bay just as one of the recruits bumps his head on the top rack drawer he’s lifted up.

  “MISSON FIRST, SAFETY ALWAYS,” Dave instructs on his bullhorn. “It’s like we got a hurricane evacuation order and we’re evacuating to Fort Dix.” After a few minutes, the first recruits arrive on the quarterdeck with their big rucksacks on their chests, their seabags, smaller ditty bags, and rifles slung on their shoulders.

  “Find room on the floor to put that stuff down,” he tells them. As the space is jamming up with recruits and their belongings, a tall, neatly coiffed Navy chaplain, Lt. Cdr. Yolanda Gillen, arrives. Dave appears mildly dismayed.

  “Place your crap on the deck and face the chaplain,” he orders. She begins by reading a news story from today. A Coast Guard buoy tender saw a 16-foot boat going under and diverted to pull a sixty-five-year-old man out of the water.

  “They rescued him. That’s our mission. Wherever you are sent, be sure you bloom wherever you are planted. Do your best here so you’ll be ready to help your shipmates out on the fleet.” She asks if there are any specific prayers needed. A female recruit asks for a prayer for her cousin in Iraq. Others ask for deceased and loved ones. Someone asks if they can pray for sports. She gives them a few baseball and football scores and suggests that Detroit could certainly use some prayers. She says those who don’t want to pray don’t have to. “Those who want to pray, let’s bend our heads.” The girl whose cousin is in Iraq leans her head against the stock of her rifle and closes her eyes. I resist the desire to take a picture, as the flash would startle her.

  “Let’s pray for our ill and lost loved ones and let this company know they’ve come a long way and you [God] will see them through.”

  As soon as she leaves, Dave has them on the run again, switching their sleeping bays.

  “They took money from the Coast Guard and gave it to the NSF [National Science Foundation], which hired a Russian ship for icebreaking in Antarctica, and the ship got stuck, and the [Coast Guard Cutter] Healy had to head out to sea to rescue the Russians and saved them.” He tells the story not exactly as it happened but close enough to make his point. “So let’s GET MOTIVATED,” he shouts through the bullhorn. “I’ll give you a minute thirty-five to finish. Let’s be like we’re getting under way to save that Russian ship!” He hits the bullhorn’s wailing police siren again.

  “Healy—must SAVE RUSSIAN VESSEL. Preparing to get under way. This is the captain speaking.”

  Crowds of recruits are hustling back and forth through the halls, top-heavy with bags and bedding and rifles.

  “MISSION FIRST—SAFETY ALWAYS—LINES AWAY—FULL SPEED AHEAD!’ Dave Knapp calls out, his blue eyes shining with delight.

  O

  n my last day, I attend a recruit graduation that has been moved indoors to the gym because rain had been predicted. Naturally, the parade ground is now awash in bright sunshine. Some five or six hundred family members are crowded onto the gym’s bleachers as the graduating recruits march out in their dress blues. There’s a band, a color guard, and a precision honor guard that performs with rifles and bayonets. My favorite part is where they form a circle around their instructor and point their bayonets at him shoulder high, a nice fratricidal flourish.

  The Training Center’s captain thanks the families of the recruits for “trusting us with their care and sharing them with our nation.” The band plays a tune I remember as “A duck must be somebody’s mother.”

  “That would be ‘Stars and Stripes Forever,’ ” the bandleader archly instructs me.

  As the recruits are called up to the front of the gym, their assignments are read aloud: Woods Hole, Massachusetts; Yorktown, Virginia; Cutter Alex Haley in Kodiak, Alaska; Barbers Point, Hawaii; Cutter Boutwell in Alameda, California; Miami Beach; Key West; Juneau; San Diego; Ohio; Venice, Louisiana; Cutter Mellon in Seattle; Cape May; Portland; New Orleans; San Francisco; Texas; New York; Omaha, Nebraska . . .

  An Air Force dad hands his son his graduation certificate. A Coast Guard commander identified as a mentor gives a young man his. An Army Ranger gives his cousin her certificate. A diminutive Army mother in dark green uniform gives one to her son, a policeman to his nephew; a Marine hands one to his Coast Guard brother. There’s the final muster. “What you learned may one day save your lives or the lives of others.” After the retiring of the colors, families and friends swarm the gym floor to embrace their sons and daughters, now active-duty Coast Guard men and women.

  The Factory

  Now take boot camp and add four years of rigorous academics, at-sea training and sailing on a tall ship, various assignments in the fleet, leadership development, and senior projects that could pass for master’s or PhD theses, and you have the Coast Guard Academy, the smallest and least known of the armed services academies, and also the most gender neutral.

  The whiteboard on the big bridge simulator reads CONN: Steph DECK: Claire HELM: Jenni PLOT: Katie NAV EVAL: Virginia RADAR: Laura RECORDER: Ysabel BEARING: Tasha. An all-male crew in the academy’s nautical science lab might not seem unusual, but we’re still early enough in this century that I’m impressed to find an all-female crew operating the virtual bridge of a 378-foot High Endurance Cutter, a crew that wasn’t intentionally formed around gender but just shook out that way because with women now making up 28 percent of the cadet corps, and friends selecting friends to work with, it wil
l on occasion happen like that.

  First a little background. The Revenue Cutter Service founded its School of Instruction in 1876 on board a 93-foot two-masted schooner named Dobbin. There were nine students. By 1890, they’d moved to a new ship, the Chase, and a land-based campus in Curtis Bay, Maryland. In 1910, they moved again, to Fort Trumbull, a New London, Connecticut, Army post dating back to the Revolutionary War. The modern Coast Guard was formed in 1915, and in 1932 the citizens of New London donated the present 110-acre site of the academy, just above town on the Thames River.

  New London itself is a somewhat down-at-the-heels working port with commercial docks and car ferries. Across the river is the General Dynamics Electric Boat Yard that builds nuclear submarines. Twenty-two operational subs are stationed upriver at the Groton Navy base.

  The academy sits on a rise on the river above where the barque Eagle is usually berthed. Since the Coast Guard gave up Governors Island in New York Harbor in the 1990s, the 295-foot Eagle, the largest tall ship flying the Stars and Stripes, is now its most visible symbol. Every cadet will spend six weeks at sea on this floating classroom, sometimes crossing the Atlantic or sailing the deep Caribbean.

  The academy, also known as the ensign factory, has around a thousand cadets, graduating some two hundred a year (after attrition). It’s the only service academy that doesn’t require a congressional nomination, which meant something back when politicians’ letters of support were based more on favoritism than on merit. Even though it offers a free education (in exchange for five years’ service), is a well-regarded engineering school with a STEM program in science, technology, engineering, and math, and has some thirty sports to choose from, the number of high school students applying has been in decline for years. As a result, in 2006 U.S. News and World Report lowered its rating from “highly selective” to “selective.” It saw some application growth right after 9/11, but, as with the other military academies, that declined as the war in Iraq dragged on.

  With its big white-columned redbrick buildings, parade field, flag-backed football field, boathouse, sailing center, and ceremonial guns that fire every Friday (setting off car alarms in nearby parking lots), the academy has the feel of the pleasant New England campus that it is, rather than the historic grandeur of a West Point or Annapolis. Still, most of the cadets seem satisfied with the choice they’ve made.

  “I was chosen at West Point and here and decided I’d rather train to save a life than take a life,” Lt. Elizabeth Ferry tells me. She’s a 2002 graduate now working as an academy planning officer after a few years on a buoy tender.

  “I grew up next to the ocean in Ocean Park, Maine, and so I was always aware of the Coast Guard and just felt I’d rather save lives than take them,” agrees fourth-year (freshman) cadet Noah Hudson at the end of his civil engineering class.

  “My feelings are similar to Mr. Hudson’s,” his classmate Ryan Flannigan concurs. “My family has been in the military for generations. My father was a Navy aviator, and I wanted to fly, and yet I’d rather not be bombing people. I’d rather be pulling them out of the water.”

  Of course, the Coast Guard’s humanitarian mission is only one of the reasons cadets join, according to Lieutenant Ferry.

  “Other academy graduates say, ‘We love our academy but hate our service.’ It’s the opposite here because during the summers cadets get to do stuff with the operational Coast Guard and then they’re just waiting to get out into the fleet and onto these awesome missions. To tell a twenty-two-year-old you could run your own ship in two years . . . It could be five to seven years before a graduate from [the Naval Academy at] Annapolis gets that kind of opportunity.”

  C

  oast Guard cadets go through a kind of reverse year order. Freshmen are called fourth class. They begin in July with Swab Summer, which is a seven-week version of boot camp except they also get to go sailing, including a week on the Eagle. After that they spend their freshman year learning to be “exemplary followers,” in much the same way Lima Company recruits do. This includes squaring away their meals, meaning they have to look straight ahead while eating. The next summer they get to spend ten weeks working as an enlisted rank on a Coast Guard vessel, learning the finer points of scraping, painting, and sanding.

  In their third-year sophomore class, they become mentors to the fourth class. That summer they get more time and experience with the fleet, including five weeks sailing aboard the Eagle.

  Second-year juniors train (give orders to) the freshman class and run Swab Summer as “cadre.” Trainers from Cape May teach them how to do this. They also get to spend time with Coast Guard units and take a 44-foot sailboat around Long Island Sound for two weeks with three or four classmates and a safety officer.

  The first-class seniors run the Corps of Cadets. They also find out if they’ll get their “dream sheet” assignments as newly minted ensigns. This is determined by their combined GPA and military rankings and by what’s available.

  Most seniors spend their last summer at sea as junior officers or divide their time between sea duty and an internship. Some act as division officers aboard the Eagle.

  Since the school became the first service academy to admit women, it has established dating rules. Fourth class can only date other freshmen. Third can date third and second class. Second can date first, second, and third. First can also date recent grads who are now Coast Guard ensigns. You can also date outside the Academy, including anyone who’ll have you at Connecticut College just up Route 32, one reason that in looking at flag officer bios you’ll find that a number of admirals’ wives are Connecticut College alumnae, or “New London Lovelies.”

  While the dating rules were established to prevent those with more power abusing those with less, it hasn’t always worked out that way.

  In December 2005, charges were brought against twenty-two-year-old First Class Cadet Webster Smith claiming he raped and assaulted his former girlfriend and three other women cadets. His court-martial in June 2006 was the first court-martial of a cadet since the academy was founded. During the trial he and his accusers admitted to having sex on campus and binge drinking, while he denied coercing or extorting the women. A military jury acquitted him of rape but found him guilty of indecent assault, extortion, sodomy, and two lesser charges. He received a six-month sentence and served five months with time off for good behavior.

  In September 2006, the Coast Guard established a task force to examine race and gender issues at the academy (Cadet Smith was African American). It was headed by retired Rear Adm. Errol Brown, the first African American to make flag rank. In November 2006, nineteen-year-old Third Class Cadet John Miller was arrested by Groton police and charged with third-degree sexual assault and unlawful restraint. He was at an off-campus drinking party with other cadets where, the police claimed, he assaulted a female civilian. She claimed he attempted to force her to have oral sex. He ended up with a broken nose and a trial date. The academy dismissed him and another cadet who was at the party. In April 2007 Miller was placed on special probation that would see his record cleared if he stayed out of trouble for two years.

  Ten days after Miller’s arrest, academy superintendent Rear Adm. James C. Van Sice was reassigned as director of personnel management at headquarters. An investigation of Van Sice was initiated as a result of information that surfaced during the task force’s review. It concluded he had made some “inappropriate” comments to staff. In January 2007, Van Sice announced his early retirement from the Coast Guard.

  In March 2007, the task force released its report with the jargon-laden title Comprehensive Climate and Culture Optimization Review Effort (C3ORE), stating that while sports and academics are important, the academy had to refocus on leadership and character development to distinguish itself from civilian colleges.

  The Coast Guard also launched a civil rights investigation into the Smith case after Smith filed a complaint claiming whites who committed offenses similar to his had only received administrativ
e punishments. Between 1993 and 2005, the Academy had ten reported incidents of sexual misconduct. Eight resulted in dismissal or resignation. Two lacked sufficient evidence to pursue charges. The investigators ruled there was no race bias. In April 2008, the Coast Guard Court of Criminal Appeals ruled Smith’s sentence was correct in law and fact.

  Capt. Tom Jones was president of the jury in the Smith trial. “It came out later he didn’t have any friends in his years at the academy,” Jones tells me. “In a group that tight, that should have been a red flag. There are some cadets who in their last two years, when they get to be in a position of authority, cross the line and abuse that trust. In his case he was way over the line.”

  That isn’t to say racism doesn’t exist among some on campus. In July 2007, a noose was left in the seabag of an African American cadet aboard the Eagle. The next month, a second noose was found on the office floor of a white female officer conducting race relations training in response to that first incident. Just as swastikas symbolize Nazi terror, nooses symbolize the murder by lynching of thousands of black people that was a common occurrence in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In October 2007, Coast Guard Commandant Thad Allen went to the academy to tell the cadets that “when you enter the Coast Guard you are held to a higher standard” and that spreading “symbols of racism . . . is conduct unbecoming an officer,” which could lead to dismissal or court-martial. He vowed to find those responsible, assigning a dozen CGIS investigators to the case. After an extensive months-long probe, they were unable to determine who was behind the two incidents.