The first black cadets were admitted to the Coast Guard Academy in the 1960s. The first women were admitted in 1976. In 1979, the all-male graduating class announced their class motto as “LCWB—loyalty, courage, wisdom, and brawn,” but everyone knew it really stood for “Last class with balls.”
Capt. Anne Flammang, chair of the Humanities Department, was in the second female class, which graduated in 1981. “The first class had fourteen women. Mine had twelve,” she says.
“Was there overt hostility?”
She rolls her eyes. “Absolutely.”
One of the incidents at the time involved two drunken first-class cadets kicking down the door of two female cadets and groping them in their beds. The only action taken was that one of the women got demerits during a room inspection for having a damaged door.
“There are still issues of young men and women and adolescent attitudes that might include some hostility, but the adults don’t struggle the way they did then,” Captain Flammang explains. “Today I think Coast Guard errors are errors of cognition, misunderstanding, or ignorance [“male cluelessness,” as my late love used to put it] and not of a malicious nature.”
“This is a completely different corps of cadets than when I went here in the 1990s. They’re far more diverse in terms of gender. There was still a ‘boys will be boys’ attitude in my day very hostile toward women,” says Lt. Scott Borgerson, director of the academy’s Institute of Leadership. “I’m amazed how today the male cadets embrace their female counterparts and work together—although their writing skills have gone down badly.”
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hase Hall houses all the academy cadets. In its foyer there’s an inscription in the marble deck: WHO LIVES HERE REVERES HONOR, HONORS DUTY.
The rooms, which have two and sometimes three bunks, include blue comforters and white pillows, waxed tile floors, white cinder-block walls, storage space, desks, and Dell computers. U.S. News calls them dungeon-like, although I’d go with Spartan. All the wings are coed, while the bathrooms are separate male/female.
I knock on open room doors (they’re all kept open till 7:00 P.M.) and chat with cadets who are trying to study but too polite to blow me off. I ask if they have any thoughts about the Smith case.
“I don’t notice any harassment. That’s not the culture here,” Emily Kurt tells me. She’s a government major and member of the sail club.
“I didn’t even know about it till they announced it,” Jennifer Hom adds. She’s into operations research and computer analysis (ORCA) and also sails.
“I think they made a big deal out of it, like to set an example,” Kyle Schaffner theorizes. Kyle is a big, goofy-looking blond kid who’s into naval architecture and a member of the swim team. He escorts me to the cadet wardroom, where I’ve been invited to have lunch by the cadet leadership.
“I’m from Sandy Hook, New Jersey,” Kyle tells me. “I like the missions of the Coast Guard and growing up would see them flying by. I went to check out the Naval Academy, and it didn’t feel the same as when I came here. This is more of a community. Also, with three younger sisters, my parents are glad not to pay that extra $30,000 a year [for college tuition].”
A female cadet begins shouting out “the Clock,” announcing the impending lunchtime fare. “Afternoon meal formation. The meal will consist of lentil soup, buttered egg noodles, beef stew . . .”
I’m introduced to Rob Foos, the regimental commander of cadets, and his posse (staff). He’s six-six, clean-cut, with short blond hair. A management major, he plays lock for the rugby team, which he’s quick to let me know is the divisional champ. “I’m also a basketball player.” He grins. I wonder if he has any friends in the world.
The cadets all stand to attention as we walk through the crowd to a podium area where we’re seated, introduced, and applauded.
“Everything’s regimented,” Foos explains, assuming that at my age I must be vision impaired. I watch a fourth classman with a shaved head as he squares his meal, looking straight ahead and kind of down, silently raising his fork in front of his mouth and then bringing it straight back with some noodles and salad attached. Rather than try the beef stew, he wisely shifts to a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, followed by a banana and milk.
After lunch I visit McAllister Hall’s electronics labs, where third-class cadets are working with biometric face recognition software.
In the networking lab, they’re working on cyber defense. Every year, each service academy sets up its own network with its own e-mail and codes, and the National Security Agency tries to damage it. The hackproof system wins the contest.
In the antennas lab, I’m told about the real-world application of a cadet’s senior project. The fleet’s 110-foot cutters have a kind of electromagnetic doughnut hole where their midrange communications drop out. They’re sending the cadet and a faculty member to Hawaii to test out the midrange “towel bar antenna” he designed. I can see it’s named for its shape.
Two years ago, a cadet designed a new engine room for a 75-foot river tug as his senior project. Another got a 41-foot utility boat running on biodiesel. Still another is doing her senior project based on work involving ultrawide-band radar that can see through walls.
Leigh Dorsey, a self-described Air Force brat, with a flip hairdo and an attitude to match, spent the summer working with the Navy’s dolphins and sea lions and plans to do her senior project on Coast Guard applications for the animals.
We walk into the design lab, where a group of fourth-year students are stress-testing their crane barge constructions, adding weights until they break, much to everyone’s delight. It takes sixty-three pounds to break Cadet Trevor Clark’s crane.
We climb up a metal stairway to the tow tank that runs the length of the building. Here the cadets’ foam model hulls are towed through the water and tested for durability. I wonder if they tried this before letting defense contractor Northrop Grumman stretch their 110-foot cutters to 123s (that then had to be scrapped).
In the construction bay/power lab, they’ve just completed the frame for an autonomous dune buggy that will race other robot cars in Baja come the spring. Other courses include terrorism, nuclear detection, and strategic intelligence.
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t 1600 (that’s 4:00 P.M. civilian time), the cadets get two hours for sports. More than nine out of ten cadets earned a team letter in high school. Half were team captains. Nick Custer, a ruddy-cheeked third-class cadet, tours me around the facilities. He’s a lifelong offshore sailor who’s here because he wants to work at sea. We visit the huge indoor track in Roland Hall, then go downstairs and watch some racketball games. Thirty-six cadets are sharing the swimming pool’s six lanes, doing timed laps under the traffic-control-like supervision of their coach. The main basketball court is being cleared for a college game.
We hike over to the old gym past the observatory, where they used to keep their live bear mascot, Objee (“objectionable presence”). Actually Objee was a series of young bears first brought on board in 1926. The bears were often allowed to wander around Chase Hall, the showers, and the wardroom. Capt. Scot (“with one t”) Graham was a cadet and football player in the late 1970s. “My friend John Ochs was the bear keeper,” he recalls. “The bear was huge. We had a special room in the barracks with mattresses on the floor and walls, and we’d dress up in extra pairs of jeans and sweatshirts and gloves, and four or five of us football players would wrestle the bear. She’d just toss us around like rag dolls.”
Adm. Tom Atkin remembers the time the bear was taken to a birthday party in a cadet’s room and ended up half under the bed eating the birthday cake with the cadet standing terrified on top of the bed shouting for the bear keeper.
In 1984, new laws about keeping wild animals as pets forced the academy to replace its last Objee, a 250-pound black bear, with a cadet in a bear costume. Before that, Objee had often been seen growling at Coast Guard–Merchant Marine Academy football games, which academy folks describe as “our Army-Nav
y game.”
There’s a game of flag football taking place on Memorial Field in the twilight of afternoon. I can imagine Objee lurking in the shadow of the stands, licking mariner’s blood off her paws.
At the old basketball court, dozens of cadets are playing pickup games and riding stationary bikes under a bear emblem reading SCIENTIAE CEDIT MARE (The Sea Yields to Knowledge). The upstairs weight room is crowded. Downstairs a dozen wrestlers are matched up on the mats. Every sixty seconds the coach calls “Ready,” and they take new positions, then “Wrestle,” and they grapple, sweat, and strain with unbridled intensity.
We go over to the attic of the Alumni Building, where the boxing club is training. Nick Custer is unimpressed. He got to sail the Newport-to-Bermuda race last summer and is just waiting to do it again. I ask him if he charts his own courses. “Charting is easy,” he claims. “Sailors aren’t the brightest people in history, so it has to be practical enough so anyone can understand it.”
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ourse should be around 284, and tower’s at 325. So plot 325, and now go to Tango Tango,” the instructor directs the bridge crew. I’m in the nautical science lab of Yeaton Hall, on the smaller of two bridge simulators where groups of cadets are training to drive real ships.
This sim-bridge for a 378-foot High Endurance Cutter is about 175 square feet and looks out on a computer-generated video scene of Charleston Harbor while also generating matching electronic charting and radar displays.
“Thirty seconds to mark. Tango Tango 325,” one of the third-class crew calls out.
“Freeze it for a second,” their instructor directs, and the virtual winds and waters of the bay stop moving. “Will course or speed change the effect of drift?” he asks.
“Yes,” the eight young men and women agree.
“Would missing that mark make you cry?” one cadet asks another.
“Why?”
“It would make me cry if I missed.”
“It’s so dramatic when men cry,” she teases him.
Most of the crew are now humped around the charting table, working with their course plotters and two-pronged dividers.
“So record your bearings. Try shooting for the light on the other side of Fort Sumter,” they’re told. The fort and the Arthur Ravenel Bridge are straight up the channel, whose computer-generated waters have come back to life on the bridge’s screens.
“Mind your helm,” one of the guys says.
“Mind your helm, buddy,” his shipmate replies.
Behind the “bridge” is the controller’s room, where a second instructor sits in front of a row of five flat-screen panels. Above him is the computer imaging of the harbor, and in front of him are closed-circuit images of the map table, radar screen, and other indicators the cadets are also viewing.
I go over to the “main bridge,” where the all-female crew is at work. This room is about 250 feet square, and with its 180-degree wraparound screen the water motion fools my inner ear into believing the bridge is actually swaying with the motion of the waves.
“Why are you standing here?” Lt. Andy Passic, their instructor, asks one of the crew who’s leaning over the map table.
“I’m helping her get the bearings.”
“She plots, you record.” He turns to her shipmate. “How can you shoot a bearing if you don’t have a fix?”
“We’re in a narrow channel—”
He turns to the officer of the deck, another lanky, confident girl with her hair in a bun.
“You are in charge of everything. You have the bridge.”
I follow him through a door to another controller station with a bank of screens, monitors, mikes, and digital recorders on a low console. In front of it, Eric Conley, a contractor for General Dynamics, the company that built the simulators, is seated.
“This group is doing better than the last,” Lieutenant Passic tells him. “They don’t seem lost out here. They’re on point, set, and drift. Every three minutes, they’re getting a fix and adjusting for current.”
He teaches nautical science labs Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. After graduating from the academy in 2001, he went aboard the Mellon, a 378-foot cutter out of Seattle, then got command of his own 87-footer in San Francisco.
Conley tells me they have more than twenty projections they can use on the simulators, including San Francisco Bay, Block Island, Seattle, Kodiak, the approaches to Boston, the open ocean, a fictional port, and Key West, which, like Charleston, is a popular one.
Passic is back on the bridge reminding the crew that it takes a while to turn a 378, “and your bearing taker is giving bearings before the fix is called.”
“On a real cutter they’ll need to learn to plot, shoot some bearings, do some visual piloting,” he explains on his return.
”There’s a buoy straight ahead. You need to bear left,” the deck officer instructs the helm as we watch them on a fifteen-inch black-and-white monitor that reminds me of early live television plays.
“They didn’t use enough rudder and ended up outside the channel. I think they just figured that out,” Andy Passic notes.
They also realize they missed the buoy by twenty-eight yards.
“When they hit a buoy, there’s a computerized ding. We used to bang a garbage can outside the door,” Andy says. “They get into it and really think they’re there. They get so stressed I’ve seen cadets cry when they’ve hit a buoy.”
He presses a button and a tugboat horn sounds, a prompt that gets them to return an acknowledgment to the cartoonish-looking video tug now coming up on their port side.
“Cadets will do around sixty hours in the bridge lab during their four years, which is the equivalent of perhaps two hundred hours on a real bridge in terms of what the instructors throw at them. We intensify the experience.” Andy grins.
“Ten seconds to mark,” one of the crew announces.
The controllers freeze Charleston Harbor with its single-span bridge, and I follow Andy back into the simulator. “A couple of points,” he says. “One, you said, ‘Come around 365 [degrees]’?”
“Just keeping them aware.” Claire, the officer of the deck, blushes and smiles.
“Also, you came within twenty-eight yards of the green buoy. You cut it a lot closer than we’d like. Also, start turns with a fuller rudder. You can always back off. Also, taking a fix on a turn is not very accurate. I think you guys figured that out. So let’s do it again.” They continue.
OCS
“Line, get ready. Is line ready?” The buzzer sounds. Bam, bam . . . Bam, bam . . . Bam, bam. The officer candidates blast their silhouette targets; two rounds in three seconds from three yards.
“Is there alibi?” the firearms instructor asks on his mike after the firing stops. The red-shirted coaches and safety crew raise one arm each to indicate there were no malfunctions of the weapons, ammo, or target. The three officer candidates holster their weapons and step back to continue shooting the practical combat course from seven yards and then from kneeling and standing positions at seventeen yards. I’ve never seen such safety control on a gun range.
“If there is a jam or other problem, we expect them to fix it themselves, drop the clip, clear the jammed round, replace it, and fire again,” explains Gunner Mike Lechler, the range master. They’re firing 9 mm Berettas. The academy hasn’t yet received the service’s newer .40 caliber handguns.
We’re in one of the two old basement firing ranges in Chase Hall that are undergoing rehab to improve ventilation and reduce lead exposure. Lead pollution is why I’m a big fan of the Army’s green bullets, which the Coast Guard will soon adopt. They’re made of tungsten instead of lead. They still kill people but leave ducks unharmed.
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fficer Candidate School residents live in the C and D annexes of Chase Hall. There are two seventeen-week OCS courses that graduate 160 ensigns a year. When the service needs to expand rapidly, as it did after 9/11, the OCS school can gear up to three classes a year.
Sixty percent of the candidates are enlisted Coasties up from the ranks. The rest are college graduates. Their average age is twenty-six. Today’s class is 76 percent male, 24 percent female. Most of the class, however, is off on their two-week “long cruise,” with the fleet.
Cdr. Patti Seeman, the assistant school chief, petite with short brown hair and glasses, is officious at first but quick to warm. She tells me about the college precommissioning program, for schools with student bodies at least 25 percent minority, that helps tutor and support potential officer candidates. The program is one of the Coast Guard’s attempts to increase its racial diversity. Diversity is not only a moral but an operational requirement since this is the only armed service in daily contact with the nation’s increasingly diverse public.
The school also runs three- to five-week direct commission officer (DCO) courses that bring in abut 110 officers from other services each year, mainly physician assistants and helicopter pilots, along with selected civilians such as lawyers and intelligence agents. They also transition about a hundred reserve officers to the regular corps.
“We graduate over four hundred people a year. More go through our doors than the academy’s,” Commander Seeman notes.
Still, while OCS grads make up about half the officer corps, the modern Coast Guard has long been dominated by admirals wearing academy rings, including all its commandants to date. The social and political networks formed within each year class at the academy generate strong currents in favor of career advancement that seventeen weeks in OCS cannot match. In addition, until 2004, all academy graduates went straight to sea duty, and serving on a cutter is one of the few assured ways of moving up in the service.
With only 75 percent of cadets now going to ship duty, however, more valued at-sea billets are becoming available to OCS grads, and while I’ve been told that, “there’ll probably be a woman commandant before there’s an OCS commandant,” Vice Commandant Vivien Crea, the Coast Guard’s second-ranked officer, is both female and an OCS grad. The new superintendent of the academy, Adm. Scott Burhoe, is also the first OCS grad to run the school. So things do seem to be changing—and change is, after all, what the Coast Guard is about, and has been for more than two hundred years.
Rescue Warriors Page 9