I ask if they were white, as I recall reports of racial conflict on the island. “There was definitely a racial element,” he admits. “We formed a caravan of cars to get out, and other vehicles would block the road, and we had to get out and knock on their windows with our M-16s to get them to clear out. We got to the pier and called for reinforcements and then went back for more folks who were on the southern tip of the island. These folks were real relieved to see us when we showed up. We got the evacuation under way, and then gunshots erupted. It turns out this shop owner had discharged his shotgun [at a looter] and there was one dead. Then other shots were fired, and the evacuation, which had been going in a lackadaisical manner, really picked up speed as people jumped into [Coast Guard small] boats and abandoned their cars and just got on board.”
It used to be that with the exception of wars, riots, and interventions—a Coast Guard cutter led U.S. forces into Haiti in 1994—the service was a largely unarmed one.
Incidents involving Coast Guard shootings during the Prohibition era, including the killing of at least twelve rumrunners between 1924 and 1928, proved hugely unpopular. The Coast Guard killed four more men in 1929, including three aboard the British motor launch Black Duck, headed into Narragansett Bay with a load of liquor. That incident resulted in protest meetings and newspaper editorials across New England demanding the resignation of the service’s commandant, Adm. Frederick Billard. There were also mob attacks on off-duty Coast Guardsmen in New London and angry confrontations with Coast Guard recruiters.
The hanging of rumrunner Horace Alderman at the Coast Guard base in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, that same year generated local protests and national outrage, even though he had shot and killed two Coast Guardsmen and a Secret Service agent during a boarding. A Coastie in Key West was threatened with lynching after he was falsely accused of shooting another smuggler. By the end of their thirteen-year-long “Rum War,” the service had dramatically expanded in size but lost much of its hard-earned credibility with the public.
The introduction of sidearms during the early years of the “drug wars” of the 1970s and ’80s also generated lots of controversy.
“The boating public was up in arms about our armed boarding parties. It was a hard sell,” recalls retired Adm. Roger Rufe, now with the Department of Homeland Security. “It’s like the fire department versus the police department, except in the Coast Guard we’re both, and the public prefers the fire department aspect, the search and rescue.”
Surfman Ricky Spencer remembers odd attempts at compromise when he was serving in Port Angeles, Washington, thirty years ago. “I wore my gun belt with a .45 and was told not to have a clip in it and to cover it over with my long float coat. That didn’t make any sense to me at all.”
The Coast Guard also got into trouble for getting too deeply into paramilitary activities overseas. Adm. Paul Yost, Coast Guard commandant from 1986 to 1990, volunteered the service for the War on Drugs, the Cold War, the looming Gulf War, and any other war in sight. The Vietnam combat veteran’s swing toward all things military, starting with a ban on beards (including then–Lt. Cmdr. Thad Allen’s) had service members grousing about the new “Yost Guard.” He even began placing antiship Harpoon missiles on Coast Guard High Endurance Cutters. The first demonstration launch blasted observers on the cutter’s bridge with heat, smoke, and debris.
One of his most troubling legacies was the International Maritime Law Enforcement Team (IMLET) created for the War on Drugs. It was supposed to be a part of the Coast Guard’s overseas training program but by 1990 had married up with Army Special Forces, DEA, and Ecuadorian, Colombian, and other military units that were targeting and attacking cocaine processing labs deep in Latin America’s countryside.
“It was not a smart idea having Coast Guard guys running around in the jungles of Panama and Colombia. It was not a great moment in the Coast Guard’s career,” says Mark Quinlan of TACLET South.
When Soldier of Fortune magazine ran a September 1990 story on IMLET, “Coast Guard Fires Up Narcos,” and 60 Minutes started investigating, the new commandant, Adam. J. William Kime, shut the program down. Kime, a maritime safety expert, also removed the Harpoon missiles from the High Endurance Cutters.
Today, for the average coastal resident, the most commonly seen Coast Guard vessel is likely to be a 25-foot Defender class RBS, or Response Boat Small (there are some seven hundred), often mounted with one or two machine guns.
Still the public remains ambiguous in its attitude about how militarized it wants its Coast Guard to be.
O
ne of the biggest controversies to date erupted in 2006 around the Great Lakes. That August, the Coast Guard posted a notice in the Federal Register of plans to establish thirty-four permanent live-fire training zones on the Great Lakes. The service had already begun temporary training on the lakes with M-240 machine guns following an agreement between the United States and Canada stating that this did not violate an 1817 treaty to keep the lakes demilitarized.
The Federal Register notice established a thirty-day period for public comment, but, of course, most of the public doesn’t read the Federal Register. When word began to get out, recreational boating groups, ferry operators, fishermen, environmentalists, and others started to complain. Boaters and fishermen feared people accidentally entering the live-fire zones and getting shot. Environmentalists expressed concern about the impact of the lead bullets (up to six hundred rounds per minute) on wildlife and water quality.
The Coast Guard’s 9th District Headquarters in Cleveland, which oversees the Great Lakes, extended the public comment period while arguing that the machine-gun training was essential and that the zones would be at least five miles offshore and used only two or three times a year for two to six hours at a time.
At the public hearings and town meetings that followed, hundreds of people, while stating support for increased security on the lakes, condemned the planned firing ranges. Eighty lakeside mayors from eight states and Canada criticized the plan, as did members of Congress. Even the residents of Grand Haven, Michigan, one of a handful of “Coast Guard Cities” and host to the largest annual celebration of the service, were not on board for this one. In December 2006, the Coast Guard announced its live-fire exercises would be suspended indefinitely and its proposal withdrawn.
“It’s simple,” Coast Guard Commandant Thad Allen tells me when I ask about the decision. “If the public won’t tolerate it, we won’t do it.”
Yet the public doesn’t know much about the service’s commitment to Airborne Use of Force—or about Coast Guard gunners in general and their expanded role from our major ports to the most obscure maritime reaches of the global war on terror.
O
n April 29, 2005, in the Bay of Aden off the coast of Somalia, sixteen members of TACLET South were working off two Navy patrol boats, LEDET 404 aboard the USS Firebolt and LEDET 406 on the USS Typhoon.
They were under the command of Naval Task Force 150 out of Djibouti. Their group included the U.S. guided missile cruiser Normandy and German frigate FGS Karlsruhe. For several weeks they’d been stopping, searching, and questioning local mariners, ranging from Egyptian trawler crews to small Yemeni fishing boats with armed Somali guards on board, trying to develop intelligence on a reported Al Qaeda training camp ashore.
While working with Navy SEALs and CIA types, the Coast Guard gunners brought their own unique skill sets into the War on Terror that day, including well-honed instincts for search and rescue that are imprinted into the very DNA of the organization.
Late afternoon on the twenty-ninth, the Karlsruhe came upon a poorly maintained fiberglass boat, about forty feet long with high canvas siding, and more than a hundred Somali refugees squeezed aboard trying to make the dangerous eighty-mile transit to Yemen. Somehow by the time the German ship radioed the Normandy and the Normandy radioed the Firebolt, the message had been scrambled so that LEDET 404 was armed up with M-16 rifles and shotguns, believing they were about
to do a tactical takedown of a hostile vessel.
“We got on scene and through our binoculars saw this grossly overloaded boat and realized this was actually an urgent SAR case,” recalls Jeremy Obenchain, the lieutenant jg in charge of the team. “The boat was rocking even in calm water, and we knew we needed to get them off of it.” Among his team were Bosun’s Mate First Class Pete Rossi and Machinery Technician First Class Dale Stauffer, both experienced in rescue and recovery of overloaded migrant boats in the Caribbean.
An RIB was put in the water. A second smaller boat was dispatched with additional life preservers and rescue gear to approach from the other side. The Coasties knew that if you approached an overloaded boat from just one side all the migrants would run to that side and capsize it. Their rescue plan was taken up the chain of command to the Karlsruhe and the Normandy.
It turned out that if any refugees were taken onto the German ship they’d be in a position to demand political asylum in Germany. As a result, an order was issued for the refugee boat to be turned back to Somalia. Within a minute of trying to come about, however, the crowded, unstable boat capsized and the water was suddenly filled with panicked drowning people.
I watch clips from a color video taken by a Navy public affairs cameraman who happened to be on the Firebolt that day. It shows the sudden turnover and a ridiculous amount of people leaping and tumbling over the boat’s canvas walls into the water, then dozens and dozens of heads floating like dark seeds upon the water and the two small inflatable boats from the Firebolt tossing them life rings.
“It was chaos. I had three guys in the RIB and five topside throwing life rings and vests, anything that would float,” Jeremy Obenchain recalls. “By this time we had the other small boat in the water. You could see a lot of the women and children and some men were not able to swim, and it was pandemonium. Our PC [patrol craft] had a dive platform at the back and a pilot’s ladder lowered on the port side, and the stronger men who could swim there climbed up the ladder, and the small boats picked up other people. The Navy rubber boat was designed to hold an eight-man SEAL team, and it had sixteen people on board.”
The next video segment shows life rings being tossed from the Firebolt to people who have made it closer to the patrol craft. Parts of the water are dyed bright green, and a few men are clinging desperately to a pole being held by a Coast Guardsman along the side of the patrol craft. Some women are floundering. There’s a brief shot of a baby floating facedown, and then you see someone jump from the Firebolt.
“I was back on the fantail helping pull guys up [the ladder], and we had a Navy corpsman and EMT there who started treating people,” Jeremy recalls. “Four or five women made it to the ship, and I saw the men were trying to go first up the ladder and pushing them off, and I could see they [the women] were fighting for their lives and to keep their heads above water, and I could see the panic coming into their eyes, so [against orders] I took off my boots and jumped in and took them around to the dive platform.
“There was also a baby floating in the water, and a Navy chief jumped in, but the baby was already deceased. I grabbed these women and did a standard lifeguard swim around to the dive platform, just maybe ten or fifteen feet, and these other guys helped them up. It was a real team effort.”
The video shows the Navy chief jump in and the baby’s head lolling back as he lifts the infant up in the water. Women lie on the deck amid green water; a man throws up seawater; exhausted refugees crowd on deck. A sailor starts passing out plastic bottles of water, and off-camera someone says, “I got fifty-nine, but more came on since I counted.”
The mixed Coast Guard/Navy crew managed to save eighty-six people that day and recover three bodies. A woman and small child they rescued didn’t make it and died on the fantail. Some twenty other people were probably sucked down with the boat and their bodies never recovered.
Chief Mark Quinlan arrived on scene with additional emergency medical technicians from his LEDET team ten minutes after the boat capsized and began treating the survivors. The video shows him bandaging an older man’s injured leg and washing his feet.
“We listened to their blood pressure, took their vitals. They were happy just to have care. There were about sixty to seventy injuries caused by other humans: cuts, scrapes, scratches, gouges, from people panicking to escape. There was a German doctor who came aboard. The German boat had thrown dye marker in the water, and I remember all these people we treated, their skin was covered in this fluorescent green and yellow.”
Search efforts continued through the night without success. Meanwhile, the Coasties and Navy sailors provided their own food, water, blankets, and dry clothing, including socks, T-shirts, and underwear, to the survivors huddled on deck.
“The next morning, we were loading the survivors and the body bags up onto this Somali cargo dhow,” Mark Quinlan recalls. “They were going to take them back, and as we reached up this child’s body slid inside the bag—it was so small. That’s stuck with me.”
“To have started that incident as a noncompliant [armed] boarding and ended it saving eighty-six people was tremendous,” says Jeremy Obenchain, now working as a Coast Guard staffer for the House Committee on Homeland Security. “We literally had to pull a couple of our guys out of the [inflatable] boats [that night]. They didn’t want to quit searching. Before they even bothered to put on dry clothing, they would go down and try to find stuff for these Somalis, these people, these refugees who were just trying to improve their lives. Any Coastie would have done the same, ’cause it’s how we’re bred.”
No matter how heavily armed, Coast Guard gunners, like their service shipmates, tend to remain lifesavers at heart. This is how we know and think of the men and women of the Coast Guard, when we think of them at all.
We know far less about their history and ongoing operations as combat warriors from the storm-tossed North Atlantic of World War I to the Persian Gulf of today.
CHAPTER 6
Warriors
“Why they didn’t kill everyone in our boat I will never know,”
—COAST GUARD COXSWAIN DESCRIBING GERMAN GUNFIRE HITTING
HIS LANDING CRAFT ON D-DAY
“They killed three people, but that RHI [rigid-hull inflatable] kept turning
that boat away so it couldn’t accomplish its real mission.”
—CAPT. GLENN GRAHL, COMMODORE, PATROL FORCES SOUTHWEST ASIA
Nate Bruckenthal and Joe Ruggiero were part of an Australian-led Coalition effort to secure Iraq’s two big offshore oil terminals close to the coast of Iran. When the two Coasties showed up on a Navy patrol craft the morning of April 24, 2004, there were hundreds of local fishing dhows working the waters around the terminals. The sailors began directing the fishermen away from the oil complexes in order to establish a two-mile exclusion zone.
“After about five to seven hours, most of the dhows had cleared out. After lunch we did a boarding on a converted cruise liner acting as a RORO [roll on/roll off cargo ship] and found the bridge all shot up,” Joe recalls over breakfast on the beach in Fort Lauderdale, where he’s now stationed. “The captain told us Ali Babas [thieves, pirates] had opened fire on them after they refused to open the [water-level] pilot’s door to let them board.
“At dinner chow [on the USS Firebolt, later to be used in Somalia], we set up a rotation and decided we’d have two-man watches, and me and Nate took the first watch. Twenty minutes later, we had a boat in the area. Our ship tried to pull alongside it, but it was too windy and we couldn’t get close, so seven of us got into a small boat, me, Nate, and five Navy guys, and we were craned over the side.
“We went out and found two boats. They had no documentation, just a Koran and fish all over the decks and fishing gear and nets, and the men were in cutoffs and tank tops or bare-chested, just regular fishermen trying to earn a livelihood.
“Then we get a call to come all the way around the terminal, and there’s another boat, a very shiny boat a half mile into the exclusion z
one. It’s just about sunset, and it’s approaching us out of the sun, maybe thirty feet [long] with a fifteen-foot beam and no marks on anything. It’s freshly painted in gray with double outboard engines, which is unusual, and just these three crab pots that look almost decorative, and there’s this one guy on board, and as we get closer we signal him over the engine noise to slow down [downward hand movements] and to cut his engine [finger across throat]. He took our slow-down signal as one to go away, and he starts heading away, and I notice he’s putting off dark smoky exhaust, which could come from a heavy load or wrong-type engines, and then he turns and heads back toward the terminal.
“Me and Nate stand up, signaling for him to stop the boat, and he’s cupping his ear like he doesn’t understand, then starts to turn away. Then he cuts hard right like he’s going to hit us. I was on the opposite side from Nate, who was facing it. We’re leg to leg, there’s so little room, and I turn to the coxswain and say, ‘Cut out of here,’ and we get about ten to fifteen feet from the boat.
“Then this huge explosion goes off, and it all went slo-mo with the heat and noise and then total silence as our eardrums were blown out and I saw debris flying. I was hanging onto the RIB with my left arm and must have raised my right arm to protect my head and got this impact from something that just split the skin open, and the arm swelled up like a football was stuck up my shirtsleeve. I was pushed into the water by the blast but with my legs and feet still in the boat, and then the outblast, the return suction, just flipped the boat over in the air in the opposite direction.
“I bounced off the sponson [pontoon] as it was flipped and remember spinning and spinning and spinning underwater and not knowing which way was up. I popped the lanyard on my life jacket, but it was shredded. I heard the air from the CO2 canister going out, and there were bubbles everywhere, so I couldn’t follow them to the surface. I got in a fetal ball, and gravity took me to the right, and I followed in that direction and finally surfaced. Our ship was about two hundred yards away. People said it was forty-five to sixty seconds before they saw anyone surface, so I guess that’s how long I was down.
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