With no automatic steering or course correction, Kevin, the CO, has his deck crew switch out every fifteen to twenty minutes, one of them at the wheel battling to keep a steady course through bone-jarring seas while the others stand lookout on the bridge wings through the violence of Arctic rain, sleet, snow, and spray, perhaps comforting themselves with the thought that others have seen worse.
O
ne day in a typhoon we did a sixty-three-degree roll in fifty-foot seas with seventy to eighty sustained knots [of wind]. She creaked and moaned, but she kept us safe. It was quite an adventure,” Chief Greg Papineau recalls. We’re sitting in the wardroom of the High Endurance Cutter Munro, but he’s not talking about the Munro, named after the Medal of Honor winner. He’s talking about another World War II combatant, this one a survivor called the Storis (derived from the Scandinavian name for “great ice”) that he served on before transferring to the Munro in 2007. Chief Papineau himself is a well-salted forty-five-year-old Bosun’s Mate, thickset with a respectable beer belly, reddish mustache, and rolling gait.
“Storis was round bottomed so she could go over eighty-five or ninety degrees and come back up,” he recalls. “She bobbed like a cork. We had more than a few people fly out of their racks [wake up in midair out of their bunks after a wave hit the ship], but no one was hurt too bad.”
Decommissioned in 2007 after sixty-four years of service, most of it in Alaska, the 230-foot Storis saved over 250 lives (and twenty-five boats) in Alaskan waters, busted Soviet, Japanese, and other foreign fishing vessels poaching in U.S. waters, and provided needed services to a hundred thousand people in remote and otherwise inaccessible parts of the state.
“I remember we’d go to different villages with a Russian Orthodox chaplain. We had a Christmas service on St. George Island, and it was the first service they’d had with a priest in nine years,” Chief Papineau says.
“Another trip, to Adak, the kids all came around ’cause we were the new excitement in town. There’s a kid on this ship who joined the Coast Guard because of that visit we made in 1996. So did his sister. Up on St. Lawrence [Island] we brought medical doctors and dentists; this was back before they had contract doctors. The elders have these oral histories of the villages, and the Storis is in the Native elders’ stories because of our visits. She had a magic about her,” he recalls, describing the decommissioning ceremony in Kodiak. “We had this tough kid onboard, his father was an Army Ranger and he’d smoke a cigarette and chew tobacco at the same time, and drink two Budweisers, and the day he left he looked like Niagara Falls. Everyone was crying, like.”
The chief is one of five Storis crewmembers who volunteered to transfer to the Munro after it came north from California to replace the World War II cutter. Like Chief Papineau, the Munro’s CO, Capt. Craig “Bark” Lloyd, a towering, square-jawed veteran, is familiar with Alaska’s waters and their unique challenges, having once commanded the Alex Haley.
“We had a guy with a halibut hook in his eye,” Captain Lloyd recalls from the Munro’s bridge. “The [fishing boat’s] master gets on the radio and says, ‘Maybe I can push it through,’ and we’re gagging and making choking noises, and finally I have to say, ‘Quiet!’ so the doc can talk to him and tell him, ‘Put a mug over his face and tape it in place with all the gaffer’s tape you can find and we’ll come get him,’ and the corpsman says, ‘We’ll need a helicopter’ . . . [Later] the pilot’s talking to the master of the vessel, who says, ‘I don’t think you can do this. I got a gantry and antennas [acting as obstructions], and its rocking and it’s nighttime and not nice weather, and the master’s complaining it can’t be done, but they do the safety brief for him and lower the basket, and as we’re flying back with the injured guy the master’s on the radio saying, ‘That’s amazing. I didn’t know you people could do that kind of thing.’ We brought the guy back to the ship and ran toward St. Paul for eight hours till we were close enough for the helicopter to get him ashore and treated.”
“It was a big hook?” I ask.
“A huge hook.”
“Did they save his eye?”
“You know, with SAR cases a lot of times you just don’t hear what the final outcome is.”
T
he Coast Guard’s big cutters remind me of the warships of my youth that blockaded Cuba and fired at phantoms in the Gulf of Tonkin, which makes sense since they’re the same vintage, only painted white. The Navy keeps its gray ships for about fifteen years, then has Congress buy them new ones. The average age of the perennially underfunded Coast Guard fleet is thirty-five years.
The 378-foot-long Munro was commissioned in 1971 and has a crew of 175. Below its bridge is the captain’s quarters, officers’ berthing, and an electronics shop; another deck down is a navigation office and a small conference room with ripped furniture, scarred bulkheads, a faded porthole curtain, and pullout metal drawers from the days of disco.
It has five departments when under way—operations, engineering, supply, aviation, and weapons. Its weaponry includes a 76 mm deck gun and an aft-mounted CIWS antiaircraft and missile system that can fire forty-five hundred rounds per minute. At the forward gun control station, I’m shown the big cylinder they use for hand-loading the 76 mm shells. Only one of the dozen 378s still has a functioning ammo hoist from its below-deck magazines.
The weapons department also runs the deck crews that launch and recover the small boats and helicopter, handle the external hoists, and paint and scrape the ship.
The aviation department is run by the chief pilot of the helicopter that deploys with the Munro from Kodiak Air Station.
The operations department runs navigation, intelligence, communications, and selection and approach to targets from the ship’s Combat Information Center three levels below the main deck. It also oversees the radio room and top-secret electronic servers and sensors.
The supply division covers all the ship’s requisitions and housekeeping from stocking the galley—whose food service handlers might purchase $90,000 of groceries for a single deployment—to maintaining the gym, laundry, paint, lines, chains, and anchors.
While the captain, XO, and department heads get their own single staterooms, most junior officers and chiefs live in two- and four-rack staterooms. Most of the enlisted live in sixteen- to twenty-rack berthing areas that include two heads and two showers. Since the cutter pitches a lot in heavy seas, it’s easy to hit your head on the lower half of these narrow double-stacked bunks. Bumps and lacerations are the common currency of the cutter’s sick bay.
Captain Lloyd recalls that on a recent fisheries operation he was in his stateroom and “we were hit by a big wave on the beam, and my [lounge] chair took a roll to port and the chair and I went over and the [dining] table and all the chairs from the table rolled to port and back again, and the phone rings. I had my radio clipped to me and say, ‘Whoever’s calling, I can’t get to the phone right now ’cause I’m under this chair!’ They radio back and say, ‘Sir, we just want to inform you that we had a nineteen-degree roll to port.’ ” Since their staterooms tend to be higher up and forward in the vessel, closer to the bridge, where movement is magnified, it’s not unusual to find the officers trying to get some sleep in their wardroom when the weather gets rough.
The engineering department includes propulsion, generators, boilers, damage control, freshwater evaporators, wiring, and plumbing. Down in the engine room I’m shown the two diesel engines that can generate 3,500 hp each and the Pratt & Whitney gas turbines that can generate 18,000 hp each. They switch from one to the other when they want to kick in the afterburners and chase after bad guys. This allows them to surge from about eighteen to twenty-eight knots. Cruising on the diesels at twelve knots they burn about 210 gallons of diesel an hour; going all out on turbines, 2,897 gallons per hour. In the tropics the Munro’s engine room can reach 130 degrees, but in Alaska it rarely gets above 100.
C
aptain Lloyd, who is about to head off to a meeting of 378 captains
to discuss how to keep their aging vessels operational through the next decade, tells me the Munro was sent north to Alaska because it was in the best condition of the four High Endurance Cutters in Alameda (he doesn’t mention another reason—ex-Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska had long been demanding a 378 for his state). “Actually it’s in the best condition of the eight on the West Coast,” Captain Lloyd claims (there are also two in Hawaii and two in South Carolina).
There’s no question the Munro is in better shape than the Rush, Morgenthau, Chase, or Hamilton. In 2008, the Rush had to abort a SAR mission in the Bering Sea when water began seeping through a two-foot corrosion crack that opened up, basically a hole in its hull. It docked in Dutch Harbor while another cutter, the Jarvis, took over the rescue mission. In recent years, the Morgenthau and Chase have also experienced corrosion failures. The Hamilton, the oldest of the 378s, was commissioned in 1967 and will likely be the first of its class to retire, but not before 2011 at the earliest.
T
wo months later, I’m visiting the cutter Sherman in California. Sherman recently returned from a counternarcotics patrol in the eastern Pacific, where it seized and sank two drug boats. Unable to access the hidden compartments in one of them, it rammed the 60-foot fishing boat, breaking it open like a piñata, releasing six tons of baled cocaine that floated to the surface for collection by the cutter’s small boats. Under differing bilateral treaties, fourteen of the seventeen drug runners arrested were returned to their home countries of Ecuador and Costa Rica for trial, while three Colombians were sent to Florida to stand trial in the United States.
Touring the Sherman, I get to see lots of rust spots and corrosion along with some earnest efforts at upkeep. It’s Good Friday, and Capt. Mathew Bliven has just received an e-mail message from the Munro’s Bark Lloyd, who’s out on patrol.
“First day of spring,” Captain Lloyd writes. “Here in the Bering, the current dry bulb temp is 6 degrees. Wind chill is 39 below. Just recovered the helo. Thankfully the ice edge keeps the seas down . . . Port calls for this patrol: Dutch, Dutch, and Dutch. And I’m happy. Lookouts are scanning for the Easter Walrus.”
T
wo days later, at 2:50 A.M. Easter Sunday 2008, the captain of a 203-foot factory trawler radios, “Mayday, mayday! This is the Alaska Ranger . . . We are flooding, taking on water in our rudder room.” He tells the Coast Guard they are 120 miles west of Dutch Harbor in twenty-foot seas with thirty-knot winds and abandoning ship. The Munro steams toward the scene. Once it gets within eighty miles it launches its Dolphin helicopter in high winds. A forward-deployed HH-60 Jayhawk also takes off from St. Paul Island and a C-130 from Kodiak.
The Jayhawk is the first to get on scene two and a half hours later. Its pilots are Lts. Steve Bonn and Brian McLaughlin, whom I met and flew with in Kodiak. Brian describes what they encountered.
“As we approached we saw three strobe lights and figured those were the rafts. A little closer and there was a fourth light, fifth, sixth, and the numbers just kept growing. The first strobe we flew over was a pair of survivors in Gumby suits waving at us.
“[Climbing higher] we did a quick ‘big picture’ scan and saw the ocean flashing at us over about a mile-long stretch, yet no Alaska Ranger that we could see. The scene was very grim.”
The Ranger had sunk within fifteen minutes of its mayday call. Of its forty-seven survivors floating on the waves, many had not made it to life rafts, though they all had survival suits on.
The Jayhawk put its rescue swimmer, Aviation Survival Technician Second Class O’Brien Hollow, in the water and began hoisting crewmen amid big rolling waves and swirling snow squalls. Having filled their cabin with what they believed to be thirteen fishermen, they flew to the Munro and lowered them by basket to waiting crewmembers on the cutter’s pitching deck (the cutter crew would only count twelve).
The Munro then refueled the large helicopter in the air, using HIFR. Before it could finish, the cutter’s 65 returned from its rescue mission, landing another five survivors. They’d also lost a Ranger crewman whose survival suit had filled with water and who had fallen forty-five feet from their rescue basket. Short of room the Dolphin had to leave their swimmer, Aviation Survival Technician Third Class Abram Heller, behind along with a helicopter raft that he climbed into with three fishermen from the sunken trawler.
By now the Ranger’s sister ship, the Alaska Warrior, had arrived on scene and recovered more people from life rafts. The Jayhawk went back and recovered five more, including the Dolphin’s rescue swimmer, and returned them to the Munro.
Four senior Alaska Ranger crewmembers, including the man who’d fallen from the rescue basket, didn’t survive. Capt. Eric Jacobsen and these others had been floating in the frigid water for some six hours before they died of hypothermia. They were called heroes, having sacrificed themselves to make sure the rest of the crew made it. A fifth Ranger crewman was lost at sea. It took several hours before the Coast Guard realized that twelve rather than thirteen survivors had been off-loaded from the first helicopter recovery and that someone was still missing. The Munro spent the night searching for the man, Satashi Konno, a Japanese national and the ship’s fish master, without success.
Meanwhile the Munro’s mess deck had been converted to a medical ward with heaters, sleeping bags, blankets, hot drinks, and IVs of warm saline solution for the rescued, this operation overseen by the ship’s corpsman. At one point Captain Lloyd spotted a recovering fisherman huddled by himself sketching out a tattoo design: an anchor with the words RANGER SURVIVOR.
“I ask all my new crew what their moms and dads do,” Lloyd told me earlier, “and a really common answer I get from about 10 percent of them is their mom’s a nurse. So you have this rescue personality—people whose mothers were nurturing for a living, and they want a life like that, but with more adventure.”
Shortly after the rescue, the Coast Guard opened an investigation into why the Seattle-based Alaska Ranger, a onetime oil service ship in the Gulf of Mexico, sank. It also began to examine what went wrong with its own efforts. Of course, far more went right than wrong when you consider the conditions in which forty-two out of forty-seven souls were saved.
From prepositioning to decisive action in incredibly confusing and dangerous circumstances, the Alaska Ranger case, despite its tragic losses, is still a thing of wonder, an example of how the Coast Guard can do a lot with a little, saving lives in places near and far, both fiery and frigid, any day of the year.
E
ven so, if the Coast Guard were a private corporation, it would probably have filed for Chapter 11 by now. As many of its cutters rust out from beneath it, funding lags, and delivery of new assets is delayed, its mission requirements continue to skyrocket.
In an era of expanding global trade, the world’s fleet of large commercial ships will soon grow from eighty thousand to over one hundred thousand. The United States’ port activity and maritime trade is also projected to increase in the next decade. Also expected to grow are the number of Category 4 and 5 hurricanes and intensity of El Niño storms linked to climate change. Droughts, coastal flooding, political instability, and the world’s expanding population will also have a direct impact on illegal migration by sea, while food security is threatened by the collapse of the ocean’s wild fisheries and pollution of the sea. As living resources decline, the tendency to cheat will likely see some fishermen turn to piracy, and some pirates link up with drug cartels and terrorists on the high seas. Terrorism will continue to threaten ninety-five thousand miles of U.S. shoreline, as will the collapse of aging bridges, piers, and other infrastructure. Additional threats include invasive species like Asian mussels that can sink navigation buoys with their cumulative weight, harmful algal blooms that can sicken people, and toxic and deadly accidents and oil spills on our waterways.
At the same time, the Coast Guard is being asked to take on new regulatory and security roles for LNG terminals, greater oversight for twenty million recreational vesse
ls, and responsibility for our emerging open-water fifth coast in the Arctic.
How can the Coast Guard find ways to grow and bring others along on these new and expanded missions during an economic recession and waning trillion-dollar war? How can it deliver to the public when the public isn’t even aware of all the services it now provides, or else has different priorities and expectations? The next few years will tell. The challenges for its leadership are immense and immediate.
CHAPTER 13
The Next Surge
“I really don’t know why it is that all of us are so committed to the sea, except I
think it’s because in addition to the fact that the sea changes,
and the light changes, and ships change, it’s because we all came from the sea.”
—PRESIDENT JOHN F. KENNEDY
“Past successes don’t guarantee future performance.”
—COAST GUARD COMMANDANT THAD ALLEN ON THE STATE OF THE U.S. COAST GUARD
Leadership counts. While secretaries of the navy and chiefs of naval operations (the Navy’s top military position) tend to come and go with little change to the fleet, the Coast Guard is such a small, multifaceted organization that its leadership can have a profound impact on its direction. Its founding commandant, Ellsworth Bertholf, and its longest-serving commandant, World War II’s Russell Waesche, both came to shape and personify the service they led.
Being an institutional orphan in Washington whose neglectful foster parents have included the Treasury Department, Navy Department, Department of Transportation, and Department of Homeland Security, the Coast Guard is also more reliant on its commandants to provide guidance over time. Unfortunately, this can sometimes lead to erratic course corrections, such as the shift from the militarizing mission of Adm. Paul Yost (1986–90) to the environmental and corporate management ethos of his successor, Adm. William Kime (1990–94).
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