Rescue Warriors

by David Helvarg

  He wants an integrated system for everything they wear and segues this into his talk about simplifying logistics and supply chains, “like the aviation folks do. Curtis Bay [Baltimore, the Coast Guard shipyard] will become the product line source for all 225s [large buoy tenders] like Elizabeth City is for aviation—but you’ll have to trust the system and not squirrel away extra parts. We can no longer have one-boat stations with two boats, the second functioning as an engine holder.” The mechanic next to me grins at that.

  “I would never talk down to the deck people,” Allen later tells me, “but I want to explain the parts of the reforms that impact how they work day to day.”

  He asks if they have any questions. They do. One is about privatizing ATON, the aids to navigation mission that is the Willow’s bread and butter.

  He claims Hurricanes Katrina and Rita proved that recovery of maritime commerce works best as a government job. “There were rivers with altered bottoms and debris and all their navigation buoys gone, and no private contractor would do the job or could get insurance to do it, but the Coast Guard did, marking the best water.”

  Along with proposals to privatize Coast Guard missions like ATON and icebreaking, Congress has periodically proposed charging money for search and rescue. The Coast Guard has always resisted this idea, believing that if people think it’s going to cost them money they will delay calling for help until the risks become so great that more lives, including the lives of their rescuers, are lost.

  “You’re in a high-risk environment,” Allen tells his people. “Take care of each other. Watch your backs, and not just on the job, but when you’re out there don’t let your buddy do something stupid. I couldn’t be prouder of you guys.”

  He’s given a Willow T-shirt and bill cap. “If anyone wants a picture with—”

  “I want a picture with you, sir,” one of the crew shouts out, to the amusement of his shipmates. The digital and video cameras are pulled out as the crew of hardworking men and women pose with their boss in groups of one, two, and four.

  We then climb onto the 41-footer. Chief Warrant Officer Kevin Galvin, an old friend of the commandant’s, is driving. We head across the gray choppy waters of Narragansett Bay to Station Castle Rock, escorted by the machine-gun-mounted 25. Galvin offers Allen the wheel. The crew feed him coordinates and distance. “Fourteen hundred yards left on this course.” We pass the Rose Island Lighthouse, Fort Adams, Castle Hill Light, and the stunning old-money “cottages” of Newport.

  We slow and enter a narrow channel that takes us to the red-roofed white shingle Castle Rock Station that still has the old rail ramp the Life-Saving Service used for sliding their wooden boats into the water.

  At the top of a forested hill they’ve set up a white tent and a barbecue station offering hot dogs and burgers. There are about a hundred Coasties here from Sector SE New England. After everyone starts eating and they give recognition to a chief on his fiftieth birthday, Admiral Allen does a variation on what he calls his “spiel,” including the fashion show. “It’s untucked, with pockets here and here, and very pleasing for us in petite sizes,” he jokes. He talks about the Deployable Operations Group, streamlining logistics, and other challenges such as fixing the inland Coast Guard’s shore facilities.

  He’s asked if people can take pictures with him. “If the camera can tolerate it,” he replies, not for the first time. I notice the stewards of our public seas don’t recycle their cans and plastic bottles, which all go into a single garbage can with the BBQ trash.

  The commandant next climbs aboard an HH-60 that will fly him and a few officers to the Chatham Surf Station on Cape Cod on his way to Boston. I catch a ride with one of the CGIS vans to the waterfront hotel in Boston where we’ll be staying.

  That evening I’m invited to a dinner at Admiral Sullivan’s house in Beverly, north of Boston. The spacious Hospital Point Coast Guard residence with its adjoining lighthouse overlooking scenic Salem Harbor is elegant and impressive, even if it was once the site of a smallpox hospital.

  Cars are shuttled around and CGIS radios chatter until the commandant and his escort, including an unmarked state police car, arrive. Unlike most states, Massachusetts always gives him a trooper escort. I later figure out why when he tells me his children are Yankees fans.

  There are a dozen people at the party and a dinner buffet including oysters, clam chowder, crab cakes, and crab claws. Admiral Allen is dressed casually in tan slacks and an understated blue and brown aloha shirt. He tells a couple of people about how he went into the Margaritaville Café in New Orleans after Katrina to show his support and wrote a note on a napkin and Jimmy Buffett called back months later, thrilling his office manager. Among his ambitions, he says, is to get the popular NPR radio program Prairie Home Companion to do a show at the Coast Guard Academy.

  I go into the kitchen and meet the house manager, Food Service Specialist First Class Brittney Gonzales, and her dinner crew, which includes her husband, Machinery Technician First Class Raul Gonzales, whom she’s wrangled into helping out, and Food Service Specialists Second Class Melissa Olson and Michael King. The enlisted ratings with the most at-sea time are not coxswains, gunners, or mechanics but cooks. The commandant comes in to greet them, and after dinner they’re introduced to the party guests.

  Gonzales, who used to cook on a Medium Endurance Cutter, is one of a handful of house managers working at admirals’ residences. They each do a stint at the commandant’s house before their assignments. “So they’re working where I’m living and I’m living in their workplace” is how the commandant explains it. Later he will instruct Raul Gonzales on the proper way to chill a glass for a Manhattan.

  On the Road, Day 2

  Thursday starts early with a fast-moving caravan of four vehicles pulling up at a cable news station. The commandant enters with an entourage of eight plus me. Waiting in the greenroom, he begins to read a newspaper, then checks his Palm for other news and e-mails. Next week he’ll fly to New York to do a boating safety spot for the Today show. He’s led into the studio and seated across from Karen, the attractive morning hostess, while the soundman mikes him. Before they go on air, Karen tells him she lived in Slidell, Louisiana, during Hurricane Katrina and was with the CBS affiliate in New Orleans and thanks him for all he did down there.

  When they go live she asks, “How prepared are we in New England for a major storm?” He says that people need to prepare to get along on their own for seventy-two hours before counting on the government to respond to a crisis. He talks about safety, security, and stewardship of our oceans, and their five minutes are up. They cut to the weatherman, who also reminds the viewers of the need for hurricane preparedness.

  On the way out, I suggest the admiral do public service announcements on hurricane preparedness. His press aide, Brendan, worries the head of FEMA might take offense.

  Heading back to Boston, we hit morning rush hour. The state trooper hits his lights and siren, and the caravan cuts across three lanes of traffic and rolls onto the shoulder moving fast.

  Back at the hotel’s concrete wharf, we board a machine-gun-equipped 41-footer and head out into the harbor. There are fourteen people on board, including a couple of enlisted Coasties modeling CBRN (chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear) ODUs in green and blue that also function as floatation suits with hoods. If they put on their protective gloves and air masks and a death-spewing witches’ brew comes along, leaving the rest of us dead or writhing on the deck with foam and spittle on our lips, they’d still be comfy enough to take over the boat’s helm and machine gun. One of the two types of CBRN suits is used by British forces, the other by U.S. Special Forces. The question is which is better suited for the Coast Guard’s marine environmental demands. Recently retired Coast Guard Strike Team member Dave Dugery is evaluating the two for SAIC, a Coast Guard contractor.

  “You’re the systems integrator. You don’t have a vested interest in any of the suits?” the commandant asks.

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p; “No, we don’t,” Dave assures him.

  That’s what newspaper editors call “the nut graph,” the key bit that holds a story together. With the Deepwater program, the systems integrator had a $24 billion vested interest in the boats.

  We pull up by the old red and white Coast Guard lightship Nantucket, moored in the middle of the harbor. We’re welcomed aboard by Bill, a Boston lawyer who purchased it on eBay, then spent $5 million converting it into a palatial floating home and conference center that he charters out in the summer. We’re toured through the mahogany-, brass-, and marble-laden rooms as he shows the admiral how the mast light still works, a light he claims “immigrants once saw as a beacon of hope, welcome, and warning.”

  Bill’s wife is ready to move back to the land, though, and “as a steward of this national treasure,” Bill would be willing to sell it to the Coast Guard Foundation for the $5 million he put into it, rather than his $7.5 million asking price.

  The Commandant thanks him for his stewardship. Bill tells him his ninety-four-year-old dad is still in the Coast Guard Auxiliary.

  We get back on the 41-footer and head up Chelsea Creek close by the LNG terminal, the Tobin Bridge, and the Chelsea Bridge, which has been scheduled for replacement since 1992 and is, according to Coast Guard Bridge Program manager Gary Kassof, “a disaster waiting to happen.”

  Cruising past the King Edwin, a huge blue-hulled fuel tanker flagged in the Marshall Islands, I understand what he means. The gap at the Chelsea Street Bridge is ninety-six feet wide. The tanker is ninety feet wide by some six hundred feet long. We pull over by the Conoco-Phillips tank farm to watch four tugboats gingerly playing the King Edwin through the slot, one of them at the ship’s rear acting as a counterweight. It’s a delicate maritime ballet, always at risk of a stumble. There are some six or eight collisions with this bridge every year, none catastrophic to date.

  We’re then dropped off at the Boston Coast Guard station in the North End, where, after posing for pictures with the crew, the commandant meets with top district officers.

  Afterward there’s a retirement ceremony for Chief Warrant Officer Dan Parker, who served with Thad Allen in Thailand. There are about 125 people attending. The slim gray-haired Coastie talks about some of his career highlights as an engineer and safety inspector sent to Antarctica, Thailand, and various oil rigs off the coast of Africa.

  After the ceremony is completed with an officer reading him out of the service (“Shipmate—this watch stands relieved”), there’s a reception and roast for Parker with valiant attempts at humor. Thad Allen skips the humor part and tells of their time in Thailand when the loran needed an emergency repair and “we had Dan upside down with a torch and the fuel line packed with ice and everyone else backed off except for three [guys] who were standing by with fire extinguishers.”

  The admiral’s next stop is at the Boston Globe for a sit-down with two of its editorial page writers, Don and Larry. There are old campaign posters of LBJ, Nixon, and Kennedy adorning the conference room walls. They start out by asking him about a quote that morning from the secretary of defense saying force can’t solve all problems. He responds with a rapid-fire unrelated answer. Whenever he gets a question he doesn’t like, he talks faster.

  They finally find an area of mutual interest discussing proposed new LNG sites off Massachusetts and on Long Island Sound. There are over forty applications for new LNG terminals in the United States, and the Coast Guard has to approve each plan for safety and security. On the eastern seaboard, the liquefied natural gas will come from gasification plants in Trinidad and Algeria.

  “I went to Trinidad and took a tour, and its LNG is spotless and secure. Those are conditions of their bank loan and insurance, which is something to look into,” he suggests. “We are satisfied with Algeria,” he adds, without mentioning a 2004 accidental explosion that killed twenty-seven workers, injured eighty, and caused over a billion dollars of damage to the port.

  Other topics discussed for possible future editorials include shipping container security (a Customs job), wind turbines off Cape Cod (the Coasties pull out the maps on this one), and ship strikes of endangered northern right whales, of whom there are only some three hundred left. Because of their tendency to loll at the surface, these great oil-rich cetaceans became the “right” (easy) whale to kill for New England’s early whalers. Today this same tendency leaves the last right whales vulnerable to being struck and killed by container ships, tankers, and other vessels plying the shipping lanes off New England. The Coast Guard has taken modest steps to try to reduce these fatal collisions, including shifting one shipping lane out of a feeding area.

  From the Globe the caravan heads to Logan Airport, where we are waved through the North Security Gate and driven up to the commandant’s jet waiting for him on the tarmac.

  A

  fter we take off, I ask him what the Coast Guard of the future will look like, and he gives me the Thad Allen doctrine. “We can’t predict the future. We need an organization that can adapt to change, that can fluidly respond to whatever the environment requires—and that’s no small thing. Change is hard, [especially] trying to deal just with the rush of business, the tyranny of the present. My legacy isn’t the CIAOs. I told my flag corps [admirals] I’m a transition commandant. We are an organization that is changecentric, asymmetrical, and very flat [accessible and driven from all levels of command]. Of course, they can tell me to go to hell,” he concludes, “but if they don’t adapt, it’s not going to be my failure of imagination.”

  He’s constantly in campaign mode, and what’s interesting is how much of that is focused internally on the Coast Guard itself. He’s trying to sell his vision to the next generation of leaders from the deck plate to the chief’s mess to junior officers in the field as well as the captains and admirals at headquarters. He plans to talk to all fifty thousand active-duty and reserve members by the time his term is up in 2010. In his first year he met with seventeen thousand.

  He also met with a hundred members of Congress, recognizing, as few before him have, that just doing the right thing does not get you the resources you need in Washington.

  “The Coast Guard doesn’t do politics and policy,” says former Coast Guard Academy professor and now Council on Foreign Relations fellow Scott Borgerson. “We can save people off rooftops after a Category 5 hurricane, but we can’t understand a high school graph about how a bill becomes law.”

  Thad Allen seems to understands politics and policy and has begun working hard to make friends among congressional majority Democrats, to eradicate their identification of him as a Bush administration figure. “We don’t always see eye to eye, but I respect the commandant. The man has integrity,” says House Coast Guard Subcommittee chair Elijah Cummings.

  Allen has also become a strong policy advocate for a cogent U.S. response to the Arctic meltdown, the rapid loss of sea ice due to fossil-fuel-fired climate change. “I’m agnostic on climate change, science and everything else,” he’ll later claim in a press conference. “All I know is there’s water where there didn’t used to be, and I have statutory responsibilities to operate there.”

  I understand his reluctance to challenge the commander in chief (George W. Bush at the time), but to me that sounds a bit like “I’m agnostic on what caused the damage at Pearl Harbor; all I know is we have to refloat those ships and get them operating again.”

  “I’m unconstrained to do the right thing,” the admiral claims, taking a Jack Daniel’s from one of the crew. “My three kids are all grown; my wife is the assistant dean at George Mason [University]. I can put in the twelve- to eighteen-hour days. I’m fairly passionate. I wear people down.”

  “He doesn’t play golf. Work is his hobby” is how Batch, his assistant, explains it.

  He’s also a believer in applying social network theory to organizational change. Social network theory analogizes complex systems such as cellular biology, power grids, the spread of diseases, and the Internet with social ne
tworks to study the ways in which groups of people organize themselves, identifying key nodes, or hubs, be they neurons in the brain or a SAR coordinator at a surf station, that can facilitate and accelerate growth and communication but are also highly vulnerable to disruption and sabotage.

  In this context, Thad Allen’s saying his organization is “asymmetrical” was more likely a reference to its simultaneous formal and informal networks of communications, rather than the military definition of asymmetrical I’d taken it to be: an imbalance of forces leading to the use of compensatory tactics and strategies by the nominally weaker side. Either way, the Coast Guard fits the bill.

  The admiral recommends I read two books on social network theory, Linked, by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, and Nexus, by Mark Buchanan. I ask him what book he’s reading now and he says Guns, Germs, and Steel, by Jared Diamond, which is a different type of social theory, one using a scientific view of history to demonstrate that geography and environment, not race or culture, were key to the development of the technologies and immunities that gave “Western civilization” its edge in global hegemony, at least through the early part of the twenty-first century.

  So how, in a world of accelerating socioecological change, unrestrained markets, nongovernmental players, and ubiquitous information, does one institutionalize reform in a 220-year-old organization, I wonder.

  “In 1998, [then Commandant] Bob Kramek put Jim Loy on staff with a high-level plan, the Long View Project,” Allen explains. “It was to take five or six strategic drivers—globalization, energy, population . . . and we came out with twenty-five future scenarios, and senior leadership looked at these and got a core five or six futures and described these worlds. We’d build twenty-five-year strategies and then bring them back together and look across these five or six futures, and we had some commonalities, we had two or three keepers, and one was Maritime Domain Awareness.”