Coast Guard Boot Camp

recorded by Dan Stewart, July 2010

[You didn't get] to touch your bed from 5 o'clock in the morning until 9 o'clock at night. It had to be made by 5:15, and you didn't touch it until [9]. And then you had 30 minutes to get in bed and be prepared to sleep. Heck, I mean, don't talk [after 9]. If you talked, then you got up at 1 til 3 and you marched.

[Rhonda] Did you ever have to do that?

Oh, we did that a lot. (laughs)

[Rhonda] Cause some people couldn't learn to shut up?

Well, there was four from Washington state and three from Oregon. There were seven of us out of 40-some people. The rest were all from California and they thought they had controlling vote. They found out they didn't because of the if they got pushy, well, we would march all night!

[Rhonda] So you would talk on purpose]

Yes. (laughs) It took two weeks and the seven of us had control. Total control.

So the company commander, he was a first class postman(?) and he knew exactly what we did. We all, all of us, graduated with honors in the class.

[Rhonda] Good leadership skills, right?

Absolutely. Take control of any situation.

I did the same thing when we went to Alaska. I was standing on look-out duty in May or early June, going up the Inward Passage.

Rainy.

Foggy.

Cold.

I sat up on the bow of the ship and I thought, "this is stupid. There's gotta be something better."

Next morning, the ship captain comes up: "I need a volunteer for mess cook duty."

(mimes scrambling to attention)

He says, "you'll have to get up early."

I said, "I don't want to stand on look out duty on that damn bow." (laughs)

He says, "you're gonna do well."

I was mess cook. I got up early and I was warm. I had the best food. If someone gave you a hard time that would determine where you placed his food on the tray.

That's why I say enlisted people in the military are geniuses. (laughs) They know just exactly how far you can go and get away [with it] or what you can do to get even and how you do it.

About the 83-footers

recorded by Dan Stewart, July 2010

The coast guard was different because on the stations I was on, we didn't have any officers. It was all enlisted. We had an officer over a group, but down in Oregon at the lifeboat station, it was just the Chief in charge, see, it was all enlisted. 83 footers? It was all enlisted. When I'd go out on the 40-footers, I was most of the time in charge, I was the senior man.

That's the way the Coast Guard works. They don't muck around with officers; they do their job.

I was reading in that Coast Guard history book on the 83-footer that I was on, this was the one fifty years ago now. [Sylvia] and I got married, I was on this 83-footer. They were built for the landing at Normandy. Their job was to rescue every one of those landing crafts when one of them got shot up. Those boats would rescue the people, take them back to the boat. They'd put them back on a landing craft and they'd go back in.

They said if it hadn't been for the 83-footers - it was every major landing that the allied forced made in World War 2 - there was at least fifty to sixty 83-footers at each one of those landings. And that was their job, to rescue people. And they made every landing, and without them, most landings would not have been successful.

They named them the "floating bomb" because they had 2000 gallons of gasoline on them. Not diesel oil, gasoline. And they served in vietnam too.

You know, we didn't think anything of it at the time, to get down in that boat, get on that stupid thing. When the gas truck'd come up, we'd drag the gas up and pump that sucker full. We had to keep it 80% full of fuel. We'd put the gas in it.

At Friday Harbor, when the ferry hit the dock and that beam went through the engine room. The fire men were standing like over here (gestures to one side), and the beam went here and here (gestures a foot on either side}.

And [Sylvia], she had came over and spent the night. They'd took the ferry, her and another one of the guy's wives. We were probably newlyweds, and they came over on the ferry. Then they had to go back on that ferry, cause we had to take the boat to Seattle. I didn't tell her for a long time where that beam went.