My Coast Guard Experience

by Tom Barnes

“Thanks for coming guys, this is awful nice.  I will try and keep this under ten minutes.  I was thinking about my career before we came over here and without going into a long list of where I was stationed, I just want to thank some people and tell a few stories.  I want to thank Seaman Recruit John Santo for trying to sneak into the woman’s barracks with me when we were in Boot Camp together.  No one else would do it with me but him. 

We got caught before we got in there and lied about what we were doing and they bought it.  It was a close call, but it was fun”. “I want to thank the forty guys and gals that I served with on the Governor’s Island Security Detachment at my first assignment after Boot Camp.  We drank ourselves into oblivion most of the time we were not working. 

We broke up some fights and stopped some married couples from killing each other. We saved some drunks from death and watched a few other drunks die right in front of us.  It was not a boring tour for me. That is for sure!  Of course that was the old Third Coast Guard District.  It doesn’t exist anymore.”

“Thanks for coming guys, this is awful nice.  I will try and keep this under ten minutes.  I was thinking about my career before we came over here and without going into a long list of where I was stationed, I just want to thank some people and tell a few stories.  I want to thank Seaman Recruit John Santo for trying to sneak into the woman’s barracks with me when we were in Boot Camp together.  No one else would do it with me but him.  We got caught before we got in there and lied about what we were doing and they bought it.  It was a close call, but it was fun”.

“I want to thank the forty guys and gals that I served with on the Governor’s Island Security Detachment at my first assignment after Boot Camp.  We drank ourselves into oblivion most of the time we were not working.  We broke up some fights and stopped some married couples from killing each other. We saved some drunks from death and watched a few other drunks die right in front of us.  It was not a boring tour for me. That is for sure!  Of course that was the old Third Coast Guard District.  It doesn’t exist anymore.”

“I want to thank the men and women that I served with at Coast Guard Base Gloucester City, New Jersey.  It doesn’t exist anymore either.  We did some real serious drinking at Donna’s Bar and Grill just outside the gate.  That is where I learned about the Coast Guard and oil spills and hazardous materials and of course, serious drinking.  Thanks everyone.”

“But before I leave my mental sojourn at Base Gloucester City in New Jersey I would like to tell one story that sort of encapsulates the whole crazy experience there.  I worked with another yeoman named Frank (name withheld)  who was a single guy. He was born and raised in Camden, New Jersey just five miles away. He rented an upstairs apartment on Euclid Avenue in Woodbury, New Jersey from an officer’s wife who was a leading member of a witch’s coven.  She had a dozen cats who were her familiars and were always pooping all over the old house and she had ghosts in the house.  Frank would be drunk any time that I would visit him and finally it came out in conversation that he was being visited by ghosts every night.  That is why he was drunk.  He was scared to death”.

“The officer whose wife owned the home was stationed in D.C.  The wife was having an affair with the warlock of the coven because the officer was never home.  The whole place was spooky and the situation was goofy.  One night, in the middle of the night, Frank got up to sit on the toilet.  As he was sitting there the ghost of an old woman came drifting through the bathroom door and over to Frank and passed right through his body.  He was terrified. The next day he came to work and wanted to speak to me alone”.

“As you may not know, I had studied to be a priest for a few years before I entered the Service.  Frank knew that and asked me to perform an exorcism. As anyone familiar with this sort of thing knows, a former seminarian is not qualified in any way to perform an exorcism and I explained this to Frank.  He would not hear of it.  He insisted that I come over that night and throw the demons out of his apartment. So I agreed”.

“At that time my marriage was pretty much in the dumps. My wife was having severe emotional problems and I was pretty much a terminal drunk.  She was too preoccupied with her mental state to really pay much mind to me.  So that night after I was home about two hours, I took a big crucifix off the wall of our bedroom and told her that I was going over to Frank’s place to exorcise some demons.  She simply said, “Fine.  Don’t wake me if I am asleep when you get home”.  I left and drove over to Frank’s place.”

“When I got to his place he is completely smashed and upstairs cowering in his bedroom on the bed.  I have this big oversized crucifix in my hand and I say, “Okay, get up and follow me.  Put your right hand on my left shoulder and push me to where the ghosts are staying in the house”.  He tells me that he thinks they stay in the living room.  So I tell him that we are going to start in the living room and climb back up the stairs and exorcise the ghosts in every room.  He says to me, ‘Tom, are you sure that this will work?’ and I assure him that this is foolproof and that I was the number one student at seminary in exorcism class.  He buys into the story and follows me down the steps and the whole time I have the crucifix in front of me and I am screaming “Demons be gone!  In the name of Jesus be gone!” I tell him to say it along with me and so he does.  The two of us are screaming this in every room we pass.  His witch landlady was at a coven meeting so she was not home to stop us”.

“When we get to the living room I tell Frank that this is most important part and we have to do this exactly right.  I tell him to do exactly as I say and do.  He agrees.  He is behind me with his eyes closed and has his right hand on my left shoulder as I instructed him to do.  I then start chanting and do the actions that the chant calls for.  I tell Frank to do the same.”

“I start chanting. ‘Put your right foot in, put your right foot out, put your right foot in and then shake it all about!  Do the Hocus Pocus and drive the Demons out!  That’s what it’s all about!’  We circle the living room three times doing this ridiculous chant and all the actions that go with it and Frank is more serious than I have ever seen him.  We continue to do this as we climb back up the steps to his upstairs apartment and by the time to his room, he passes out on the bed dead drunk.”

“The next day he shows up back at work.  He is confident, cocky and completely self assured.  He was himself again.  He took me out to lunch and thanked me for driving the demons out of his house.  He told me that they never bothered him again.  I did not have the heart to tell him that generally speaking the Hokey Pokey usually has no power over demons but who was I to argue with success?  Pretty much that whole tour at Gloucester City was like that”.

“I want to thank the instructors who threw me out of OCS when they found out that I could not navigate myself toward the bathroom at night.  They did the right thing.  If I had been commissioned and become a deck watch officer, I would have killed the crew.  And they would still be looking for that ship!”

“I want to thank the pilots and air crew and black shoes at Coast Guard Air Station Brooklyn and of course it does not exist anymore.  Are you noticing a pattern here?”  Everyone laughed.  “I especially want to thank Aviation Machinist Mate Second Class Martin (name with held)  for allowing me to assist him in making a UFO out of wire hangars, dry cleaners plastic wrap fashioned into an air tight box kite and sealed by butane lighter at the seams.  We hung a Sterno fuel pack under the box onto a cradle we made with wire and lit the fuel and let the hot air rise into the airtight see-through box kite”. 

“We then hung forty feet of aluminum foil wrap under the UFO-kite and it rose and glowed in the sky.  All you could see from below was a glowing light.

The radar people at JFK airport tower caught the forty feet of aluminum foil on the radar as it was just rising higher and higher.  The New York Air National Guard launched a helicopter to investigate when the UFO would not respond to radio calls from JFK Tower.  They could not find it but it floated over to Sheepshead Bay and the old Irish women over there thought it was the Virgin Mary coming to them in the sky.  I guess the light from above made them think it was a Marian Visitation right there in New York.  A crowd gathered and started to say the rosary.  The miracle ended after an hour or so when the box kite UFO landed in a backyard and set a dog house on fire.  We were very lucky that we did not get caught.”  The room erupted in laughter.  Tom waited for it to die down and continued.

“I want to thank the staff and students at Yeoman School in Petaluma, California for putting up with me for the fourteen months that I was instructor there.  I am not sure that I was a very good instructor but I had a captive audience and got to tell a lot of my jokes.  It was heaven.  Since my drinking got so bad by this time, they forced me to get help.  I am grateful and want to publicly thank them now.  They saved my life, I am sure.“  Everyone grew quiet at that last comment.  Tom continued.

“I then got promoted to Chief Yeoman and was immediately assigned to Coast Guard Cutter Rush.  She was home-ported in Alameda, California and I served in her for 34 months.  She was the worst assignment and the best assignment I ever had.  I saw action in her twice, got injured several times, very sick once and did the best I could to serve the crew.  I hope that they know that.  I will never forget that assignment.”

“I want to thank the men and women who served at Support Center Alameda with me after my Rush days.  I made a lot of high placed enemies there and I am quite sure that I am hated even today by some of these people.  They say that a man’s importance in life is measured by the power of his enemies.  If that is true, I am one important son of a bitch!”  With that everybody laughed. “I also want to thank Yeoman Second Class Sharon Redmond for the pay cage incident.  She knows what I am talking about, wherever she is.  Thank you Sharon!”  Everyone laughed but they were not exactly sure why.

“I want to thank the men and women of the old Second Coast Guard District in St. Louis, Missouri with whom I served as Personnel Officer.  Of course, the Second District does not exist as a District anymore!  My career imploded here. I was passed over for W-3 while I was away in Alaska on the Exxon Valdez oil spill cleanup operation serving as personnel officer there. I learned a lot from this bitter lesson, probably more than from any other assignment.  I also want to thank the men and women with whom I served in Alaska for those three cleanup seasons. It was a bitter assignment in St. Louis, but one I needed to have.  I will never forget those lessons and the people in Alaska and my friends in St. Louis made it worthwhile”.

“I want to thank the men and women with whom I served at Base Philadelphia especially the junior officers who made my assignment there quite pleasant.  As usual, I made a lot of enemies as the Personnel Officer there and I had to step into some lousy situations and correct them. Some days were downright dark there.  It was not a pleasant assignment but they all cannot be pleasant. Some old scores were apparently expected to be settled there.  I was on the receiving end of a lot of Service hatred an awful lot of the time.  Let me just state that careers were ended and mine was not one of them.  Let me just remind everyone here as I retire.

Do not mess with a warrant officer.  We are too old and too cagey and we know too many people.  If you screw with the bull you get the horns.  A word to the wise is all that is needed.”  Everyone quietly listened and some moved nervously in their chairs.

“And lastly I want to thank the men and women with whom I have worked here at the National Pollution Funds Center.  You are a different sort of group.  That is for sure!” Everyone laughed.  “I look forward to my life in retirement. I am not sure what I will be doing, I will be staying here in Northern Virginia, so I hope to see all of you some time again.  Thanks for what you do”.