This is the rarely-advertised and seldom-celebrated life of the men and women who work on the Coast Guard’s more than 31 medium-and high-endurance cutters. A Coast Guard cutter is a fusion of young and old sailors, those with years of sea time and those with days, those who have traveled the world and those who have never left their hometown.
Jordan recites the weather and the plan of the day for the rousing crewmembers, while never breaking from the disc jockey character he plays so well. In a world where routine and tradition are often set aside for operational needs, this is a welcome recurring event.
“You know you’re doing a good thing when you can make people look forward to waking up in the morning,” said Jordan.
These men and women spend more than 185 days on average away from their family and friends, and aside from the occasional grumble or homesick remark, the men and women of the Forward are happy on the 270 feet they call home.
“Underway duty is not necessarily harder (than shore duty), just a different lifestyle. In the end, the missions are a little different, but the goal is always the same – excellence,” said BMC George Smith, the chief of the Forward’s deck division. Every aspect of underway life is vastly different from shore duty at a station, a group or a support unit. People underway long to pull into port to hear the voice of a loved one, while at the same time rounding off an eight-hour work day and eight hours of watch. Mess cooks sweat in a hotscullery washing dishes for 14 hours and desire to be on the bridge or in the engine room learning the trades that may some day be their career.
“When you’re on land, you have more chances to participate in your community, but when you’re on a cutter, that is your community,” said Smith.
The fact that everything is different is just one of the challenges a newly assigned basic training or class “A” school graduate faces when reporting aboard a cutter.
Seamen, firemen and junior petty officers gather on the mess deck of the Forward just about every night to become proficient in damage control, the only hope the crew will have to save their ship if something should happen underway. The crew is taught fire fighting, plugging, patching, dewatering and basic first aid. They are required to know the location of every dewatering pump and firefighting station onboard. This rigorous training is squeezed in between their normal eight-hour workday and eight hours of watch.
Everyone on the ship has his or her skills tested on a regular basis. Every day is usually marked by fire drills, boat lowering details, law enforcement boardings or flight quarters. Every operation requires the participation of everyone onboard. Senior officers and chiefs walk young officers and enlisted members through every imaginable damage control scenario aboard the Forward on a regular
basis. The ship is transformed into a classroom, where mock fires and engine causalities consume the boat. Ensigns and lieutenants junior grade send repair parties and fire teams out to stop imaginary flooding and fires; young petty officers lead fire fighting teams into the engine room; all the while their senior leadership prompts them on the correct procedures and methods.
“It’s so important that they learn these skills,” said CWO2 David Cornelius, the main propulsion assistant onboard the Forward. “It’s not like your house where you can just go out on your front lawn and wait for the fire department. On a ship, you’ve got no where to go.”
Law enforcement boardings are an equally complicatedand important mission. Within hours of becoming the command tasking unit for Coast Guard assets participating in Operation Able Sentry, an operation aimed at deterring illegal migration off the coast of Haiti, the crew of the Forward had already conducted two boardings and was following another seemingly suspicious sailboat in the Windward Passage in the Caribbean Sea.
