SAN DIEGO — America was between wars when I was on active duty in the Coast Guard (1955-1959). There was peace in the world. The only remote hint of future conflict was the comment made by a sore loser Japanese student pilot in U.S. Naval flight school at Corpus Christie, who said to me, “Maybe some day we fight again.” He retired eons ago without his dream being realized. I had no opportunity to return home a hero with a chest full of medals and a fifty-mission crush Army Air Corps hat like my Uncle Lenny had. During World War ll, he was a B-25 bombardier/navigator who blasted the smithereens out of German and Italians in Africa and Italy, and the Ploesti oil fields of axis-occupied Romania. Ironically he had a terrible sense of direction when reading a road map.
After I had completed active duty, the law required that for the next four years I attend monthly weekend duty and two weeks annual active duty at a base in my home environs. I lived in New York City and worked for American Airlines, so I had free air transportation and I was able to get assigned to the Captain of the Port office on Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco Bay. This was an important and busy command center that controlled all the ship and shore activity in and around the Bay, assuring that everything flowed smoothly and legally.
I presented my orders to a surprised Commanding Officer, who commented, “I don’t have any reserve program here, so you better figure out something to do every day. If I find you hanging around, I’ll have you file papers or some other shit duty.” I got the message. Just then, I looked out the second floor window from the second floor location and saw two petty officers on a 40-foot patrol boat hauling a gray-green bloated dead man onto the dock. He was an alcoholic who had fallen off a pier and been dead for several days. They had been looking for him. It was a good way to start my duty.
A short time later, the boat was going out on patrol again. I joined the two Boatswain Mate petty officers operating the craft. Our job was to cruise around looking for anything unusual or illegal. We also were a search-and-rescue vessel, in case someone or something fell in the water and became a hazard to navigation. A considerable number of vessels of every size and description were always transiting the Bay It was the Coast Guard’s mission to keep the harbor free of problems.
We cruised around for a few hours and I was enjoying the intimacy of our situation. It was like being a water cop, not a tour boat pointing out the rock of Alcatraz and the restaurants of Sausalito. We motored under the Golden Gate Bridge, and poked around inlets with a vigilant eye. We examined the wakes of passing ships, looking for tell tale rainbow signs of fuel leaks or large flocks of sea trailing them. Birds were a sure sign of illegal garbage dumping.
One of my shipmates fancied himself a gourmet chef. There was a hot plate in the cabin on which he could sauté the most imaginative preparations into the finest of delicacies. At lunch time, our “chef-de-cuisine” prepared his award-winning recipe in my honor: scrambled eggs dipped in corn flakes, lightly browned on each side. The pancake was elegantly laid between two slices of white bread. One side was generously layered with fine ketchup and the other, golden mustard. My other shipmate and I ate the concoction with gusto and many compliments to the chef.
As we finished our repast, the radio barked, “Ready Boat, this is base. Proceed to pier 18. There’s a dead stinking cow floating in the water and it’s very close to the pier. The smell is bothering the longshoremen working on the dock above. Tow the cow away from the dock and stand by until further instructions.” The cow apparently had kicked out a slatted sidewall on a cattle barge being towed across the Bay to a railroad siding. “We’re trying to locate the owner to get rid of it.” The award-winning chef had not eaten yet and was hungry. He prepared his own portion while the other well-fed mate drove the craft toward our destination. We arrived at the pier just as the haute-cuisine was ready. I suggested he might want to postpone the meal until we completed the task, but he was not deterred.
The longshoremen saw us approach and laughingly pointed to the location of the green, bloated creature, that should have had an arguably better fate tucked between endless sesame seed buns. The chef grabbed the pointed gaff-hook pole with one hand and reached to secure the vile hulk. The other hand securely held the sandwich, from which he took generous bites, while performing his task. The crusty stevedores on the docks above thought they had seen it all until this mad scene, and came unglued in unrestrained laughter.
The carcass secure, and the sandwich safely digesting in what has to be one of the all-time cast-iron stomachs, we motored to a safe location away from the dock and waved farewell to the most enthusiastic shouts and hand clapping short of a July 4th parade. Forty-five minutes later, the beast floating down wind, we finally were given our instructions, and we hauled it to a boat ramp where the owner was waiting with a truck.
A few days later, I arranged to fly in the ready helicopter. Our job was air surveillance of the Bay, We were a part of the search-and-rescue team for downed aircraft or vessels in distress. I asked the flight desk if it was possible to drop me off at the end of the flight at Moffett Field, a Navy air base in San Jose, south of San Francisco. A vendor I worked with in my civilian job lived and worked in that area and had invited me to see to see his plant.The flight desk agreed. I arranged for the vendor to pick me up at the base in an hour.
The chopper flight was fun and illuminating. The experience of touring the Bay by air and boat gave me a Monopoly game perspective of the greater San Francisco area. Flying slowly under and above the Golden Gate and Bay bridges was delicious and it repeated a feat I had enjoyed a few years before with all the bridges in the New York City area. Forty-five minutes into the flight, a radio message from the search-and-rescue base crackled in our earphones. “A single engine navy jet fighter has gone down in the mountains east of you. The pilot ejected and a parachute was reported being seen. We were to head toward the area and begin a search pattern.” Within five minutes another message advised us the pilot had parachuted safely to the ground, was not injured, and called in his status and location from a public pay phone. We were directed to pick him up.
“Listen fellows I said to my host pilots, as long as the guy’s okay and we’re heading somewhat toward the direction, do you think you could drop me off first so I could keep my appointment?”
Obligingly they called in the request and it was granted. A few minutes later I was on the ground at Moffett Field. The poor son of a gun who had gone through the fear and trauma of an ejection and parachute landing, and was in an unknown psychological state, had to wait an extra fifteen minutes for rescue so this reserve officer could take care of business.
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Ira Spector is an author and freelance writer based in San Diego. This selection, with slight revisions, was republished from Spector’s 2011 work, Sammy Where Are You? An Unconventional Memoir … Sort of. It is available via Amazon.