Some post-Veterans Day recollections

Sam Smith – Now that Veterans Day is over, I think I can safely recount a couple of my experiences as operations officer of the Coast Guard Cutter Spar in the early 1960s that are worthy of being left out of festive celebrations. On the whole, it was a great experience but there were times when it would have been nice if things were a little different.

The Spar was primarily a 180 foot buoy tender operating out of Bristol RI. But because the supposed search & rescue vessel in the area had been built in 1929, it wasn’t allowed to go out heavy weather, leaving the most unpleasant tasks to us.

My official assignments included being operations officer, navigator, morale & recreation officer, electronic material officer, education officer, photography officer, public information officer, exchange officer and drug control officer. These duties ranged from the titular to the trying. For example, the ship's supplies were kept in a closet. One month's inventory included 437 cartons of cigarettes, 226 assorted chewing gums, six cans of Dr. Lyons tooth powder, 31 normal tubes of toothpaste, four decks of regular cards and eleven for pinochle as well as 48 X Cellos and 41 Sultans for a total cost value of $766.04. To reconcile our massive inventory and sales would sometimes take a couple of hours a month. Not even a penny could be unaccounted for and some fiend at headquarters had designed the reports so that throwing one of your own pennies into the pot wouldn't help.

The drug inventory I performed with the deck officer. Each month, we would retire to the captain's cabin with all the bottles of drugs and the brandy that we carried on board. We would take a drug bottle and dump its contents into a cigar box and then count each pill, confirming to each other what we had seen. Should someone actually need to consume the pill, its strength would presumably overcome any residue left by our monthly  finger mauling.

The bottle of brandy was a little harder to assess, although we had seen its contents diminish in the wake of sea rescues. If a crew went off in a lifeboat as part of the operation, they would be welcomed back with an order to report to the captain's cabin. There the captain laid out as many glasses of brandy as there were lifeboat crew members. These young men were, as the captain well knew, almost all beer drinkers with little interest in the more effete liquors. They would take a few sips and then put their glass back on the green felt table in the center of the captain's cabin. After an appropriate moments of good cheer, everyone would depart leaving the captain to finish the job.

To survive a North Atlantic winter gale the Spar had to keep punching like a cocky little fighter, always on her toes, always moving. She would have alternate rolls of up to forty-five degrees while leaning way back and then plunging into the sea. Sailors call the motion corkscrewing. And don't like it much.

One of the worst examples was when we patrolled in hurricane strength winds a radar tower the Air Force had abandoned because of the weather. A few years earlier another "Texas Tower" had collapsed in a storm with the loss of 28 personnel. Now the Air Force apparently thought it wise in extreme bad weather to evacuate the towers and let the Coast Guard patrol them to make sure the Soviets didn't climb aboard. Circling a Texas Tower 110 miles from shore in a 180 foot ship for hours in hurricane strength winds is not a lot of fun.

TEXAS TOWER

I had been reminded of this the night I found myself on the bridge with the conn, supposedly 45 feet above sea level, but looking up at the crests as we dipped into each trough and then one even higher wave had suddenly stopped and shook the Spar's 180 feet, bringing a call from below, "What the fuck you doing up there? You just knocked two guys out of their bunks." And that was just an ordinary storm.

If you felt ill, you have only the marginal solace of companionship. The bridge, being the only access to the outside during bad weather, was host to crew members seeking the leeward wing from which to relieve themselves. Later I would drink Coke and eat plain white bread to calm the internal insurrection, but for the time being there was nothing to do but go about one's business feeling awful.

During the hurricane not a single Russian vessel approached the tower. But to sooth the fears of the Air Force, the cutter Spar did its job, even if the winds reached 75 mph and higher.

THE SPAR