Dave Metz's Blog: Coast Guard

Dave Metz's Blog: Coast Guard: Except from my coast guard novel. A Slow Grating Death The executive officer, a lieutenant junior grade, who...

Coast Guard

Except from my coast guard novel.

A Slow Grating Death

The executive officer, a lieutenant junior grade, who we simply called XO, was in the process of getting three of us housing when I arrived, but it was taking time. I had to live on board the ship. “You don’t mind staying on the boat for a couple of weeks until we get you housing?” he asked. I said I didn’t mind but really I did. What else could I say? It was miserable living on board. I had virtually no privacy. I had to store my bike and most of my possessions in the cab of my little truck; I didn’t have a canopy. Each time I opened the door in the parking lot to get something, a bunch of other things that I had crammed in there would fall onto the pavement. I didn’t have pots or pans or any other household items, just exercise equipment, hiking gear, and books. I missed nature by being on the ship.

            I lived in the forward birthing compartment for the first few patrols, where no human being should be made to live because of the beating it took, being right under the bow of the ship. It was a serious design flaw to put a birthing compartment so far forward, like it was meant to be a punishing chamber for the lowest caste of the crew. I felt like a sardine packed in there with five other guys. It was no bigger than a walk-in closet, and the floor was always sopping wet and the walls were covered in mildew, which the captain and XO didn’t know about. They never ventured to this part of the ship. It was a coffin basically, designed for six low-ranking crew members. If you weren’t dead yet you soon would be if you slept in there. The night of my first patrol the sea was so rough that each time the ship hit a wave, the bow would plummet and I’d find my face, for just a split second, plastered to the bunk above me in a free fall. They stacked them three high on each side of the compartment. They called rooms on board the ship, compartments. That was the same day I learned about my seasickness, and it would become the gnawing misery of my life for the next two years, like a slow grating death.