This was originally and idea for the Waterloo Courier but I decided to post it here.
I had to make a call. I was the commanding officer of a Coast Guard cutter, and earlier that day, we experienced a personnel casualty. I phoned the sailor’s mother and said her son had been injured; we did not know the extent; he was evacuated to a nearby Coast Guard station and then airlifted to a hospital. We arranged transportation so she could be with her son as soon as possible.
I am not a resident of Cedar Falls and have no input into the city’s safety programs – and neither should the Iowa legislature. I understand maximizing resources and operating within budgetary constraints. I have seen data-driven presentations and understand many decisions are made based on those data. I know, at times, data does not always tell the entire picture. I am painfully aware that numbers and finances should not solely drive decisions regarding public or crew safety or mariners in distress. At times, exercising authority and practicing leadership requires those leaders to make difficult decisions. Decisions define sound leadership.
The accident happened during routine operations while the crew repositioned navigational buoys on the cutter’s deck. This was an evolution the crew did every buoy trip. While moving the crane, a large object broke free and fell to the deck, striking the sailor’s leg. Six inches to the right would have resulted in a catastrophic accident.
The ship conducted this mission every winter, placing specialized ice buoys to mark a critical waterway that required in-depth planning and timing. Just as we started this ice season, the district command center diverted the cutter for a search and rescue case. We searched an area for three days in significant weather that physically wore on the crew. Not finding who or what you are looking for impacts a crew. After completing multiple searches, the district released the cutter, and we returned to homeport. After one day, we resumed the ice buoy mission. It was the morning we restarted with the ice buoys that the mishap happened.
The Coast Guard has 11 statutory missions that range from law enforcement to environmental protection to maintaining the nation’s waterways and a host of others. The service expected its cutters a multi-mission readiness posture. The ship specialized in maintaining ocean-going buoys but routinely performed search and rescue, enforced fisheries laws, conducted migrant interdiction operations, and had dedicated equipment aboard for oil spill response. The crew maintained qualifications in damage control, navigation, engineering, small-boat operations, and others in addition to mission-specific training. I was proud of the crew and what they did on a daily basis; perhaps too proud. Admiral James Loy, the 21st Coast Guard Commandant, often talked about the “curse of Semper Paratus” (the service’s motto, Always Ready). The Coast Guard was a multi-mission organization with limited resources and prided itself in accomplishing those 11 disparate missions.
I will never know if the decision to resume buoy operations so quickly after a search resulted in my crew member's injury. And that is the point. I do not know. At that moment, I felt my crew could quickly switch from search and rescue to ice buoy operations. When is the price too high to be multi-mission? When one person is injured, or two people, or more? What if something worse happened? That call was devastating, and I would not want to make one again, or worse, tell a person their loved one perished during an operation. Leadership requires the ability to apply lessons from the “Curse of Semper Paratus” rather than decide based on a timeline or budget.
