´Tauk of the Town
I reported to the small 20-25 person unit in August, just as one of the hurricanes that rocks the eastern end of the Island each year was hitting. In the exact hour that I walked onto the unit, the Chief of base was out on a ¨training evolution,¨ that he mismanaged and would cause him to soon be relieved (fired).
Following that event, the unit was the mostly in disarray. There were various temporary replacement leaders who were unable to understand the unit enough to make any progress against its misfit culture. I slowly learned that the unit was always and nearly forever in this state of disarray. It was a small group of 18 to 40 year olds living in a town of 3,000 that swelled to 300,000 in the summer party months. The unit had weak ties to any sort of broader organizational leadership. It was neglected in the worst way, causing it to go rogue in an unhealthy way.
Sexism, racism, harassment, drug abuse, secrets, manipulation, infidelity, the ugliness of humanity was a daily occurrence thanks to a few lethal bullies who, without proper leadership, could not be knocked off their pedestal. The word ¨toxic¨ does not do it justice, it was more than poisonous, it was also alive and infectious.
This became the yin and yang of my existence, the extremes of pure love for the region of Montauk and its character lived with me alongside the often disgust of the work environment. Any achievements the unit had were sadly knocked apart by its lows.
In the first year, after the initial shock wore off, I did my own research on how to quit, how to get out, but reading about AWOL was intimidating. There was not going to be any quick fix. As a new person to this whole world, not only the military, but the workforce after college, mine now with extreme restrictions and hierarchy, I was on my own, or at least perceived it to be that way, not knowing that some from my bootcamp class were experiencing the same lack of leadership and disillusion.
Amazingly (seriously after writing those general last few paragraphs, I remain amazed), there were still good memories. With the right limited crew for a training or a rescue, we could bask in the lack of nonsense while out on the ocean in the waves, isolated from the isolation of the unit.
One of the most valiente ocean rescues I was part of involved a man named Gary, who radioed the unit in a panic that he was lost at sea. It was summer night, which meant the waters were calm, without the chaotic winds of the winter or the Perfect Storm waves of hurricane season. We asked Gary to give us his position, made sure there were no medical emergencies on board, and wrote down the description of his vessel, essentially an 8 foot canoe that somehow had a radio on board.
In taking in all the information, with too many people in the communications room eager for something to do, one person mapped out his position while someone else looked out the side window. Both concluded in the same amount of time that Gary was not so much lost at sea, but was floating around the back of Lake Montauk, a small lake connected to our harbor that was bordered by summer homes.
After some back and forth on the radio, Gary still didn’t understand where he was. Being the bored and sometimes caring little unit that we were, a small crew boarded our 25ft boat and in No Wake Zone speed, cruised over to Gary with a large spot light and a loud speaker.
¨Gary,¨ the crew announced through the megaphone to Gary waving both his arms in the air.
¨You are literally in three feet of water, we cannot get any closer. Are you able to step out of your canoe and drag it to shore?¨
Gary could and the rescue concluded. Gary was safe and, miraculously, he was a few doors down from his house, one of the ones that bordered Lake Montauk. The man who was lost at sea turned out to just need someone to shine a light to guide his way home. Much like the Coast Guard´s history of manning America´s Lighthouses to guide home the mariners desperate to reach shore, this little station continued the tradition by doing the same for Gary (omg cheese).
And what about the summertime East Hampton celebrity sightings contest between myself and the cook, which I always won because what tops sighting a naked Amber Rose in CSV? The lunch time jury concluded that a disheveled Matthew Broderick in the Amagansett IGA certainly did not (actually, those are both mine, I can not remember who he saw for one second out of the corner of his eye, was it Wesley Snipes at the Montauk Overlook? No, could not have been because that was also mine - Keith, email me if you want redemption).
Also interesting was the local fishing community, so much shade, part of the reason our off seasons were so slow was because typically the fishing fleets in this region (the only boats left on the water after the others ventured to the Caribbean for the winter) called each other if they needed assistance. Why bring out the rescue/law enforcement entity who was going to have a problem with your drugs on board unless you were in serious trouble? I do not think they had much to worry about considering our typical focus was on training to pick up a man overboard and wandering around mansion sized yachts to check for life jackets...Not that there was a lack of response to some of the regional shady dealings from other entities (The prices though).
Of course, there are also the stories of the young coast guard men boarding a vessel and being aggressively pursued by wealthy elderly ladies who had no shame in objectifying my shipmates who clearly had not experienced that level of harassment before.
Moreover, I have so many questions from this experience, like why do maritime services like mops so much? As in swabbing the deck kind of petri dish cleaning tool. I know I am a person who easily dismisses tradition, but these mops, marinating in mop water water over night, a single one designated for both the gym and the kitchen, needed to go. The only progress I could manage in updating the cleaning products was persuading our supply officer to buy a dust buster instead of the bristle brush and dust pan. If things needed to be spotless, we needed the right resources. Just never could make progress on replacing that mop for a Swiffer.
On a serious note, reflecting on how this unit functioned taught me a lot about the influence of the physical location of places and how they can never be immune from the environment in which they operate. Station Montauk, with its isolation and lack of mission for months at a time, was never going to be a place where many could thrive. It was located at the eastern end of the everything in a place remote enough that they had sent soldiers to quarantine there during the Spanish Flu. Without a huge shift in how this unit was run, perhaps like a unit in the Florida Keys that was only up and running during the tourist high seasons, when boredom would not be so quick to occur, this unit was always going to struggle.
It also showed me the importance of communication and interaction with leadership. It might not have seemed important for the high level leaders of the unit´s mothership, so to speak, to visit this little place, but maybe a a little more interaction would have revealed some of the dysfunction that could have been fixed before formal measures had to be taken. A few additional exchanges between junior people at the two units could have provided an informal check as to whether what one person was experiencing was usual military life or should not have been accepted as the norm.
It was a rough time, though I was lucky to at least be able to cherish my adventurous days off (shout out to Minardi Training and the doctor who lived at Ditch Plains who waited around during one of my solo sunrise surf sessions for sanity to make sure I made it in ok).
After about one year there, I had another stroke of national catastrophe luck, something as dreadful and damaging as the Swine Flu, (which provided me four days of peace in bootcamp), was about to give me a break from Montauk - the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Sweet home Alabama, the white sand shores, now doused in oil, were calling.
