RESERVIST MAGAZINE HEADQUARTERS UPDATE The end of an era: Don Hartmayer calls it a career Story by Anastasia Devlin The Coast Guard’s Office of Boat Forces recently hosted the retirement of a long-employed civilian member, Don Hartmayer. Hartmayer joined the service out of high school in 1979, and he spent the next 44 years serving in the Coast Guard—on active duty, as a reservist, and finally as a civilian overseeing the Boat Forces Reserve Management Program. At his going away, which was very casual and filled with shipmates and laughter, many praised Hartmayer’s impact and dedication to the Coast Guard, the Coast Guard Reserve and the Office of Boat Forces. Q: You were part of one of the original “notional” port security units, which were stood up in the 80s. What was the early concept like? A. When D9 got tasked with this, they created PSUs 301, 302, and 303. PSU 301 pulled people from the Group Buffalo stations in Rochester, Erie, Buffalo, Niagara, Oswego, and Alexandria Bay—and especially if you could drive a boat, you were in. When we started, you were only part of the PSUs during your two weeks, wearing the camouflage uniforms; the rest of the time, we were doing our drills at our normal stations in our working blues. So most of the time, I was a coxswain at Station Niagara or Station Buffalo, but then they would bring us together to do exercises. At the time it was called the “RDF,” the Rapid Deployment Force, and we would deploy during our two weeks to work on exercises in other countries like Egypt, Central America, and Korea. Q. What was your experience at Desert Storm like? A. When Desert Storm came along in 1990, that’s when the rubber hit the road for us operationally. I ended up becoming a chief petty officer while I was stationed in Saudi Arabia in 1991. I think someone had to loan me a set of anchors. The whole thing was a little surreal; back in those days, port security operations fell under the captain of the port authorities, which was left over from the World War II era mission. We were operating the 22-foot Boston whalers, and when they ran out of two-cycle oil we couldn’t just run to the marina to grab some more like we’d do if we were stateside. On duty days, we spent about 12 hours underway, every other day or so, and that got old quick. But we worked with the Saudi coast guard, and as part of that, we’d have to go over and pick up our host national—the assigned officer who would do patrols with us. Before we could leave for our patrol, we’d sit, drink tea and converse with them, which was part of doing business there; we had to build that time 38 RESERVIST . Issue 2 • 2023 CELEBRATING CELEBRATING 70 70 YEARS OF THE RESERVIST YEARS OF THE RESERVIST
