in so we could be on time to relieve the boat that was currently underway. We got to know a few of them really well. It was pretty wild times. Q. You seem to have been a part of many sets of short term active duty orders. What were some of the other things you worked on? A. I made warrant in 1999, and I came back on active duty to work on waterways security. We looked for vulnerabilities in domestic ports to make sure the economy was protected. I was running the Special Interest Vessel program where we monitored awareness of when ships flagged in certain countries were coming into U.S. ports. The port security stuff—understanding the pieces of how a port works: the physical piece, the mechanics, the workers like the longshoremen and the pilots, the laws and regulations, the commercial aspects, the vulnerabilities—a lot of those skills were kind of atrophying prior to 9/11, so there weren’t a lot of people around with experience. Just like the pandemic and the supply chain effects, it’s work to maintain the balance or everything can cascade quickly. I also was part of the team writing the Maritime Transportation Security Act (MTSA) and the International Port and Facility Security (ISPS) Code; I stayed on orders until 2003. Then came back on in 2004 as part of a team that was writing the Area Maritime Security Plan for Sector Buffalo. There had been a recent bill (MTSA) passed that said every captain of the port had to have one. That’s around the time the Coast Guard was morphing from Groups and [Marine Safety Offices] into Sectors. Hard to believe that was 20 years ago. Funny thing is back then, they called those short term orders “TEMAC” or temporary active duty; now they call it ADOS. Q. You’ve been part of so many projects over the decades— did you know from the beginning that you’d be a lifer? A. There were just always things that needed to be done, and the Coast Guard is a small organization. I never planned on sticking around for the 20! But I was enjoying the work I was doing, both on active duty and at Sector Buffalo, my regular reserve unit. You have to remember, they didn’t have a RFRS staff yet. So as a bosun warrant, I would track boat forces training, qualification and certification for the sector. I hit 30 years in 2009, and when I started doing the paperwork for retirement, they told me, “You know, you could stick around, why not ask for a waiver?” There were more projects to do, but I ended up retiring for a few years. I didn’t get rid of all my uniforms though. I kept some. Q. How’d you get the call that you may need to use them again? A. All those little projects, you make connections. The office I’d worked for in 2003 that dealt with port security was also overseeing the port securityman rating change around 2009 or 2010. At the same time, the Office of Boat Forces knew they’d need to address some problems with their systems for reservists, and that’s when they talked about bringing me back on retiree recall orders, which started in 2012. Q. Part of your legacy is your work on the Boat Forces Reserve Management Plan, which began work in 2011 and was rolled out in 2013, achieving qualification rates near 70%! How did you get started on that? A. There was a very low certification rate a few years after 9/11 [for boat crews and coxswains], right around the mid- 2000s. It was down around 12%, due to a number of factors. There was more standardization, more adherence to currency cycles, and there was a high focus on proficiency—it was a big buzzword at the time. There was one other big change. Back in my day, we were still doing a lot of boat tows; you’d go out on a weekend and you might do four or five tows. But then commercial salvage came in, and we stopped doing them. That may have put a dent in our skillset, because we weren’t practicing as much. Right around the same time, the mid-aughts, there was some confusion about who the reservists actually belonged to, how they fit in at a station. We needed to build a structure that was standardized, where people would be part of a crew. Ten years ago, we had stations with one reservist, others with fifty or sixty. That makes it impossible to get everyone enough boat time to get Issue 2 • 2023 . RESERVIST 39 CELEBRATING CELEBRATING 70 70 YEARS OF THE RESERVIST YEARS OF THE RESERVIST
