by Barry Hastings
If you haven’t read the book (or seen the movie) The Finest Hours, by Michael Touugias and Casey Sherman (Scribner paperback, 2015), run out and buy a copy, or take in the movie pronto. The book describes, in frightening detail, how the U.S. Coast Guard has been protecting and saving lives of sailors caught up in violent storms at sea for well over 200 years.
In February 1952, I was just entering my second semester as a freshman in high school. In England, the young Queen Elizabeth II,was preparing for her first public acts as monarch; here at home, the notorious bank-robber and killer Willie Sutton had just been re-captured. Our Army was still fighting in Korea, and the last good Republican president was campaigning for the oval office. The newest models of automobiles were sprouting small fins which, over the next few years, would become the most obvious features of auto design (the ugliest cars ever produced.)
On Feb. 18, out in New England, a terrific storm was brewing up off shore. At the Chatham, Mass., Coast Guard station, huge waves (they’d grow to 70 feet and higher throughout the day) were breaking over the Chatham bar just offshore. Over the next 36 to 40 hours, two small, 36-foot CG lifeboats (CG36500 and CG36383), each crewed by four young Coasties, fought gigantic 70-foot waves (twice as high as their boats were long) in a battle to save the crews of two 500-foot World War II T2 tankers, which had broken in half during the night of Feb. 17-18, in mountainous seas.
Hardly a man in the two-rescue boat crews was over 25 years of age, at least half of them were younger. Their lifeboats were built of wood. Their hearts were made of iron. In this book you’ll learn the true meaning of the Coast Guard’s motto – Semper Paratus. Always Ready. Coasties live it every day. Terrific sailors, courageous sailors, a very proud service. CG36500’s cox’n was Bernie Webber, his crew mates Richard Livesy, Andy Fitzgerald, and Ervin Maske, a Lightship crewman who happened to be at the Chatham station awaiting a ride back out to a lightship where he was stationed. Crew of the CG36383 were cox’n Donald Bangs, Antonio Ballerini, Richard Ciccone, and Emory Haynes. Maske left the CG when his enlistment expired; most of the rest made it their life’s work.
Photos of these men taken at the time, remind me of me, when I first went to sea in the North Atlantic at age 17; and in Alaskan waters at 18. The book adds no lustre to the Coast Guard – its reputation for service in peace and war was firmly established long before 1952. But it makes me even more proud than I’ve been in the past. Read it — well worth the time. Several CG ships also took part in rescue operations during this storm; but no crewmen aboard ships suffered like those in the 36-footers. CGC Eastwind (sister-ship of my Westwind), CGC Acushnet, and CGC Yakutat all contributed. But Bernie Webber, in CG36500 rescued a tanker crewman for every foot of length to his boat, then returned to Chatham through high wind, 70-foot waves, blinding heavy rains, and strong currents, with no navigational aids still working in his boat. In a boat designed and built to carry a crew of four and a dozen rescued, they saved 36 and brought them safely ashore in one 18-hour trip.
Some seaman, some seamen, indeed.
Trump and family all cut from same cloth
Trump’s kids, like Trump himself, are so ignorant of what most Americans believe, do and feel, they don’t begin to realize their father is an ignorant fool. His call for “Second Amendment people” to “do something about Hillary” was nothing more or less than a call for some “gun nut” to shoot the Democrat candidate. Even as he tries to explain it away as a call for those fiakey (and dangerous) nitwits, “to get out and vote,” you could see the shock (and embarrassed smiles) his words brought to faces in the crowd behind him. It cost him another huge block of Republican politicians and voters who’ve seen enough pres
idents shot-at, or shot dead.
Then a day or so after promising he’d not endorse Paul Ryan or John McCain, he changed his mind in (what seemed) an instant, and took both under his wing. Those two gentlemen revealed then-lack of class by refusing to refuse his endorsement, despite knowing the man is a threat to our institutions, and to the nation. Trump’s kiss is the kiss of death for the Republican Party. And though they all seem to know it, they also appear unable to stop their slide toward the extreme edge, and over, it!
Republican role-playing; or role-changing. “Who the hell knows?”
Democrats and Republicans are squared off for the political fight of the new century, and for the new century. It makes me chuckle to recall the big-name Republicans who swore up and down they’d not support Trump, but abruptly changed the tune when they looked around at the current world and national political scenes. Somehow, a wonderful opportunity for successful action against world bad-guys has arisen. Generally itfs the GOP screaming for more (and firmer) action against terrorists and bad actors (Russia, China, Syria) who continue stirring the world’s big pot of troubles.
They’ve turned against men they used to hold up as heroes, and let their presidential candidate verbally abuse them. Trump’s verbal assault on the Kahn family (and by inference, their killed-in-action son), sent a flood tide of Republican voters into left-turns, tracking the mob who did so following the McCain fiasco. The old Republicans, through their silence, are helping Trump’s campaign to raise the level of fear in the nation. This talk about (what amounts to) breaking up NATO, and of discarding relations with our many Asian allies, even if only a tactic, is de-stabilizing both here and among our friends and allies.
Oh, dear, whatever can we do?”
The first order of business is to elect a government of positivity and reform. Of course we’re living in a dangerous world full of dangerous enemies. But the United States is physically the strongest nation on earth.
Problem is, we cannot live up to our potential until constant right-wing attacks on voter rights, civil rights, human rights end; and our metro regions are cleared of the new organized crime families destroying them.
Life in our inner cities is a life of random gunfire, murder, drugs, (prostitution, child and immigrant slavery, dead hope. And hope is “the only incentive for sustained change,” according to Sir Alistair Hardy.