Interviewed by Matthew Fouts and Andrew Hu
Okay, so I was born in 1974 in Reading, Pennsylvania. My childhood was basically…not great. I had two parents up until the age of 2, and then my mom and dad split. I went with my mom, who was a single parent for most of my childhood. She married again when I was 6, but then divorced when I was 7 or 8. I moved, I counted it up, 14 times from the time I was born to when I graduated high school. I think a lot of that instability and moving around didn’t set me up much for success and I had a lot of problems grade-wise throughout high school.
When I graduated high school, I was told by my mom that I had 6 months to get out of the house. So, my options were basically college, which I didn’t have the money or grades for, working retail, or the military. I was working at Boscov’s, a department store, through high school, and my dad worked there for pretty much his whole life, so I was looking at that prospect…“Do I really want to be working in a store for the rest of my life?” So, the military was the only real option for getting out of what I saw was a shitty situation and get upwardly mobile. I think sometimes there is this impression of veterans, like they must have had this desire to go kill people or something and that’s really not it. Most people are doing it cause they’re in a bad situation and for them, the military is the best way out. So, I went and talked to the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, and the Coast Guard, and the Coast Guard was the one that I wound up going with. It was closest aligned to my personal values; they did search and rescue and humanitarian stuff (and not killing anyone), so that’s why I picked them.
I went to boot camp in Cape May, New Jersey, and my first assignment out of that was the Coast Guard cutter Sherman in San Francisco. We did fishery patrols, search-and-rescue patrols, law enforcement stuff, and I was the lowest guy on the ship. It was right out of boot camp. You don’t have any job or training, you’re called a non-rate, which basically means you don’t have a rating or specialty. I hadn’t been to any kind of school yet, so I was basically washing dishes, painting, and standing watch with the crew, and it sucked. So, I was putting in for all different schools, and it just happened that cook school was the first one I could get into.
After school I went to my second boat, which was a 180-foot buoy tender also out of San Francisco. I was one of four cooks on that boat. A total crew of 40, 45 people. At the end of my enlistment I got out of the Coast Guard, was placed on an inactive reserve status and moved to New Orleans with my then girlfriend, who was in the Navy. I worked in restaurants in New Orleans for about a year and a half. I eventually signed back up for the Coast Guard on active duty and did a total active time of 22 years and 3 months or something like that, give or take. After I came back to the Coast Guard on active duty I went from New Orleans to New Jersey. I was on a cutter in New Jersey, a 110-foot patrol boat. At one point they requested our boat to go to the Caribbean for two months and do anti-drug patrols. So, we did that for like two months. On our way back up, after we were done, we stopped off in North Carolina to take on fuel, and that was September 11th, 2001.
We didn’t have a working TV antenna at the time. The radio was messed up cause we had been in a storm as we were coming up the coast. We got tied up, got hooked up on TV and realized that, holy shit, our home area just got hit by terrorists. A lot of our families and a lot of us were from the area and had family working in Manhattan. So it was a mad rush to get fuel on the boat, get stocked back up with food, and get back underway to get back home. Up above Atlantic City, you could start to see the orange glow on the horizon, from the city lights and all that. It looked like fire to us, because we were envisioning all these buildings burning. We were on scene there for about the next 6 months, where we would do patrols around the horseshoe of Manhattan just showing the flag, having our presence known, because the city was kind of in a state of shock.
In January of 2003, we were called down to Virginia and we went through all kinds of training to go overseas for the war. We were there for basically a month and a half…two months, and they shipped our boats over to Sicily. We were there from February until June, in the Mediterranean, in support of the war Operation Iraqi Freedom.
When I came back, I went to a station on Long Beach Island (NJ) as a Food Service Officer. My next duty station was a river tender buoy boat in Alabama, as an independent duty cook. After that I went to Long Island, New York and I was at a station as a Food Service Officer, and from there I was selected to be a special command aide…that’s the Admiral’s cook, or the Admiral’s personal chef, at the Coast Guard Academy in Connecticut. We had a two-star Admiral that ran the Coast Guard Academy and she was the first female Superintendent. She lived in a historic home up on officers’ row and I maintained the house and acted as her liaison between the regular enlisted people and the officer corps. For me, part of the cool thing with working at the Admiral’s house was that it’s a historic home. It was built in the 1920s…so, this place I was working in was about 100 years old and it was filled with Coast Guard history. We would have nautical artifacts all over the house as decoration, and paintings of historic Coast Guard ships. All this stuff throughout the house had a history to it. The Admiral would be like, “you know, people are always asking me, ‘What’s that painting about?’ or ‘what’s this artifact?’ I want to have something where I can just stop and talk to them about it.” This was all on loan from the museum, so I would go and spend a lot of time with the curator researching the items and then making up little index cards with info that I’d stash behind them for the Admiral.
I’d spent like 5 years working there and doing research on all this stuff and as I was getting ready to retire the curator asked me, “What are you going to do?” and I said, “Oh I might use my GI bill to go to college for a business degree” (I’d been doing a lot of budgeting and business stuff for the Admiral’s house, and thought there was good money in it too) and she was like, “Why would you do that? You love history, you obviously have an affinity for it. You should think about maybe doing that as your degree, then do whatever you want after that.” So I thought about it as I got out. My wife and I moved back to PA and I took some courses at Delaware County Community College and started working towards my Associates. I made my major History after a few months because it seemed to really be going well and it was something I liked. I graduated and had to transfer somewhere else to get my Bachelors, and that’s how I wound up at Penn. Being a student and having a family is a different factor you have to bring with you sometimes, but it’s not a negative in any way. I think when you grow up not really thinking college is a possibility, it isn’t a possibility. So to have my son seeing “Hey, this is what’s expected and what is there for you if you choose to take it,” I think it sets him up better for success too.
Sometimes it does feel like there is a bit of a stigma around vets here and think that there’s an automatic assumption in a school that is super liberal at times that a veteran is going to be a close-minded person and ultra-conservative and all that stuff. If I wasn’t open minded, I wouldn’t be here to begin with. To go through the crap I had to go through just to get here, I’m not bringing a closed mind to the table. I look at it like, if I’m willing to do that, it should go the other way too. There’s a subtle kind of feeling that you have here…maybe some of its personal, maybe I’m carrying a little bit of a chip on my shoulder…but I’m looking at a school with, what? Ten-thousand-five-hundred undergrads? And there’s like fifteen or seventeen veteran undergrads? That’s an astoundingly low amount of people in my eyes. You don’t feel very loved…I guess is what I’m trying to say. It would be nice to see more of us walking around. Penn kind of sells itself as this historically-intertwined-with-America kind of school, and veterans are a huge part of that history, but there’s so few of us running around here now right now. It would be nice to see more of us here on campus. I love Penn, but think it can do better in that regard.