EASTERN PACIFIC OCEAN — A Coast Guard cutter operating roughly 200 miles off the Pacific coast intercepted a fully submersible narco-submarine carrying an estimated 17,000 pounds of cocaine on Tuesday, boarding the vessel while its own crew was actively trying to sink it out from under them, recovering the cargo in open-ocean swells, detaining four suspects, and returning to regularly scheduled operations in time for the afternoon watch — a sequence of events the crew described as a normal Tuesday and the rest of the country described as nothing, because the rest of the country never heard about it.
There is a video. Twelve people have seen it. Eleven of them work on the boat.
The petty officer first class who went over the side and onto the flooding submarine asked that his name not be used, citing a normal amount of modesty about the specific act of leaping onto a sinking drug submarine in international waters while a man he had never met tried to drown the evidence directly beneath his boots.
“It wasn’t even the biggest one this month,” he said.
He was asked what the biggest one this month was.
He described it. At length. With a level of operational detail and casual hand-gesturing that made it clear he considered this the boring part of his job, the part he does before the part he considers interesting, which he declined to specify and which we have decided we do not want to know about.
This article is not long enough to contain what he said. Nothing is.
The crew that pulled eight tons of cocaine out of the open ocean on Tuesday also runs search and rescue, enforces fisheries regulations, breaks ice in the Arctic, inspects commercial vessels, and responds to oil spills — frequently in the same week, occasionally in the same shift, and on at least one documented occasion, according to a chief petty officer, “before lunch, and then we had lunch.”
The Coast Guard’s annual budget is approximately $13 billion.
The Navy’s is $257 billion.
The Navy has a theme song. You know it. You could hum it right now. You are humming it.
The Coast Guard has a theme song too. It is called “Semper Paratus.” When it is played for people, the most common response is a long pause followed by the question “wait, that’s real?”
It is real. It has been real since 1927. It is older than the entire Navy SEAL program and roughly seven thousand times less famous.
“We don’t really get into all that,” said Chief Petty Officer Ray Dempsey, seventeen years of service, who has participated in more drug interdictions than he can accurately recall — a figure he was careful to clarify is not a memory problem but a volume problem. “You stop counting around the point where counting stops being useful. It’s like asking a guy how many emails he’s sent. We just do the job and go to the next one.”
He was asked how many the next one was.
He had already left to go do it.
A public affairs officer for the Coast Guard, Lieutenant Junior Grade Amanda Reyes, was contacted to provide context for this report. She confirmed the interdiction statistics. She verified the tonnage. She corrected this reporter’s pronunciation of “cutter.” And then, in the last thirty seconds of the call, with the tone of a woman remembering she left something in the car, she mentioned that a Coast Guard rescue swimmer had been awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross the previous month.
The Distinguished Flying Cross is the same medal Charles Lindbergh got for crossing the Atlantic. Amelia Earhart got one. So did the swimmer, a second class petty officer named Cole Bautista, for jumping out of a helicopter into a hurricane to retrieve a fisherman who, by every reasonable measure, should not have been retrievable.
Reyes was asked why this had not been announced more widely.
There was a pause.
“We’ll put something on Facebook,” she said.
They put something on Facebook.
It got forty-three likes. Two of them were Bautista’s parents. One was Bautista, who appears to have liked the post by accident and then left it liked because un-liking it felt like a bigger statement than liking it.
The Navy’s post that same day was a photograph of a ship at sunset with no caption.
It got twelve thousand likes, four thousand shares, and a comment from a defense contractor that simply said “🇺🇸 the best 🇺🇸.”
At press time the Coast Guard had quietly completed its four hundredth drug interdiction of the year, a pace that, if it holds, will set a service record. The record is currently known to exist by approximately nine people, all of whom are in a windowless room in Washington, none of whom have told anyone, because telling people is not in the budget and was not assigned to anyone, and the one person who might have done it on her own initiative is the public affairs officer, who is currently on the phone confirming tonnage for the next one.
The crew is already underway.
They did not ask for a parade. They have never asked for a parade. When the concept of a parade was raised with Chief Dempsey, he treated it as a logistics question and immediately identified four reasons it would interfere with the schedule.
That is the whole problem.
They are too good at this to be noticed, and they are too busy to mention it, and the one branch that would never in a thousand years post a sunset is the one branch that has actually earned the sunset.
Somebody should fix that.
It will be assigned to a working group.
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