The ghost of Christmas yet to come

Ghost of the Future! I fear you more than any spectre I have seen. But as I know your purpose is to do me good, and as I hope to live to be another man from what I was, I am prepared to bear you company, and do it with a thankful heart. Will you not speak to me?

Duty on Christmas is reliably mellow. You make a few rounds, munch candy canes with fellow watchstanders, energize the Christmas lights, dial up the holiday tunes, and settle down for a long winter's night of catching up on your undone work while nobody’s around to bother you. While you eat leftover Christmas cookies dropped off by sympathetic shipmates, who are now at home, bundled up by the tree.

There's usually a nice Christmas dinner spread put on by the cooks (or in this case, the contracted galley staff). There's no competition for the weights or cardio room, it's easy to find a parking spot, and often the CO calls or stops by to dole out some non-alcoholic holiday cheer. At OCS, my first Coast Guard Christmas on duty, I think they sent us the Chief of Staff and his pleasantly cordial family to raise our spirits as we sat around drinking forbidden soda, eating forbidden sweets, and watching forbidden football (when we weren't sneaking off to find forbidden pay phones). I swear, that'll be me some day: all the other flags are home popping Christmas crackers and re-gifting fruitcakes, and I'll be the schmuck out awkwardly celebrating Christmas with the troops. Every year. I'll volunteer.

Christmas is quiet. Excepting the odd officer or chief who calls to share holiday greetings, nobody calls. Nobody emails. Nobody arrives. Even the message traffic slows to a crawl.

What you don’t expect is to hear from the detailer.

Christmas Eve morning, sure, you're supposed to be at work unless you're taking leave. So maybe the detailer was trying to wrap things up before he headed out for the holidays. But Christmas is a holiday, and this year Dec. 26th was a federal holiday too, and then it's the weekend. I figured the detailer'd maybe get back to me sometime next week, by which time I'd hopefully be safely aboard BOUTWELL somewhere in the Pacific, making it that much harder for him to extract me and stick me elsewhere.

I woke up relatively early Christmas morning, not for Santa or stockings but to arm up and make a security round. I checked message traffic, eyeballed the logs for any overnight issues, and as an afterthought, glanced at my email. Maybe somebody'd wished me a Merry Christmas.

There was only one email, a quick message sent from the detailer's Treo. Does he sit texting while his kids rip open presents? I wondered. Just what I needed on Christmas - another "great idea" to yank me off the deployment. I wasn't sure I wanted to open it.

The two COs have been negotiating, he began, and they've worked out a plan that'll get you off the BOUTWELL a little early so you can still get to JARVIS. This is sort of a "have your cake and eat it too" scenario. If you still want to go to JARVIS, let me know and we'll work out the details later.

Did I ever! Aloha Hawaii! Now that was a Christmas present. I didn't stop to wonder how the detailer knew I'd be at work on Christmas Eve AND Christmas Day. Except that I always seem to be.

Again the ghost sped on, above the black and heaving sea – on, on – until, being far away, as he told Scrooge, from any shore, they lighted on a ship. They stood beside the helmsman at the wheel, the look-out in the bow, the officers who had the watch: dark, ghostly figures in their several stations; but every man among them hummed a Christmas tune, or had a Christmas thought, or spoke below his breath to his companion of some bygone Christmas Day, with homeward hopes belonging to it. And every man on board, waking or sleeping, good or bad, had had a kinder word for another on that day than on any day in the year; and had shared to some extent in its festivities; and had remembered those he cared for at a distance, and had known that they delighted to remember him.

The ghost of Christmas present

Built upon a dismal reef of sunken rocks, some league or so from shore, on which the waters chafed and dashed, the wild year through, there stood a solitary lighthouse. Great heaps of sea-weed clung to its base, and storm-birds – born of the wind one might suppose, as sea-weed of the water – rose and fell about it, like the waves they skimmed.

But even here, two men who watched the light had made a fire, that through the loophole in the thick stone wall shed out a ray of brightness on the awful sea. Joining their horny hands over the rough table at which they sat, they wished each other Merry Christmas in their can of grog; and one of them: the elder, too, with his face all damaged and scarred with hard weather, as the figure-head of an old ship might be: struck up a sturdy song that was like a Gale in itself.

This was my fifth out of six Coast Guard Christmases I've spent on duty. (I was scheduled for duty my second year in, too, but squeaked out of it after I covered for someone who skipped out on watch a couple weeks earlier.)

I don’t mind holiday duty. I volunteer for it. Let someone else rack up family time. The essence of American Christmas – Santa, presents, reindeer, lights, cheesy pop music, succulent ham, and unbridled consumption – fails to impress me. And, my family doesn’t have any great Christmas traditions (half my family doesn’t celebrate Christmas, to begin with), at least not any I’d want to replicate with warm nostalgia. (Dragging out the withered Christmas tree in April to the tree graveyard out back? Being tasked to wrap your own presents? Christmas music blaring at 5 am when you were up performing for three Christmas Eve services, the last stretching past midnight? Ripping open a gaily wrapped package of...Sears underwear?)

I’ll go for a quiet candlelight carol service and charitable gifts in honor of friends and relatives; I enjoy writing Christmas cards. But that’s about it. My one Christmas off, I spent the 24th and 25th cooking meals in a soup kitchen. So give me duty, really...I don’t mind.

This year, it was unexpected. Whether due to my supervisory responsibilities, my changing duty status, my rank, or the transitory nature of my non-billet, I’d escaped the duty rotation and thus dodged the specter of holiday duty. Until a week ago, when one of my petty officers fractured his shoulder in a particularly spirited Morale game of Ultimate Frisbee, and there I was a couple days later, shooting lead downrange to re-qualify and stand his duty.

My roommate, meanwhile, was heading home to Turkey for three weeks. She had me wake her up at oh-dark-thirty to say goodbye – by the time she returned, I’d be sailing in the Pacific somewhere. “I’ll see you in the summer,” she blinked drowsily.

Christmas Eve flew past faster than the NORAD-tracked reindeer. Morning staff meeting, a long passdown as my supervisor disappeared for 15 days of leave, and then a busy procession of cars to check through the front gate, everyone rushing to squeeze in last-minute Christmas shopping at the exchange. I’d saved up a fair amount of paperwork to slog through, too, so it wasn’t until late afternoon when I noticed the light blinking on my work voicemail. Blink. Blink. Blink. Who would call me on Christmas Eve at work? Who knew I was here? It was, to my astonishment, the detailer. Uh oh. Wasn't my future set? “Call me. I have an idea I’d like to run by you.”

Of course, by then, it was evening on the East Coast; and assuming he was busy envisioning the dancing of sugar plums with his family, I left him a quick message and then put it out of my mind, searching out my watchstanders to go spread Christmas cheer. No more ideas! I thought. I thought I was all set to deploy. Don’t change that now. Don't ruin my Christmas.

A dream deferred

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore--
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over--
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

Don't get me wrong. Despite the expostulations of my well-meaning roommate, there was no bad choice, no rock, no hard place, no Scylla, no Charybdis. Only two amazingly good strokes of luck, sandwiching a providential determination of good health.

Still, it was bittersweetly that I released one dream in order to embrace another. The cheap plastic lei I'd draped on my CYPRESS stateroom door when I'd first received those improbable "OPS on RUSH" orders last year still beckoned, hopeful, dusty but unforgotten, on a closet door in my San Francisco apartment. The dream still flickered in the dusty depths of my mind, only set aside by chemo and radiation and temporary distractions, never abandoned, never boxed up, never tossed out.

Lightning never strikes twice. One or the other. Half-hearted ideas I tossed up to the detailer sank like rocks. The ship wasn't willing to waive the schools I'd miss, didn't want to wait, needed me now or never. So, no. My roommate reassured me, "Hawaii isn't going anywhere," and my great white visions slowly faded to black, to thoughts of perhaps a buoy tender out there, something else, the dream still not released, just set aside, just deferred, in stasis, waiting.

As thrilled as I was about the deployment, I still had to keep explaining to everyone why I'd chosen the improbable over the unlikely. An exhausting day aboard BOUTWELL, driving the ship from drydock back to homeport, unpredictably stirred up the spirits again - ear to the wind, the news was that BOUTWELL's CO had been advocating for me with JARVIS's CO. Why two captains, one who never met me and the other who'd seen me in action for all of two weeks and a day, would negotiate over me like choice chattel, was beyond me.

So I started to pack my seabag, and to plan for my return this summer, and to wrap up things in the office; but I couldn't help but cast a few last longing glances at that cheap plastic lei, considering packing it away. On second thought, I left it hanging where it was, garish plastic flowers against a drab white closet, reminding me, a dream deferred.

The ghost of Christmas past

He then made bold to inquire what business brought him there.

"Your welfare!" said the Ghost.

He could not help thinking that a night of unbroken rest would have been much more conducive to that end.

It was a year ago, just before Christmas. This time, last year, I was partying in Key West, fresh off an astonishingly successful and exciting TAD trip on board THETIS, leading a dozen merchant vessels in an depressingly fruitless man overboard search, weaving at high speed through a fleet of fishing vessels to chase down go-fasts, carefully choreographing intelligence and helicopter flights and small boats and international agreement and ship navigation to catch drug runners, threading back and forth through rough seas in pitch blackness to pick out and retrieve jettisoned, camouflaged drug bales, deftly bobbing the ship just in sync with the surging sea to squeak just inside the pitch/roll limits for helo ops, frolicking during sun-baked port call days in Grand Cayman, and above all, reveling in the respect and confidence, invaluable shiphandling opportunities, and the deep, newfound confirmation that I really was, and would be, and wanted to be, a cutterman.

So here I was in Key West, squeezing out a few more days of paradise while my permanently assigned ship, the CYPRESS, was underway working buoys. The sun-drenched time passed quickly, filled with delicious food, apple pie-baking, Christmas church services, jogs around the island, a small-boat trip out to a lazy inlet, and daily JO get-togethers. Even a day trip I arranged to JIATF-South was more adventure and reconnecting with an old friend than work.

It seemed anything was possible. I'd met my goal, earning a 270' OOD qualification in just 10 days of watch. What took me 13 months and two boards to achieve on CYPRESS, I'd somehow knocked out in just a week and a half, the best birthday present of all, as the timing had it. The ship's CO had passed along a glowing recommendation. And at last, I had a whole group of JOs to hang with, and we were having a blast. I'd fallen in love with white hull life. But I was living on borrowed time.

One afternoon, as I was putting on a necklace, preparing to go out with my newfound friends, I felt a funny lump tucked under my collarbone. Tiny. Barely noticeable. Didn't belong there. I put it out of my mind until late that night, curled up on the couch, trying to focus on a few paragraphs from Jeremiah, everyone else asleep, the house heavy with humid, warm December air. I kept fingering that little lump in the hollow of my neck, my heart sinking. I knew. Somehow I knew.

I didn't tell anyone, not then and not for a couple of weeks, not until the holidays were over and I was back at work, at last. We were getting ready to go into drydock. I was nervous with expectation over my impending orders, wondering anxiously if all the ammunition I'd gathered during the 270' patrol would be enough to influence the detailer into taking a tremendous chance and granting me a white hull OPS billet somewhere. Frustrated, because for three glorious weeks I had tasted freedom, challenge, and respect, underway; and now here I was, nobody again, loving my job but bristling against a structure that kept me a big fish in a small pond, heavy on responsibilities but completely stripped of any authority to accomplish anything, feeling unrespected and harassed for all I did. Disappointed we'd be going into local drydock instead of undertaking a much more interesting voyage around the Keys and up the East Coast to the Coast Guard Yard in Baltimore.

It was time. I went to see the ship's HS1. "Doc, I've got this weird lump in my neck. It's probably nothing, but I'd like to get it looked at." He asked me a ton of questions, carefully massaged my neck, and flipped through several diagnostic books. He wrote everything down and sent me away, and later that afternoon he brought me back. "I'm going to send you over to the clinic for some bloodwork," he said. "It looks like you have a swollen lymph node. There are a lot of things that can cause that." I don't remember the laundry list of possible, probable causes he rattled off, but at the end, as almost an afterthought, he pulled out one of those thick diagnostic books and slowly turned the pages until he found what he wanted. "Now, this is highly unlikely, but you should know that there's also a very remote possibility that you have either Hodgkins or non-Hodgkins lymphoma. But I wouldn't be worried about it right now."

I wasn't worried. But I knew.

Right vs. Right

Our class schedule at OCS (Officer Candidate School) incorporated an inordinate amount of time studying ethics. We defined ethical dilemmas, classified the different flavors of ethical dilemmas, analyzed ethical dilemmas with a variety of specific methods, and eventually, learned the processes for resolving ethical dilemmas. We then spent countless class hours debating actual ethical dilemmas from "Ethics for the Junior Officer".

While certainly a welcome break from (and infinitely more engaging than) the multitude of other topics of our tutelage during training, I found this obsession with ethics befuddling. Mainly, I worried that the sample scenarios we debated seemed so cut-and-dried to me, even the ones which were clearly dilemmas: "right vs. right" and not a deftly disguised "right vs. wrong". Sure, there were gray areas, patches of shoal water, endless reflections of "ifs" - but my decisions were swift, my supporting arguments clear-cut and without regret.

At first, I chalked it up to a perhaps overly developed sense of right and wrong, until I discovered that classmates with unbending views on any topic found it nigh impossible to choose between competing virtues. Experience, loyalty, integrity, wisdom, and compassion did much to weed out non-dilemmas, but only muddied the waters for the true tough choices.

Now, more jaded after five years in, I venture to guess that my classmates' indecision (prophetically foreshadowing, for me, astonishing moments I later encountered of senior officers' indecision or complete refusal to decide) stemmed not from intellectual or moral uncertainty, but from a fear of being judged wrong in the final analysis, the "command review", or most strikingly, on the OER. In the heat of battle, often any decision is better than no decision, particularly in a dilemma. I like to think I'm immune to brown-nosing and wardroom politics, but most of the toughest dilemmas I've faced thus far have been decisions between what is best, or right, and what the command directs. I've learned diplomacy.

These past few weeks, I've faced a different sort of dilemma entirely, completely unexpected on my part. Early rotation to (and thus guaranteed placement in) my most-desired job, or a crazy, high-intensity deployment. Sounds like a no-brainer, and I could tell most of the people I asked for advice saw it as a short-term vs. long-term dilemma, with the long-term career benefits easily weighing out the short-term adventure. (I daresay they also saw it as individual vs. community - pleasing the detailer and the Hawaii ship's command, or indulging in a personal, irreplaceable adventure.)

But it wasn't that simple. While my decision was swift, I didn't trust myself at first, and it was only as the intervening days played out that my reasoning became clear-cut. After the medical argument - that my doctor needed to see me once more in six months' time to complete my care - it turned out that my next strongest point was actually a rebuttal to concerns of the Hawaii ship's XO - that I didn't have enough "white hull" experience. As I explained to the XO in my carefully worded "Dear John" letter yesterday, this deployment provides me the opportunity to gain much of the white hull experience I lack, and makes me a much stronger candidate to walk into a 270'/378' OPS job this summer.

I followed my heart on this one, and it was only after much consideration that my head came around to see the wisdom of the snap judgment. It turns out, in hindsight, that there really was no second choice for me, though I'm still astonished at the detailer's willingness to accomodate my desires, even at the expense of his.

I won't let them down.

Plans to prosper you and not to harm you

It's our unit Christmas party tonight, so I'll post later, but I wanted to pass that I talked to the detailer today, and after congratulating me on my healthy scan, he said, "So, I am ready to support whatever decision you make."

I'm deploying on the OOH.

And now, I'm out celebrating!!!

Good news!

The scan was negative! More later.