- Joined
- Feb 2, 2008
- Messages
- 3,059
My uncle is a retired USCG Captain and spent much of 67/68 and 70/71 in Vietnam for Market Time with Ron 3 on the Cutters Bering Straight and Morgenthau conducting interdiction and GF support missions. Lot of interesting stories (Hong Kong was a pretty popular liberty port back then
)- he also says that it was a surprise to many sailors when they discovered themselves deploying to Vietnam with the USCG as they rather expected to be on a Buoy tender in NY Harbor or something similar. Reality is that the CG has a lot of really diverse missions , some of which are more military in nature than others. What makes them interesting is that the core missions of the CG are conducted in peacetime or war time. For example for most of his later career my uncle was in the Marine Inspection /Captain of the Port field. Typically , those are pretty different from a Navy mission- Captain of the Port of Memphis is not something that a USN Commander would relate to much. But other missions are pretty closely related to counterpart Navy missions. LEDETS and Patrol Boats in the Persian Gulf for example were requested specifically from the CG because of their expertise gained in performing their ongoing mission off the US shores. For that matter, even typically "peacetime" missions like Aids to Navigation need to be maintained in theater as well as in home ports. And the CG conducts MTTs and training for all kinds of smaller countries which have Navies which perform both civil and defense missions- so you can find a CG training mission in west Africa right now. So the bottom line- the USCG has a pretty broad and eclectic collection of missions, some of which are more traditional war fighter missions and many of which are not. They are a military service with specialties and strengths of their own. they interact far more with the general population than any of the other services. It's different- neither better nor worse than the other branches- they are themselves.
