COAST GUARD OPERATION SPECIALISTS AT THE HEART OF THE OPERATION

Blue lights flood the room much like the water surrounding the ship, and the radar screens cast an eerie green glow on those individuals sitting in front of them.  In another area of the room, three men crowd under the only white light in the room, each of them hunched over, peering down at a nautical chart – a kind of road map of the seas.  The man at the radar screen interrupts the constant hum of the electronics, as he shouts out a bevy of numbers and the three men work together to plot the position.  It takes a small army of men and women to maneuver a 378-foot ship, and it is no different for those men and women who proudly call themselves operations specialists in the United States Coast Guard.

Stationed throughout the country including Alaska, Hawaii and Guam, Coast Guard operations specialists perform several vital functions in the service, including search and rescue coordination, intelligence gathering and analysis, and real-time target acquisition, tracking and identification.  In short, OSs are at the heart of almost every Coast Guard mission.

“Basically, we are the brains of the ship,” said Petty Officer 1st Class Josh Nichols, an operations specialist aboard the Coast Guard Cutter Gallatin, homeported in Charleston, S.C. “We do intelligence gathering, read messages, look for drug smugglers, navigation and ship defense when we’re underway.  We get the information and pass it up the chain of command on the ship.”

“It’s a great job,” Nichols adds.  “You’re always in the middle of the action.  We may not be the ones who go out and pull someone out of the water, or the ones who get the drugs off the boat, but we have a big part in accomplishing the mission.  We’re the ones doing the navigation and planning, and in the end, we’re the ones who do the paperwork and put together the case package.”

OS training is held at Coast Guard Training Center Petaluma, Calif.  The four-month school trains students to deal with real-world events through simulated training scenarios – events which sometimes can test one’s own limit.

“There’s a lot of stress that gets thrown at you at once,” said Petty Officer 3rd Class Brian Vogelheim.  “At school, they’ll throw a couple of search and rescue cases at you all at once, and that can be very stressful for someone who’s never had to handle that before.  That’s the way the school is run – to prepare you for a very stressful job in the real world.”

OSs in the service see air, land and sea duty during their career.  On land, OSs mostly run search and rescue cases, but aboard a Coast Guard cutter, an OS can put to practice everything he learned at school – a reason Nichols says to get underway sooner rather than later.

“A ship is where you’ll gain most of your experience because you do so much more than on land,” Nichols said.  “Also, the higher in rank you are, the harder it is to go to a ship.”

Vogelheim is currently stationed at Coast Guard Sector Long Island Sound, Conn., but is underway aboard the Gallatin in order to experience life at sea as an OS.

“I like doing the search and rescue stuff,” Vogelheim said.  “I’m just getting my feet wet on the combat side of things here, but even when I was on land, I had no clue about all of the operations that go on at sea.  It’s interesting to be a part of something that no one else has a clue about.”

Additionally, OSs are often privy to information most of the crew is not aware of.

“Everything that happens here, I know about it,” Nichols said.  “I often forget that sometimes.  As OSs, we often know information most of the crew doesn’t – even something as simple as where we’re at.”

In the civilian world, OSs can take their skills and apply them to other jobs including air traffic control, emergency operations coordination and database management.

Whether it’s a search and rescue case on the Great Lakes or a big drug bust in the Caribbean, at some point during the mission a Coast Guard operations specialist was there, behind the scenes coordinating the efforts of team Coast Guard.

For more information on the operations specialist rate, click here. Or for more information on other career opportunities in the Coast Guard, contact your nearest recruiter at 1-877-Now-USCG.