Ships Etc

I spent the last couple of weeks writing about maritime security. I rang around and talked to truckers Joe and Adam and Lou and to the secretaries who work in shipping yards and customs brokers with their Long and Staten and nasal Island accents: “We are an aennti-tearrorghrist oarganizaiiition,” said one Linda. Then I rang the coastguard press office. Press offices are normally reserved for the species of people who say no to things. Like mules and bouncers, their neutral answer, their starting position is one of great unhelpfulness. But not at the New York coastguard press office.

“Himyname’s Sam-Knight-I’mcallingfromColumbiauniversitywriting-about-oh-you-know-changes-to-maritime-security-and-I-waswellwondering-if-you-I-don’tknow-you-see…”
“That’s great!”
“Uh-huh,” (?) “Right, well I was wondering if I could talk to someone, who would be a good person..?”
“You want one of our MSST’s.”
“A… ?”
“MSST’s, they’re sort of like our SWAT teams, they’re great, we’ll get you out on a boat, try some vessel boarding, drug interdiction…”

And that was that. Last Friday I took the ferry to Staten Island and Fort Wadsworth to meet Lieutenant Chris Boes of Shrike Squadron, MSST 91106, New York’s newest baddest coast guards. Shrikes are, in Boes’s military-capability language, “predatory birds but without the necessary equipment for their mission.” Instead they throw their prey, their mice and rats into prickly bushes or barbed wire fences and pluck from them at their leisure. Boes told me they chose the shrike name because the Commander’s dad’s unit had been called the Shrikes in the Navy in the Second World War. “Initially, when we were thinking of something really scary, we wanted to be called like the Vipers and we had this logo with all these snakes but the Admiral said it was too, it was too…” Intense? “Right, too intense. So we said, you ever heard of a shrike, Admiral? He said no, so we were like, that’s all sir…” And the Shrikes they are.

Going to Staten Island is a bit like going to New Jersey, it’s like pushing through the cardboard scenery of Manhattan and finding yourself in America. On Staten Island there are old fences and wooden houses and clapped out cafes and strip malls and larger cars and people on the bus waiting for payday. It’s not that Staten Island is poor – it’s not, it’s got some of the flashiest bits of New York. It just looks real. More generic. The poverty I’ve seen in New York, in Brooklyn, in the Bronx, has a strong sense of place. Those huge projects in the Bronx only occur in a few places in the US, and with the old train tracks above you with the 2 or the 3 trains creaking squeaking over the Yankees Barbershop, the grime and potholes are well and truly grounded. Same along the Brooklyn waterfront or Sunset Park where the fat Mexican children run with a postcard backing of Manhattan towers and the planes coming into JFK.

Staten Island is greener and it felt more replicable as the bus pulled up Bay Street from the ferry terminal. Lieutenant Boes was 19 feet tall, big like a truck, with a square head, formal blond hair and delicate spectacles. He had the shiny boots on that tell you that civil law and handcuffs belong elsewhere, we’re in shotgun and destroy country. We went into his office which had potplants on the windowsill, Black Hawk Down in the bookshelf and cutesy Army advice posters from decades ago, cheerily asking you to make sure your gun is empty otherwise you’ll lose a stripe! Maybe your eye! Boes sat at his desk and answered the questions like a pro. He described the mission of his team of 73 and their six boats with MS240 machine guns mounted fore and aft and standard M16 firearms and shotguns. He talked about vertical insertion – jumping out of helicopters – diving capabilities – 20 scuba tanks arrived in the mail that morning – and sniper training with the army. He was loving it. “We’re not embarrassed to say it, ‘We are the best of the best.’” At one point his printer did not work as he tried to print out something for me. Boes called in one of his men, the conversation went something like, The printer is not functioning properly, Sergeant. Right sir, I’ll see to that. Very good. (The Sergeant went out and called through the door, “Is that working now, Sir.” Nothing happened. “Negative.”)

Boes was careful and surefooted when we talked about how the coastguard might not be catching as many drug dealers these days (they are spending a third of the time and resources they did in 1999 on drug smuggling) and about the size of its tasks, which include patrolling Guantanamo Bay, securing ports in Iraq and patrolling America’s 95,000 miles of coastline with fewer people than the NYPD. But he let his worldview out when we talked about those ole terroristicals, in his words, the “Abdullah-bad-guys” that he’s out to catch. Asked about how you evaluate risk, he did some analysing. The quotes aren’t word for word, but they’re close.

“You ask yourself whether your house or my house or my brother’s house is going to get attacked and you say the likelihood is pretty poor. So in the grand scheme of things, when we get a boat of timber coming from Canada into the port, we’re not that worried, but when you see you’ve got a container load of North Korean radicals loaded in a port in Kazakhs-bad-stan or some other nasty place, you know that the likelihood of risk is higher.”

“My job is to make it as difficult as possible to attack this port, to make them look elsewhere. I know that Middle Eastern fanatics are not like Kamikazes in World War Two. The Kamikazes just had to take off from their aircraft carriers and they were set ok. The suicide bomber needs to have an 85% or higher rate of mission accomplishment, of taking somebody else’s life with him, to get into Shangri-La or whatever the hell place it is they go. My job is to make it as hard as possible to take that life.”

Whatever that means.

I waited in the wind for the bus back with three men who knew each other well and then made for the Brooklyn Brewery, where we had a little tour and tasted some fine drinks. We played pool in the bar they had downstairs, all picturesque Williamsburg right-on families, art on the walls, organic beer on the tables. As the owner said, “The more educated you are, the more likely you are to drink beer brewed in a micro-brewery.” Which called to mind geniuses in cupboards with their PHDs and Nobel prizes, sipping from tiny-tiny bottles.