11/10/13 By: Cortney J Corino Machinery Technician 1st Class, USCG, Honorably Discharged I served on active duty in the US Coast Guard from 2002-2010. Over those 8 years, I served aboard 4 different cutters (ships), one of which deployed with the US Navy Expeditionary Strike Group 5 in support of Operation Enduring Freedom. It was after that deployment that I began losing my interest in staying active duty in the military. I found myself no longer supporting the direction the US Coast Guard was headed. During that deployment we boarded dozens of vessels off the coast of Oman and Somalia. I was a small boat engineer who saw first hand the type of boats we were boarding and the kind of people aboard them. If I had to guess, I would say that over 90% of those boats were just poor fisherman out at sea to collect food to feed their communities with nothing more than some water and a 50lb bag of rice to survive on. The vessels were barely seaworthy and some were actually broken down on the high seas as we boarded them. Most vessels had around 3 to 4 people onboard and we would send a boarding team over consisting of anywhere between 6 and 10 armed boarding team members, not including the two armed smallboat crew that sat along side. With every new boat that we would board, I became more and more disturbed with the fact that 10 armed American military personnel would board a vessel with 4 poor fisherman from a third world country and start questioning them as to why they were there and what they were doing. I began asking myself, why are WE here and what are WE doing? When you zoom out and look at the overall picture, there was the American military, who sailed half way around the world to ask the citizens of that part of the world just what they thought they were doing and why. Lets be clear about who I am. I am not an isolationist, I am not a liberal, I am not a republican, and I am not anti-America. I am a veteran. A veteran who proudly served in the US military for 8 years and 9 months and I would do it again in a heartbeat if I thought the country were in serious danger from abroad. All I wish is that America would finally learn to stop trying to control the world and solve everyone else’s problems at the expense of it’s own citizens. The fat cats in Washington DC will never suffer because they made it so they are exempt from any suffering. They continue to get paid while they are making poor decisions, or worse yet making no decisions causing a shutdown, that eventually lead to the average American citizen taking the full burden of the consequences from Washington DC’s actions. This is OUR country. The citizens of the United States. We deserve better and we demand better. The song goes: “Our Country ’tis of thee, sweet land of liberty…”. That verse is rapidly becoming less true everyday. It is time to change. Cortney J Corino
Posted on: Mon, 11 Nov 2013 01:25:06 +0000
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