In My Own Words

Lt. Charles W. Hawkins
Commanding Officer, U.S. Coast Guard Station, South Padre Island

We’re located right on the border with Mexico, so we have a lot of law-enforcement missions that we do as far as narcotics and human smuggling. This is also a resort area, and we’re the only search-and-rescue asset in town. Anytime there’s a person in the water, or someone who’s having trouble with the currents, they usually call us because we’re the only ones with boats.

We work along the Rio Grande, a navigable waterway in some parts, and we also patrol the Gulf of Mexico. There is a lot of area to cover.
On the Rio Grande one time, we had our small boat hidden in some of the brush that overhangs the [river]. We could see people on the Mexico side loading up what looked like bales on the riverbank. A couple of people swam across. Then we heard them get on their Nextel phones and radio back to the other side. They then started swimming the bales across.

As they were swimming across, a boat came up. Then an SUV-type vehicle pulled down into the boat ramp. Once people swam across, they started loading bales into the boat ramp. We had a couple of people jump off our boat to try and stop the vehicle, and had a couple people try to stop the boat without causing a search-and-rescue case to happen. If we have people in the water, we don’t want to cause them any more distress than they already have.

We were able to stop the vehicle, and with the help of the Border Patrol we got about 1,000 pounds of marijuana that was in the vehicle, but the runners got back across the border. It was pretty interesting how fast and dynamic all this could happen. This was in a matter of minutes.

When I was with the Pacific Law Enforcement Tactical Team in San Diego, we were on a boarding of an Ecuadorian fishing boat that had [illegal] migrants onboard. It was a 60-foot boat, so there wasn’t a lot of space for people.

We had about six days that we just cut circles in the ocean, waiting to hear what the final adjudication for their case was going to be. Eventually we were told to take them into Puerto Cancal, Guatemala, and turn them over to the Guatemalan officials. During those six days, we we kept them on their boat, but we would send food and water and go over and check on them every day.

There were 260 Ecuadorians and nine Sri Lankans onboard. We got to talk to those folks about what their situations were. It was good to hear their stories to get a sense of what their lives were like in their home country.

When I challenge myself, I also try to challenge my crew. In the Coast Guard, you get challenged every day by the missions that you do, the job that you do, being able to know what you are supposed to do — but rarely are we challenged by being put in a situation where there is no book to tell us how to handle it, where it doesn’t depend on your rate or rank, it just depends on you and your will.

If someone were to write my epitaph, I hope it would say, “He missed a few family dinners, dance recitals and baseball games, but he did his part to keep the country safe.”