In My Own Words:
Operations Specialist 2nd Class Brent Massey

Coast Guard Cutter Bear, Portsmouth, Va.

My grandfather was a damage-control chief in the Navy. My dad never really joined the military, but he kind of stuck around in a military town [Norfolk]. My uncle on my mom’s side owns a marina, so I knew that I definitely wanted to do something on the water. I guess it flows in my veins. I bought my first boat when I was 18, a 26-foot little sailboat.

I had it narrowed down at one time to Marines, Navy and Coast Guard, but I ended up picking the Coast Guard mostly to try to do search-and-rescue type stuff. That was what I did in Key West. Coming here has been something completely different.

We were sent over to Africa basically to fulfill a mission that the Navy could not: teach these foreign navies the mission that we do in the Coast Guard of lifesaving, search and rescue, and guarding the coast against pirates and drug runners.

Basically, I’m in charge with making sure that onboard [the Bear], we receive message traffic and can communicate properly with the guys on land. We have lots of different equipment and lots of different ways to contact people, but just to try to find a method that gets through reliably on a consistent basis is probably one of the most difficult things.

This is definitely one of the more tight-knit, team-playing units that I’ve ever worked at. Our captain wanted to make sure, for example, that we came home a day early. And as petty as that sounds, we were just ready to come home. And when the command tries to take care of us, then we try and do our job a little better. And that, in turn, makes him look better.

I hope to be the kind of leader who can sit back and have guys who are well-trained and well-equipped enough that they can do their jobs well and come to me if they have problems, but let them get their own recognition for it.

I’ve got at least another three years to go. I really am kind of in limbo. I’m definitely making a headlong run at getting myself trained and prepped and ready for making it a career.

I’m currently going to an EMT (Emergency Medical Technician) school. I also go to school to learn how to use our ion scan machine, which is the machine that we use to scan for drugs, because that’s the mission on our next ship.

I don’t know about going to the top. I had actually hoped to achieve chief. I’ve already made E-5 in three years. It’s definitely achievable, maybe not within six years, but definitely within 10.

I’d at least like to, at every station that I go to, leave an impression there. I walked away from Key West with one Meritorious Unit Commendation and three Meritorious Team Commendations, being the first group of people to be able to use disabling fire on a migrant-smuggling go-fast boat.

I had always had hopes and aspirations of doing something in law enforcement.

Because Key West is such a small town, the people I helped on the water I would also see out in town. And just to get a “thank you” from a mom, wife, daughter or whoever, for them to walk up and say, “Hey, I really appreciate what you did the other day; they wouldn’t have made it without you” — that’s really a feeling that you have to step back and say, “wow, I did all that?”