Interview with Mark Andrew O'Hara [March 30, 2003]

Barbara Dowling:

Today is Sunday, March 30 and this is an interview with Mark O'Hara at his home, at 2907 Blue Robin Court, Oak Hill, Virginia. My name is Barbara Dowling and I'll be the interviewer. Mark O'Hara is my brother-in law. Capt. O'Hara, would you tell for me, just for the record, what wars and branch of the service you served in?

Mark O'Hara:

Yeah, I was in the United States Coast Guard on active duty from 1966 to the summer of 1997, and during that time, whatever conflicts the United States was involved with I was on active duty. Probably the most memorable was the Viet Nam conflict and the First Gulf War.

Barbara Dowling:

Okay. And what was your final rank in the Coast Guard?

Mark O'Hara:

I retired as a Captain 06.

Barbara Dowling:

Okay, thank you. Just to begin a little bit on your record, were you drafted or did you enlist?

Mark O'Hara:

Well actually, I was...I accepted an appointment to the Coast Guard Academy. That was in 1966.I was looking at several of the academies and...one of the other academies...I received an appointment to was the Merchant Marine Academy, but I ended up picking the Coast Guard Academy.

Barbara Dowling:

Why did you decide to do that and why did you choose the Coast Guard?

Mark O'Hara:

Well, it was...actually I didn't even know the Coast Guard existed until my senior year...they had a college night and the recruiter showed up and they showed all this neat stuff that the Coast Guard did, and I said that sounds like something I'd be interested in. I was certainly looking at a sea service, Navy, Merchant Marine, but then the Coast Guard came and an opportunity and it sounded interesting and so I leapt forward.

Barbara Dowling:

Where were you living at that time and was it difficult to get in to the Academy? Did it require a Congressional backing or something?

Mark O'Hara:

No, the Coast Guard Academy of all the academies does not have a Congressional appointment. Theirs is strictly competitive. I was living in Satellite Beach, Florida at the time and the process was...for the Coast Guard Academy...was you just took the SATs and then they evaluated your extra-curricular activities and your academics and they came up with a score. For the other academy, for the Merchant Marine Academy, you had to take a government test and it was similar...instead of using the SATs they used...I think it's the Postal, the United States Postal Service Employees exam and I took that and that one was a Congressional appointment that...I did receive the Congressional appointment so I had to choose between the two.

Barbara Dowling:

Okay.

Mark O'Hara:

Yeah, it was competitive. I don't think it is as competitive as it is now. I guess now the Coast Guard Academy is one of the most competitive schools in the country. Since I was a B student, I'm not so sure I would get in any more.

Barbara Dowling:

Okay, so after you were there for four years, and when you finished, what do you recall of... what did you do immediately after? Where were you assigned?

Mark O'Hara:

I graduated in the June of 1970, the Viet Nam War was still going on...in fact it was...the Academy was a site for anti-war protests even before I graduated. When I graduated, I went to a Coast Guard cutter, the Dependable in Panama City, Florida. That was...I was a Deck Watch Officer. We had...the way you...the Academy at the time, they had a basically...whoever was the highest academically rated ...and also there was a rating for adaptability, what they called ...you would pick by that seniority, and so some of the more smaller units were the more popular ones, particularly near-by places where people lived. The larger cutters which were, you know, going to go to Viet Nam, Operation Market Time, they were less favorable, so the more senior people in the class, a lot of them, unless they wanted to go to Viet Nam, you know, usually picked units that were going to be Stateside. I was, as...like I said, I went to the medium Endurance cutter, the Dependable, in Panama City.

Barbara Dowling:

Okay. How do you recall feeling about that, was a good assignment? Or--

Mark O'Hara:

I was like...I graduated from High School in Florida, my family still lived in Florida, and so I was basically doing geographical, I wanted to get closer to my family. Although I didn't realize that Panama City...Florida is a big state and it's in the panhandle and so I was getting to...my parents lived in Satellite Beach which is near Cape Canaveral, that was a good haul. But I liked my first unit, it was interesting. You know, we were doing mostly at that time fisheries patrol and oil pollution patrol...was what we did stateside. The two-hundred-and-ten-foot beam Endurance cutters were not...they were too small, didn't have enough sea-going time to be sent to Viet Nam, so that was left to the higher Endurance cutters.

Barbara Dowling:

Okay, and after that you were on the~

Mark O'Hara:

After that I was Commanding Officer of Coast Guard Loran Station French Frigate Shoals, which is halfway between Oahu and Midway, in Hawaii, up the chain. That was at the time a Loran A, Double Master. And it was also a Loran C monitor. Loran C was the more advanced electronic navigational system and that's what was being used in Viet Nam. So this was the...basically, the Hawaiian chain version of what was in the... was being used in Southeast Asia at the time.

Barbara Dowling:

And did that...did that have any connection with boats going to Viet Nam or serving there?

Mark O'Hara:

Well it would be...it was certainly...they would...anybody going to and from the war zone would certainly be. At that time we had Loran stations all throughout the Pacific. There was some in the Marshall Islands, there was some in Palau. There were some in Japan and of course, there was the Philippines. And then there was one in the, like I said, in southeast Asia which was the most advanced and that was used for aircraft and other vessels to navigate. And that... so, everybody who was going to and from the war zone would be using these facilities. We were required...they were trying to keep like a 100% airtime and besides 100% airtime they also wanted 100% accuracy. I mean, you had to keep the system running. Of course, 100% is pretty difficult, so you were trying to keep 99% plus accuracy and on airtime. The newer... actually the older equipment, RNA, which was older technology at the time was actually pretty...it ran like...it wasn't as accurate but it certainly had the bugs were all worked out of it so it just went along. In fact we were told by some of the pilots that the way Loran works, was that you have a master and a slave they used to call them at that time, or a primary or a secondary station and it was the time for the signal to go from the primary to the secondary and come back and you would use electronic equipment that would measure the nano-seconds the time and the difference and that way with several lines you could generate where your position was. That was how it was supposed to be used, but the thing is that the Loran A had a low frequency and it really...the signal traveled far and a lot of the aircraft would just use it as a...like a homing beacon and they would just use it as a beacon and they would just fly toward whatever island they going to and just-bame in on the Loran A. Back at the Point at that time they were phasing out the Loran A and they were going to use...the Loran C was going to be the inshore navigational system and they...at that time the Omega was the world-wide electronic system. That's all been supplanted now by GPS, Global Positioning Satellites.

Barbara Dowling:

Right. You said you were CO there?

Mark O'Hara:

Yea, I was the Commanding Officer.

Barbara Dowling:

What was your rank? That must have been quite a responsibility for~

Mark O'Hara:

Well I was a lieutenant junior grade, which was an 02. Yeah, I was...that was probably the youngest you are going to be and get command. I had on the Loran Station at the time...I had a crew of about 19 or 20. I had a couple of warrant officers and the rest were enlisted personnel. At the same time though...they were.. the station had several years before I had gotten there...had gone underwater and the island was actually left over from...was built by the Seabees just before World War II, in fact it was...the island looks like an aircraft carrier from the air, but what happened was that it was made to be used as an emergency runway for naval aircraft going from the main Hawaiian islands out to Midway. It was at that time when the aircraft got to be a little bit better off the Coast Guard was on another island in the French Frigate Shoals, which is about 20 islands depending on the tide. We moved over to the larger Tern Island which is where we were. It only was six feet above sea level so there was a storm several years earlier and that does a real tap-toe dance on electronic equipment, so they had a contract to rebuild the station on elevated buildings and it was during this time that they made a decision that they were not going to keep the Loran A but the contract had let so it was cheaper to just continue with the contract then to stop the building. So I had, besides the twenty military people, I also had between twenty and thirty civilian contractors on board.

Barbara Dowling:

But what were the living conditions like then if you're living-

Mark O'Hara:

Well, we had a low barracks for the troops and at some point another building project had been out there and there had been several trailers and those were used by the officers and the senior enlisted. We also had a large, kind of recreational facility, it looked like a big barn where they used to show the movies and had a little bar there, 'cause we were...at isolated duty stations we were allowed to give out beer and so we were allowed to have a rationing, and they had a movie hall and it kind of...also a pool hall and such things and during the construction that was converted to another barracks. And basically they brought in a bunch of bunk beds and sleeping materials. We used the...I had a galley, a cook, and during the...usually it was a one person operation but with the-

Barbara Dowling:

the extras of the contractors-

Mark O'Hara:

the extra we had another cook brought on board and we had to basically space the meals one back to back, you know, breakfast for the crew, then breakfast for the contractors, and we ended up moving the projector for the movie theater...would be moved from an indoor to an outdoor theater. We had the camera basically projecting movies out on to a screen that we had made out from the barracks, actually it was out of the Sick Bay. It was the back window of the Sick Bay that we just projected it out on to a..,basically a screen that we built. At that time the movies,.,we used to get one movie a day through the Navy system and they were the old 16mm reel to reel. And they're heavy. The reason I know that was that we used to be supplied with a.. you know, once a week with a logistics flight from Honolulu and it was the FAA was, had the contract to do it. They had a plane that they used mostly to check out the navigational, air-navigational systems out in the Pacific, and it was a DC3, It was an old DC3 and it only had two thousand pounds worth of cargo space and so you had to calculate...

Mark O'Hara:

--what the mail weighed, what the persons weighed and what the milk and other perishables...

Barbara Dowling:

I did the same thing with the Mogadishu run, yes-

Mark O'Hara:

Mogadishu run,, ,it was the same thing, the same problem...

Barbara Dowling:

same plane, DC3--[Interviewer worked as GSO for Mogadishu 1995-1996, out of the U. S, Embassy in Nairobi, Duties included the running of a small supply/passenger plane,]

Mark O'Hara:

They're pretty reliable, Weil our other problem was that the island had been built by the Seabees and it was packed coral. Packed coral is just really tough on anything, in fact, we used to have with the contractors out there we also had enough to have basically two softball teams, that could play on the runway and the softball was good for one game, [laughs] It would get beat up. In fact we, the uniform there on the island was soft soled shoes, which, you know, was unheard of at the time because you would go through, even those, you would go through a pair of sneakers basically every three or four months because the coral would just, was very sharp,

Barbara Dowling:

Okay, you said that you, that you had a, the supply plane came in like once a week?

Mark O'Hara:

--once a week...

Barbara Dowling:

so you weren't really on rations that were like today's MREs

Mark O'Hara:

-no, no, no, we had our regular, we ate pretty good. That's one thing about the sea services, they usually, you know, have good food, no, that was to bring in like the fresh vegetables, milk and ice cream, the perishables. We had a supply ship would come out, of course with the, it was more frequently during the construction, 'cause they would bring out both the construction materials and some supplies. Like I said, it was basically male movies and milk was what the plane brought in. I think during the construction they occasionally would do it two times a week, but it was basically a one flight a week, that they brought the materials out.

Barbara Dowling:

Okay, after that when did you next serve during a war or, you had said something before we started the interview about accompanying an admiral on inspections?

Mark O'Hara:

Let me back up a little bit. When I was on French Frigate Shoals during the wind-down of Viet Nam we had a little incident out at French Frigate Shoals, like I said, the . the French Frigate Shoals was a group of like twenty islands and in the center of it is a large pinnacle called La Perouse Pinnacle named after the French explorer that almost sunk his fleet discovering it. And it had been claimed it was 120 feet above sea level and it was kind of unusual because basically the island was the rim of a volcanic crater. And during that time a Russian, or Soviet Union auxiliary vessel ended up mooring close to La Perouse Pinnacle, We were still in, you know,, I think things were, we were in a heightened state of readiness for whatever reason, it escapes me now, but they were an auxiliary vessel, they weren't a man-o-war but they were still, very clearly it was a Soviet vessel. They were clearly within the territorial waters of the United States, and I ended up sending a message back to, as close as we could figure they were out there and I was measuring with a land sextant as basically what the angles were and we said they're there and, of course, the initial reaction from Headquarters... at that time the District Headquarters was in Honolulu, was to board her! And I said well, it was about a 180-foot-long vessel and the largest thing I had was a mike boat of forty feet and also the only arms I had on the station were some Ml6s or probably Mis at the time, plus a couple Mis and a couple of pistols, 45s. So I said, well, "I don't think so," and besides that the angle, the precise angle I had on.,.I could not get a,, .usually in navigation when you do lines of sight you like about a 90 degree angle to get you ...well, I had a basically, something less than 30 degrees because my island was twenty-one hundred feet long by, no, thirty-one hundred feet long by four hundred and ten feet wide.. it wasn't big.. you know-

Barbara Dowling:

[laugh] About the size of a deck-

Mark O'Hara:

Yes, like you say, it looks like an aircraft carrier from the air, So I said, I don't think...I can't say for sure but I'm pretty sure just from, you know, seaman's eye that we were that close. And so they said Okay, don't board and we'll report it up to, you know, Washington up the chain of command and we'll send out an aircraft, you know, because it happened just as the sun was setting and they'd send out a aircraft in the morning. They'd get a better flight. Well, by the next morning I was getting all kinds of wild messages from Washington, D.C. from the Pentagon saying don't do anything to, basically, stir things up . And the plane confirmed that they were there, and through diplomatic channels they ended up going through and suggesting that they might want to move their vessel and so forth and eventually they left. What they did was they...they were looking for a lea, the weather had turned, you know, the ocean had gone., .they had been out for,. .what we sent out.,.we did send a small boat out with my chief Bo 'sun's mates that went out and actually talked to them and say "why are you here," they swapped cigarettes and stories and they told them that they had..,that the weather was just., .they'd been away from home for two years and the weather was still pretty yucky and they were just looking for a lea, and we told them, well, you're pretty close to, you're within the territorial waters of... And they said, yeah, but., you know, the problem was out there, and you have to get that close just to get an anchor to take hold, so. There was almost a chance for a, I guess there was some talks going on at, from a diplomatic point of view that we didn't appreciate out there was that it was a pretty tense moment, at least for the higher ups. For us, we basically kept our cool and things went on. Eventually they left before, they were going to, they actually had sent out a ship to actually do a boarding if it was going to be necessary, but by the time they showed up,

Barbara Dowling:

--they had moved on?

Mark O'Hara:

They had gone on. But after that I was, I went from the Loran Station to Honolulu.

Barbara Dowling:

How long were you at the Loran Station? Sorry, I forgot to ask that.

Mark O'Hara:

One year.

Barbara Dowling:

One year.

Mark O'Hara:

Yeah, it was...isolated duty was a one-year. They figured-

Barbara Dowling:

It was all that you could stand on the...

Mark O'Hara:

...rather they would, yeah, its ....and this was more isolated than most because we didn't have any.. a lot of the Loran Stations did have indigenous personnel. You know, they were on like Palau or the islands where they had...where they actually had people on them. Saipan...

Barbara Dowling:

Right.

Mark O'Hara:

Or...but the thing is if you're...these were, these were unaccompanied, if you were married, I wasn't at the time, but if...it was an unaccompanied so it was a one year tour. You received extra time for, you know, liberty or leave compensionary leave because it was isolated duty. And for the folks that did have married...you know, there was a kind of a separation pay that was supposed to make up the difference for not having a spouse around. They got paid a little bit more. Probably not enough to make the difference. But after that, yeah, after I was there a year I was two years on my first station on the Coast Guard Cutter Dependable and then we were a year on the Loran Station and then I was transferred to be the Admiral's aide and Public Affairs Officer for the District Commander in Honolulu. That was supposed to be a couple year tour and it ended up being just a year for me because I was accepted to law school shortly after I left French Frigate Shoals. That was during, I believe either the Viet Nam...we had, we had backed out of or finished our presence in Viet Nam either at the end of my Loran Station, either just the beginning or end of my Loran Station, because just after I got to the Fourteenth, the District Headquarters, we were not, we did not have a presence in Viet Nam. At one time the Loran Stations, the Loran C Stations throughout the southeast Asia, there was two in Viet Nam, one near the DMZ and one on an island that actually was a resort area, at least for that part of the world, in southern Viet Nam, was... were the two.. and then was several Loran Stations monitoring...another Loran Station or two in Thailand. But at that point, what we did with the District Commanderbecause these were his unitswere throughout the Pacific. We would visit them once or twice a year, particularly the Loran Stations which were spread at that time, we had a chain that we had the Hawaiian Chain, we had the Marshall Chain, we had one in Palau, in that chain. We had some in the Philippines. The Philippines we had turned over but we still had a presence there to help them maintain the equipment, and then we had the group, a group in Japan, which was one in Hokkaido and another station.. like in several of the Pacific.. Okinawa was one station and then there was another one named, the Volcano island that's still smeltering...Was another one. We still manned those, but we had turned over...at that point we had turned over the two Loran Sea Stations in Viet Nam over to the Vietnamese and they were operating, 'cause we were still operating the other parts of the chain in Thailand, with the monitoring station, which we...I did visit both times we were there. It was still...in fact we, at that point we had a...they made a point... we had to... we could not, for logistical purposes, we still could not fly through Vietnamese air space. So, it was still considered a little bit dicey, so they...we had to, you know, whatever we...they did the trip in a C130, which is not exactly...I mean, they're wonderful planes and they can take off in very short...and can get into very tight places, but even with the VIP package, which was basically airline chairs put on because, you know, the C130 is a cargo plane. That's what it is.

Barbara Dowling:

Right, they have those little sling type seats normally-

Mark O'Hara:

normally. That's the sling type seat, but they put in these airline seats and put a pot, but it still it still was a, I mean, they're not, you know, jets, and they'll get you there and they do have a long range but that they take their time, so it was not exactly a primo roses so then you kind of, you know, when you had to make...you know, fly around countries that made the trip longer but... We did visit, you know, the stations in Thailand, and like I said it was still...it was still tense, there was still, you know, there was... although the official war had... it was still, you know, it was still the bases were on...that we were visiting... 'cause a lot of our Loran Stations, some of them were co-located on other you know, bases, under military...particularly the monitoring station was basically a trailer, a large trailer with the equipment with a tower next to it. That was... and it was on an Air Force base in mid-country. And so. But they were still on a wartime footing, it was still things going on. I mean, it wasn't like a it was during the height of the battle, but

Barbara Dowling:

Right.

Mark O'Hara:

but it was still before the fall.

Barbara Dowling:

Okay, then you said you went on to law school.

Mark O'Hara:

I went on to law school. I went to the University of Miami. I was...this was a program whereby the government actually paid you and paid your law school. The agreement was that you would give them two years for every year you were in school. We went summers at the time, so we actually got through law school in two-and-a-half rather that three years. Although during the time we were at law school, we at the time...we owed five years for our official Academy...going to the Academy you agreed to put on five years active duty after the Academy. When you went to post graduate school you had to...that went into a hiatus...you still owed them for the five years-

Barbara Dowling:

right-

Mark O'Hara:

so the two-and-a-half years at the law school didn't count anything for the

Barbara Dowling:

for the first lot

Mark O'Hara:

and so, and then so law school was two-and-a-half, so that was five years, so it was basically...you'd owe them twelve-and-a-half years by the time you finished, you know, all the time you owed, and, of course, well, you know you can retire at twenty so you're over halfway there, so it was kind of, incentive to make sure you hung around for at least twenty years so they got their investment, so it was in my...I went to the university of Miami in Coral Gables, and I stayed right after that, I stayed in Florida, it was in the 7th District Headquarters in Miami. I was in the Legal Office during that... during that time the drug war had just kind of picked up. That was probably the main thing was the amount of drugs coming to the United States, initially it was marijuana that was the old...in fact that was the problem...they used to...they said one of the largest sales that Sears ever had was Sears garbage compactors going down to Columbia [laughs] because they ended up using them to compress the marijuana into bales, square bales, which got to be known as... 'cause they used to, when the Coast Guard would approach these vessels, the initial tactic in the beginning was to throw them overboard and they then would wash up on the beach and, of course, the joke was...they would refer to them in Florida as "square grouper" named after the large fish that's found in those waters was a grouper. They usually were wrapped with a plastic, but the thing is the active component of marijuana is THC but apparently it doesn't get along with salt water so once the things had been thrown over, the actual drug benefit of the marijuana was no longer good. But that didn't stop people from running down the beach and trying to get the

Barbara Dowling:

[laughs]--well maybe a little in the center

Mark O'Hara:

-well, that's right. You may luck out. I was there, I was in the Legal Office, and like I said, mostly the principle thing was the dealing with the flow of drugs. The other major issue was the flow of illegal immigrants. Initially, it was Haitians, coming from Haiti.

Barbara Dowling:

Right.

Mark O'Hara:

And that was also...there's a large pressure on, you know...most of the countries in Central America, of course...that was during the, you know, the Contra stuff done in Central America...that was ongoing, and so we had refugees from that part of the world and, you know, besides the economic refugees, you know, from most of the Caribbean chain because, you know, they just did...in fact the Miami Herald had written an article that the forces were not going to get better, they were going to get worse, that there was going be constant pressure from the Caribbean Islands to migrate, you know-legally or illegally'cause the islands' economy could not support them. Tourism and agriculture was not going to support their growing population. Probably the biggest operation we had was the Mariel Boat Lift, which was the last year of my tour in Florida, which would be '79 to '80. That's when the Mariel fleets...basically Castro emptied his jails and his mental hospitals and among other things basically sent them out on a flotilla to, you know, send them off to the New World, it was... initially there was an effort made to prevent the boats.. what happened was basically he encouraged the Cuban community in southern Florida to, anybody who had a boat or could get a boat, to come to the port of Mariel, which is in northern Cuba, to load up, a lot of them going in the hope of bringing relatives back, but, that is not exactly how it worked in the end. But the thing was the initial operation was meant to stop the flow of boats going to Cuba and eventually that became overwhelming, in fact it got, you know, there was moves to bring larger vessels in, and so on and so forth and eventually they...when that got overwhelmed...the...it turned into a large search and rescue operation, just to make sure the people leaving Mariel coming back to the United States were...would not fall prey to the elements, so... It became, probably, one of the largest immigration operations at the time. It was kind of interesting, as a junior lawyer, in fact, the Coast Guard Law Firm at that point had lost a lot of its, for whatever reasons, lost a lot of the senior lawyers and they had either retired or found greener fields, and so the position of the little officer in the Seventh District was supposed to be a Captain, an 06, and, you know, the number two guy was supposed to be a, you know, a Commander or an 05, well, when we initially got there, I was, you know, the...we did have a commander for a while, but by that time we had had...they didn't have enough commanders and so they had. ..John Sckor came down and was the Legal Officer, so at one point [tape rolled over at this point when transferred from micro-disc to cassette] Atlantic Area Commander but it was certainly, you know...talk about ,you know, the young lawyer getting, you know, in the... starting off with a big, big operation as big as that one. Because a lot of it was, what could you do...what were the laws... in fact as a result of it a lot of the laws were changed to give authority to the Immigration and to the Federal Government to actually stop, you know, the boats from going to Cuba and then stop the...try to prevent the mass immigrations, you know, what it basically came down to was how you deal with a mass immigration. You know, we had road blocks down the Keys trying to find the illegal immigrants as they were coming in and to process them and so on and so forth. So, what was really difficult is to how to, what kind of legal authority, 'cause, you know this was not something that had happened before, we hadn't had a mass immigration. And so it wasa lot of ittesting a whole lot of new legal authority and then, in fact we ended up quite frequently...that was probably the first time I ended up as a lawyer running around with a beeper on, in case it got...and it wasn't infrequently that we were talking at night to the White House Situation Room, to the senior you know, civilians that were monitoring the situation and that was, of course...the President had said some things about, "We welcome them with open arms," which presented quite a bit...you know, when you're trying to stop them, [laughs] And particularly when you're charging the boats that were going down that they had violated [coughs] excuse me, the order, in fact the judge kinda quoted that back to us in court that how can I sit there and say they did something wrong when the President of the United States goes out and says this thing. So, yes, it certainly was a challenge in that respect.

Barbara Dowling:

And the president at that time was?

Mark O'Hara:

Carter.

Barbara Dowling:

Carter. Okay.

Mark O'Hara:

It was the Carter White House. Of course, this was, you know, a bit before the problems we had with the Iran captives.

Barbara Dowling:

Right. And were you, you weren't involved in that at all?

Mark O'Hara:

No, I was...I left the summer of 1980, it would be the summer I left. And that was just that they were winding down...the actual flotilla was winding down in the fall. After that it was mostly how you dealt with...there was a lot of boats seized. The question was what do you do with all these, you know, seizures and what do you do with the prosecutions of all these individuals that had supposedly violated the prohibition of going to Cuba and smuggling, basically, smuggling illegal aliens in. And, of course, there was the old problem whether they are illegal aliens or whether they are asylum seekers.

Barbara Dowling:

Right.

Mark O'Hara:

It became a, you know, a massive ... And of course, in the mean time the Haitians sympathizers said, "why are you..." which kind of pointed out a dichotomy in our policy at that time, here we are welcoming any Cubans that could get anywhere close to the United States, we were bringing them in, in the mean time, we were running a Haitian migrant interdiction operation, which was basically keeping the Haitians away from, you know, coming to the United States. And so they were, the Haitian community in South Florida were certainly pointing out that...why, you know, they're fleeing Communism but we're fleeing just as much a...the government of Haiti at the time was not, you know, exactly, you know, a freedom loving, diplomatic, democratic society. And the conditions were maybe, in some respects in Haiti were worse than they were in Cuba and why aren't you welcoming, you know, why can't they become asylum seekers. Of course, that was the difference between political asylese and economic asylese. At least that was the distinction that was drawn at the time.

Barbara Dowling:

Right.

Mark O'Hara:

After that I was transferred to Coast Guard Headquarters. I was the Senior Appellate Council in the Military Justice Division at the time. I don't think we... and then from there I did several years in the Military Justice, three years. And then I was, I became the Legal Advisor to the Operational Law Enforcement Division at Coast Guard Headquarters and that was actually the people that oversee the law enforcement operations in the Coast Guard.

Barbara Dowling:

But the next point that you actually got involved in a war situation was the Gulf War?

Mark O'Hara:

Gulf War.

Barbara Dowling:

Okay. And where were you located at that time and what was your rank?

Mark O'Hara:

Okay, from Coast Guard Headquarters I went to Cleveland. I was the Legal Officer for the Great Lakes in Cleveland and then after that, in the summer of 1990,I became the Group Commander of Coast Guard Group Buffalo at Buffalo, New York. Before I got there, and even when I was in the District Office, there had been...you know...the Commandant was Paul Yost, Admiral Yost. He had been...he had been a major player in Viet Nam. In fact, I think he was probably the senior Coast Guard Officer in Viet Nam at one time, which was to oversee.. there were two operations going on in Viet Nam where the Coast Guard was involved with the Navy. One was basically doing the same thing we do with drugs and illegal immigrants which was to block off more supplies reaching, you know, the enemy at various points along the coast. So it was basically a... you were running a blockade or interdiction operation ...is what they did. They also had some smaller 82 foot patrol boats...were doing riverine operations, you know, just mostly...that's because they were only, excuse me, boats small enough to be able to operate in those close quarters. The other part of the operation was... Coast Guard has been involved with, you know, marine safety and port safety. And so they were involved...the one group was involved with bringing, actually bringing ordinance into Viet Nam and unloading it from the vessels that were shipping it and getting it safely onto the dock and then out in the country where it was supposed to go, so they were basically an ordinance safety loading operation and the senior officer, the Coast Guard officer in connection with the, you know, senior commanders operating the whole, you know, theaters would oversee the Coast Guard side of the operation and Admiral Yost had been, I think, the senior Coast Guard officer for a time there as a Commander or Captain. I don't remember which. But by then he became Commandant...he thought that the Coast Guard had forgotten by this point...had gotten too far away from its...in time of war the Coast Guard becomes part of the Navy, by statute... we are one of the armed forces, although people forget that, but it is only in a declared war that we actually go operate under the Navy. All our units go. I don't think that it's really happened since World War II, because logistically the Navy does like using our cutters but the more civilian regulatory operations like marine pollution and marine safety, that's not something that they're familiar with, that's not what the Navy does, they don't do, you know, regulatory programs, federal regulatory programs. So, since then, when the Coast Guard has gone to the Navy, they've not made the declaration and done the shift because they just do it by a memorandum or agreement and they take...the Navy gets the resources they want without all the headaches. But, Admiral Yost at the time thought that, you know, we had gotten away from our military readiness, in fact, he became...thought that it was necessary that...they changed our officer efficiency reports to add a military readiness score that they actually started marking officers on... and you either had to, you know, do something in the...either go ten courses or make...for most of us that were not in any of the military readiness kind of fields, you had to at least read or take a show of interest in the Naval Institute proceedings and some of the other things that deal with, you know, military readiness and those things. And as part of that, he created what the reserved units in the Ninth Coast Guard District, 'cause I guess we had a large enough concentration and they wanted, they had the facilities, was they would do some kind of, basically, port safety, you know, patrols and they had...they set up several reserves units with Boston Whalers, with fifty-caliber machine guns and other things on them, you know, basically, to work as port protection. And, they trained at a couple of facilities up there that they can do training with, you know, shooting and so on and so forth. And this was kind of all along...it at least has been several years where they had been training as units, you know, setting them up and so forth, but there had never been any thought, you know, at least there hadn't been...whether they'd be used. But that all changed when the Gulf War came about.

Barbara Dowling:

Right.

Mark O'Hara:

Because they would need some kind of protection for the ports that they were going to be operating in in the Gulf. And so they actually activated three of the Port Security Units.. PSUs as they called them...in the Great Lakes, all the units...and they were basically sent overseas to Saudi Arabia to, you know, deploy. And they ended up using them with Seal Units, it was a combined, it was, Port Security was the, you know, you've got Coast Guard worried about intrusion from on the surface and the Seals would worry about subsurface, you know, intrusions, I don't know if they expected that it really would happen in the Gulf but they were ready. And they were supposed to make sure that, you know, that the mining or any other kind of, you know, bad things happen like basically what happened with the Cole.

Barbara Dowling:

Right.

Mark O'Hara:

The same fear exists, you know, its even more so when you are talking about a munitions ship. It will make a bigger bang. And during that point, I was responsible for, you know, the...because the Unit was at least administratively attached to Buffalo. And so as a result, when they activated the Unit and put everybody on an active duty, all their dependents became my responsibility, 'cause it was as kind of the Admin Unit, you know, their husbands, or spouses I should say, at that point we had...did have both male and female personnel deploy. And then I was left with the spouses, and it was a major...it basically doubled the size of my dependent population. I basically doubled and, of course in the military everything depends on an identification card and they...one thing we did learn was that there was not a simple way, once you activated, you know, these reserves...they, of course, had all of their stuff but no one had thought about what you do with the dependents that were left behind that need to access, you know, commissaries and medical, because they're no longer...their husbands are no longer...a lot of them lost their medical, you know, their civilian medical care and they were...they would definitely need, you know, the military but they had to have...be put into the DEERs System, you know, which requires an ID card and everything, all the paper work. And so doing five hundred ID cards in a matter of, you know...and then you had to go to several units, you know, throughout the District 'cause my area of operations was from half-way... you know, I had half of Lake Erie, all of Lake Ontario, the navigable Finger Lakes, and the St. Laurence Seaway all the way up to the Canadian border. So all of these reserves, some of them were even a little bit further out, were all outside, you know, these units. So I had to go send my, basically, my store-keeper and yeomen out to the fields with the paperwork and, the, you know, computers, and the ID, Make-ID, which is a photograph and laminated, and it's a controlled card system. And so we had to basically send them out and try to get these people on the books.

Barbara Dowling:

What did that do to your services? Did that suddenly overload your medical facilities, your commissaries or any other-

Mark O'Hara:

the reality was in the Great Lakes...is we did not...the Coast Guard...there was no military hospitals basically throughout the Great Lakes and we were under...whatever we had, we had under contract. Like in Cleveland. But to get access...there were some exchanges, there was Fort Drum up near Watertown, New York, and there was, I think they still had some of the facilities in Syracuse, but I think that the largest one was in Utica. There was a hospital and a large exchange in Utica, New York, there was an Air Force base there for a time and then there were some small units around the Finger Lakes, there was a deep sea dive place with a Navy... I think on Seneca Lake. The Lake is so deep, seven hundred some feet, that they had a facility there. And there was also an Army facility there that they always used to have the protests out because it actually I believe, although they disavowed it, but there was a nuclear weapons storage facility, which they all used to, you know, they used to protest, and, of course, everybody disavowed it but there was a certain point in there that they had signs that "any further and we shoot to kill." [laughs] But yeah-

Barbara Dowling:

It wasn't your normal ammunition dump then, right?

Mark O'Hara:

Well yeah, they would neither confirm nor deny that the rumor that it was, that there were nuclear weapons stored there, but there was a few, but like I said...but what happens is they needed to be in the DEER system so they could go to use the Champus, which was the reimbursable, where you would go find a~

Barbara Dowling:

right-

Mark O'Hara:

you know, facility or doctor that would accept Champus, and then they could, you know, submit their claims and get their claims paid, and so...or even use, you know, any of the facilities. And there was also, you know...you could get...I think they were gearing up at that point...you could get some meds by mail through one of the distribution centers, but you had to be in the system to get it, so yeah. It was mostly just being able to get them to access. So then there, you know, there's...the problem is that the military and the government does not, you know, reimburse as well as some other plans and so there was a reluctance on some of the civilian community to actually accept it, so, you know, finding caretakers that would accept it, and so on and so forth. There was also the issues of just, you know, dealing with, you know, "where are my husbands and what are they doing and when are they coming back.. but my spouse gives me"

Barbara Dowling:

all that stress, right-

Mark O'Hara:

that stress, and so they were, you know, always, not always but they would...we would certainly get the concern from the, you know, dependent community. There also was a learning curve, just telling them how do you access, you know, medical care, how do...where is there commissaries that you can use and so on and so forth, you know...I mean, I am certain what we really saw was that, you know, no one, I mean the Coast Guard Reserve at the time was mostly...we would go when there were floods in the mid-west. That was about it, when they really got activated was for natural disasters. Particularly, like I said, floods in the mid-west was, you know, Coast Guard is activated to deal with, you know, the flooding and so on and so forth. And so, that is what the Reserves had probably expected up to this point was...expected that.. if they were going to be activated they would be activated for ninety days, six months and that they would go do what they normally were used to doing in the Coast Guard, and so, this...the idea of these Port Security Units that was okay, you know, we're getting this, but I don't think anybody thought, you know, up until that point, that they'd ever, you know, deploy into a combat zone, you know, the Coast Guard / combat zone, that was just.. and so it certainly was a shock and the thing is, like I said, they didn't really.. I don't think they, you know, readied their dependents as to, "okay, if I were to get activated this...you are going to have to rely on the military, you know, system for medical and other things.

Barbara Dowling:

Right.

Mark O'Hara:

And I don't think, they certainly were not in that mindset when it happened. It was certainly a shock, you know, and the idea that they could be over there for more than... 'cause usually when they were activated for natural disasters, ninety days was, you know, was more than enough. I mean, even.. they did a little longer when they had the big spill up in Alaska of the Exxon Valdez, but then I think, even then, it was six months in and they rotated you out and, you know, it was....but in the Gulf War was, who knew when.. I mean, it was six months just basically bringing things up to speed and before the actual, you know, fighting began, so it was, you know, that was...it was certainly longer than any of them had expected. And, in fact, one of the officers with the group ended up complaining in front of the media which sort of ended up with a backlash. It was kind of saying things were not quite honky-dory over there. This, of course, was before the fighting actually started but they said, you know, they were complaining about the conditions over there, but the media got a whiff of it and kind of played it back up at home, so that caused the usual stir.

Barbara Dowling:

Right. And for you and all the people you were dealing with back home.

Mark O'Hara:

Well, yeah. It... well not for us, but it certainly, you know, made some ill feelings and, you know, it didn't...it kind of fanned, you know, some things. It was...I didn't think myself it was a big deal, but, you know, speaking out of turn is always, you know, somebody didn't think it was such a good idea, you know.

Barbara Dowling:

Now, none of your direct personnel, though, were sent overseas, so you...was there any unfairness felt of that, that the actual, regular Coast Guard people who were working with you were still in Buffalo and on the Great Lakes?

Mark O'Hara:

Well, that certainly was.. that was, you know, that was...yes. You know, in fact it was, "why are we sending over the reserves and the active duty people who do this all the time are staying in place." Apparently that was not just us. That was true even with the other services, particularly the Air Force and, I think the Land Services, not so much the Naval Services, but that could be wrong. Yes, in fact, no, I'm wrong, particularly aviation specialties for the non-combat, the support aviation, apparently a lot of that, a lot of the other services rely on reserves, so...but the thing was, you know, this was...the rest of the Coast Guard wasn't doing this. The decision was, for right or wrong, is that they assembled these units strictly to be reserve units. I mean, I think there was one suggestion that maybe that it shouldn't be all reserves after the First Gulf War, and that maybe there should be active duty and reserve components, but that wasn't how they were set up. There was regular duty Coast Guard over there but it was mostly in the marine safety and advisory groups. I still think they were running a...they were sending over...we had what we called Law Enforcement Detachments, they were created when I was in the Coast Guard Headquarters and working for Operation Law Enforcement. They called them Law Enforcement Detachments. There was a big push at the time, you know, particularly in Congress, when we were...the drug war was heating up and when I got to Coast Guard Headquarters one of the major issues...there was two major issues that were kind of floating around. One was whether drug information could be classified and protected... 'cause there was concerns that, you know, that the druggies had better equipment and better Intel than we did and there was a way.. and particularly, when you're dealing with, what stuff can come out in court and what shouldn't come out, you know...at the time was...there was feelings that, well, drugs and terrorism and, you know, security were not linked like they are now after September 11 . And so there was a major push was, can we, you know...at least there was an indication that there was a link, but not as strong as we probably now know it today. So there was a... we were dealing with the intelligence community, how do we deal with that, in fact it was basically the standing up of a Coast Guard Intelligence capability and to deal with this and then the classification issue. The other major issue was... it just slipped out of my head... oh... there is the Posse Comitatus, this is a post Civil War statute which prohibits the use of the Army to be used to enforce the laws. And it was mostly to prevent, you know, the Reconstruction use of the [?] And there's exceptions, you know, when you call up... when you federalize the National Guard...there are certain , there are certain specific exceptions for use of the military to enforce domestic laws. Well the Navy said, you know, the [territory ?] has got Navy vessels operating throughout the Caribbean, why can't we use Navy vessels to interdict some of these suspected drug runners and immigration smugglers and, you know. And one of the foul processes was that we would put, you know, the Navy doesn't want to do that stuff, so maybe we'll put a law enforcement detachment of, with a young Coast Guard junior officer on board with the, you know, a couple of boarding teams and they could do it, but they could do it from a Navy ship. And there was some questions about Posse Comitatus at the time, you know, whether the Navy Could do it, in fact, it ended up being...Congress eventually passed what they called the Posse Commons, what they call exceptions or clarifications, depending what you...anyway, what basically allowed the Navy to do these things without violating Posse Comitatus. Although there is a lot of legal mumbo jumbo, but technically I guess Posse Comitatus in its really original form only applies to the army. There isn't a Navy component so, but the Department of Defense has already applied it to all their services. And so the LEDETs they were doing this in the boardings for drugs and migrants in the Gulf, and they said, "well, for...we're are doing a blockade in the Gulf, you know, to prevent supplies and stuff to go in and go out, and so the active duty parts were the LEDETs that went over and also the other portion that went over were the people that deal with, you know, the safety with looking, offloading, the same thing that we did in Viet Nam. The marine safety aspects of it. There also was because they set off the...part of the Gulf War was they lit off the oil wells. So we had to...they also ... a lot of the Coast Guard strike teams, the ones that go and actually handle the clean-ups of oil spills were, part of that group were sent over there to deal with the pollution aspects of it. Although the shut down of the wells themselves even, I think it has always been Red Adair...they usually contract it out and they end up using civilian people that do this, in the oil spills in the United States or elsewhere, that do it for a living...they would go...actually are the ones who go in and shut them down but the actual pollution clean-up and overseeing those kind of operations was the Coast Guard. So there wasn't just the Port Security Units but they were the ones that were probably the closest to combat of any of the Coasties over there at the time, so it's...that was kinda...but, yes, there was a little bit of ill feelings, like I said. But of course some of the... but they called it a Port Security Unit and they told you this is what they're going to do, so why are you surprised?

Barbara Dowling:

So that was your involvement there...was more the families and the dealing with the--

Mark O'Hara:

-yeah, we were dealing with, you know, the...getting word back when they came for it...and, of course, when they finally did come home we had to have the big welcome back ceremony. They actually flew them in to, there's a reserve Air Force base at Niagara Falls and so they flew them in and we had all notified the families and made sure the band was there, and flags and welcomed them home.

Barbara Dowling:

Okay. After that you came here to Washington and then you retired recently.

Mark O'Hara:

1997, right

Barbara Dowling:

Okay. And you retired at the rank of?

Mark O'Hara:

Captain, 06.

Barbara Dowling:

Captain 06. And what are you doing now and is what you did in the service affecting your outlook and what you're doing today?

Mark O'Hara:

Well, I don't think you can ever go through the service and not have, you know, a military mind/paradigm look at things. We're certainly looking at another Gulf War, you know, right now. You know, you look at it probably a little different than your civilian counterparts. Right now I work for a...I work for a non-profit association, the National Criminal Justice Association. They really represent state and local governments, particularly in the area of Public Safety and Law Enforcement, so I'm more dealing with the legal law enforcement side of what states do, and, of course, now that's Homeland Security, first responders, that's the same issue, so its more of that we're back here in the, you know, domestic security, so yeah, there's a tie. It's not, you know, you're dealing with a different...different characters, but, you know, it certainly factors in about how you think about what, you know...whether this is a good idea or a bad idea. You may have different outlooks about, you know, what, you know...based upon your experience. And anyways, the Coast Guard no longer is with the Department of Transportation, that was one of the big things when they stood up to the new Department of Homeland Security. It was interesting that they moved the Coast Guard over to the new Department of Homeland Security. I remarked to one of my friends, I said, you know, when I was in the Coast Guard Headquarters in the Law Enforcement Division, there was a little old book. It was a study, I think, by the Bookings Institute, it was just after...the Coast Guard was, you know, very much involved with interdictions, but during Prohibition. You know, they were stopping the rum, the Rum Wars is what they called them in those days, you know, coming in from Canada and also from the Caribbean. And shortly after that, the Bookings Institute did a...did this study and what it was...it was a suggestion that we do something different with our border agencies, which was the Border Patrol, Customs and Coast Guard, and they suggested at that time, and this is the early 30s, that they all should be under one Agency. Well, it only took them, sixty years, no, seventy years and we created the Department of Homeland Security and did that, basically what the Bookings Institute Study at that time said. So... 35

Barbara Dowling:

Is there anything that we haven't covered in this interview that you think that we should have, anything you'd like to add or an incident that comes to mind that you feel is worth passing along?

Mark O'Hara:

No, I think the last one was probably the [laughs] ...

Barbara Dowling:

Okay, thank you, Captain O'Hara: for sharing your experiences with me today and for participating in this project.

Mark O'Hara:

Thank you.