Shipmates: Before the Mast: A Coastie's Chronicle of the Dishonorable

In his first full length publication, Bradley Angle pulls on his enlisted experiences in the post 9/11 Coast Guard to create vivid accounts of the lifestyle and attitudes of 21st century Coasties. In a world of warn-out cutters and shipmates, debauched port-calls, dishonest missions, and facade salutes, the ani\ti-hero of Shipmates, Seaman Ashore, struggles to find himself as alcohol, drugs, and assault are normalized through every passageway.

This is the first portrait of the enlisted Coastie, published by a former junior petty officer, without a superfluous focus on the popular version of the Coast Guard: machoism and devotion-to-duty.

With a backdrop of the US Coast Guard's transition from the Department of Transportation to the more militant Department of Homeland Security, in this story of stories, the straight-out-of-boot non-rate, Pojack Ashore, rambles his way through life aboard a 378' cutter. Soon, Pojack finds an opportunity to join one of the most elite units in the CG. At this new unit, he struggles to fight off old addictions, he's pessimistic about the new objectives of the Coast Guard, and he crafts better ways of impressing his superior officers.

At each step, our pseudo-hero finds important connections with his shipmates. He watches many of them struggle, and responds with both empathic kindness and belligerent indifference. Following the issuance of a DD-214, he hears of and watches his past shipmates struggle with suicide attempts, some more fruitful than others. Letters are written to the VA. Other-than-honorable dischargers are given. Police document maddening episodes of emotional collapse. Waves crash over historical figures and symbolic towers...

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UPDATED, AUTHOR'S THOUGHTS

Today is November 1, 2019. "Shipmates Before the Mast" has been available to the public for almost six months. The feedback I've received is all over the charts. On the one side, it seems most readers relate. Enlisted personnel and veterans alike have responded with support. The Shipmates they read resembled a familiar experience and an accurately melodramatic conclusion. On the other side, there is frustration, misunderstanding, and hostility towards the book, and maybe towards me. With a subtitle like "A Coastie's Chronicle of the Dishonorable," I can honestly say that I anticipated the hostility.

The following remarks are my response to the negative feedback:

My background includes 5 years as a non-rate and a junior petty officer in the US Coast Guard. My personal experience is not what Shipmates is about. The book Shipmates, is clearly about a fictitious Coast Guardsman who struggles with unethical superiors, fake accountability programs, and general debauchery. The main character resembles the sum of every non-rate and junior level petty officer I served with in the Coast Guard - the good and bad. While there are many books published about the Coast Guard experience, I believe those books are about the "Hollywood Coast Guard" - the same Coast Guard Façade that a Behavioralist in 2011 said created "the most suicidal branch of all the militaries." If you want a bunch of pretty-boy frat-house Coast Guard Stories, read something else... If those hostile attacks on my book are about my character's experience, I can only direct readers to the published literature on depression, alcoholism and suicide in the USCG. If those hostile attacks are about my writing style, being "without flow," I would agree. Mainly because my point in the book is to draw attention to the problems I mentioned above, and publishing this book was my best tool to do it. Though I would also argue that the memory of a depressed and debauched drunk is almost always without flow; Full of random piecemeal stories (yarns). Shipmates is made up of the confessionary-recall of exactly 100 of those stories. The stories of shipmates, friends and superiors. The story of a true Coast Guard