Red Crew: Fighting the War on Drugs with Reagan's Coast Guard

by Jim Howe

Red Crew is a first-hand account of U.S. Coast Guard anti-smuggling operations during the early years of the nation’s maritime war on drugs. Jim Howe describes his experience as the executive officer of a specialized drug-hunting crew that sailed in then-state-of-the-art “surface effect ships,” a small flotilla of high-speed vessels pressed into the drug war on short notice. In the early 1980s, South Florida and the Caribbean were awash in illicit drugs, with hundreds of smuggling organizations bringing huge loads of marijuana, and later cocaine, into the United States. To fight this epidemic, the Reagan administration led a massive effort to disrupt shore-side gangs while bolstering interdiction activity at sea. To increase the number of days at sea for each surface effect ship, a “multi-crewing” concept was employed, with four teams of sixteen sailors—the Red, Blue, Green, and Gold Crews—rotating among three hulls. Through its first-person narrative, Red Crew offers a rare glimpse into the day-to-day pressures, challenges, failures, and successes of Coast Guard cuttermen as they carried out complex and dangerous missions. Red Crew provides a unique historical view of the early days in the Coast Guard’s war on drugs, and is the only book-length history of the diminutive, one-of-a-kind surface effect ship fleet.

297 pages, Kindle Edition

Published June 15, 2018

Reviews

[Thomas Bardenwerper · Rating 5 out of 5]

Awesome book. Exciting, detailed, and extraordinarily accurate. Howe brings to life Coast Guard counter-drug operations like no one else. The narrative reads like fiction based on how wild Howe's two years aboard the SESs were. Any aspiring Coastie would be well-served to read this.

[Dan Jezeski · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book. It brought back a lot of memories from my experiences with the SES fleet. While I was serving on the CGC Tahoma in 1988/89 we were doing drug interdiction operations in the Windward Passage. We were contacted by the CGC Shearwater and they informed us that they were having intermittent radar problems, and it was hampering their mission. The Shearwater asked for our assistance, and they transferred me over to the Shearwater for a week to troubleshoot and repair their SPS-64. It took me two days to fix the radar which left me the rest of the week to get to know the crew and ship. I got to spend some time on the bridge and the engine room, plus observed a number of boarding's. What a great group of sailors. I hated leaving them when we pulled into Jamaica, but had to go back to the Tahoma. Plenty of work for me to do there.

[Kristen Reagan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great book! My dad also served in the USCG, on Blue Crew for a time (actually mentioned a couple of times in the book). It was great to read stories of what it was like and see some of the things my dad probably did as well. I’d love to read more about Jim’s career - a sequel of the latter part of service! I keep telling my dad he should write a book about his Coast Guard adventures.

[Drew Williams · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well written! This book tells an exciting and informative tale of an Era of Coast Guard history that won't come again. Surface Effect Ships rode on a cushion of air, in part, to improve their speed. The broad beams made them useful platforms to combat drug smuggling, conduct search and rescue, and interdiction illegal immigration.

[Kimberly Tawney · Rating 5 out of 5]

A really good read

Made you feel like you were there with all of the suspense, humor, excitement and emotions. Thanks for sharing your experiences