Andrea West, who goes by her middle name Jill, is a freshman legal studies major with plans to become a certified paralegal after graduating. She loves to cook and loves to read. Jill always has a book in her hand. Aside from reading she loves watching her children play sports. Her daughter plays softball and rides BMX bikes.
On September 1, 2011, I retired from the Coast Guard after 22 years of service. It’s been a long road, that initially was only supposed to be four years, but time flew by so fast. Twenty-two years seemed like five minutes some days.
I joined the Coast Guard in 1987 after being put on academic suspension in my second year of college. I was 20 years old and my father told me to either get a full time job to pay rent and bills or to join the military. To him, the military meant the Marines, as both he and my brother had been a part of that particular service, but the Marines didn’t appeal to me. I called a friend from high school who had joined the Coast Guard and asked her about it, went to see a recruiter and signed on the dotted line. Eight weeks later I was in boot camp in Cape May, NJ, a most surreal experience for a 20-year-old girl from Louisiana.
After boot camp I was stationed in New Orleans, not too far from home, but not too close either. I was only there for a year, before going to rating training course in Petaluma, CA, a place I would eventually revisit as an instructor. I graduated as a Yeoman (for those of you who don’t know what a Yeoman is, think Human Resources/payroll) and went to Topeka, KS to the Coast Guard Pay and Personnel Center.
I know, the Coast Guard in Kansas, right, my thought also, not a discernable body of water anywhere, but that is where all of the pay for the Coast Guard gets processed. I was there for about a year and a half then got orders to Kodiak, AR, where I would spend the next five years. They were great years as I met my husband, Scott, and we had our daughter, Shelby. From there we went to North Bend, OR, had our son, Sam, then on to Mobile, AL.
In Mobile, I was standing my first duty day as the Officer of the Day, when a plane went into the first twin tower in New York. Yes, that day was Sept. 11, 2001. I will never forget being on watch that day, and again for the rest of the week, because I wasn’t able to leave the base until we got everything secured. The base was in a panic. 9/11 changed the military. In the days and weeks that followed that incident, you couldn’t get onto any base without spending about an hour going through security checkpoints, having your car searched and having every form of identification thoroughly scrutinized.
In my mind, our security should have always been so thorough, but hey, we’re America, no one would dare attack us on our own soil. That day changed the way the military was viewed as it was the beginning of the conflict in Iraq, it ramped up the situations in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and it just changed everything. In the days and weeks that followed, my children, who were very young at the time, asked some hard questions, the way that children do, but they were more worried that their mother or father would be sent away.
The hard parts about being in the Coast Guard were the missed birthdays, school events, and sporting events that tend to happen. A phone call could ruin a vacation that had been planned for months. These were the main reasons I decided it was time to hang up the towel and go back to school. I was ready to spend more time at home with children. My daughter was starting high school, and my son starting middle school. They like that while they are doing homework, I’m right next to them.
While both of them are extremely proud to have a mother who served their country for more than 22 years, and a father still serving, they are even more proud that I’ve chosen to go back to school full time. Not only am I bettering myself through knowledge, but I am also fulfilling a promise to my father that I would eventually graduate college. I told him he’d have to come to both his only daughter and only granddaughter’s graduation within six months of each other. His reply to that is that nothing would make him happier.
