The former seaman had served on active duty for two and half years. He had last stepped aboard a Coast Guard vessel 43 years earlier, possibly before the captain of this vessel was born. Yet the honors he was rendered this day showed the value placed on his service by the officers and crew present for the ceremony off the coast of Humboldt County, Calif.
The former seaman was my dad, Dick Walker. And on this day, the officers and crew of the USCGC Long Island commended his ashes to the ocean he had sailed so many years earlier.
“The ceremony was conducted in the manner that has become traditional for burial at sea,” wrote Lt. A.M. Lever, the Long Island’s commanding officer. 
The U.S. flag was lowered to half mast and the ship’s company was mustered. Then Lever, as commanding officer, read from the Scriptures and offered a prayer. Following the prayer, the ship’s company was called to attention and saluted while Lever read the committal, “after which time the ashes were scattered to the sea,” Lever wrote in a letter to me.
“The burial at sea ceremony is probably the most honored custom of seafarers, and it was an honor to be able to conduct it in the memory of your late father. On behalf of the crew of the United States Coast Guard Cutter Long Island, I extend my deepest sympathies.”
My father never told me exactly why he enlisted at 16 on Dec. 28, 1951. His father, my grandfather, had been an adventurer who joined the Navy at the same age during the Great War. Growing up in a Navy town like Long Beach, Calif., my dad would have seen sailors returning home from World War II, would have heard the stories, would have seen the Gold Star flags in windows. And his mother, my grandmother, helped the war effort working in a gun assembly line. 
My dad took advantage of a clerical error in his birth record that made him a year older than he was. But he still needed the permission of his mother to enlist, and the only branch she would consent to was the U.S. Coast Guard. 
After boot camp in Alameda, my dad listed Hawaii at the top of his dream sheet; the Korean War was on, and Coast Guard cutters were assisting merchant ships and aircraft transiting the North Pacific. The closest he got to his wish was a vessel that had formerly been home-ported in Hawaii: the USCGC Chambers, in New Bedford, Mass. (He reminded me it’s called a “dream sheet” when I enlisted in the Navy in 1980 and told him of my post-boot camp plans.) 
Aboard the Chambers, he worked as a deckhand, ran the paint locker and stood his share of watches. Once, he was almost washed over the side while standing watch in a heavy storm in the Atlantic. During his enlistment, the Chambers conducted weather patrols between Massachusetts and Newfoundland, participated in medical evacuations and assisted vessels at sea.
In 1954, the Korean War over, enlisted ranks were reduced and on June 28 that year, Seaman Walker was transferred to the Inactive Reserves. The Coast Guard sent him home with $428.74, a National Defense Medal and a “ruptured duck” on his uniform.        
In the ensuing years, my dad married, embarked on a career, used a VA loan to buy a home in a tidy suburb, and became a father. He had once dreamed of being a forest ranger but he never escaped the ’burbs. 
His life was a swirl of ups and downs, successes and shortcomings. Sketching at his easel and painting houses — both appealed to his creative side. He liked cars and motorcycles. He fished in Mexico, had a respectable bowling average, and dominated a lot of pool tables in his hometown. He liked giving blood. He once saved a co-worker from a fall from a building that would have resulted in serious injury and, possibly, death. 
He also lived too fast. A divorce in 1974, a second marriage in 1976. A career change in 1982, forced retirement 10 years later. His 40s and 50s more resembled Pete Hamill’s “A Drinking Life” than family life. By 1997, his body started shutting down. One of his regrets was that he wouldn’t be here to watch his granddaughter grow up. 
There were a lot of years and life experiences between the time of my dad’s Coast Guard service and the waning days of his life. But during those last days, our conversation turned to his time in the Coast Guard. And I learned that even though he didn’t talk about it, he had always been proud of his service. 
Only 16 when he enlisted, he was a member of a special group — the brotherhood of veterans — at age 19. It was not lost on him that he had returned home an honorably discharged veteran when many of his friends were graduating from high school. He spent his Korean War service in the Atlantic, far from the action. But he served. 
My dad was not one to talk about himself. His attitude about doing a job might have been, “You do what you’ve got to do, and don’t make a big deal about it.” Everybody’s got a job to do, whether painting a house or patrolling the Atlantic or fighting a war. I didn’t know he had received the National Service Medal until I saw it on his DD214.
“Meh, they gave those to everybody,” he said. But I’d bet few 19-year-old veterans had one. 
My dad died Aug. 16, 1997. He didn’t want a funeral. He wanted his body cremated and his ashes spread over the … well, he wasn’t specific on that part. Perhaps he trusted me to make the right decision. To me, there was only one choice.  
After a small gathering, I left my father’s ashes to the care of a neighbor — a U.S. Coast Guard master chief who was stationed at Alameda, where my dad had joined the Coast Guard almost 46 years earlier. And then, on 28 Oct. 1997, the ashes of former seaman Richard Arlin Walker — “our brother,” Lever wrote — were commended to the deep.
It’s true that our veterans haven’t always received the benefits and respect they deserve. But as evidenced by the ceremony and dignity afforded my dad — a one-time teenage sailor who was anxious to serve and took advantage of the opportunity to do so — our nation tries, more often than not, to do the right thing. And it doesn’t forget. 
I’m forever thankful.
— Richard Walker is editor of the North Kitsap Herald in Poulsbo. He was a quartermaster aboard the USS Manitowoc (LST 1180) from 1980-84.