THE HOME FRONT

COAST GUARD RESERVISTS, UNEXPECTEDLY NEEDED, PATROL NATION'S SHORES

ABOARD COAST GUARD VESSEL 41381, IN PUGET SOUND, Wash., Oct. 17 -- In
normal times, Jose Chavez is a letter carrier in Yakima, 140 miles
inland from here, over on the sunny side of the Cascade Mountains.

But rather than making his regular rounds delivering the mail, the
33-year-old Mr. Chavez is making the rounds of Elliott Bay, patrolling
the Seattle waterfront as the coxswain of a 41-foot Coast Guard
utility boat and, abruptly, an enlistee in the country's largest
domestic-security operation since World War II.

Mr. Chavez is a member of the Coast Guard Reserves, although he, like
nearly all 2,700 reserves called to duty in recent weeks, had never
been ordered into active service and never really expected to be. But
he was ordered to Seattle four days after the Sept. 11 terrorist
attacks, leaving his wife and three young sons in Yakima, and told he
would be needed here indefinitely, perhaps for as long as a year.

Even as Mr. Chavez and others participate in the first involuntary
call-up of the Coast Guard reserves since the Persian Gulf war, in
1991, and the largest call-up in its history, those in charge concede
that current patrols cannot really guard effectively against the
threat of terrorist attacks.

"I am not about to sit here today and remotely infer that we've got a
handle on this, that the maritime component of this national security
package is O.K.," the Guard's commandant, Admiral James M. Loy, told a
Senate hearing in Washington, last week. "It is not."

With a regular force of 35,000, one-seventh of its size during World
War II and its lowest staffing level since the mid-1960's, the Coast
Guard is stretched thin even in the most placid of times to patrol the
country's 95,000 miles of coastline and inland shores. Its crews
conduct search- and-rescue operations, enforce fishing limits, respond
to oil spills and other pollution incidents, and look out for vessels
carrying drugs and other contraband.

But all duties except those involving life-threatening emergencies
have now taken a distant back seat to monitoring and responding to
security threats, however rare they may be or difficult to discern.
Virtually all the reserves like Mr. Chavez have been thrown into that
work.

"Most folks in the reserves wouldn't expect to be recalled unless
there was a war," said Ensign Steve Youde, a Coast Guard spokesman in
Washington. "We've had a lot of people say that, 'Oh, I'd never have
to go anywhere unless there's a war.' Well, guess what? There is."

Though the instant call to duty has imposed tremendous disruptions,
just as it does for members of the Armed Forces' reserves, the Coast
Guard reservists here and elsewhere say they view their new work as a
patriotic duty.

"When I saw the World Trade towers burning that day, I knew right away
we were at war, and that I would get a call," said Mr. Chavez,
piloting the utility boat and casting an eye along the city piers, at
the giant cargo ships from Asia in the harbor and out toward the
green- and-white commuter ferries that crisscross Puget Sound.

"We all have a role to fill," he said. "Maybe for the Coast Guard,
it's not to the extent of the other services, like for soldiers who
have to go to Afghanistan. But we definitely have a part in all this."

Mr. Chavez and three other crew members look for anything out of the
ordinary and search vessels in the busy maritime world out on the
Sound, which stretches from Olympia, 60 miles south of here, north to
the Strait of Juan de Fuca.

Chief among the concerns right now is how to develop adequate
protections against the threat of sabotage or a suicide attack on
huge, potentially explosive installations like the natural gas tanks
along Boston Harbor, the petrochemical complexes of Houston or the
vast collection of oil tanks at the terminus of the Trans-Alaska
Pipeline in Valdez, Alaska.

Another problem is monitoring the shipping containers offloaded from
the giant seagoing vessels that transport 95 percent of all goods
coming into the United States; only a fraction of those containers now
get inspected.

The Senate panel before which Admiral Loy spoke, the transportation
subcommittee of the Commerce Committee, will examine possible
increases in the Coast Guard's $5 billion budget, which could be used
to expand the Guard's ranks, replace outmoded vessels and aircraft,
and buy equipment for screening and detection of terrorist threats.

For now, the Guard is making do, diverting staff from other duties,
bringing in reservists like Mr. Chavez, and even issuing a plea to
commercial captains, tugboat operators and recreational boaters to be
alert to any unusual activity, from the high seas to the most inland
ports.

"There are lot more eyes and ears out there right now than just the
Coasties," said Capt. Mike Moore, the Guard's captain of the Port of
Puget Sound. "We're tapping into the normal network, telling people to
be on the lookout for abnormal behavior."

There have been no documented terrorist activities in the region in
recent weeks, but Captain Moore said that several incidents of
suspicious activity had been documented by security patrols in that
time, prompting further investigation. Regulations, he said,
prohibited him from giving details on the nature of those incidents.

Search-and-rescue operations and other safety programs have always
been a primary function of the Coast Guard; looking for terrorists has
not been. But now, in ports all around the country, the new emphasis
is summed up in one word: security.

"It's always been part of the mission, but it played a minor role,"
said Tim Monck, the commanding officer of the Manistee Coast Guard
Station, in the forested northern coast of Lake Michigan. "It's not
been a standard function of the crews, but it is now."

The focus on security has cut down on patrols to intercept drug
smugglers, which are down to about 25 percent of normal levels,
Admiral Loy testified. Enforcement of the 200-mile fishing limit and
other fisheries statutes is "close to zero," he conceded.

For Mr. Chavez and virtually all the reservists called up in recent
weeks, all duties pertain to guarding, in some fashion, against
threats of malicious behavior. On patrol here today, he and the three
other members of the crew -- all but one of them reservists -- said they
had seen little out of the ordinary in their surveys of the waterborne
world that begins just a few feet from the skyscrapers of downtown
Seattle.

Most, though not all, of the country's 7,868 Coast Guard reservists
were on active duty at some point in their lives; Mr. Chavez, for
instance, was a full-time coast guardsman from 1990 to 1996, assigned
first to a stretch of the Missouri River near Omaha, then to Seattle.

Like Armed Forces reserves, they generally have to devote a weekend a
month and up to two weeks to training, and can be called up at any
time. Sometimes the assignments are voluntary ones -- these, however,
are not.

Under current emergency rotations, the reservists work one 24-hour
shift; then spend a day in which they must be able to return to duty
within an hour of receiving a call or a page; then get one day off. On
that day off, Mr. Chavez tries to drive two and a half hours to Yakima
and see his wife, Adelicia, and their three sons for several hours
before returning to Seattle, to start the next 24-hour shift.

His boys -- Jesse, 13, Orlando, 10, and Nicholas, 6 -- are full of
questions. "Their biggest concern is if I ever could get deployed
overseas and I say, 'as of now, no, don't worry about it,' " said Mr.
Chavez. "The oldest one tries to play it cool anyway, the youngest one
asks questions in such a way where I can reassure him that
everything's fine, everything's going to be just fine."