Clearwater Coast Guard Volunteer Mentioned in National Address

Donald Hoge was on duty at the U.S. Coast Guard Air Station Clearwater the morning after a 7.0-magnitude earthquake left Haiti devastated and desperate.

Hoge, a New Port Richey resident and Coast Guard auxiliary leader, was volunteering for his weekly stint at the station’s operations center on Jan. 13, 2010, as the Coast Guard was launching air rescue and relief operations from the base to Haiti, where as many as 300,000 were killed by the quake.

It was a chance for Hoge, 63, who served as a Navy aviator for 24 years, to draw from a deep well of experience in international crises situations to help.

What followed was a 16-hour day for Hoge as he aided the Coast Guard's efforts to coordinate flights from Clearwater to a small Haitian airfield. For the next 10 days, he returned to the base, where aircraft, trucks, people and supplies arrived from throughout the country, and helped again for 12-16 hours daily.

“I was there generally as long as I could stay awake,” said Hoge. “…They were flying 24 hours a day, so we were trying to coordinate 24 hours a day.”

Hoge’s support of the Coast Guard’s rescue services after the Haiti quake, and his services as a volunteer auxiliary coordinator for the Florida Gulf region, earned him recognition from the Coast Guard’s top brass recently.

Hoge, a member of the Dunedin auxiliary flotilla for more than six years, was the only auxiliary member out of more than 30,000 nationwide to be mentioned by Coast Guard Commandant Admiral Robert J. Papp in his State of the Coast Guard address in Washington, D.C. Feb. 10.

“The auxiliary is a bunch of well-meaning, good people trying to do good things to assist the Coast Guard," Hoge said. "And that’s what I was doing."

Ask him if it was an honor, and he’ll say, “Oh, absolutely. It was an honor to be invited and be pointed out in front of a national audience."

Read his copy of an article about the recognition, basically a rewritten press release, and you’ll see he’s crossed out a  passage that explains the honor was given to him for his "unselfish devotion to duty and exemplifying the Coast Guard motto, Semper Paratus, which means 'Always Prepared'" and replaced it with "exemplary support for the Coast Guard and Coast Guard Auxiliary."

“I didn’t think it really applied,” he says. “I do it because I can help, and I get satisfaction out of doing that. I don’t need awards or newspaper articles. I know that I have done something that is beneficial. And that’s the pay we get.”

Hoge logged 3,100 hours with the auxiliary last year. He serves as auxiliary coordinator for Sector St. Petersburg, which encompasses the Gulf from Tallahassee to Naples.

Hoge, born in Washington, D.C., and raised in Danville, Ind., started in the U.S. Navy in 1969 and served in Vietnam, where he worked on turning over naval operations to the Vietnamese Navy in the Cam Rahn Bay and stopping infiltration into Central Vietnam from the North. After undergoing U.S. Navy flight training, Hoge returned to Vietnam, where he conducted search and rescue missions from aircraft carriers.

All told, he spent 24 years as a Navy aviator. He was stationed in the Philippines, Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Japan, Kenya, Somalia, Kuwait. He served on NATO staff in Denmark.

Retiring  after he was stationed at MacDill Air Force Base in 1993, Hoge spent about a decade doing things like working on his family’s 100-acre farm in Indiana and helping his wife, Jerrie, with her antique business.

A friend in The ToyMakers, which makes wooden toys for children in hospitals, recruited Hoge into the auxiliary in 2005. He served as vice commander and then commander of Dunedin Flotilla 11-10, which operates out of the Dunedin Marina, in 2009.

When the earthquake struck Haiti, masses of rescuers began arriving in an attempt to provide relief. The problem was trying to figure out how to get people and supplies, some so large that a forklift was necessary to remove them, to Haiti’s main airfield without creating a traffic jam. Hoge not only had experience with facing such a challenge (he did so in the Gulf of Iraq and in Kenya during the Somalia conflict of the 1990s) he had the benefit of being familiar with the base.

“I know the pilots. I know the operation," he said. "And that’s why I could be of some benefit. I didn’t just walk in there on that day.”

In the midst of all this, he got a phone call from the Coast Guard liasion at the U.S. embassy in Haiti.

“He said he had a bunch of embassy employees and kids he was responsible for because I guess they had no other place to go," he said. "He called me and said, 'I need a place to sleep tonight, and can you get me some ground mats,'”  sleeping bags, tents and the like.

“It was several months later that I finally met that guy that called,” Hoge said. “And he was really appreciative, ‘We’d have been sleeping in the dirt that night,' he said."