Westerly native inducted into Coast Guard Academy Hall of Heroes

Capt. Ernst Cummings, known to everyone as “Ernie,” sat in a comfortable chair in his living room in Wakefield, surrounded by models of U.S. Coast Guard vessels and other maritime memorabilia. Born in Westerly, he spent his childhood summers at Watch Hill.

Cummings has the relaxed demeanor of a man who has lived a rewarding life, but it has also been an exciting, and at times, even dangerous life.

Cummings was inducted into the Coast Guard Academy Hall of Heroes for his service in Vietnam. From January to October 1966, the Point Grace, a Coast Guard cutter under Cummings’s command, detected 2,482 junks, boarded or inspected 1,138 junks, and captured one sampan with three Viet Cong aboard.

Cummings described the Point Grace as a heavily armed, 82-foot boat that was small enough to travel up the rivers looking for enemy supply vessels. He and his crew of 13 patrolled the rivers 24 hours a day.

“This one night, with our radar on the ship, we spotted some activity trying to cross the Soai Rap river, which leads from the South China sea up to Saigon,” he recalled. “We intercepted them, tried to get them to stop, they did not, we fired some warning shots across their bow, and luckily they stopped so we didn’t have to fire into them. We captured the boat, the supplies and the people on the boat.”

The sampan was only 18 feet long, but it carried several men, and a full load of weapons and ammunition.

“We had a Vietnamese naval officer on board, because none of us spoke Vietnamese very well, and we interrogated the people we captured and gleaned some very good intelligence out of them,” he said.

Peter Busick, who graduated from the Coast Guard Academy with Cummings in 1963, said, “I was with him the night they intercepted the sampan crossing the Soai Rap river. I remember that kind of vividly. That was a really exciting event. There were four people on the sampan and they were shooting at us. That kind of gets your attention.”

Patrolling the rivers was dangerous work. Most of the day traffic was legitimate — people going about their business. But at night, it was different. All regular traffic ceased, and the rivers became “free fire” zones. Anyone found in the area was considered hostile, and could be fired on. Cummings’s job was to make sure that any vessel apprehended at night was not carrying supplies for the enemy.

“We’d bring them alongside, tie them up alongside our boat and then a boarding team would go on board while we had people watching to make sure that everything was going correctly and that they weren’t going to bring some weapons or anything out,” he says.

The Point Grace also transported Navy Seals and Marines.

“We had a lot of small arms, then we had five 50-calibers and an 81-millimeter mortar – quite a lot of firepower for a little 82-foot boat. The Marines loved them,” he said, laughing.

Cummings had several Coast Guard assignments when he returned to the United States, but in 1969, he volunteered to return to Vietnam as the executive officer of the buoy tender Blackhaw. When he came home for good, his assignments ranged from commanding the Coast Guard base in San Francisco to commanding a cutter out of New Bedford, where he met and married his wife, Mary.

The assignment he remembers most fondly, however, is his command of the tall ship Eagle. He commanded the barque for five years, and in 1988, sailed it to Australia for the bicentennial celebrations there.

Other assignments that followed included three years in Kodiak, Alaska, as commanding officer of the Coast Guard Support Center, and his last active duty as director of security for President Bill Clinton’s inauguration in Washington, D.C..

Cummings has been awarded several medals, including the Bronze Star, the Meritorious Service Medal and the Legion of Merit.

Steve Martin nominated Cummings for the Hall of Heroes. The two sailed together at the Coast Guard Academy in 1967 when Cummings was chief of the Waterfront Section in charge of the academy’s small boats, but the two men really got to know each other when Martin served as a reserve officer on the Eagle.

“He was a very confident, not cocky, but a confident man, everybody looked up to him and respected him,” Martin said. “He’s a laid-back guy. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him angry. I’ve never seen him nervous. He just kind of has control of things, and that’s his personality.”

Busick said, “You want to make him happy — put him at sea, running a boat around, directing people. He was very, very good at being the captain. That role fits him to a tee. He just was wonderful at it, and you talk to anybody who has served in his command, and they all love him. I’ve never heard a bad report.”

Nowadays, Cummings’s nautical adventures are confined to a 13-foot Boston Whaler that he and Mary use to explore the salt ponds near their summer house in Green Hill. They spend much of their time visiting their eight children and 19 grandchildren, most of whom live in the Westerly area.

The Hall of Heroes was established at the academy in April 2005, when the class of 1959 transformed part of a first floor corridor into a series of signs and plaques honoring alumni. The annual tradition of honoring the achievements and sacrifices of alumni and former cadets began in 2009.

Cummings said he is particularly pleased to receive the Hall of Heroes honor, because it is the cadets at the academy who choose the inductees — just 12 each year.

“The Corps of Cadets votes on them, which ones will be inducted that year,” he said. “They read the recommendation and probably the bios, too. Then, the corps votes on them, which makes it especially neat for me, because it’s the Corps of Cadets. It’s not a bunch of fellow officers. It’s these young men and women of the academy that are voting on it.”

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