Stephen Petersen grew up on Long Island. His father was a Danish sailor, so he grew up on the water. The Navy seemed like a foregone conclusion until Petersen read a book on the Coast Guard. He enlisted in 1960, when he was 18 years old. He was trained as an engineman, a boatswain’s mate, and a deep-sea diver. He served on cutters, at rescue stations, at a LORAN station on a remote island in the Philippines, on a polar icebreaker, and on buoy tenders in Alaska and Miami before being sent to Vietnam to an ELD to oversee explosives being handled on ships. “We handled anything from .45 ammunition all the way up to 16,000-pound bombs,” he recalls. Chief Petersen was on of the last Coast Guardsmen in Vietnam.