For more than four decades, the enlisted men and women who have served at Coast Guard Station Barnegat Light have all called the Jersey Shore home at least once before, less than 90 miles away in Cape May at the only training center for recruits. But their journeys began even before that with a phone call or face-to-face meeting with a recruiter.

“I always say I joined by accident because I just kept doing the next step,” said Grant Hill, a recruiter based out of the Atlantic City Recruiting…