As SS Coastal Guide, the ship entered civilian service under the United Fruit Company and later the Polaris Steamship Company. In June 1948, the Army acquired her and rechristened her USAT Sgt. George Peterson, putting her to work with the Army Transportation Service. Two years later, the Navy reclaimed her, and as USNS Sgt. George Peterson (T-AK-248), she commenced eight years of steady, unglamorous duty hauling cargo through the Gulf of Mexico, the Caribbean, and along the southeastern seaboard under the Military Sea Transportation Service. Her only break from that routine came in the summer of 1955, when she carried supplies north to Arctic stations. By early 1959, the Navy had no further use for her. She was towed to Mobile, Alabama, and mothballed with the National Defense Reserve Fleet, where she sat for over a decade.

In December 1971, a man named John E. Marsh bought the retired cargo ship for $41,000, with one condition: she could not be used for transportation. Marsh converted her into a private yacht and renamed her Marsha Lynn, a transformation that must have been something to see, a military freighter reimagined for leisure. The yacht life did not last. In 1979, she was sold again, this time to TransAlaska Fisheries Corporation, a subsidiary of The 13th Regional Corporation. They renamed her Al-Ind-Esk-A Sea and converted her once more, this time into a fish factory ship, a floating processing plant designed to catch and package seafood at sea. It was her fourth name and her third career, and it would be her last.

On October 20, 1982, while undergoing repairs in Port Gardner at Everett, Washington, the Al-Ind-Esk-A Sea caught fire. What happened next unfolded slowly and inevitably. The fire burned through that day and into the next, the kind of stubborn shipboard blaze that firefighters struggle to contain because the fuel is the vessel itself: paint, insulation, oil-soaked timbers, decades of accumulated flammable material in compartments that act like ovens. At 10:14 on the morning of October 22, after burning for two full days, the ship rolled over and sank in the shallow waters of Port Gardner. Her owners collected a $14 million insurance claim. The wreck settled into the harbor mud, and there it remains, a steel skeleton in the waters off Everett.

The site of the sinking, at approximately 47.98 degrees north and 122.25 degrees west, lies in Port Gardner Bay, the sheltered inlet where the Snohomish River meets Puget Sound. From the air, Everett's waterfront is dominated by the Naval Station on its western edge, but the eastern harbor where the Peterson went down is commercial and industrial, a working waterfront of piers and boatyards. The wreck is one of those quiet maritime artifacts that most people drive past without knowing it exists, the final resting place of a ship that was born too late for World War II and reinvented herself three times before the sea finally claimed her. Her story is small but telling, a footnote that captures something essential about the afterlife of military vessels: the Navy builds them, the market repurposes them, and the water eventually takes them back.