Searching military records at Ancestry.com, rather than port arrivals, I found a man with your father's name who enlisted as a private in the U.S. Army Air Corps on Oct 24, 1942, at Patterson Field in Fairfield, Ohio. He was born in 1942 and his residence was Kings County (i.e., Brooklyn), New York. Even if this is your father's record, however, it sheds no light on why he held a merchant mariner identification card.
Also in Ancestry.com I found a record for what is probably the same man at age 18, in the 1940 U.S. Census. At the time he was living with his parents, Abraham (age 43) and Bertha (age 40), and two younger brothers, Howard (age 15) and Damil (age 7) in an apartment at 2323 Mermaid Avenue, Brooklyn. (Mermaid Avenue is on Coney Island, a few blocks from the Atlantic Ocean shore.) His father was a shoemaker, with a 1939 total income of $475 (!). At the time of the census your father was apparently seeking employment: his occupation was listed as "New Worker." Again, this does not explain his merchant mariner card.
You may wish to make the same searches I made and see whether any of the men I found among the port arrivals in fact was your father, or to replicate any of the other information I found. You can obtain a monthly subscription to Ancestry.com for about $23. In addition, Ancestry.com currently offers a 14-day free trial subscription through which you can make unlimited searches and then cancel short of 14 days, without any expense to you. Subscription details are available at the Ancestry.com homepage.
Taking an entirely different approach, you may be able to obtain your father's merchant marine service record via the U.S. Coast Guard, which is responsible for issuing documents and licenses to U.S. merchant mariners. See this page from the website I manage for information on contacting the Coast Guard: http://armed-guard.com/searchmil.html. In particular see section A.2. Records of Individuals - Merchant Marine. You will have to contact the Coast Guard's National Maritime Center in West Virginia, providing as much identifying information as possible. Contact information is available on the above-noted page. If you can obtain his record it may indicate the ships in which he sailed, applicable dates, the shipboard positions for which he was qualified and possibly other information. Again this may not fully answer the question of why he would have a merchant marine identification card but it should at least confirm that he had one, plus information related to his merchant marine employment.
From your initial message I cannot tell for sure whether you actually have his merchant marine identification card in your possession or not. You say he had a card "from about 1941, 1942 or 1943" so perhaps you don't actually have it in hand. If so that's unfortunate, since the card would have an identifying serial number, beginning with the letter Z, that would help the Coast Guard identify him. But perhaps providing his full name, date of birth, Social Security number and other information noted on the above web page will be sufficient as identifying information.
I will suggest one possible explanation that may address why he had a merchant marine identification card but eventually ended up in the Army Air Corps. Early in World War II the losses of ships and crewmen among the merchant marine were so severe that some merchant mariners decided not to continue sailing. Instead they allowed themselves to be drafted into the military, or chose to enlist, in the expectation that service in the uniformed military would actually be somewhat safer than continuing in the merchant marine. (Whether this proved to be true varied from man to man, of course.) We know from the 1940 census that your father was unemployed but was seeking work, so presumably he was not in the merchant marine earlier than 1940, when he was 18 years old. It is possible that sometime between the 1940 census and his eventual enlistment in October 1942 when he was 20 years old (assuming the record I found was his), he may have chosen to join the merchant marine. At a later date, whether for the above reason or for any of a number of other reasons, he may have decided to leave the merchant marine and enlist in the Army Air Corps.
In fact you may never know the exact reason why he had a merchant marine identification card but later served in the Army Air Corps. You may, however, find bits and pieces of information that will suggest what was going on in his life between 1940 and 1942, which may hint at whatever choices he made.
Good luck.
Ron Carlson, Webmaster
Armed Guard / Merchant Marine website
www.armed-guard.com
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