[from the stabenow.com vaults, 2007] April 13 Today’s photo is of another cutter rendering honors to Munro. This is a long-standing, time-honored maritime tradition between warships. The XO explained the process to me. First the officer of the deck tells all stations to man the rail on the passing side. We were passing port side…
[from the stabenow.com vaults, 2007] May 11 Things I won’t forget The schizophrenic nature of an equatorial sunrise. Sometimes it’s a bare, self-effacing minimum of pink pastels, peeping over the edge of the world with a diffident look, as if to say, “Oh, don’t mind me, I’ll just come up over here and you go…
[from the stabenow.com vaults, 2007] May 10 I just got my mess bill from FS1 Kelly Napier. The total comes to $290.25 for March, April, & May. “Was it worth it?” she wants to know. “Not exactly cruise ship quality?” Kelly breaks my mess bill down this way. “Breakfast is $1.65. Lunch & Supper are…
[from the stabenow.com vaults, 2007] May 8 It’s called, in Coastie speak, a COMREL, short for community relations. Forty-five Munro crew members leave the ship at ten a.m. and present ourselves at a local orphanage for duty. We enter through a locked gate and are led to a courtyard occupying the center of a group…
[from the stabenow.com vaults, 2007] May 7 Relieving the Watch LTJG Josh Dipietro “Why’s this engine overloaded? What the hell you been doing all watch?” “Overload, what the hell are you talking about, look at the rack reading, look at the scav air. We are acting perfectly within published parameters, the only thing wrong here…
[from the stabenow.com vaults, 2007] May 6 Lookout SN Dennis R Gordon III 1120. I have been on watch for five minutes. It feels like three hours. The ocean rocks the 378 like a cradle. Water against the hull, wind whistling through the antenna, the occasional unrecognizable clank or thud. It is dark. The moon…
[from the stabenow.com vaults, 2007] May 5 There were initially sixteen students in what I called my Underway Writers Workshop. I confidently expected that number to drop by half after the first class, especially since it wasn’t for credit and class time was at the mercy of ops and as such, well, fluid. They stuck…
[from the stabenow.com vaults, 2007] May 2 Pam Dipietro is LTJG Josh Dipietro’s mom. Back in Scotia, New York, Pam teaches a SAIL class. “S.A.I.L. stands for Students Active In Learning,” she says. “It’s a program that our middle school set up to try and help the at risk students before they reach high school…
[from the stabenow.com vaults, 2007] May 1 On this patrol, it got so I knew who worked in Combat because I didn’t know who they were. I don’t have clearance for CIC, so I couldn’t go down there and watch them work and get to know them. It was really bothering me that they were…
[from the stabenow.com vaults, 2007] April 30 The preflight brief consists mostly of what to do A) to stave off disaster, and B) if disaster strikes. Put on fire retardant jumpsuit, PFD, Kevlar vest, helmet and steel-toed boots, the collective weight of which if we do go into the drink ought to take me right…