IN OUR OPINION ■ Page 4 The D-Day invasion and why it’s relevant today.
SPOUSE TO SPOUSE ■ Page 5 Maintaining your identity: These tips can help you.
SPOTLIGHT ■ Page 6 Alisha Weiss’s successful screen-printing business has its roots in soccer
HONORS ■ Page 8 Meet Naval Hospital Bremerton’s Sailors of the Year
Kitsap
MilitaryTimes MilitaryTimes The Voice for Kitsap County’s Active-Duty
June 2016
Personnel, Veterans and their Families
TTF training saves lives BY TERRYL ASLA tasla@soundpublishing.com
The following is based on May 9 interviews with instructors at Triton Training facility, Navy Base Kitsap — Bangor. BANGOR –– On 8 Jan. 2005, the fast-attack submarine USS San Francisco rammed into an undersea mountain — 6,900 tons of submarine slammed to an abrupt stop. The bow and the front ballast tanks were ruptured. Almost threequarters of the 137-member crew were injured; one later died. “It’s a miracle it didn’t sink,” said one Triton Training Facility instructor who saw the boat later. “The fact that we didn’t lose the boat and all aboard her is a credit to her crew and the training they got here at Trident Training Facility.” “Our job here is to put them in impossible situations,” said another instructor. “Situations with fire and flooding and equipment failures that are way beyond anything they may ever actually experience at sea.” Until it does happen, as the crew of the USS San Francisco learned. It’s all about procedures You have to be qualified for anything you do in the U.S. Navy, TTF instructors will tell you. That means having the proper procedures so ingrained in you that, in an emergency, you can act without thinking about it first. There’s a procedure for everything and you stick to the procedure, instructors like to say, because those procedures are based on hard-earned experiences. Bad experiences.
A WWII Army surgeon recalls
D-Day and the hanging
BY CAPT. ROBERT L. KASHA, M.D. (RETIRED)
Training is credited with helping the crew of the USS San Francisco survive after the sub crashed into an undersea mountain at flank speed in 2005. U.S. Navy photo For example, on 1 March 2012, the Los Angeles-class attack submarine, USS Miami (SSN 755), entered the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in Kittery, Maine for a scheduled 20-month engineered overhaul and system upgrades. On 23 May 2012, a civilian employee accidentally started a fire in the forward spaces aboard the boat. By the time the fire was located, it was far advanced and there were complications. Lots of complications. “The hatches were full of crap,” recalls one TTF instructor, and by the time firefighters finally fought their way to the fire, they couldn’t stay long because their air bottles
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were only good for 30 minutes. Ultimately, the fire did $450 million damage, destroying the crew’s living quarters, command and control spaces, and the torpedo room. The damage was so extensive that the Miami had to be decommissioned and scrapped. Any fire aboard a submarine is serious. But most are minor like a dryer fire, according to TTF instructors. After the Miami incident, the Navy recognized that the greatest fire risk comes when the boat is in drydock. As a result, now there is a fire training procedure for all shipyard employees; all shore-side
“Our job here is to put them in impossible situations”
See TRAINING, Page 3
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The following is excerpted from “Memoirs of a World War II Army Surgeon” by the late Robert L. Kasha, M.D.
I
was a healer who never fired a shot in anger. But, by a twist of fate, those same skills [led me to the beaches of Normandy] and ultimately trapped me in a situation where I had to help hang an American soldier. D-Day None of us knew when D-Day would be. So it came as a surprise one morning when a remarkable noise woke me up. I came out of my tent and looked around for the source of the sound. It was coming from up in the air, but it was so loud I didn’t
realize what it was until I looked up. What appeared to be thousands and thousands of planes were flying overhead on their way to France … It was just amazing to see how many planes we had — planes twelve at a time, twenty at a time. It was absolutely amazing to see them flying overhead … I had never seen anything like it. I was thrilled and my adrenaline was pumping like mad. Several days later, Dr. Kasha’s hospital group crossed to France. In France, it was cloudy … [and] we didn’t have any equipment. So, we all slept on the ground that night. I didn’t take off my clothes, but I did remove my shoes because I was tired of wearing them ... All of a sudden I felt rain on my face. The first thing I did was to turn my boots upside-down so it wouldn’t rain in them. It rained, and rained, and rained, and we were in mud all the time. The mud just stuck to you and clung like a leech. If you stepped in some deep mud, you’d have trouble getting your feet out of it because it was so thick and gooey. Finally, our pup tents arrived and See HANGING, Page 2