Corpus Christi Caller Times Caller.com - 'Behind-the-scenes' staff keeps Inchon afloat

   ABOARD THE USS INCHON - Standing at the rear of this ship, gazing out onto royal blue waters made bright by sunlight, Chief Petty Officer Mike Brandt dreams of a time when he could go swimming on a hot day.
   A decade ago, on some of the seven ships on which he has deployed eight times, two men would stand shark watch while the crew dove in.
   "The USS Goldsborough or Waddell, both guided missile destroyers, were my ships, but my ships are gone now," Brandt said, looking down at the tufts of bubbles churned up by the ship's propeller.
   "I would love to do that now," Brandt said. "I would go and dive off the bridge and hope the captain wouldn't mind."
   These days, most sailors say that time has slowed until they can see family and friends waiting for them at the pier on Wednesday morning, when the USS Inchon returns home after its relief stint in Kosovo. On the ship,sailors in the engine room, on the midwatch and in the Inchon's other nooks and crannies are counting the days.
   Now, four days feels more like four years.
   "I would give anything to be sitting in my own living room right now fighting my youngest for the remote control," Brandt said. "My troops are counting the days. So many more hours, so many more drills, so many more wake-ups until we're home again."
   And a good cool swim would break up the monotony brought on by staring out onto water that stretches beyond the horizon without sight of land, sailors said.
   "I think about swimming every day," said Airman Heather Wreston, her cheeks red from the heat while she leans against the lifeline that holds the crew back from the side of the ship. "It's funny, but I'm surrounded by water and can't take a swim."
   The waters in the Gulf of Mexico grow bright during the middle of the day. As night falls, the waters grow steadily to the hue of navy before going black. And the colors are different everywhere. The Persian Gulf's waters are bluish purple, while off Fort Lauderdale the color purple is more prevalent, Moyes said.
   But regardless of the color, the waters always are inviting on a hot day.
   "But they're not as cool as you think they would be," said Petty Officer 1st Class Gene Ryan. "But I'd still dive off the flight deck if I could."
   And after a long day, swimming is a fantasy for some.
   "I think about it every day," said Petty Officer 3rd Class Clenzo Kitchen. "If I could swim I would. I might even get home faster that way."
   In the engine room
   Nineteen-year-old Anthony Ray told his Navy recruiter that he likes to work on cars.
   After getting information about ships, and where his interests and skills would fit in, a year ago he decided to become a machinist's mate and work in the engine room.
   Now, he works with a system that churns out 23,000 horsepower - as much as 67 1999 Corvettes - that drives the 19,600 tons of the Inchon at up to 23 knots, or about 26 mph.
   Ray and more than 100 sailors work in or around the engine room, the lowest space on this ship where people work. Nine decks below where the captain conns the ship, Ray works in a maze of red, white and yellow pipes which weave their way into hidden places well below the waterline.
   Nestled between pipes holding back 600 pounds per square inch of steam, Ray ducks to make his way across slippery floors that emanate the smell of oil seared by the heat.
   On his deck, there is none of the glamour of flight that accompanies the helicopter pilots who flew to Albania to bring aid to Kosovar refugees.
   "It used to bother me that we didn't get much credit," Ray said, leaning close to yell through the ear pieces that muffle the roar of the engines. "But it doesn't anymore because everyone knows that we're the ones who keep this thing running."
   When the ship pulls into Naval Station Ingleside, those who work the engines, air conditioning, sewage, water, hydraulics and electrical systems will be the last ones to leave the ship.
   "The hardest part of this job is trying to keep the people down there motivated," said Lt.j.g. Reyna Medina, the main engine division officer. "It's hard to keep people who work that hard with those hours happy about their job. It is the hardest place to work. It's hot, nasty, dirty and definitely not a vacation."
   A typical stint in the engine room is four hours on, eight hours off. When the heat index rises, the crews work three hours on with six hours off. On a recent day, the heat index reached 101 degrees. Not much body heat escapes their gear that covers them from neck to wrist to ankle.
   "Even going there where there's the heat, the people are working to make things better," said Petty Officer 3rd Class LaVor Williams. "The conditions are bad because of the heat, but the people around you pull you through."
   The Inchon is 30 years old, and its systems below deck have been painted over so many times that the colors seem to form a shell around pipes.
   "We have a lot more watches and a lot more responsibility," said fireman apprentice Adam Wilson. "There's a lot of people expecting a lot from us."
   Ray and Williams walk across grooved metal planks in steel-toed boots to one of the few areas that get relief from blasts of air that come from above deck. Most of the time, the enginemen carry clipboards to check monitors on the systems that produce fresh drinking and washing water.
   The sailors are required to have emergency breathing devices on them at all times, and fire-resistant head and hand covers. But Ray's not nervous about the dangers.
   "I suppose I could be worried, but we know what we're doing," he said. "We have to."
   Regular drills to ingrain natural reactions to emergencies leave nothing to chance.
   In the midst of the maze of pipes and systems that keep the ship moving and powered up, a control center is filled with dials that go from waist to above the head and show temperatures and pressures.
   Most importantly, there's air conditioning.
   "I get to work with the whole ship by working with the electrical systems," said Petty Officer 1st Class Neil LaPointe, who works in the control center. "Everything's got electrical power, so you get to know pretty much everybody. Some jobs you just stay in one shop."
   Working in the close, hot environment brings the men together, Medina said.
   "They're a very tight-knit group and they really watch out for each other," Medina said. "I've talked to wives that think when we leave shore, it's like a cruise. It's far from it. But my group works the hardest on this ship and you can't find too many people on here that will argue with that."
   The divers
   Chief Petty Officer Jimmy Johnson likes being a guinea pig for the Navy, even though he knows what his shipmates say about him.
   "They think I'm nuts, as in really, really crazy," Johnson said, moving his finger in small circles near his temple. "I let the Navy use me as a guinea pig."
   They call Johnson and others like him Sat Rats because his job as a saturation diver helps the Navy learn how other divers can be kept safe and healthy while diving.
   He has stuck tubes down his nose, has ridden a bike underwater and has been submerged into 51-degree water after swallowing a pill to prevent urination, to learn the effect of hypothermia.
   And he loves it.
   He frequently jokes about himself. But in all seriousness, his expertise in depths of 1,000 feet have come in handy in seas surrounding the United States.
   Divers like Johnson start out as basic scuba divers who work on submarines . Second class divers do ship husbandry, or repairs outside of the ship.
   "You ask anyone who does this and they'll tell you they love second class's work," Johnson said. "You go down there and remove and replace a 25,000-pound propeller and it makes your day."
   For jobs like that, they use the ship's key, a 10-foot tall wrench that's tucked away against the hangar deck's bulkhead.
   "Every ship has a key," Johnson said. "And we go down there and put it up to the nut that holds the shaft and holds the propeller and a big crane lifts it to unscrew it."
   The first class diver supervises dives. That was where Johnson's fun began.
   "Most people don't do this because they're not nuts enough," he said. "We can spend 30 days at 1,000 feet. It's just completely dark.
   "The sea life down there has really big eyes to adjust to the lack of light. We can do anything down there that you can do on the surface - if it was cold and you wore gloves."
   But the job isn't without its hazards. On land, the body has 79 percent nitrogen and 21 percent oxygen. When a diver goes under, the body's tissues absorb the nitrogen, Johnson said. Coming back up to the surface, divers have to go steadily, moving no faster than the speed of bubbles to avoid nausea and cramping.
   "The most extreme would be artereal gas embulism, when a bubble goes to the brain," Johnson said. "You could die."
   To help divers with sickness, they are placed in a decompression chamber which simulates the pressure of the water's depths. The body then gets the chance to recover. When they are brought up again, the bubble has dissipated.
   A decompression chamber is on the Inchon, and it was used during the exercises in the Persian Gulf before the Inchon went to the Adriatic Sea to participate in Operation Shining Hope.
   Sometimes, Johnson hasn't been involved in the technical work and has instead gotten involved in looking for lost articles at sea.
   After the crash of the Titan II Missile, which was intended to bring a satellite into space, he helped pick it up piece by billion-dollar piece from the bottom of the ocean.
   And Johnson helped recover the bodies from TWA Flight 800 that crashed a couple of years ago. He can relate to what the dive crews went through recently trying to find the body of John F. Kennedy, Jr.
   "You try not to think about who you're looking for," Johnson said, standing in his office that is tucked into a portion of the hangar deck. "We crack jokes trying to do everything we can to detach ourselves from what we're doing."
   And the work isn't what many divers like to do.
   "It's a somber time for the divers," said Senior Chief Petty Officer Kurt Nelson. "Pulling open people's wallets to check for identification and seeing their family photos isn't any fun."

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