A tale of two sailors
Posted by Mark Faram on June 5th, 2008 filed in USS Kitty Hawk
Lt. Kevin Tilley, an aviation maintenance officer with Strike Fighter Squadron 192, has made the last cruise on three aircraft carriers: the Coral Sea, America and now the Kitty Hawk. If that is any omen of what is to come for Kitty Hawk after decommissioning, it’s not a good one.
Coral Sea — known to her crews as the “ageless warrior” — was scrapped for her metal in Baltimore in the 1990s, while America was sunk in highly secret weapons tests in 6,000 feet of water in the Atlantic Ocean, much to the chagrin of her former crewmembers.
What this precedent could mean for the future of Kitty Hawk once her days as an active carrier are over only time will tell — but sailors are superstitious types, and if Tilley’s secret is known, I’m sure a betting pool would be started in a hurry on how quickly Kitty Hawk might become a target in the future.
But Tilley’s not waiting around to find out, either — he’ll leave Carrier Airwing Five in the next month.
“This will be it for me and ships,” he said. “I will go to shore duty after this and then into retirement myself — not so long after the ship.”
On the other hand, Lt. Charles Kimball has another tie to the Kitty Hawk. As a first class interior communications electrician, he helped take the Kitty Hawk to Japan in 1998, and now as a lieutenant, he will help take her home, though he won’t stick around to see her decommissioned. Instead, by September he’ll be back in Japan as a member of the crew of the guided missile cruiser Cowpens.
Kimball is what sailors call an ‘old hand’ in the Forward-Deployed Naval forces. As a young sailor, he cut his teeth on the Midway, now a museum ship in San Diego. As a senior petty officer, he was on the Kitty Hawk heading back to Japan when Kitty Hawk relieved Independence.
“It’s a tough thing for a stateside carrier when it comes into FDNF. There’s a different pace to deployments and different way of doing things,” he said. “It takes time for the ship as a whole to adjust — and it will be the same for George Washington as it takes its place over there.”
Like the Independence sailors who cross decked to Kitty Hawk, the Kitty sailors who find themselves on GW will have a rough time until the that ship comes together as a team.
That’s because stateside carriers are used to doing things one way and FDNF sailors are used to a totally different pace of operations.
“You operate all the time and soon enough, they’ll come together just like we did,” he said. “We became the ‘Hawk 5 Team’ and it was something we were very proud of. Sure there were growing pains when we were getting used to being together, but once it clicked, it was an awesome relationship.”
Maybe all that good karma bodes well for Kitty Hawk’s retirement … time will tell.
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