Military News - Military Times

Sailor delivers aid to storm-ravaged hometown

SAN DIEGO — The supplies of water and rice delivered to residents of the typhoon-ravaged Philippines weren’t just a humanitarian gesture but a personal delivery of hope for one sailor aboard the aircraft carrier Ronald Reagan.

Some of the supplies offloaded by Storekeeper Seaman Grace Geroche, 22, went to help members of her own family, whose island home was damaged by storm waters from Typhoon Fengshen.

“I never thought when I joined the Navy, I would be helping out my family in this calamity,” Geroche, who enlisted one year ago, said Monday by phone from the ship off the coast of Iloilo, a city in the central Philippines hit hard by the storm that struck May 21-22.

Days before the Ronald Reagan reached the region, Geroche was enjoying liberty in Hong Kong with the rest of the Reagan Carrier Strike Group, which had left San Diego in May for a scheduled deployment. But that weekend, her sister sent her an urgent e-mail about the typhoon. Rising seas and rains threatened the family’s house, where Geroche’s mother, brother, sister and aunt live.

“It was flooding out our house,” she recalled, and storm waters in her mother’s home reached up to her neck. “She said, send out the helicopters and pick us up.

“I tried to call her using my phone card,” she said. “I was really worried.”

The family had spent the night sleeping amid the rafters under the roof, the only dry place in the house until the muddy waters subsided.

The storm forced the Reagan and its strike group to pull anchor and shorten the Hong Kong liberty so it could avoid or ride out the storm at sea. “We didn’t know that we were going to go over there [to] help out,” Geroche said. But two days later, President Bush ordered the strike group to the Philippines to assist with humanitarian aid.

“I was really happy, and sad, because I know that I might have a chance to check on them and see their situation,” she said.

Sure enough, Geroche rode in a Navy C-2 Greyhound carrier onboard delivery airplane June 27 to the Iloilo Airport, where her mother, Edna Geroche, and relatives, including her aunt who wore a USS Ronald Reagan T-shirt, met her on the tarmac.

“My mom said I’m the only lifeline they have,” Geroche said.

The sailor visited the family’s one-story home, which was still standing but was caked in mud. Most of their clothing, personal belongings and furnishings were damaged or destroyed in the storm.

The immediate need, she said, was clean water. “It’ll help keep them away from any diseases and keep them away from any sicknesses,” Geroche said.

Since June 26, sailors aboard Reagan helped load COD aircraft and the strike group’s helicopters with humanitarian supplies for delivery ashore.

“I never thought that [a box] I was lifting would be one of the boxes that my mother would be getting,” she said.

The Reagan strike group, with its 16 helicopters and COD aircraft, had hauled more than 30,000 bottles of water and 10,000 pounds of rice in “hundreds” of flights to Iloilo, where Navy and Philippine military forces and nongovernmental groups were helping distribute the supplies. Some of the ship’s engineers also went ashore to help repair generators at two local hospitals affected by the storm.

“We gave everything we could give onboard, which frankly is significant,” said Rear Adm. Phil Wisecup, the strike group commander.

Geroche is just one of more than 400 members aboard the Reagan who hail from the Philippines, and a few of them have family in the affected areas. One sailor aboard the guided-missile destroyer Howard, Storekeeper 1st Class Raymond Paguia, got to visit his wife, who lives in Iloilo.

“It’s a big deal for them,” Wisecup said. Sailors “are very proud of the fact that they’re here helping some of their families.”

The strike group’s COD airplanes and helicopters flew about 30 supply missions a day to Iloilo, the hub of the humanitarian effort led by the Philippines’ government and supported by the U.S. Agency for International Development and nongovernmental agencies. The strike group left the area Thursday.

“We have a long friendship with the Filipino government, and this was an opportunity to help our friends when they really needed it,” Wisecup said. “This has been a very, very rewarding mission.”