Photos and video: One day of training in the Navy

On any given day, just over the horizon and out of sight, sailors on Navy ships are training.

Those days at sea don't carry the anticipation of deployment or the emotion of homecoming. They involve countless repetitions of every action a warship's crew might conceivably need to perform, from weighing anchor to fighting fires and landing aircraft. It might not be thrilling, but it's essential to preparing for the mission.

Recently, on one of those training days aboard the dock landing ship Gunston Hall, the ship's commanding officer, Capt. John Meier, stressed the value of the drills in his daily announcement to the crew.

"Every one of those makes us better. Like many things in life, the more you do it, the better you get."

(Photos: David B. Hollingsworth | The Virginian-Pilot)

Petty Officer 2nd Class Darlanetta Pugh, a damage controlman, waits for helicopters to arrive. She and others are already in their protective gear, firefighting equipment at the ready.

“Every evolution that we do has personal hazards. Flight ops is probably the most glaring one,” Capt. Meier tells the crew. “All it takes is one missed step, one moment of inattention, to turn another outstanding Gunston Hall evolution into a terrible mishap. … All right, Gunston Hall – keep your head on a swivel.”

The evening’s training will be flight operations with helicopters from the Army’s 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment in Fort Campbell, Ky. – but before the first Black Hawk can land, the flight deck must be cleared of every bit of debris that could pose a hazard. Crew members from throughout the ship take part in the “FOD walk” – short for “foreign object debris.”

Navy beach masters prepare to load their vessel – a light amphibious resupply cargo, or LARC – onto another amphibious craft known as a landing craft utility, or LCU, in the Gunston Hall’s well deck.

LCUs aren’t very fast, but they can travel up to 1,200 nautical miles at a time and stay at sea for more than a week, says Senior Chief Petty Officer Scott Sandquist. And they can haul plenty of stuff – a couple of M1 Abrams tanks, or 13 Humvees, or 400 combat-loaded Marines “standing in there like sardines.”

A landing craft air cushion, or LCAC, backs away from the Gunston Hall after exiting the ship’s well deck, a vast, hangarlike space that can fill with water to take aboard other watercraft. LCACs are workhorses, ferrying troops and equipment from ship to shore and onto the beach. They can carry a load as heavy as an M1 tank.

A big part of the Gunston Hall crew’s training focuses on smaller craft like these. Sailors in ballast control raise and lower the ship in the water, using a system of tanks and valves. Sailors in the deck department practice getting the vessels aboard and off again safely.

As the training begins, two Army helicopters circle the ship and take turns landing in a large, white circle on the flight deck. Sometimes members of the ship’s deck department dart out with chocks to secure the helicopter and let the soldiers off. Other times, the helo touches down for a few seconds, and the pilot gives a thumbs-up and takes off again.

Up in the control tower, Ens. John Thomson is coordinating the operation. He’s been in the fleet only two years, but he’s already done this lots of times. “When we were in Haiti,” he says, “we were doing this, like, every single day.”

Petty Officer 2nd Class Devon Patterson leads some of the ship's newest crew members in an anti-terrorism and security class - how to stand watch in a foreign port, how to use batons and handcuffs, how to move through the ship with weapons. He honed his skills during a year in Afghanistan on a solo deployment.

"I try to make it as real as possible without injuring anybody," he says. The two-week class culminates with students running a gantlet of obstacles, taking a shot of pepper spray in the face and then, nearly blind, having to subdue an attacker.

Teaching the class is an extra duty for Patterson - on a smaller ship, hardly anyone does just one job. His official job is in maintenance in the ship's galley - "basically, fix the Pepsi machine." 

Chief Petty Officer Michael Harris of the Gunston Hall's weapons division is responsible for making sure sailors know how to correctly maintain and operate the ship's defenses.

"We're a big metal target," he says.

But hardly a sitting duck - the ship carries rolling airframe missiles that leave their launcher at Mach speed, two Mk-38 machine guns and a massive Phalanx close-in weapons system that fires 75 20-millimeter rounds per second.

"It's kind of hard to miss," Harris says.

Seaman Ricky Donaldson stands watch while the Gunston Hall is at anchor off the coast of Virginia Beach. He's one of 297 sailors aboard.

This ship is part of the Gator Navy. Its main missions are to transport Marines and their equipment and to support the assault landing craft and helicopters that conduct amphibious landings, whether in combat or, more recently, on humanitarian missions such as the response to the 2010 earthquake in Haiti.

The crew's day begins about 6 a.m. with bells and whistles and the call, "Reveille, reveille... All hands, heave out and trice up," which harkens back to the days when sailors had to stow their bunks and secure them with ropes.

The LARC is dwarfed by the Gunston Hall, while a massive cargo ship waits nearby.

The amphib is headed for pierside maintenance and is slated to deploy to Africa at some point, but Meier says those plans could change at any time if a more urgent mission arises.

Training periods like this, he says, are central to his job as skipper. "I do not want to lose those perishable skills."

Capt. John Meier, the ship's commanding officer, catches up with Ens. Jessica Wood, the officer of the deck for the day, on the bridge.

A naval aviator, Meier spent much of his career aboard aircraft carriers, which carry more than 10 times as many sailors and Marines as the Gunston Hall. Yet Meier guesses there are more ensigns - the most junior officers - aboard his ship than aboard the typical carrier.

The head of his air operations department is a midgrade lieutenant - on a carrier, that post goes to a captain, three pay grades higher.