Commanding officer of carrier Truman dies

NORFOLK

Capt. Tushar R. Tembe, commanding officer of the Norfolk-based aircraft carrier Harry S. Truman, died Tuesday after being taken to a hospital.

Sources speaking on the condition of anonymity told The Pilot that Tembe was stricken Tuesday morning. He was then taken to Bon Secours Maryview Medical Center in Portsmouth. The Truman is docked in Portsmouth at the Norfolk Naval Shipyard, where the ship is undergoing maintenance.

Officials at Maryview would not confirm Tembe's death but instead referred questions to the Navy. The Navy also would not provide confirmation, citing a Defense Department policy that requires the service to wait 24 hours after the next of kin is notified before making deaths public.

No information on his cause of death was available Tuesday.

Tembe lived in Virginia Beach and had been the Truman's captain since August. He was 49 or 50, according to a public records database.

Born in Bombay, India, Tembe immigrated to the United States as a child and grew up in New York City. He told The Pilot in an interview earlier this year that he attended high school in Brooklyn and loved the melting pot that was his neighborhood.

He attended Texas Tech University and earned a bachelor's degree in petroleum engineering, according to his official Navy biography.

After joining the service roughly three decades ago, he became a fighter pilot and deployed all over the world aboard aircraft carriers, including the Enterprise and the Forrestal.

Before reporting aboard the Truman this summer, Tembe worked at the Norfolk-based Joint Forces Command as the chief of staff of one of its directorates. He became the commanding officer of the amphibious transport dock Nashville in 2008 and led the ship on a humanitarian mission to West Africa, its last deployment before it was decommissioned.

Before that, Tembe served as executive officer aboard the carrier Eisenhower and as skipper of the Virginia Beach-based Strike Fighter Squadron 87, the Golden Warriors.

He also served as a pilot in Guam; as a pilot instructor in Jacksonville, Fla.; and as a test pilot in Patuxent River, Md. He held a master's degree in national security and strategic studies from the Naval War College.

Tembe was deployed in the Middle East aboard the Enterprise with Strike Fighter Squadron 87 on 9/11. Speaking to The Pilot earlier this year for a story commemorating the 10th anniversary of the terrorist attacks, he recalled the day: "It was almost an immediate reaction: There's stuff we have to get done now," he said.

He said he continued to use memories of that deployment to motivate himself: "The tremendous motivation and dedication of the young Americans that served in my squadron and on my ship, the team of 5,000 that gelled together toward a single purpose.

"Sometimes I think we lose sight of what it takes to launch airplanes, release ordnance and recover those airplanes.... That's what I hang my hat on when I'm having a bad day - it reinvigorates my faith in America in general. The best of that is on display in our squadrons, on our ships."

Corinne Reilly, (757) 446-2949, corinne.reilly@pilotonline.com