Capt. John Cohoon

'Teamwork' is key ingredient to Navy's success

By Capt. John Cohoon
Naval Submarine Base Kings Bay commanding officer

On April 14, 1988, the frigate USS Samuel B. Roberts (FFG 58), serving in the Persian Gulf as part of Joint Task Force Middle East, struck a mine. The mine struck at frame 276 on the port side and blew a 15-foot by 20-foot hole in the hull. It nearly broke the ship in half.

As the emergency unfolded, the ship's skipper, Cmdr. Paul Rinn, talked with the task force commander, Rear Adm. Anthony Less, about the challenge at hand. The admiral asked him, ''Considering your situation, what do you think about remaining with the ship?''

''I haven't thought about that at all. I have no desire to leave the ship,'' replied Rinn. ''We'll stay with the ship and fight it. Right now, I think we can win this thing. We have no other choice. In a nutshell, we're in trouble.''

What the skipper was saying to the admiral was, as a team, he felt they could save the ship. To do that, the crew worked feverishly for hours and hours to repair buckled bulkheads, arrest flooding, extinguish fires, repair leaks, fix critical systems failures, move ammunition, and tend to severely burned and injured shipmates.

The exhaustive effort of the crew, working together, did save the ship and, because of their teamwork, USS Samuel B. Roberts was repaired and returned to duty.

While what we do here most days is not on the scale of saving a damaged vessel from sinking, teamwork is still necessary for us to accomplish our mission. Our goal at Naval Submarine Base Kings Bay, and our mission is ''to enable warfighter readiness.'' That means we, as a team, must always strive to prepare our submarines and crews to meet their strategic deterrence mission and, if necessary, put weapons on target.

Each of us contributes to that team effort. Checking in a new person to the command, helping a family make repairs to housing, ordering food for a boat preparing to get underway, standing a security watch, helping a shipmate in trouble, writing a report, playing softball together during liberty, or setting the maneuvering watch to get underway all take teamwork.

At some time or another, we all work together in small and large teams. It is not only the fact that working together as members of teams in the Navy certainly makes life easier and more pleasant, but the positive mindset we develop about teamwork may one day help us as it did the crew of Roberts. In the Navy, we train as a team, we work as a team, and ultimately, we live or die as a team.

Teamwork - it is the ''cooperative effort by the members of a team to achieve a common goal'' and it is our word of the month for August. We cannot live without it!

For more information about the USS Samuel B. Roberts incident and the heroic efforts to save her, go to: www.news.navy.mil/media/allhands and in the search engine query for the August 1988 issue of ''All Hands'' magazine and read ''To see the dawn'' on pages 5-10.