There is — at this writing — a lot we do not know about how the destroyer USS Fitzgerald came to collide with a heavily-laden freighter in the waters off Japan in the middle of the night.
First, we know the crew fought heroically to save their ship and the lives of their shipmates. We know that from early reports by Navy officials but also from the images that flashed across our screens, our tablets and our phones after the incident happened early Saturday.
One look at the crushed, twisted starboard side, the hoses flaked about, the water being discharged, the frantic work being done tells you all you need to know about the stuff you can’t see in those same images: a fiercely brave crew working together to staunch the flooding, to rescue their shipmates and to save their ship.
You can be certain they ended up drenched, exhausted, scraped and bruised — but not broken. They kept that ship from foundering for 16 brutal hours. And they brought her back into port.
I don’t care who you are, but you have to respect that kind of teamwork.
Any sailor will tell you how long and how hard they train to get good at damage control. It’s pounded into them from the time they set foot at boot camp or the Naval Academy or a hundred other schools they must attend throughout their career.
Fire and flood are enemies at sea, same as an adversary’s fleet. Except that fire and flood can be the results of accidents, mishaps or even your own mistakes.
And that’s the second thing we know for certain today: that the Navy is going to find out exactly what happened. The investigation has already begun. It will be thorough. It will be clear. It will be definitive.
Investigators will document minute-by-minute how these two ships came to occupy the same piece of water — how they approached one another, at what speeds, courses and angles. They will interview every possible witness, examine every relevant piece of equipment, pore over every kilobyte of recorded data.
In the end, they will be able to reconstruct the entire event in time and space and determine precisely what lapses in judgment, seamanship and leadership occurred.
And then they will make that investigation public. They will lay it out there for all to see and for all to learn from. Reporters won’t have to submit Freedom of Information Act requests or rely on leakers to find out what investigators discover.
