CJ
--------------
'Jinxed' Sub Hits Navy Ship Greeneville Was On Afghan Duty [No doubt helping Karzai's navy to find OBL and the Mullah in their bath tubs.CJ]
By Thomas E. Ricks Washington Post Staff Writer Tuesday, January 29, 2002; Page A03
The USS Greeneville, the submarine that hit and sank a Japanese fishing boat in Hawaiian waters last February [The US recently agreed to pay 11.5 million dollars to the gov't of Ehime Prefecture, which will then pay out to the families of the dead--CJ] , killing nine people, was involved in its third accident in less than a year on Sunday, colliding with another Navy ship off the coast of Oman.
No one was hurt in the incident, Pentagon officials said.
The Greeneville's latest mishap provoked discussions inside the Navy and elsewhere about the submarine's apparent run of bad luck. "Not again," was the title of the discussion on one Web site for submarine veterans, with several contending that the Greeneville is a "jinxed ship."
But former submarine skippers said there is no such thing as a jinx, and said instead that the crew of the Greeneville appears to be deeply troubled. Retired Navy Capt. John Byron, a former submarine commander, said he believed that the admirals overseeing the Greeneville are at fault for failing to properly assess the crew's problems.
Sunday's mishap occurred when two sailors were being transferred from the Greeneville to an amphibious transport ship, the USS Ogden, in the Arabian Sea, officials said. An inflatable boat was being readied on the Ogden to go to the Greeneville to collect the sailors, who were being sent home on emergency leave because of deaths in their families.
Both vessels are in the Arabian Sea as part of operations related to the war in Afghanistan.
Before the transfer could take place, the Greeneville and Ogden bumped into each other, damaging a stern plane on the submarine and puncturing a fuel tank on the Ogden. The accident occurred under windy conditions at 9:25 a.m., said Rear Adm. John D. Stufflebeem, deputy director of operations for the Joint Staff.
"The two aft ends touched," he said yesterday. "What went wrong, we don't know."
Several thousand gallons of light diesel fuel leaked into the sea before the punctured tank was pumped dry, a Navy official said. The Ogden is steaming toward a port in the Persian Gulf for repairs, while the Greeneville is sailing toward the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia, where it will be examined [Hope they can find DG--it's a mighty big sea! CJ].
The Greeneville's current skipper is Cmdr. Lindsay Henkins, the fifth officer to command the submarine in the last 11 months.
The submarine's troubles began during an exercise on Feb. 9 when the Greeneville, then captained by Cmdr. Scott Waddle, performed an emergency surfacing drill nine miles off Honolulu. As it surfaced it rammed into the trawler Ehime Maru, which was on a training voyage for Japanese students learning to be commercial fishermen. The 190-foot-long trawler sank within minutes, taking with it four students, two teachers and three crew members.
After that accident, which caused an uproar in Japan [well, the remark by one US official that the US had 'apologized enough' really showed how sorry they felt--CJ], Waddle was removed from command. He was spared a court-martial but ultimately was given a letter of reprimand and retired from the Navy in September. A Navy court of inquiry concluded that 16 civilian guests who had been aboard the submarine at the time of the accident had distracted the sub's crew but were not a direct cause of the collision.
The submarine was commanded temporarily by Capt. Anthony Cortese, until he was replaced by Cmdr. David Bogdan, who was its skipper in August when it ran aground off the coast of the western Pacific island of Saipan, causing $120,000 in damage. A subsequent investigation found, among other things, that the ship's crew plotted a track that would take the submarine, which has a draft of 32 feet, across a shoal with only 29 feet of water. They also sailed the sub on the wrong side of a harbor buoy.
In the wake of that investigation, several of the Greeneville's officers were charged with hazarding a vessel or dereliction of duty, and Bogdan was relieved of his command [Hmmm...this is interesting because this incident was also reported as a collision with another ship--CJ].