The Aftermath

USS John S. McCain conducts comprehensive at-sea testing. Photo by Aron Montano.

Fortune Favors The Brave

The bleating of a poorly-timed collision alarm, the shaking of a steel rack, the nightmares of lost shipmates – for the crew of guided-missile destroyer USS John S. McCain (DDG 56), what was supposed to be a routine strait transit became 11 hours of hell, 30 days of loss, and years of attempting to reclaim stability.

On Aug. 18, 2021, five of the survivors – Master Chief Electronics Technician Victor Granados, Cryptologic Technician (Technical) 1st Class Christopher Lawrence, Logistics Specialist 1st Class Aaron Azuma, Air Traffic Controller 2nd Class Juan Romero, and Boatswain’s Mate 3rd Class Michael Antoine – held a resilience forum aboard aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan (CVN 76), sharing their experiences of the collision and passing on lessons learned amidst the tragedy. This forum was a part of, but by no means the end, of their story.

11 Hours

For some of the Sailors, it started with a crunch. At approximately 5 a.m. Azuma, a petty officer second class at the time and one of the ship’s master helmsmen, was still asleep when the ship’s announcement system declared a loss of operational steering. The call was immediately followed by metal rattling, shaking, and 30 seconds later, a jolt. As the bulkhead ruptured, and fuel, saltwater, and waste flooded in, Azuma scrambled to yank Sailors from their beds and push them out of the berthing, screaming “Wake up, wake up! We got hit.” While rushing to aft steering, one of the steering controls of the ship and Azuma’s general quarters (GQ) watch station, he heard for the first time the ship’s collision alarm. Already in the space is a smattering of rates and ranks, engineers desperate to return control of the ship to the captain and his crew. He tested the rudder with no response, and with increasing desperation turned to the last resort for steering the warship – a pump, with 30 cycles signaling 1 degree in a direction. Azuma began pumping, and began steering the ship.

Just before this, Romero, a gas turbine systems technician at the time, finished setting up communications from that same space with the pilot house, and began to run to damage control (DC) central. Stopping people as they rushed past him, he heard the other casualties on the ship – flooding in some, fires in others, and after relaying this to the officer in charge of damage control, he moved to stand up his GQ watch station on the bridge. Throughout, he believed the ship had run aground. On the bridge, he saw the truth, and began to fear.

“Getting to the bridge at [night], with no illumination, and seeing a tanker off the portside – close enough to where you can see the other workers on the tanker, I was filled with awe and fear,” said Romero. “I never really feared for my life. The fear was for the guys in the engineering spaces.”

There was a worry the next casualty would be the electricity. Then communications failed, and the bridge team resorted to message runners, handheld radios, and yelling from the announcement system to pass orders. The next to fail was the gyroscope (the ship’s compass), and for Romero it “felt like all the unfortunate things that could happen, just happened at once.”

Five hours later and still in aft steering, Azuma heard all of this relayed while driving the ship. Different types of casualties were being called out – class charlie and bravo fires, ruptures and other emergencies, and after his relief took the helm he made his way to the mess decks to assist. The scene he arrived to was one of carnage.

“All is saw was blood, gore, flesh, my brothers naked and in shock,” said Azuma. “I asked, ‘Where can I help?’”

Azuma responded to a casualty in a main space – still only dressed in shirtless coveralls and flip flops – and without thinking, grabbed a CO2 bottle to begin fighting the fire. After running out of air, he turned over his place on the casualty and returned to the mess decks when he saw one of his close friends.

“His head was crushed between two racks – he got hit,” said Azuma. “He pulled on my coveralls and told me ‘Azuma, make sure my family is going to be okay.’ I wanted to stay, to help him and treat him, but I couldn’t. I had to be a [firefighter]. It killed me inside because I knew my friend could potentially be dying right in front of me. It hurt.”

Eventually, he would return to the helm for five more hours of steering the ship. Throughout, the command began mustering its Sailors.

“You would hear the exact 10 names put out [over the ship’s announcement system] from the start of GQ to the moment we ended,” said Azuma. “All of us already knew they didn’t make it.”

30 days

After their arrival in Singapore, and subsequent medical and quality-of-life assistance by USS America (LHA 6), leadership tried to restore a sense of normalcy to the crew. Sailors mustered for duty, stood watches, ordered parts, cooked food, and went about the daily life and grind of working on a warship.

“I knew for a fact the captain meant well, tried to keep everyone engaged,” said Azuma. “My body was there, but my mind wasn’t.”

The crew stayed in hotels, expenses covered by the Navy, with accompanying liberty hours in a foreign port. Still, the tragedy stuck and the emotional toll began to emerge. But the crew looked out for their own. One of Azuma’s supervisors made a point of ensuring his juniors were never alone – eating, drinking, or sleeping, someone always had a battle buddy to lean on.

Some Sailors stayed for longer periods in Singapore while the ship was towed to Yokosuka, Japan, while Azuma was sent ahead. The ship would return to Yokosuka and begin dry dock repairs, but the future looked bleak. However, the crew put the metal patch up, covering the scar of the collision and the impossible began to feel inevitable.

2 years

Antione arrived at his first duty station, the John S. McCain, knowing not to ask about the patch. Walking through the passageways was not the usual maze of tunnels and turns that accompanies a ship – instead it was a straight shot forward to aft, everything blocked off for repair. In the boatswain’s locker, he saw the shrine.

“Everybody was joking around after a long day and I see this search and rescue (SAR) swimmer’s gear... all this equipment on a shelf,” said Antoine. “I asked my [supervisor], and the look on his face was just ‘Why did you ask?’ And he responds ‘That’s our SAR swimmer, and the stuff right here we are never going to touch.”

The ship was well on its way to a full restoration, but the crew was far from okay.

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)

Azuma was wracked with both survivor’s guilt and a rational fear of the ship. Pretending the collision didn’t affect him, he drowned himself in work, taking tasks from his juniors, piling on more and more, creating what he called “a front, to cover up that [he] wasn’t ok.” After meeting his then girlfriend, now wife, he learned he talked in his sleep, repeating the same names over and over, the names he heard over and over following the crash, until he eventually jumped out of bed. He, and the other Sailors in his shop, stopped sleeping in beds on the ship. Instead, they would sleep on cardboard and sleeping bags in their office.

“I was scared,” said Azuma. “Maybe it might happen again, and I was sad because [John S. McCain] was in the water, but my 10 brothers are not with [her]. Walking through the deckplates and passageways, not seeing those family members, it hurt.”

He continued to suffer in silence. He never saw a doctor when he was given a chance, and when lawyers came to the ship to offer a way out of the Navy, he didn’t take it. It wasn’t until later, during an inspection, the problems became apparent.

When testing an alarm aboard a warship, it must be preceded by an announcement “The following is a test of ship’s alarm.” Because alarm testing is a routine procedure, sometimes – incorrectly – the alarm is sounded without an accompanying announcement.

His first response was to sprint out of the space while screaming “Brace for shock!” The surrounding personnel, mostly Sailors new to the fleet, were confused and telling him it was just a test. It was then his friends realized something was wrong. He spoke to his independent duty corpsman (IDC) and told them everything – the work, his night terrors, the restless sleep, and being triggered by a false alarm. The IDC arranged an appointment with a psychiatrist, who immediately diagnosed Azuma with PTSD. What followed was a period of limited duty (LIMDU) on the ship, and a moment of intense personal reflection.

“I was trapped in this shell of work, and had disregarded my entire family,” said Azuma. “I was fighting [the truth]. I was like a little kid hanging on to my mom, not wanting to go to school. I couldn’t leave my brothers behind. This was where I was supposed to be.”

He thought his friends, fellow survivors, would be upset with him, that he was leaving them. But instead, they were relieved. Azuma received his treatment, seeing a therapist and psychiatrist regularly, and eventually had to ask himself, “Why should I stay?”

The Resilience to Remain

Many lessons were learned during and after the John S. McCain collision. Watchstanding training was improved. The technological equipment used to steer the ship was exchanged for a more fullproof system. The process for reacting to and preparing for emergencies was analyzed and refined at command levels of leadership. But the reaction of the crew – to fight the ship, to never give up the ship – was what allowed the ship to return to Singapore safely, even with a rent in its hull. Azuma’s biggest takeaway, something he now preaches passionately as a DC repair locker leader aboard Ronald Reagan, is the importance of being prepared. As a junior Sailor, he hated “pretending to fight a fire.” The collision changed that.

“I realized, and it might sound corny, but I’m probably one of the rare ones who can remind these young Sailors – specifically young Sailors – that these trainings that we do [have a purpose]. When it happens, they will pay off. It’s going to be muscle memory, that’s the reason why we do it… These constant trainings saved our lives.”

Romero, the gas turbine systems technician who saw the oil tanker spilling fuel into John S. McCain’s hull, experienced his share of trauma. In Singapore, during the uncertainty of the ship and his own future, he found himself pulled off the street by a chief petty officer, and saved only by that chief’s understanding that tragedy changes people. Following that, as one the technical experts responsible for bringing steering back to life, he was questioned by a team of technical experts searching for fault. With him, they found none. And after it all he remained in the Navy, and attributes it to caring, to not giving in when waking up on the wrong side of the rack. He emphasized this when speaking on the final moment that stuck with him that night.

“The last moment that really hit home for me was after we got the ship steady and on our own power,” said Romero. “The commanding officer came over the [ship’s announcement system] and told us some Sailors had not been accounted for. He always ended his calls with ‘Fortune favors the brave…’ But before that he said ‘We will not give up the ship. Fortune favors the brave…’ We forget that this is our home, and my first feelings were for my shipmates. My next were for my ship.”

In his first two weeks, Antoine learned not to ask about the plate, nor the shrines. At the time, he didn’t think they could bring the ship back, that McCain was destined for a quick retirement. But the older crew knew otherwise, and day after day they worked long hours to fix the seemingly irreparable damage. In doing so, they taught the new generation of Sailors a lesson.

“I learned to keep going through the hard times, to never give up,” said Antoine, “that there’s always a light at the end of the tunnel… There is an aftermath. The McCain is still going, and these people that you see beside me were resilient enough to keep going. Look where they’re at today.”

McCain Sailors are marked for life. A Navy Enlisted Classification (NEC) – USS John S. McCain collision tracking NEC – makes official what is informally apparent. Tragedy has touched them, healing has been a journey, but by sharing that journey they’ve proven that fortune favors the brave. Giving just a bit of that bravery to USS Ronald Reagan, helping keep peace through strength in the waters they previously roamed, stands in testament to their enduring resilience and resolve.