Vinson visits San Diego on its way home

Los Angeles Times

SAN DIEGO – The USS Carl Vinson, the first U.S. aircraft carrier to wage war on the al-Qaida terrorist network and its Taliban partners, arrived in San Diego Saturday to a hero’s welcome and the strains of Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the U.S.A.”

“We were the right hand of America to get the job done,” said Petty Officer Third-Class Juan Pineda, 22, of Seattle.

“It feels good,” said Petty Officer Third-Class Bridgette Shryock, 23, of Chicago. “My parents are proud.”

After unloading aircraft equipment and more than 1,000 sailors, the ship will leave today for Bremerton, its home port.

The tale of the Vinson’s role in the war in Afghanistan is in the numbers: 4,200 combat sorties, 2 million pounds of ordnance dropped, 16,152 launches and retrievals of aircraft, 111 days of operations, and only four “down” days for maintenance of its 70-plus warplanes.

Other carriers have also played key roles – the Theodore Roosevelt, Kitty Hawk, Enterprise and John C. Stennis – but none can claim the numbers of the Vinson or the designation of having launched the first airstrikes in the opening U.S. salvo of the war on Oct. 7.

The Vinson was in the first weeks of a planned six-month deployment enforcing the “no-fly” zone in Iraq when terrorists struck the United States on Sept. 11.

By Oct. 7, the carrier and several of its supporting ships were in the northern Arabian Sea, within striking distance of Afghanistan.

“We were there when everybody else was trying to get there,” said Command Master Chief Mike Williams, 42, of Lawrence, Mass., a Navy veteran of 24 years and 19 deployments.

By any measure, the war numbers are impressive – 18 million gallons of jet fuel used, 1,421 briefings by meteorologists about weather conditions, 37 under way replenishment operations (no time to go to port for more bombs or beans), and no major injuries or aircraft accidents.

The truism about an aircraft carrier is that it’s a floating city, and there are numbers to support that: 1.4 million e-mails sent by sailors to their families, 2.1 million e-mails received by sailors, 53 surgeries performed by the ship’s doctors, 535 pairs of glasses made by the optometrists, and 839 teeth pulled by the dentists.

There is another number, too: 76, the number of babies born to the wives of crew members while the ship was gone.

As the Vinson docked at North Island Naval Air Station in Coronado, fathers with babies they had not yet seen were given priority in the lengthy process of disembarking 5,000 sailors and several hundred visitors.

And so Michael Floyd, 24, who repairs electrical systems , was able to rush to meet his wife, Jennifer, 19, and hold their month-old son, Michael Sean, for the first time.

“I’m so glad I was able to be part of what the Vinson did,” said Floyd, cradling the infant. “Maybe we made the world a little bit safer for my son. We got rid of some bad people that America needed to get rid of.”

After being relieved by the Stennis on Dec. 16, the Vinson made port visits in Singapore and then Pearl Harbor, where several hundred family members of the crew joined for the ride to San Diego.

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