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CNN Sunday Morning

Chiefs Control Operations Aboard USS Theodore Roosevelt

Aired November 11, 2001 - 08:30   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
MARTIN SAVIDGE, CNN ANCHOR: U.S. military forces are working hard to fight the war against terrorism. At sea, there is one group with an important task: keeping morale high among young sailors.

CNN national correspondent Frank Buckley has more on the chiefs aboard the USS Theodore Roosevelt.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

FRANK BUCKLEY, CNN NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): The pilots get the attention, the captain commands the ship. But it's the chiefs who run the show. They are the Navy's most experienced sailors, charged with motivating and managing the young men and women who make up the enlisted ranks. September 11 still very fresh in their minds.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: They started it, and we're going to finish it.

BUCKLEY: Gravy Evett is the command master chief of the USS Theodore Roosevelt, the ship's top enlisted man. He gathered together a group of chiefs to give us a sense of life in the ranks.

(on camera): When we're up top we can see these flight operations, planes leaving, planes being recovered one after another. The tempo seems very high. How long can you sustain this sort of tempo?

GRAVY EVETT, COMMAND MASTER CHIEF: Well, this is pretty much our normal operations on an aircraft carrier. We'll run 12 hours, 13 hours of flight, flying every day. We can do it -- as long as we can get food, we can stay out here forever.

BUCKLEY (voice-over): The USS Theodore Roosevelt deployed from Norfolk, Virginia on September 19. The chief saying this particular deployment in a wartime situation did cause some concern among their charges.

KEITH BRYANT, MASTER CHIEF: I think initially the people were kind of antsy and anxious to get started. And the real problem as keeping them, you know, in a routine, to slow it down and doing what they need to do without burning themselves out. Now we're in a routine, I think everything's going fine. BUCKLEY: The ship will be deployed to the region for at least six months. The chiefs using various methods to keep their sailors motivated. Once a week, for example, gun camera videos taken from attack aircraft hitting Afghanistan are showed over the ship's closed- circuit TV system.

JOHN COGGIN, MASTER CHIEF: We don't get to see the land from out here, but when they show those videos everybody has a little bit better understanding of what we're going after and what we're doing.

BUCKLEY: And onboard this ship, a special American flag, one raised by New York City firefighters at the World Trade Center site, signed by the city's mayor.

DAWN GREEN, SENIOR CHIEF: It's a huge motivational factor, the fact that the mayor took the time to sign that flag, to send it to us, so that we could defend our flag and that flag for the firefighters in New York and the people of the United States. It's just -- that's what drives us out here.

BUCKLEY (on camera): If there is any let-up in sight at all to the long days and nights for the members of the crew here, it is not readily apparent to them. They are expecting to continue to work very hard. They are, perhaps, guided, at least, by the worlds of the namesake of this ship, Theodore Roosevelt, who once said that nothing worth gaining is ever gained without effort.

Frank Buckley, CNN, aboard the USS Theodore Roosevelt in the Arabian Sea.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

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