Browsing: leadership

Rescue swimmers in the Coast Guard have to be a tough lot. That’s even more true for female rescue swimmers. There are only four of them in the service, and that gives you a good indication of their caliber. In April, we wrote about Aviation Survival Technician 2nd Class Jaime Vanacore, a rescue swimmer who was trying out for American Ninja Warrior (she got invited to Las Vegas for finals, by the way) and now Chief Aviation Survival Technician Karen Voorhees has made history by becoming the first female rescue swimmer in the Coast Guard to make chief. She was…

If you are a junior enlisted Coastie, you might have wondered if you missed the memo April 3 when you went in to work. Your chief was looking sharp in his or her service dress blues, and you were wearing your ODUs. But the chiefs wore their SDBs on Wednesday to bring attention to a serious issue: sexual assault in the Coast Guard, said Command Master Chief R. Shane Hooker, command master chief for the deputy commandant of mission support at Coast Guard Headquarters. April is Sexual Assault Awareness Month. The service had 156 reported cases of sexual assault in…

The Naval Academy is often recognized for its stellar athletics and academics, but this time the academy is in the news because of one female mid. Midshipman 2nd Class Margaret Gilroy was named one of the top 10 college women across the country by Glamour magazine. She is the only woman in the top 10 from a service academy. The 21-year-old serves as the brigade training sergeant and oversees the professional knowledge program, an entry-level training program for freshman to teach them about Navy concepts they’ll use at the academy and in the fleet, a spokeswoman from the academy said.…

Our cover story this week focuses on how a hard-partying, hard-drinking commanding officer warped the morale and authority lines of the Bahrain-based task force he led. He attended a string of parties at a subordinate’s apartment over the summer of 2011, where heavy drinking frequently led to public indecency, a highly inappropriate spectacle in an Islamic country where modesty is the norm. Officers were afraid to warn him or report his behavior. And so it continued until he became the 19th CO of the 22 fired in 2011.  Here’s a short intro to the story: By nightfall June 3, what…

Above, you see the destroyer Jason Dunham. It’s named after Cpl. Jason Dunham, who covered a grenade with his helmet on April 14, 2004, in an attempt to shield the blast from fellow Marines. He died eight days later, and received the Medal of Honor posthumously for his heroism on Jan. 11, 2007. No human being in their right mind would question the naming of the ship. It’s a logical, sensible case in which a class of ship frequently used to honor war heroes memorialized one of the greatest heroes of the Iraq war. It’s no secret that the Navy…

It’s one of those end-of-year best-of/worst-of lists that multiply like flies this time of year. But this one caught the eye for two reasons: It purports to list America’s Worst Bosses — and who hasn’t got a story to tell about an awful supervisor? — and it lists a former Navy commanding officer and a fired executive officer among its 100 worst for 2011. According to “the eBossWatch panel of workplace experts,” coming in at No. 25 was Cmdr. Liam Bruen, former commanding officer of Strike Fighter Squadron 136 out of Naval Air Station Oceana, Va., who was censured by…

On May 7, 1970, the Beatles released their last single: “The Long and Winding Road.” Last week, the amphibious transport dock Ponce, launched 13 days after the song and commissioned in July 1971, completed its own long journey, coming home for the last time after four decades of service. Those years were filled with significant events. Ponce helped evacuate nearly 300 mostly U.S. and British Westerners from Lebanon during the 1976 civil war, and supported 6th Fleet air strikes on pro-Syrian militia positions in defense of U.S. Marines ashore. It supported military disaster relief in Florida following 1992’s devastating Hurricane…

[HTML1]Proposing call signs like “Fagmeister” and “Gay Boy” — and the winner, “Romo’s bitch” — one can only assume that at least a few of Lt. Steve Crowston’s fellow officers in Strike Fighter Squadron 136 felt pretty sure the unit’s administrative/legal officer and avid Dallas Cowboys fan was a homosexual. But Crowston, who filed multiple inspector general complaints over what he regarded as anti-gay hazing in the unit, had steadfastly refused to acknowledge his sexual preference, saying it was irrelevant and that his concern was over inappropriate workplace hazing. Tuesday evening, on the 6 p.m. newscast of Norfolk’s WAVY-TV, with…

The Norfolk-based destroyer McFaul broke ranks Thursday and pinned its five new chief petty officers day earlier than the rest of the Navy. There was a good reason for that. McFaul did so to accommodate a scheduled deployment. So even when a short-notice delay changed that deployment date, the ship held the ceremony so as not to exclude family members who’d traveled to take in the rich tradition. “It was very important to have my family here with me today,” said Chief Logistics Specialist (AW/SW) Tamika Tillman.  “I can’t even describe what it means to have them present.” Tillman was…

A year ago, the dock landing ship Oak Hill was in poor shape — and that’s by the Fleet Forces Command chief’s reckoning. Beginning in 2005, five deployments in five years, no time for maintenance and inadequate manning had left the relatively young ship with a degraded power plant, endemic corrosion and a whole lot of systems that just didn’t work. A long-overdue yard period, money, lots of outside help and long hours produced a remarkable turnaround Apr. 4-8, when the ship passed its rigid underway material inspection by the Board of Inspection and Survey with flying colors. Oak Hill…

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