Sea Power - February-March 2017

I guess probably my junior or senior year of high school — I grew up in the Wisconsin area and I decided I didn’t really want to stay in Wisconsin at the time — I went to the Navy recruiter without my parents even knowing. I decided I’m going to join the Navy. It was really on a whim.

My dad was an Army veteran. He did 26 years and I knew I didn’t want to go in the Army. I love to be on the water, and the Navy — all right, let’s go! I went to boot camp in Great Lakes, Ill. I started out as an engineer in the Navy, on steamships, boilers, engines, all the auxiliary equipment. And I worked my way up.

As soon I left boot camp, I went to Japan on the Belleau Wood [LHA 3], and we did the largest ever — and the first ever — hull swap to the USS Essex, that was LHD 2. Finished there, at the time I was a first-class petty officer, and I went to the USS Juneau, LPD 10, and coming off the Juneau, I actually got selected for the engineering limited duty officer program, so I became an officer.

I went to the USS Iwo Jima in Norfolk, Va., as the boilers officer, and the from there I went to a tour with Naval Special Warfare [Command] as their maintenance manager for the Mark V Special Operations Craft. And then went to a pre-commissioning DDG up in Bath, Maine. I went to another tour with Naval Special Warfare in San Diego, where I did 11-meter RHIBs [rigid-hull inflatable boats], was the maintenance officer/chief engineer of those. I did numerous deployments, my last one being in Basra, Iraq, with one of the SEAL teams, as their maintenance manager.

Once I left the military, I took a job in Los Angeles with the Air Force, working space and missile defense.

I did that for probably seven, eight months, a very
exciting job. I learned a lot of stuff, the space aspect of
it, but I didn’t want to move to Los Angeles, so I was
driving back and forth from San Diego. I said, “Well,
this probably isn’t for me.”
I got a job with Epsilon Systems Solutions in San
Diego. They’re a ship repair facility that does a lot of
work on the LCS-class ships. That’s where I really got
started on the LCS program, through ship repair, work-
ing on LCS 1 and LCS 3, Freedom and Fort Worth. We
became not the top repair company for Lockheed Martin
at the time, but No. 2. We did a lot of their work.

Then I started looking and saw that they build ships in Marinette, Wis., which is about an hour and a half from the town that I grew up, Pelican Lake, Wis. That really intrigued me. … So I applied to Lockheed Martin and, obviously, they knew me from San Diego and what I’ve done for them out there, and got hired.

I started doing the trials aspect of it, taking the ships out, going through their entire test program, builder’s dock trials, builder’s sea trials and with INSURV [Board of Inspection and Survey] acceptance trials. I kind of got a knack for it, because of my experiences in the military. So I understood the HM&E [hull, maintenance and electrical] and how to operate