Posted: 7/12/2015 4:52:41 PM EDT
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Tell a story from your life. Don't make it some snarky political comment. Just tell a story. - - - - - - 1993. I was finishing up a deployment on a destroyer having spent the previous six months engaged in maritime interdiction operations in the Red Sea. Basically searching merchant vessels to ensure that they weren't transporting embargoed products to Iraq. We also had secondary tasking to keep an eye out for a number of ships suspected in drug smuggling. The big one was the M/V Kismetin, a Turkish merchant thought to be transporting thousands of pounds of morphine base. Having finished up our mission in the Red Sea, we were on our way back home, transiting with other ships through the Suez. One of the folks on the ship looked at the ship in front of us and said "hey, doesn't that look like that one ship we're supposed to be looking out for?" Sure enough. It was the Kismetin. We now got a new mission on the way home. Shadow the Kismetin until they could be taken down. We tried to maintain a covert surveillance, letting ourselves drop over the horizon and then sneaking peeks on them with our helos. Finally, four Turkish gunboats showed up on scene and told us that they were taking over. The Turks didn't believe in discreet surveillance. They surrounded the vessel and advised them to follow them back to Turkey. That night there was a huge storm in the Med. It was bad enough that I watched the XO lose his lunch right in front of ship's radio. The Kismetin sunk that night. It had been speculated that the crew scuttled the ship as they knew that Turkey didn't play around when it came to drug trafficking and they were getting rid of the evidence. I always wondered if the Turkish gunboats weren't concerned about losing them in the storm and decided to sink it instead. |