On anniversary of Navy Yard shooting, loss of expert shipbuilder still echoes at sea
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Version 0 of 1. ABOARD THE FUTURE USS AMERICA, IN THE SOUTH ATLANTIC OCEAN — Engineer Katie Thatcher nervously wrings her hands near the flight deck, waiting for updates from the crew six decks beneath her. From her perch, the Navy’s next great warship is picture-perfect, its hull shimmering as it slices through the waves. Down below, there’s a problem, and the Navy is missing its best man for days like this. One of the ship’s electric motors won’t start. To keep moving, the captain has had to fire its gas-guzzling engines for 12 days, often burning an extra $12,000 worth of fuel an hour. There is one person whom Thatcher would like to reach, the one who knew the ship best. Almost 5,000 miles away at sea on its maiden transit, however, the crew of the future USS America is on its own. Retired Cmdr. Michael Arnold was one of the 12 people killed last year when a gunman opened fire at the Navy Yard. The bespectacled program manager was the Navy’s encyclopedia for ships like this. If there had ever been a similar problem, he would know the solution. If it was something new, he could make sure Thatcher and her crew did not waste time going down a path he had gone before. To Thatcher, Arnold was a mentor, a confidant, a friend. “Every day I think about him,” Thatcher says. “Every day, there is something I wish I could ask him.” The military circle affected most by last year’s massacre was one of graying officers and bureaucrats who designed Navy ships, oversaw construction and ironed out problems once they were built. Those killed had together amassed centuries of experience, bringing steady hands and know-how to the top-secret work of ensuring that U.S. sailors go to sea on the safest ships. To each other, they were family. There was Vishnu “Kisan” Pandit, an institution in naval weapons calibration; Marty Bodrog, a procurement expert for the Navy’s fastest small ships; and Arnold, credited as the father and all-around problem solver for the new 844-foot America class vessels — the first U.S. warships designed to carry full squadrons of the new F-35B Joint Strike Fighters. The genesis of the USS America, the first of the class, can be traced back to a sketch by Arnold a decade ago on an airport napkin. He was in charge as it grew into a 45,000-ton behemoth of steel, wires and high-tech electronics, now steaming to its home port in San Diego. A plaque in the massive hangar that he designed to hold the jets bears his name. “Naval Officer, ship designer, pilot and family man, Michael pioneered the USS AMERICA’s enhanced aviation design,” it reads. “Although Michael’s life was taken during the Washington Navy Yard shootings, his spirit lives on aboard.” The continuing journey to get the $2.8 billion ship ready for its commissioning remains harder without Arnold. And overcoming the problems of a new warship brings daily reminders to colleagues of what they and the Navy have lost. On Monday morning, Sept. 16, 2013, the apparent happenstance of who was there and who was not in Arnold’s corner of Building 197 was in fact the end of a very long design, the culmination of a decade of planning and building the USS America. Who lived and who died became forever fused with the ship. The chain of events connecting ship to shooting had begun almost 10 years earlier, in planning meetings in Navy offices four miles away at the Pentagon. The country’s aging fleet of Vietnam-era ships designed for ferrying Marines and their Huey helicopters would soon rust beyond repair. And there was the Joint Strike Fighter, then in 2004 still two years away from its first test flight, that would need to be transported around the world. Pentagon planners envisioned the Marines fighting more and more as they did in Afghanistan, where they were being flown directly from ships to faraway front lines. Navy leaders decided they needed for the Marines a new class of compact aircraft carriers. The job of designing and building the ship was sent to a Navy office known as PMS 377 and to a man who had in some ways been preparing for the task all his life. The boy who grew up in the 1960s surrounded by muscle cars in Detroit had surprised his parents on his 16th birthday by asking not for a car but for his first flying lesson. Had it not been for a long lineage of Arnold-family eyeglass-wearers, there was little doubt his dream would have been to become a military pilot. As it was, “he used to say that if I can’t fly planes, I’m going to drive ships,” said his widow, Jolanda Arnold, whom he met at the University of Oklahoma on a Navy ROTC scholarship and married soon after. Commissioned to Pearl Harbor, Arnold soon got the chance to command the bridge of the frigate USS Ouellet but enjoyed his time on land more. He spent his off days at a civilian airfield taking flying lessons, occasionally surprising his new bride with a trip to Maui for lunch. Those were the best days. The worst were the long months at sea. A career in the Navy, it seemed, wouldn’t mesh with the couple’s plans to start a family. Arnold resigned his commission, took a post in the Navy Reserves and began looking for a desk job. Contracting work brought him to Washington and soon back into the Navy’s Sea Systems Command (NAVSEA) as a civilian employee. When the edict came in 2004 to build a carrier for the F-35, Arnold was thrilled. Designing a ship, for an airplane, brought together his two great passions. Arnold poured himself into the design of the ship, spending nights and weekends with comrades at the Navy Yard. After months, he confided to his wife that he was feeling guilty about the time away from her and their two sons. Marine commanders were pushing back fiercely over the way the jet hangar would take away room for Humvees and other equipment the Marines needed. Arnold had grown doubtful that the ship would ever be built. “To say it was contentious would be polite,” said Rear Adm. Fernandez L. “Frank” Ponds, who was then at the Pentagon, overseeing the work of Arnold and his team. Arnold flew to Pascagoula, Miss., to meet with the shipbuilder about another problem: The boat couldn’t be built for the price the Pentagon was willing to pay. As Arnold sat in an airport waiting for a flight back to Washington, the only remaining option became clear: The Navy would have to use a smaller hull, the one it already knew how to build for Marines and their helicopters. And the redesign would have to lose not only the storage space for Humvees but the ability to launch them on smaller boats. “He sits there asking himself, ‘How in the world are we going to be able to do this?’ They wanted an aircraft carrier — a whole hangar — essentially built on top of another ship,” said Gary Warner, then the top Marine working with Arnold on the design. Arnold had, over years of working on five similar ships, famously memorized all 1,588 compartments. A running office game had formed around trying to stump him on random compartments and their frame numbers. In the airport, Arnold sketched out the redesign using blocks of those compartments on a napkin. “He knew the ship so well, he could do this kind of mental gymnastics and move it all around,” Warner said. Back in Washington, Warner watched the napkin go to the design team. The plan went to the Pentagon. The ship was a go, and Arnold was put in charge. As the USS America took shape, colleagues continued to come and go from the chairs surrounding Arnold. Up-and-coming Navy officers occupied the top ranks, usually in four-year rotations. By last September, only Arnold had been in the office long enough to have seen the Navy’s last such ship from conception to commissioning. He was overseeing not just the final work on the USS America but construction of its successor, the USS Tripoli, and the design of a third, a still-unnamed ship known as LHA 8. On the morning of the shooting, all three had arrived at a critical moment. Arnold awoke at 4:30 a.m. and headed to the Navy Yard, where for years he had been among the first to arrive at Building 197. In those first quiet hours there were e-mails to answer about new shaft seal settings. After more than nine years of work, the USS America was scheduled for sea trials in six weeks, and the sprint was on. Already departing for the ship that morning was Arnold’s top deputy, Cmdr. Jon Letourneau — a trip that took him away from his normal spot at a desk outside Arnold’s office. As daylight broke, Arnold’s top assistants on the USS Tripoli and the LHA 8 were arriving for a meeting Arnold had called over contract changes needed urgently on the two. Capt. Chris Mercer, Arnold’s boss, poked his head in just before the 8 a.m. bugle call. At 8:16 a.m., Arnold was alone again in his office as Aaron Alexis fired his first shot a floor above. Most of those outside Arnold’s office dismissed it as something else, maybe a falling table. Inside, the noise passed unnoticed. The phone was ringing. It was Jolanda calling to say hi. The two had just spent Sunday together, comparing floor plans of smaller homes; a downsizing, and eventually retirement, was coming. Less than two minutes into their conversation, a fire alarm began blaring. Two of Arnold’s deputies rushed in. “I have to go,” Arnold told his wife. There were more loud noises that sounded distinctly like gunfire, but echoing, from somewhere. A colleague began urging everyone to evacuate. Arnold and his deputies briefly debated what to do; they would leave, too. They went to grab their IDs and get out. As they split up, Alexis appeared. He rounded the corner, turning first toward Letourneau’s empty desk, then toward Arnold. Alexis’s decision to turn toward Arnold gave Mercer and three others across the hall a split-second to slam the door. They heard Alexis fire and then reload. A bullet ripped through Mercer’s wall. Under his desk, Mercer frantically typed e-mails to a superior, trying to guide police to the shooter. He listened, waiting for a reason to bolt across the hall to check on Arnold. But there was no sound, no call for help, just silence. Then a text message came from a colleague who had crawled into Arnold’s office to take cover. Arnold was shot and not breathing. Alexis returned, pacing the hallways. There was a terrifying wait, a burst of gunfire, then yells of “shooter down.” More than 12 hours later, Jolanda Arnold found herself at Nationals Park, in a throng of strangers, some clutching fountain drinks. All were hoping to reunite with loved ones. She replayed the seconds of her last, mundane phone conversation with her husband, until she was asked to come into the Red Porch restaurant and two stone-faced FBI agents approached. At the docks in Mississippi, Thatcher and Letourneau had spent the day with a list of cellphone numbers for colleagues back at Navy Yard. Thatcher visualized each familiar face and when someone answered, drew a check mark next to their name. After hours, there was just one name without a mark. Every day since has brought a lesson in the ways one man — the one Mercer called his “brains,” the one Thatcher thought of as her “wise uncle” — could be missed. The morning after the shooting, Mercer sat at home in a T-shirt, on the phone with a counselor and three others who had been spared. “The first couple weeks were just ‘talk slow and walk slow,’ ” Mercer said. “I celebrated just getting my uniform on and shining my shoes and getting to work; it was that hard.” Mercer fell into a new routine. At dawn, he would go to the chapel at Navy Yard, say a prayer, sit through counseling, and on the walk to a temporary office, steel himself. He promised he would just focus on the work. Then every day a cruel cycle would repeat. A question would pop into Mercer’s inbox, or a phone call would come from the Pentagon and it would send Mercer’s thoughts to the person he always had turned to for advice, and straight back to the shooting. “This was the most difficult thing I’ve done in my life,” Mercer said. “My deputy and I had to carry on, and we were some of the most impacted people there.” In Pascagoula, once-snappy responses from Building 197 slowed. NAVSEA’s struggles to get back on its feet were obvious to Capt. Robert A. Hall Jr., USS America’s commanding officer in waiting. “It was quite a chunk of time when it was hard to go up there and be complaining,” he said. “But life goes on. You’ve got thousands of people working on a ship. It’s hard to keep going, but I give them credit, they did.” Six weeks after the shooting, Arnold’s team had no choice. Boarding USS America for its sea trials, Mercer slid a photo of Arnold into his testing binder. Over the next week, the ship’s propulsion, navigation and other systems flickered on. There were issues, but all major systems were working. USS America was coming to life. It seemed, they decided, like a natural tribute. Mercer and the crew hung a broom from the yardarm in a riff on Navy lore. Returning to port, they cheered for Arnold and a clean sweep of the tests. Back at the dock, Mercer gathered the crew and reached for a healing moment, but anger seeped through. “He should have been here,” Mercer said. “He just missed it.” Thatcher left distraught and resolved to follow through with a plan she’d once mentioned to Arnold — sail aboard the USS America as it circumnavigated South America. She would be the Navy Yard point person to keep on fixing problems. Near sunset in the South Atlantic, Thatcher paces, flipping through the design issues that still need fixing. And there’s still the most serious problem, the one that had made warning lights illuminate weeks earlier on the bridge. For only the second time, the Navy had built a warship that can operate under hybrid electric power at low speeds to save fuel. The system had worked in sea trials. Thatcher imagined what she could do to hear Arnold’s vote of confidence. She decided to fly an expert aboard. “He used to say — and I liked to hear him say — ‘sounds like you’re doing all the right things, Katie.’ ” After two weeks spent trying to isolate the problem, a Navy helicopter dispatched 100 miles away to Rio de Janeiro that morning had returned with a skateboard-sized control switch. Now waiting for an update from the engine room about the replacement, Thatcher wanders a little out of her way, passing through the hangar Arnold designed. She glances up at the plaque and runs her hand over a black-and-white pin she still wears with the number “197.” Before evening prayer, Thatcher’s phone finally rings. The hybrid engine is working. But there’s a new problem, she’s told: Pressure in the cooling water system is low. It’s another question for Arnold, and another time to wonder: What would he have done? |