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Mercy returns from mission

SAN DIEGO — With scores of friends and relatives cheering from the pier, the hospital ship Mercy nudged into its berth at the Naval Base in San Diego on Thursday, wrapping up a four-month humanitarian deployment to Southeast Asia and the South Pacific.

Hundreds of Navy officers and sailors, nongovernmental medical personnel and civilians who caught a ride from Hawaii stepped off the hospital ship.

Hospital Corpsman 3rd Class Lizet Barboza reunited with her husband, Operations Specialist 2nd Class (SW) Jason Flores. It had been nearly 11 months since the couple had seen each other. Her husband was deployed aboard the transport dock Cleveland when Barboza left with Mercy in May.

Despite the long separation, Barboza was still excited about the missions and the more than 300 patients that she helped support when Mercy and its force of military, government and civilian medical professionals pulled into ports in five countries in this year’s “Pacific Partnership” mission.

One of those nations was Vietnam, where Mercy stopped at Nha Trang and Barboza spent a day painting a women’s clinic.

“The whole mission was very exciting. You saw it in people’s faces. You bring hope. It’s very rewarding,” said Barboza, who worked in the ship’s medical-surgical, gastroenterology and ophthalmology wards. She hopes to get orders to Mercy and deploy on the next humanitarian mission in 2010.

It was the third humanitarian deployment in recent years for Mercy, which in 2005-06 deployed to assist with relief efforts in parts of South Asia after the December 2004 tsunami and earthquake.

On its 2006 deployment, Mercy visited the Philippines, Bangladesh, Indonesia and East Timor in a four-month mission. The Mercy team treated more than 90,000 patients, among them 1,300 surgery patients and 14,000 dental patients, in the region.

It wasn’t all medical. Navy Seabees and civilian engineers worked in 26 civic projects, ranging from utilities and infrastructure to hospitals and schools. Army veterinarians helped local farmers with their livestock and other animals.

The ship’s full operating crew of 68 civil service mariners, led by the ship’s skipper, Capt. Robert Wiley, grew when Mercy deployed. It quickly became a mixed crew. Wiley shuttered his crew’s mess and everyone dined in the larger, military mess decks.

“We all ate together. We all worked together,” said Wiley, who kept a “Skippers Scrivenings” Weblog during the deployment.

The military-civilian force combined under the command of Navy Capt. James Rice, who commands the Military Treatment Facility aboard Mercy. “We’re all humanitarians, and as humanitarians, we want to take care of patients,” Rice said.

The humanitarian help and international experiences of Pacific Partnership, he said, are “why people went into medicine and nursing in the first place.” Often, the villages visited “are not in the normal, beaten path,” he added.

Along with some 400 military medical personnel, medical professionals and college students from several organizations, including Project Hope, East Meets West Foundation, Operation Smile and University of California San Diego’s Pre-Dental Society and Free Dental Clinic came aboard.

Some stayed on for six- or eight-week stretches, joining members of the U.S. Public Health Service and other military medical personnel.

“It was like a huge community,” said Irvin Silverstein, a periodontist and director of the University of California San Diego’s Free Dental Clinic, who also deployed in Mercy’s 2005 mission to tsunami-ravaged Bangladesh. “There’s all these people from all over the world, with a common mission to help humanity. It seems that the Navy has it right on.”

Students and sailors alike often received warm welcomes in rural villages and poor communities desperate for medical and dental support.

“They were some of the most appreciative people we met,” dental student Diana Lin said of villagers she met in Papua New Guinea.

San Diego dentist Sussi Yamaguchi, who volunteers with the clinic, had flown by Navy helicopter with several others for a six-day medical, dental and construction mission to a village in East Timor. The experience aboard the ship — notably the 5:30 a.m. musters — also was memorable.

“I really enjoyed it, taking a peek at Navy life,” Yamaguchi said.

Dental student Sonia Chen loved the sunsets at sea — “you can’t really get that everywhere,” she said.

As sailors and civilians came off the ship, Rear Adm. Christine Hunter welcomed them back. The deployment is an opportunity to build on a “culture of service, to serve humanity, to serve on a larger scale,” said Hunter, who commands Navy Medicine-West and Naval Medical Center-San Diego. About 300 Navy personnel from the medical region deployed aboard Mercy.

Mercy’s mission, following on its previous humanitarian deployments and that of hospital ship Comfort and several other ships, will likely remain strong and a key part of the national maritime strategy.

“We are very proud of what they accomplished,” Hunter said. “Each has been built on prior experience. We do see the mission going on into the future.”

Mercy’s sailors saw firsthand the hard life common in some poorer communities.

“It was a big need,” said Personnel Specialist 1st Class Clyde Johnson, a member of the ship’s crew. “Doing something like this lets you know how important it is to do a service like this. The world gets to see you in a different light.”

Johnson’s previous sea tour came aboard the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln and its extended, 10-month combat tour in 2003-04. This time, his daily grind of largely administrative work got a few breaks. One day, Johnson helped paint a small hospital in East Timor, just as a local woman gave birth.

“That was an experience,” he said.