The curse of the Tortuga (Pat's ship)

What is going on with this ship?!?!?! Pat has recently left to help out in the Philippines and many "exciting" events have taken place since Saturday when they got on ship. This is from his first email:

"The first day on ship here was without a doubt the most interesting day on ship ever (to include last deployment). To start, the well deck flooded big time and our howitzers and vehicles were all COMPLETELY under water. Once it cleared up there was all sorts of damage. A bunch of the vehicles are now deadlined bc they all have water in their engines. A storage box with a bunch of batteries got water in it and started leaking lithium and all sorts of hazmat so they had to evacuate certain parts of the ship. And then...one of our howitzers burst into flames!!! It was absolutely insane. We didn’t end up going to bed until about 5 in the morning."

And this is from his second email:

"Just to let you know, literally 5 minutes within me hitting “send” on my last email we heard over the speakers that there was a fire in the well deck of the ship….it was one of our vehicles. So, in less than a week on ship we’ve had a howitzer and a vehicle catch on fire on ship while at sea.

Tonight, we ran a man overboard. We all initially thought it was a drill (bc the navy does those all the time) but then they came over with “this is not a drill.” The ship then started going in circles looking for someone who fell off. The ship got full accountability though and everyone thinks it was a bag of trash or something (it was night after all). Overall, it was utter chaos on here for an hr or so bc we all thought someone (possibly one of our Marines) was hurt and struggling to stay up in the ocean. All of these events in the past five days have created more chaos than the entire 6 months on the Cleveland. I don’t know what’s going on and don’t mean to worry you, but it’s been pretty exciting."

So that's all the news here for today! Don't forget to check out his MEU's blog if you want to see pictures. Pat has our camera now, too...so he should be sending some of his own pictures soon. I'll be sure to share!