Mass Maritime cadet relates Haiti effort

Source: Cape Cod Times

BUZZARDS BAY — He could see fires burning in the city, cranes tipped over in the water and cargo floating past his ship. But when shipmates saw what looked to be a body in the water off Haiti, Devin Tetlaff looked away, reports the Cape Cod Times.

"I didn’t exactly want to see that," the 21-year-old Massachusetts Maritime Academy cadet said. "I kept myself from that."

Tetlaff, a junior at the academy, was onboard the USNS Grasp, a ship operated by the Military Sealift Command, doing his commercial shipping assignment.

Cadets from Massachusetts Maritime are assigned to various ships to get the experience at sea needed to work in the maritime industry when they graduate, Adm. Richard Gurnon, the academy's president, said. Several days into Tetlaff's assignment in January, the Grasp was diverted from Belize to help with the rescue-and-relief effort in earthquake-stricken Haiti. The ship arrived six days after the quake.

"There was a lot of devastation," said Tetlaff, a graduate of Sandwich High School who lives in town with his father and sister. "It was a complete disaster."

Tetlaff spent 45 days in the Haitian port offering support to the Army divers onboard whose job it was to aid in the rebuilding of a pier. The cadet, an engineering student, even received an award for excellence for his role in fashioning scrapers from used materials on the ship. The scrapers were used by divers to remove marine growth from the piers so they could be rebuilt by an underwater reconstruction team.

"There was no True Value Hardware around," Tetlaff said.

Though much of his time was spent on the Grasp, there were several occasions when he did get off the ship and had a chance to see the crumpled buildings and warped pavement up close. Though some of the Haitians gave him dirty looks, others spoke openly about the poverty and tough times they faced even before the earthquake, he said. Others were already busy trying to sell their wares to Americans working in the relief effort.

"It was amazing just to see the fact that they were trying to get on with their lives just days after the earthquake," he said.

During one visit off the ship, Tetlaff was with a group that handed out stuffed animals and body wash at a United Nations hospital.

The Military Sealift Command operates approximately 110 noncombatant, civilian-crewed ships that replenish U.S. Navy ships. This year alone, the company will hire as many as 20 MMA graduates at starting salaries in excess of $60,000, Gurnon said.

"Sealift command is the federal government's equivalent of UPS," Gurnon said. "It delivers stuff all over the world in support of the military."

During the Haiti mission, the Grasp was one of 21 ships deployed in Military Sealift Command's response to the disaster.

Cape Codders might recall that it was divers from the Grasp — while it was still a U.S. Navy ship — that found John F. Kennedy Jr.'s plane after it crashed off Martha's Vineyard in 1999.

Though not all of the winter commercial assignments were as dramatic as Tetlaff's, they are all important to the academy's philosophy of "learn, do, learn," Gurnon said.

"This provides all of our students with amazing experiences that add to their classroom confidence," he said. "It allows them to relate what happens outside the campus to what's being taught in the classroom."

A majority of students recently returned to the classroom from sea term in Caribbean aboard the T.S. Kennedy, but others spent time in far away places such as Alaska and Australia.

All of it makes for interesting discussions in the school's classrooms, Gurnon said, though it's hard to dispute that Tetlaff has the most dramatic tales to tell.

"It is certainly a story I could tell my kids down the line," Tetlaff said.