‘I’ve taken them through the playoffs, he’s taking them to the Super Bowl’: As Bush’s captain prepares to depart, crew prepares for sea duty

With just a few days to go before retiring from his 30-year Navy career, Capt. Robert Aguilar was stepping off the USS George H.W. Bush one day this week as a brand-new sailor was coming aboard for the first time.

“I was thinking, here’s this young sailor coming on board, all wide-eyed and excited, and here I am leaving after another day at the office,” he said.

Aguilar has been thinking a lot about young sailors, since he’s coming to the end of nine months of molding a crew of mostly new sailors in a team that’s ready to sail off.

“When we came out of the yard, about 75% of the crew was first-term sailors,” he said. “There was anxiety about: ‘what does it mean to be a sailor, what does it mean to go to sea.’”

Since then, the Bush has been in an out of port as sailors focused division by division and department by department earning the Navy certifications that they can run the ship. But there’s been more to the past nine months than that.

“It’s sailorization — knowing what it means to go to sea,” Aguilar said.

“It’s not just knowing your job. It’s knowing your way around, treating everybody with dignity and respect ... getting comfortable with less privacy and not all the comforts of shore life,” he said.

Some of that means getting used to sharing berthing space with dozens of others, or going without time on the internet or social media, or fitting in personal needs like laundry and showers and haircuts or simple down time into the busy schedule of a warship at sea.

“It’s knowing you can count on another sailor, on the other side of the ship, seven decks down doing his or her job, and them knowing you will do yours,” Aguilar said.

Early worries have eased, too.

“When I walk around the ship, I see a crew that’s confident, that’s increasingly excited and at a high level of focus because this is really why they joined the Navy,” he said.

And while Bush, its airwing and the ships in its strike group will later this month head out for their final tests before deploying — their COMPTUEX, or Composite Training Unit Exercise — “they’re ready to deploy right now, to go anywhere and do any mission we’re called upon to do.”

That’s the way the Bush’s new combat systems department head, Cmdr. Karrie Lang, reads things too. Her previous assignment was with the Norfolk-based Carrier Strike Group 4, which designs COMPTUEX challenges for carrier strike groups, including the ones the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower and USS Harry S. Truman strike groups completed last year before their deployments last year and this year.

“CSG-4 designs the scenarios, plays the role of exercise control, and at some points in the exercise will have a team playing a live, thinking adversary for scenarios that are totally unscripted,” Lang said.

“The scenarios will be dynamic and no exercise is ever the same. Each is more complex and more challenging than the one before ... As we up our game, CSG-4 will respond in kind by elevating the level of difficulty of the scenario,” she said.

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Lang’s combat systems department sailors are responsible for Bush’s radars, self-defense systems, radio gear and internal communications systems.

After working with them for the past few months, “from where I sit, it appears the stars are aligning for us to have the opportunity to advance the pace in which we do that during this upcoming exercise,” she said.

Change — like the arrival of the new sailor Aguilar saw boarding Bush to report for duty, or Lang’s shift from designing and acting as the adversary in a COMPTUEX to leading a department on Bush — is constant on a carrier.

During the Bush’s most recent time at sea, Aguilar’s relief came along.

“He didn’t need to do that to know about being a captain, he knows that. But I wanted him to get to know and trust the crew and the crew to know and trust him,” Aguilar said. “I wanted him to trust what I and the crew have done to be ready for what’s next ... I’ve taken them through the playoffs, he’s taking them to the Super Bowl.”

So when Aguilar hands over command next week, and walks off the Bush for the last time, “I know I’ll be feeling a lot. I’ll want to turn around for one last look. But the tradition is that you don’t. And I won’t.”

Dave Ress, 757-247-4535, dress@dailypress.com