THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, June 26, 1996 TAG: 9606260404
SECTION: MILITARY NEWS PAGE: A10 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY EARL SWIFT, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: 65 lines
For several decades, The Virginian-Pilot has faithfully reported the departure of Norfolk-based Navy ships bound for the Mediterranean Sea.
Its reporters and photographers have captured the tearful goodbyes that accompany six-month separations, written of the challenges faced by the families left behind and returned to the piers to welcome the ships home.
But it has spent little time reporting on the lives of the several thousand Hampton Roads residents who, at any one time, are aboard ships scattered across the globe.
Readers with loved ones at sea have had to rely on occasional, hastily scribbled, shipboard letters for insight into how things were going and where their sailors were.
Beginning this week, we hope to change that.
With the Enterprise Battle Group's deployment, we'll embark on a six-month experiment to put you in closer touch with the ships and sailors in the Med.
We'll also bring a little bit of Hampton Roads to the fleet.
The experiment takes three forms. First, in Friday's paper you'll find a large, color map of the Med. A week into the deployment, we'll publish the Enterprise's location for you to track on the map - and we'll continue doing so every Sunday, Wednesday and Friday.
Barring the unforeseen - war or a communications satellite breakdown, say - we'll run the carrier's position in a box on page A2. Hang the map on the 'fridge, and you'll be able to follow the battle group's biggest ship on its travels.
Needless to say, this system won't reflect the location of every ship in the group: Smaller vessels and the group's two submarines may be dozens, perhaps even hundreds, of miles away. But if this experiment proves successful, we may be able to develop a way to keep track of more than one ship at a time.
The experiment's second face will begin appearing on this page next month: A column, written by a crew member of one of the group's ships, aiming to reflect the texture of life at sea.
This won't recite the nuts-and-bolts of the battle group's mission, nor America's defense policy in the Med. Think unofficial. It'll read more like a letter home.
Each time we run it - it'll come most weeks, though we can't guarantee its appearance every week of the deployment - it'll be marked with the battle group's seal. Be on the lookout for it.
Finally, we're putting the finishing touches on a service that we hope will relieve some of the uncertainty, some of the homesickness and some of the monotony of long weeks at sea.
To keep sailors in touch with news at home, we're inventing a digested form of The Pilot, to which we're adding an abbreviated version of Flagship, the Navy's official newspaper in Hampton Roads.
We'll use the Internet to zap this combined digest, called Pilot On Board, to the Enterprise. There, crew members will print it, copy it and distribute it twice a week to the ranks as part of the ship's newspaper, The Big E Shuttle.
At least one other ship, the destroyer Mitscher, will get Pilot On Board via the Internet. The Enterprise will get copies of the digest to the ships in the group that don't receive it directly.
Taken together, we're hoping these efforts will narrow the distance between our far-flung sailors and their home port.
But we won't stop here. We'd welcome any suggestions you have about how to do a better job. MEMO: Earl Swift is a staff writer and Military Team leader for The
Virginian-Pilot. by CNB