DATE: Sunday, April 27, 1997                TAG: 9704270043

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B1   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: BY EARL SWIFT, STAFF WRITER 

DATELINE: NORFOLK                           LENGTH:  117 lines

DEPLOYMENT OF JFK GIVES SOME NORFOLK SAILORS A REST MED-BOUND GROUP IS MOSTLY FROM FLA.

It wasn't long ago that confidence was a rare commodity aboard the aircraft carrier John F. Kennedy.

Their ship's guts sliced and strewn by an overhaul, the crew watched the Philadelphia Navy Yard shut down around them, looked on as the yard's workers walked away in droves from dead-end jobs.

Struggling to do much of the work themselves, the JFK's sailors saw the overhaul so shortened that their ship left the yard with its systems in disarray.

Then came the capper: Though the JFK was a ``reserve'' carrier, its chief role that of training sailors and aviators, its ranks learned they would join the rotation of East Coast ships bound for the Mediterranean. Soon.

This week, the big flattop pulls out of Mayport, Fla., on that deployment, leading a battle group of 13 ships eastward, seven of them from Norfolk.

Here and in Florida, scenes played in Navy towns for half a century will be staged anew, as the service continues its tradition ofdispatching battle groups halfway around the world, and those left behind bid farewells that must last six months to their sailors.

But gone are the days when the JFK's brass worried about Tuesday's departure.

The crew of ``Big John,'' they say, has surmounted myriad challenges. It has finished the work left undone in the yard and put its ship back together. More importantly, it has pulled itself together, as well.

``My personal opinion is that this deployment is the best thing that could have happened to this aircraft carrier,'' said Rear Adm. Stanley W. Bryant, the commander of Carrier Group 4.

The JFK's commanding officer, Capt. Edward J. Fahy, agreed. ``They had to work hard to make things happen, to train the crew and get combat-ready,'' he said of his ship's company and air wing.

``This is the most modern aircraft carrier in the Navy today.''

The crew's heroics in turning the JFK around in time for Tuesday's departure have been a point of pride for the Navy, and they have earned buckets of ink from service-oriented newspapers and magazines.

They also have greatly pleased hundreds of families to the north.

Long accustomed to dominating the Atlantic Fleet's deployments, Hampton Roads may remember this week's departures more for the goodbyes it didn't have to say than for anything else.

For while six of the 13 ships leaving with the carrier hail from the Norfolk Naval Station and Little Creek Amphibious Base - along with a seventh that left Norfolk two weeks early - most of the sailors shipping out are based in Mayport, home to the JFK and five other ships making the trip.

The carrier alone will carry more Florida sailors to the Mediterranean and often-volatile Persian Gulf than all of the Norfolk-based ships combined.

And while a squadron of Norfolk-based early-warning planes and two squadrons of Virginia Beach-based F-14 Tomcat fighters will join the flotilla in the Atlantic this week, the bulk of the aircraft headed east are based in Florida as well.

The assault ship Kearsarge, the largest of the Norfolk ships, pulled out of town April 15 to relieve the homebound Nassau, another Norfolk-based amphibious ship monitoring the unrest in Zaire from off the African coast.

Along with a contingent of Marines it picked up on the way from Camp Lejeune, N.C., the 4-year-old Kearsarge carries more than 1,100 Hampton Roads sailors.

It also leads an amphibious ready group capable of putting Marines ashore by air or sea: The 610-foot-long dock landing ship Carter Hall, leaving Little Creek Tuesday on its first lengthy cruise, and the Ponce, a Norfolk-based landing platform dock that served off Liberia during the disquiet there last summer.

The ``gators,'' as the Navy calls its amphibious ships, will stop off the North Carolina coast for their shares of the 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit before heading east across the Atlantic.

By that time, the JFK's battle group will be steaming far ahead. The carrier's flight deck and hangar bay will already be loaded with the jets, prop planes and helicopters of its air wing.

They'll include the E-2C Hawkeyes, air crews and support staff of Airborne Early Warning 124, based at Norfolk Naval Air Station, and two Tomcat squadrons - VF-14 and VF-41 - from Oceana Naval Air Station in Virginia Beach.

Sticking close by the carrier will be Norfolk's Arctic, a 753-foot fast combat support ship that dishes out ``beans, bullets and black oil'' to the other ships and the carrier's aircraft.

Also cruising nearby will be the guided missile cruiser Thomas S. Gates, a Norfolk-based Ticonderoga-class warship that boasts the Navy's vaunted Aegis weapons system for finding, identifying, tracking and aiming at targets around it, whether in the air or on or under the sea.

The battle group's Norfolk component rounds out with two Los Angeles-class fast attack submarines, the nuclear-powered Jacksonville and Albany.

In mid-May, not long after sailing past Gibraltar into the Mediterranean, the ships will meet up with their outbound counterparts - the carrier Theodore Roosevelt and its battle group, on station since early December and now pointed home.

This mid-sea ``turnover'' - in which the carriers will sail side-by-side while JFK officers chopper to the ``T.R.'' for the unofficial lowdown on upcoming ports and problems - is eagerly anticipated by both crews.

For the JFK and its battle group, the event marks an end to months of drilling and fine-tuning, and the beginning of the mission for which the crew has trained.

For the T.R., it's a last piece of business before the ship heads for Norfolk and an ecstatic pierside homecoming that promises to contrast sharply with its dreary departure just before Thanksgiving. The JFK will not experience that kind of welcome until October.

The Norfolk carrier and its battle group are scheduled to get home May 22.

``The challenge for the next month is to avoid that problem of complacency,'' Capt. David Architzel, the T.R.'s commanding officer, said as his ship steamed west across the Mediterranean last week.

``It's been a great cruise,'' he said. ``I've been really proud of the crew and the way they pulled together. They're seamless now.''

The officers of the JFK are already talking that way about their sailors: In some ways, the deployment may be easier than the ordeal the ship has undergone getting ready for it.

``I think initially it did kind of shock the crew,'' Carrier Group 4's Bryant said of the revelation that the JFK would deploy.

``But you'd never know that they had to go through some mental metamorphosis to get to where they got to.'' MEMO: Staff writer Dave Mayfield contributed to this report. KEYWORDS: U.S. NAVY U.S.S. JOHN F. KENNEDY

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