Jeremy Hanke

Could you talk about how you got started in the Navy and this program?

I want to thank the pastor for the time for me to come out here. I have been in the Navy sixteen years.  I tell you, it depends on what type of ship you’re on, but the ship I was on had about 2,000 Marines. Everything that’s been going on in the news right now is what we have been doing. All you’ve been hearing about is how the United States military, for the last seven years, has been involved in Iraq and Afghanistan.  We don’t really hear about these missions that we’ve done. USS Comfort was a hospital ship, but unfortunately the Comfort doesn’t have the capabilities of the ship I’m on right now which is the NLHD. The Comfort is a big hospital ship, all it does is go out to sea. A few years ago when the tsunami hit, the Comfort was one of the ships that was sent over there. . It couldn’t really get into the country and help. That’s what we were able to do. We were the first ship, that was actually able to launch LCU’s. We were able to launch helicopters-53s, big giant helicopters that the Marine Corp uses. I was able to ride in all this and just go out and help the people and see what it was like.  It was great.

How did you first get interested in helping people like this?

I have worked helping people before in high school and helped out through the church doing volunteer work.  That was an experience that I’ve always done and always enjoyed. When we got off the helicopter in Trinidad,  and I saw those kids running out.  Just seeing their eyes, it was amazing.

Was this a well known mission or was it kept more secretive?

 I printed out a bunch of stuff that I could sit here and talk for four or five hours of everything that we’ve done. I took a bunch of pictures that we had, that people took from the ship and the ones I have taken, and actually made a DVD movie. It’s about fifteen minutes long, I put some music behind it. I want to pass this around if you guys want to take a look at it. It talks about a lot of the stuff that we did. You can actually go on Google to Operation Continuing Promise and there was Commander Ponds.  Normally our operations when we get off the sea are pretty much kept secret.  You can’t let anybody know what you’re doing, for operational security reasons. This deployment though, they wanted everybody to know what we were doing.  So Commander Ponds every night got on the internet, on MySpace, and did a blog and wrote everything The ship, the Air Force, the Marines, and Navy- we had everybody- even Coast Guard; the Canadians were on board, the Germans, the Norwegians all four of our branches were there including the Coast Guard. What he would do is, every night write down in a two page blog everything that his ship had done that day. Whether we were docked in the ship at a country, or out at sea moving to a different country he’s writing this down every single day.

What deployment specifically was special to you?

This deployment was kind of unique because when we left, August sixth it was scheduled to be a four month deployment to go down and stop in eight different countries.  We had scheduled humanitarian projects set up for like 13 or 14 days.  Then the hurricanes hit.  We actually got called away from Columbia to go to Haiti.  We were there for two weeks, then we left to go back to Cuba to get some supplies.  We actually went back to Haiti for another week to finish up our operations. We got pulled away from a country to go help a country that was really devastated that needed help.  We got called there for a reason, knowing that hurricanes happen.  It was a good thing that we were able to get there two days after the hurricane actually hit Haiti.  Otherwise, who knows how long it would have taken for a ship to get down there and for any help to get there.  The other pictures like the one where I’m using a drill, that is in Guyana.  I think that’s the country that I’ll remember the most because most of the projects we did we went out for the day and we came back at night.  They would fly us out there by helicopter and we would work on our projects and then they would fly us back to the ship. We would spend the night on the ship and get up in the morning and go back.  We couldn’t get the ship close enough to where we needed to, so they sent us out for five days.  To actually sleep and work and live in those conditions is, I tell you, it really makes you thankful for what you’ve got here.  They don’t believe in screens, they don’t have screens on their windows.  You noticed in that one picture where I was sleeping on that green cot thing, that was a mosquito net.  They have high cases of malaria there.  My thinking is, just put screens on your windows.  How hard is it to put screens on your windows?  That’s one thing we should’ve done.  You think that they would learn it’s not that expensive. My personal opinion about Haiti is that they should just get everyone out of there.  It’s that bad.  We basically just fly in rice and other food.  Then we help build buildings, hospitals, and schools all over the Caribbean.  When I heard that this ship was going on a South American deployment, I was like, yeah of course.

Did you have any time to just relax and not do work?

Normally it is called a Unitas deployment, and when the ship and the Marines go on a Unitas we go around South America and it’s a fun cruise basically. You make a few stops, you do some tours, you’re shown around by the locals, and then you get back under way and stop in another country a few days later.  It’s basically a tour of South America. You know that’s one thing about the Navy that I’ve enjoyed the last sixteen years is the traveling. The day I get to the ship, and we’re not doing a Unitas; we’re doing a humanitarian cruise. I was confused and kind of asked how many ports are we stopping in? The guys were like, ‘One’. That was Kearsarge.  I didn’t put any pictures in the show about that, but one thing I got to do in Kearsarge is basically a four day, take our shirts off and relax, go out and just enjoy your time. I even gave a tour to a group of people that came on the ship, and come to find out, they were dolphin trainers at the local aquarium in Kearsarge. So they said, since we gave them a tour,they would give us a chance to swim with the dolphins.  That was an experience that I’ll never forget.  That was four days that we basically just got to relax.

After relaxing for four days did you get started on work?

Yeah, right after that we had real tough deployment.  It’s something that’ll be well remembered and the thing is you don’t really hear about this on the news. You know it’s a good thing that we did, I just wish they would have publicized it more and shown the American public all the good that we’re doing instead of the negative.   While doing the Continuing Promise project, there was a hospital where we were building a canteen. We put the walls up, roof, ceiling, wired it, plumbed it, and now it’s all enclosed so when patients and people are going in there they don’t have to worry about mosquitoes.  You know fresh food, it’s chilled the way it’s supposed to be, it’s heated the way it’s supposed to be. Another project we did is where it says Kirsarge School, we actually built a school in Nicaragua, and we built the school from ground up. The country was so impressed with what we had done; they named the school Kirsarge School, after the ship.  You know that was an experience that was really neat. While in the Dominican Republic we just built up another. The clinic had nothing, it had no running water, it had no indoor plumbing, we basically went in there and redid the clinic, and put up walls, plumbed it, and gave them the sanitation that they needed to. You know, so they weren’t huge projects, they were just little projects that got picked out in each country, and like I said we were there for thirteen to fourteen days, and we had a bunch of projects going on at one time. You had the Air Force engineers and the Navy Seabees they were the head people that were going in on the projects. Then us, the Navy people that were stationed aboard the ship we volunteered and got to go on what was called the Comrade projects, and we actually got to go out and do with the projects that we did. The Air Force and the Seabees they’re the ones that stayed out there every night every project that they had, they were out there all the night. What I did in Guiana, slept under the mosquito nets, in every country they stayed out, it was just in Guiana that they let us volunteer and stay out there for five days just because it was so far away. It took almost eight hours to get there just by helicopter, so it was quite a ways, and if they would have flew us back and forth each day, the work would have never gotten done.  But the Seabees and the Air force they actually got to stay in what you might call a hotel in some countries but it wasn’t you know you can see some of the pictures it was… not a hotel that you would think of.

Can you talk more about the conditions in Haiti?

Haiti is one of those countries that, you know I was on a ship four years ago and we did all the same things, with distributing the rice and the rebuilding. I don’t know, they just need to pack up everybody that’s there and move somewhere else, because there is no infrastructure there. I guess right before I left, there was a school that had fallen in a mudslide and there was over 8,000 kids that went missing. I just think that it’s going to be one of those countries that we’re always going to help. Some people over here are saying we need help over here; well we do what we need to do, and part of being the United States is that we need to help out others. Even though our own economy is going down right now, I think it’ll come back up, but at the same time what does the bible say if you can help out you should do it. This deployment fell right into what I wanted to do in high school, like I told my wife, sixteen years of being in the navy and we finally do something like this.

 Thank you, I would also like to thank the Church for supporting my family while I was gone. A lot of the people don’t realize what it’s like  when you’re down in Virginia and ships are getting deployed.  You have that support of the military families.You don’t really have that support up here when someone deploys.  No one really knows and Pastor Rich and the Church have really help out.