‘Dawn Light’ on Water

Review by Bill Doughty––

Diane Ackerman shares this with us:

In Ireland there are many names for rain depending on the temperature, duration, or season.  Germans use words “designed to capture the sound of rain: pladdern (heavy rain with big drops), prasseln (heavy rain but smaller drops), giessen (pouring rain), sprühen (spray-like rain), trop fern (dripping).” “Hawaiians require over a hundred names for rain, including kolele ua, a light moving rain; ‘olulo, a storm beginning out at sea; and Kahio o ke aka, rain that’s so beautiful it must be the adornment of the gods.”

Word artist Diane Ackerman writes about rain, clouds, seas, skies, and seasons –– and "the experience of being alive –– in her radiant “Dawn Light: Dancing with Cranes and Other Ways to Start the Day” (W. W. Norton, 2009). Among other topics and musings, she interprets Claude Monet and impressionism, focusing on Monet’s Impression, Sunrise.

“Surely Monet has been up for hours painting this watercolor sky in full cloud regatta. He limned many weatherscapes, but like the other Impressionists, preferred the sparkling blue skies of early morning when the air is tranquil. One can tell the time of day by the small puffy clouds that stalk their paintings, sometimes with wispy clouds higher above. Even in Paris, where pollution chalked the view, they tended to paint nearly empty skies with small well-behaved cumuli that haven’t had time yet to swell in the hot humid afternoon haze.”

Impressionism was Monet’s, Renoir’s, and Pissarro’s ways of expressing life as they perceived it in the moment.

“The experience of being alive is only one impression after another, a feast for the senses in ever-changing light, one now seamlessly flowing into the next moment of being. How do you explore the texture of being alive? In Impression, Sunrise, Monet paints the lavish spell of the senses detained by a pink and blue sunrise, colors that create purple where they meet, in a softly puzzling war of blue and red that’s not so much hue as emotion, as the eye struggles to make sense of it but pleasures in the ambiguity, and where a slightly out-of-focus fisherman floats in his own reality (no doubt occasionally eyeing the painter on the dock), and the rising sun is a watery fireball at the end of a long path of copper cobblestones.”

The harbor, Ackerman notes, was painted “at dawn, on a misty morning, when sun and sky shone equally luminous and a simple squiggle of black was enough to create a fisherman in the foreground.”

One of Monet’s influences was the eccentric nature-centric Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai. Monet supposedly happened to see Hokusai’s work in a food shop in Amsterdam, “where cheap paper decorated with Japanese prints was being used to wrap purchases.”

Hokusai was born in then closed-to-the-world Japan in 1760 and produced his most iconic works late in life as Japan was about to be opened to the world.

“It was in his seventies that he began the stunning series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, which also included The Great Wave off Kanagawa, probably the most reproduced print on earth, a scene of turbulent foam-tipped waves of cyan and pale blue clawing at three small fishing boats in which frightened men frantically bend to their oars. In the flat golden sky, billowy clouds promise a placid morning, and a tiny Mount Fuji sits calmly in the background. It’s the foreground that holds all the drama, though I think most people miss the nearly capsized swift boats that carry fresh foodstuffs at dawn to the Tokyo markets from nearby villages. That the mood of the ocean and the sky don’t match –– galloping chariots of carnal blue under a fair-weather sky –– creates a sinister beauty that alarms the senses at the same time that it reassures the psyche. To the men, the wave is much taller than the volcanic mountain, a perspective that fits. With a faint echo of the fishermen, we’re swept up onto the waves, knowing that at any moment the waves are going to crash.”

USNWC Color Guard at M.C. Perry statue, Newport, RI. (Haley M Nace)

Note: Hokusai was a teenager living in feudal Japan when America’s founders declared independence from Imperial England. He died in 1849, three years before President Millard Fillmore assigned U.S. Navy Commodore Matthew C. Perry the mission of sailing to Japan to open the country to trade with the West. The Convention of Kanagawa (the same Kanagawa in Hokusai’s iconic work) was signed in 1854. Monet was a teenager in 1854; he painted Impression, Sunrise in 1872.

Commodore M.C. Perry (namesake of the high school at Marine Corps Air Station Iwakuni, my alma mater, by the way), is honored by Japanese and American friendship groups each year both in the United States, particularly in Newport, Rhode Island, Perry’s hometown, and in Shimoda, Japan, at the Black Ship (Kurofune) Festival. Marines and Sailors often participate in the annual festival with parades, concerts, school visits, and other community outreach events.

U.S. Marines from Camp Fuji and Sailors from USS Stethem (DDG-63) march in a parade at the Black Ship Festival in Shimoda, May 18, 2019 (MC2 T. Fraser)

In “Dawn Light” Diane Ackerman connects seasons and cultures, people and animals, prose and poetry, sound and silence, nature and nurture, and cold perception with warm imagination.

Ultimately this is a book about literal and figurative enlightenment in Ackerman’s world, hoping for a better appreciation and respect for life, nature, and our precious time alive in the cosmos. A time for Love.

Ackerman shares her views as well as those of poets who appear throughout the book. She also includes more than a dozen beautiful full-color photos and prints.

Returning to the recurring images of water and the sea, as well as West (Monet) meets East (Hokusai), here are Ackerman’s choices for epigraphs to this book:

This grand show is eternal. It is always sunrise

somewhere; the dew is never all dried at once;

a shower is forever falling; vapor is ever rising.

Eternal sunrise, eternal sunset, eternal dawn and

gloaming, on sea and continents and islands,

each in its turn, as the round earth rolls.

–– JOHN MUIR

This world of ours ––

To what shall I compare it?

To the white waves of a boat

That disappear without a trace

As it rows away at dawn.

–– SHAMI MANSEI, EIGHTH CENTURY

This is a book for anyone who'd care to wake up to the experience of being alive.

Spectators observe Shimoda City's firework show during the 83rd annual Shimoda Black Ship festival, May 21, 2022. The Shimoda Black Ship Festival celebrates Commodore Matthew C. Perry's arrival to Japan, Japan's subsequent opening to international trade, and the U.S.-Japan alliance. (MC1 Kaleb J. Sarten)

(A nice accompaniment to this post: Neil Young & Crazy Horse's new album, "World Record.")

‘Zookeeper’s Wife’ and Shipwrecked Souls

Review by Bill Doughty––

In a village a circus lion suddenly died…

“The circus director asked a poor old Jewish man if he would pretend to be the lion, and the man agreed since he needed the money. The director said: ‘All you have to do is wear the lion’s fur and sit in the cage, and people will believe you’re a lion.’ And so the man did, muttering to himself, ‘What strange jobs I’ve had in my life,’ when his thoughts were interrupted by a noise. He turned just in time to see another lion creeping into his cage and fixing him with a hungry stare. Trembling, cowering, not knowing how to behave himself, the man did the only thing he could think of –– vociferously chant a Hebrew prayer. No sooner had he uttered the first desperate words, Shema Yisroel (Hear O Israel) … than the other lion lined in with adonai elohenu (The Lord our God), and the two would-be lions finished the prayer together.”

Zookeeper Jan Żabiński and real lion.

It’s an old folk story that Diane Ackerman heard as a young girl and shares in an introductory Author’s Note. And it’s a tale that became “oddly relevant” to the true story she tells in her amazing book, where art and storytelling come alive to become history.

“The Zookeeper’s Wife: A War Story” (W. W. Norton,  2007) is based on a true story in which brave people in Poland risked everything to help protect Polish Jews in World War II from the Nazis and the Holocaust. Like the lion-man in the folk story, “shipwrecked souls” eventually make their way to a zoo outside Warsaw for sanctuary.

And regarding relevance: Though the book was written in 2007 –– one year before Russia's Vladimir Putin invaded Georgia, seven years before he invaded Crimea, and 15 years before he began waging war in Ukraine –– readers in 2022 will likely think of Poland's role in Putin's current war in Ukraine as they read about what happened in Warsaw eight decades ago.

At first Ackerman lulls readers with her depiction of an idyllic human-animal bond, one of understanding, love, and respect for life. Innocence. Nature. Nurture. Peace. The pursuit of happiness in pre-war Warsaw. Ackerman beautifully depicts that world before the storm clouds of war start to destroy the way of life of the Żabiński family.

Antonina and family pet badger

Antonina Żabiński is the Zookeeper’s wife and a hero of this tale along with her husband, Jan, who served secretly with the Polish Underground to fight the Nazis. Ackerman dedicated the book “For Antonina and her family, human and animal.” The Żabiński matriarch helps manage the improbable zoo as well as schemes to hide and feed Jews they call “Guests.”

With the arrival of the Nazis, the sometimes-normal-occasional-calm of the zoo is shattered. Fascism brings iron-fisted and racist “law and order.” The Nazis build walls and deny freedom based on differences of religion and ethnicity. Casual cruelty leads inexorably to calculated genocide.

Ackerman depicts the banal evil of Adolf Hitler, Heinrich Himmler, Hermann Goring, Eugene Fischer, and others who valued the lives of other animals over the humans they condemned to camps, ovens, and mass graves.

Ackerman writes in a “narrative history” style. Her embellishments are sometimes well beyond David McCullough’s interpretive style. Yet, like McCullough, she imparts cold hard history. In "The Zookeeper's Wife" she builds her storytelling around actual facts published or contained in interviews, news stories, and diaries, including the diary of Antonina.

“‘How can this barbarity be happening in the twentieth century?!!!!!!’ Antonina asked herself, an outcry of disbelief with no fewer than six exclamation points.” Antonina saw the war as a return to the Dark Ages. She and her family counter their horrors with efforts to help those who were targeted by the Nazis for destruction. Along with housing and feeding castaways, the Żabińskis participated in a plot to feed Jewish residents in the Ghetto.

The Warsaw zoo helped make animal-human connections in 1938, before the arrival of the Nazis.

After most of the animals in their zoo were removed, released, or killed by the Nazis, the Żabińskis turned their enterprise into a pig farm. They secretly transported meat into the Ghetto. “If it felt a little off-color giving Jews pork, a taboo food, dietary laws had long since been waived, and everyone was grateful for protein, a scarce gift on either side of the wall,” Ackerman observes.

Such humanism and such audacity –– helping targeted victims of the Nazis –– was extremely risky.

“Unlike other occupied countries, where hiding Jews could land you in prison, in Poland harboring a Jew was punishable by immediate death to the rescuer and also to the rescuer’s family and neighbors, in a death-frenzy deemed ‘collective responsibility.’ Nonetheless, many hospital workers disguised adult Jews as nurses, drugged small children to quiet them before smuggling them out in knapsacks, and planted people in funeral carts under a heap of corpses. Many Christian Poles hid Jewish friends for the whole length of the war, even though it meant reduced rations and relentless vigilance and ingenuity. Any extra food entering the house, unfamiliar silhouettes, or whispers seeping from a cellar or closet might inspire a visiting neighbor to notify the police or tip off the city’s underbelly of blackmailers. The wayfarers often spent years in the dark, barely able to move, and when they finally emerged, unfolding their limbs, their weak muscles failed and they needed to be carried like a ventriloquist’s dummies.”

Diane Ackerman

Ackerman, author of “The Whale by Moonlight,” “Natural History of the Senses,” and “Dawn Light,” writes with heartbreaking brilliance of “The unbearable weight of Ghetto life.” Not surprisingly, her words include these metaphors of nature and the sea.

“During this time of seismic upheaval, more and more Ghetto dwellers washed up on the deck of the villa, arriving weatherbeaten, ‘like shipwrecked souls,’ Antonina wrote in her diary. ‘We felt that our house wasn’t a light, flimsy boat dancing on high waves, but a Captain Nemo’s submarine gliding through deep ocean on its journey to a safe port.’ Meanwhile, the war storm blew violently, scaring all, and ‘casting a shadow on the lives of our Guests, who fled from the entrance of crematoriums and the thresholds of gas chambers,’ needing more than refuge. ‘They desperately needed hope that a safe haven even existed, that the war’s horrors would one day end,’ while they drifted along in the strange villa even its owners referred to as an ark.”

Navy readers and their families who choose to read this book will identify with the core values of the Żabiński family: honor, courage, and commitment.

There is a familiar ethos in the character of the men, women, and children who participated in rescuing victims of the Nazis. Ackerman writes:

“Rescuers tended to be decisive, fast-thinking, risk-taking, independent, adventurous, openhearted, rebellious, and usually flexible –– able to switch plans, abandon habits, or change ingrained routines at a moment’s notice. They tended to be nonconformists, and though many rescuers held solemn principles worth dying for, they didn’t regard themselves as heroic. Typically, one would say, as Jan did: ‘I only did my duty –– if you can save somebody’s life, it’s your duty to try.’ Or: ‘We did it because it was the right thing to do.'"

Antonina had to deal with Nazis who invaded her home and threatened her; then she had to confront Russians who came to liberate Poland but tried to take what wasn’t theirs. Her inner strength, voice, and instincts proved to be all too powerful.

This is another treasured find I discovered in a used book store. It is also a book that gives a hopeful view of the human spirit, strength in resilience, and the power of righteousness in time of war.

Ackerman and W. W. Norton include comprehensive “details,” a bibliography, and index. The paperback version I scored comes with a “reading group guide” and list of other books with similar group guides. Blurbs are from an impressive list of reviewers, with standouts for me by Dava Sobel (“Longitude”), Jared Diamond (“Guns, Germs, and Steel”), and Donna Seaman of Los Angeles Times.

The Żabińskis in Warsaw, Poland, saved 300 Jews.

As of the autumn of 2022, Poland has accepted at least 1.4 million refugees who fled Ukraine due to Putin’s war and campaign of terrorism against civilians. This week, during a Russian missile onslaught against Ukraine, a Ukrainian defensive missile exploded on a grain farm in the rural village of Przewodow, five miles within Poland's border, killing two people. NATO nations, including the United States, met to consider additional options to deal with Russia’s continued aggression.

USS Chincoteague, ‘Sailing Home’

Review by Bill Doughty––

They were dead in the water. Their seaplane-tender ship suffered major damage after a bomb with a delayed action fuse penetrated the super structure and deck. The bomb had detonated in the after engine room, killing Sailors there. Imperial Japanese bombers came back time after time. But “whistling death” Marine Corsairs came to the rescue, chasing the enemy away from the crippled AVP-24, saving the sailors and their ship. (Happy Birthday, United States Marine Corps!)

The harrowing tale is told in “USS Chincoteague: The Ship that Wouldn’t Sink” by Frank D. Murphy (Murphy Books, 1995).

Murphy wrote the short autobiography for his grandchildren, but it’s clear he also wrote it for his former shipmates and for his beloved ship.

Murphy in Boot Camp, 1942

Murphy grew up, one of eleven children –– in Sarles, North Dakota –– in another era: no indoor plumbing, shoeshines, fifty-cent haircuts, and hitchhiking. He traveled and worked as a teenager between North Dakota, Montana, and Washington State, wanting to escape an abusive father.

After attempting to enlist in the Marine Corps but being rejected due to a heart murmur, or “mummer” as he calls it, he joined the Navy and went to boot camp in 1942.

Murphy describes visiting Pearl Harbor aboard Chincoteague (AVP-24), crossing the Equator, and dropping Marines off at Espiritu before heading to the Santa Cruz Islands and Saboe Bay, Vanikoro Island. He and his shipmates arrived there the day before his 19th birthday.

For the young men who fought in the Pacific, like generations everywhere who go to war, the experience is tattooed on their souls.

Such was certainly the case for Frank Murphy.

“I can still remember those bombs coming out of these bomb bays. They looked like capsules when they first started out at about 30,000 feet. They got bigger and bigger as they got closer and closer. The screaming of those bombs scared me so bad that to this day I hate the sound of sirens and screaming fireworks.”

A squadron of PBYs prepare to take off from an island in the Pacific to attack Imperial Japan.

Murphy explains the important mission of a seaplane tender, to support PBY patrol bombers. The book opens with a moving description of how the “Chinc” rescued an airman from a Peleliu-based B-29 that had gone down in choppy shark-infested waters. A boatswain’s mate from Chincoteague dove into the sea and swam “with the speed of an Olympic swimmer” to rescue the exhausted airman.

The book, which I was lucky enough to find in a Salvation Army store, is signed by the author. Murphy dedicates his tribute to USS Chincoteague “to the 250 crewmen and officers of the USS Chincoteague and especially to those who lost their lives.” 

What Murphy’s thin book lacks in polish, it makes up with its first-person, eyewitness account and love for his shipmates and ship.

Chincoteague serves with USCG in 1964

Murphy includes a brief description of what happened to the Barnegat-class AVP-25 after the war, including stints in the U.S. Coast Guard, Vietnam (as RVNS Ly Thuong Kiet), and Philippines (where it was named BRP Andres Bonifacio). The ship was finally sold for scrap in 2003. Murphy died ten years later in early 2013, nearly ten years ago. His obituary reads, in part, “After six years in the Navy, Frank returned to North Dakota and worked for the Great Northern Railroad, later as a conductor for SP&S in Wishram, WA and the Burlington Northern Railroad in Vancouver, WA. He retired after 36 years. On Jan. 1, 1951, Frank met Carol Mortinson and they were happily married, for 61 years. They enjoyed traveling, especially to Hawaii.”

In “USS Chincoteague: The Ship that Wouldn’t Sink,” Murphy includes this poem written in 1942 by another Sailor who served in the war, Sherman Walgren, aboard USS Northhampton. Walgren’s verses must have made their rounds to other ships and WWII veterans, and Murphy undoubtedly identified with the sentiments in the poem.

'Sailing Home'

What is it the billowing waves impart,

and repeat and repeat with each dash

What is the pounding in my heart?

I'm sailing home, at last.

The salt spray stings on the naked cheek,

and the wind sings in the mast,

but it only sings because it knows,

I'm sailing home, at last.

Was it centuries since we sailed away

Out of the harbor there,

or was it only yesterday

I don't know, nor care.

For gone are the lonely nights and the days

mid tropical isles alone

and gone is the hunger countenanced there,

At last I'm sailing home.

And tho the sailor sails the seas

and in distant places roam

There is no "call" that's quite so sweet

as the call "I'm Sailing Home”

–– Sherman Walgren, May 1942, aboard USS Northampton

For a fuller description of the Chinc and its fate, I recommend the Last Stand Zombie Island website. Navy History and Heritage Command has great information, including a damage report of USS Chincoteague. And, of course, Wikipedia has a robust account of the ship’s history.

Stavridis on Crucial Crucible of Decision

Review by Bill Doughty––

Admiral James Stavridis (USN, Ret.) offers key lessons for Sailors and Marines in “To Risk It All: Nine Conflicts and the Crucible of Decision” (Penguin Press, 2022). Most of the stories will be familiar to readers of Stavridis or his recommended reading list, but one story –– recent and still painful –– is presented with a personal and unique perspective only Stavridis could achieve.

“The Red Flare” describes the crucible faced by Navy Capt. Brett Crozier, former CO of USS Theodore Roosevelt (CVN 71). Crozier was fired for the way he responded to an outbreak of COVID-19 aboard TR in the early months of the pandemic. At that time there were more questions than answers, and self-serving politics delayed a proper national response. (We cover Crozier’s challenge and legacy in several previous Navy Reads posts.)

Stavridis begins The Red Flare by recounting his relationship with Crozier in the final days of Libyan intervention during Operation Odyssey Dawn in 2011 and subsequently as part of the NATO joint task force for Operation Unified Protector when Stavridis became Supreme Allied Commander. Crozier was considered “a talented and quite extraordinary officer.”

Crozier’s job was target selector or “targeteer,” responsible for carefully deciding how to maximize effectiveness while minimizing collateral damage and death to local citizens when planning precision-guided-air-to-ground strikes. Crozier’s decision-making during the Libya conflict was done in a pressure-cooker cauldron of international media and chain-of-command scrutiny, according to Stavridis:

“In the end, Crozier and his team planned and executed 218 air taking orders (ATOs), mammoth action orders that plan out the complex movements of aircraft in combat zones. NATO aircraft flew over 26,500 flights, including 9,700 that attacked ground targets and destroyed over 5,900 military assets, all while deconflicting operations with over 6,700 humanitarian aid flights and ground movements. And they did all this with the lowest level of collateral damage in the history of air operations. It was a stunningly successful military campaign, and Crozier’s part in it was rewarded with two significant medals: one from NATO and one from the United States. I thought then that he’d surely go on to an admiral’s stars, and over the next several years I watched his steady progress toward that goal…”

Then-Adm. James Stavridis tours NHHC, Dec. 7, 2012. (MC2 G. Morrisette)

After commanding the U.S. Seventh Fleet’s flagship, USS Blue Ridge (LCC-19), Crozier took the helm of the mighty TR.* During a WestPac cruise, which included a visit to Vietnam, a few members of the crew contracted COVID, and as can be expected on any ship, it spread fast. Crozier tried to get authorization to offload sick and infected Sailors while maintaining enough crew to remain combat-ready.

Frustrated by a lack of action and assistance from higher-ups, he sent a “red flare” message for help. The trouble was, in error, he sent the message as an unclassified email, and he did not include a key leader in his chain of command.

Crozier wrote, “We are not at war. Sailors do not need to die. If we do not act now, we are failing to properly take care of our most trusted asset –– our Sailors!”

The email found its way to the media, and the crisis aboard TR became a national news story and an embarrassment to an administration that failed to take the pandemic seriously at the time.

Stavridis evaluates Crozier’s decision-making and takes the readers to the moment that the Skipper held his finger over the “send” button before he launched the thoroughly reasoned and carefully worded email that would end his career and lead to a dissing from President Trump, who called him “Hemingway.”

Stavridis looks at the context of the events, considers the stellar record of Crozier, and makes a case for understanding the “important point” that communication is key –– and never more complicated than in the internet era.

“It is also important to remember that so often the hard choice you make is something you have to live with from that moment forward. Had Crozier been so focused on his Navy career instead of the health of his crew, he likely would have continued to go along with the shifting guidance without raising any additional complications or hesitations. Had he done that, I suspect he would have never been fired by the acting secretary of the Navy, never been investigated for the events that led up tot he outbreak, and likely would have continued with his Navy career and pinned on admiral’s stars as I’d envisioned back in 2011.”

Today, we can see clear examples of others who focus first on perpetuating their positions of power. They put their own interests ahead of country, Constitution, or the people they represent.

The sad fact is that Crozier was removed from command and, despite efforts by some senior naval officers to reinstate him in command, he was ultimately relieved for cause.

“In my view, the Navy had it right by recommending his reinstatement, and I believe some level of political pressure was exerted from the White House,” Stavridis observes.

Then-Capt. Brett E. Crozier, then-commanding officer of the U.S. 7th Fleet flagship USS Blue Ridge (LCC 19), welcomes members of the Japan Self-Defense Force Joint Staff College for a tour aboard the ship, Sept. 18, 2018. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Adam K. Thomas/Released)

“I believe this case study will be examined by generations of naval officers going forward, and with good reason. It perfectly outlines for the Navy the principles of caring for the crew and the difficulty of balancing with getting the mission done.”

“People versus mission is an age-old dilemma for sea captains,” Stavridis writes.

His book explores weighty decisions made by Capt. John Paul Jones, Lt. Stephen Decatur, Rear Adm. David Farragut, Commodore George Dewey, Cook Third Class Doris “Dorie” Miller, Adm. William “Bull” Halsey, Lt. Cdr. Lloyd M. Bucher, Rear Adm. Michelle Howard, and Capt. Crozier. There’s a bonus story right at the outset, too; Stavridis’s introduction leads with the story of Cdr. Ernest Evans, CO of the USS Johnston (DD-557), and his heroism in the Battle off Samar, 78 years ago on October 25, 1944.

Each story methodically evaluates the circumstances, personnel, and ramifications of decisions made in moments of often extreme stress, with lives on the line, and when there appears to be no perfect response.

Stavridis writes with his usual panache and passion. His book is accessible to any deckplate Sailor or rifleman Marine, who will be inspired by the courage and grit of Dorie Miller at Pearl Harbor. This book is also written for leaders of leaders –– military or civilian –– who want to understand the decision-making process, even when there is “no way out,” as was the case with Lloyd M. Bucher, skipper of USS Pueblo (AGER-2) after his ship was seized by North Korea on January 23, 1968 at the height of the Vietnam War.

The final chapter “To Risk It All” deploys practical advice for leaders who face hard decisions in their life’s voyage. Personally, I love Stavridis’s mention of a personal favorite book I read in high school, Mario Puzo’s “The Godfather,” which Stavridis calls “one of the greatest books ever written about leadership and decision-making…”

Thank you, Admiral, for another great collection of terrific stories, unexpected book suggestions, and indispensable insights, especially your take on a hero for Sailors, whose sacrifice will be even more understood and appreciated in years to come –– Capt. Brett Crozier.

*Top photo: Capt. Brett Crozier, commanding officer of the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt (CVN 71), and Capt. Carlos Sardiello cut a cake in the ship’s hangar bay during a change of command ceremony reception. Crozier relieved Sardiello to become the 16th commanding officer of TR. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist Seaman Olympia O. McCoy)