BY ROGER WITHERSPOON

NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM 

The large black sailor was naked in the middle of a roped-off area below decks, and he was none too happy.

“He kept saying ‘Not my boots, too. My wife just bought them for me.’ But they made him take them off anyway, and he was just there, naked. Then they made him scrub,” recalled Maurice Enis, navigator of the USS Ronald Reagan, one of the Navy’s newest aircraft carriers.

“They gave him this really abrasive stuff that we use to clean the hull of the ship. It’s sort of like liquid sandpaper. And he had to scrub all over while everyone watched. Then he walked over to the sink and rinsed it off, then came back and stood while they ran the Geiger counter over him. He had to keep doing it till the Geiger counter was quiet.

“Then it was my turn.”

There was a dark turn to Operation Tomodachi, the massive search and rescue effort launched March 11, 2011, off the northern coast of Japan which had been ravaged by an earthquake and giant tsunami. The combined natural disasters left some 20,000 Japanese dead and the coastal infrastructure destroyed. Tomodachi, the Japanese word for “friend”, was an 80-day mission requested by the Japanese government and coordinated by the U.S. State Department and the Department of Defense.  The DoD quickly mobilized its 63 Japanese bases and called in the USS Ronald Reagan, carrying 5,500 sailors and Marines, along with its Strike Group consisting of  four destroyers – The Preble, McCampbell, Curtis Wilbur, and McCain – the Cruiser USS Chancellorsville, and several support ships.

But the rescue mission quickly detoured down a dangerous, unchartered path. The earthquake had cracked Unit 1 of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactors, and the tsunami had knocked out all power to the safety systems controlling Units 1 through 4.  Control of the mission was expanded to include the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Department of Energy.

The fuel in Units 1 through 3 was quickly melting down. The fuel in Unit 4 had been offloaded to the spent fuel pool — which was located above the reactor itself — due to a planned refueling. By March 15 explosions had blown the roofs off and the walls out of all four reactor buildings and radiation was spewing into the air.

There was no power to circulate water in any of these buildings, so the Japanese had to improvise. They borrowed high powered pumping trucks from the Americans and poured water onto the buildings, let it run through the spent fuel pool and reactors, and out the bottom, where it flowed into the ocean.  All the while, however, the Tokyo Electric Power Company and the Japanese government sought to minimize the radiological disaster. TEPCO would declare there was little or no radiation when, in fact, contamination was high and out of control.

There were some 70,000 American service members and their families in Japan and Defense officials were worried that they might all have to be evacuated. Family members were evacuated from Yokosuka Naval Air Base, 188 miles south of Fukushima, when radiation was detected in increasing amounts there. It was that detection which convinced American officials that the Japanese were not being honest. By calculating the amount of radiation that must have been released in order for Yokosuka to be threatened, NRC officials correctly deduced that despite Japanese assurances, the reactors had been breached.

But the overriding concern was for the Americans in the land based installations — the men and women of Operation Tomodachi were overlooked. And at times, they were just two miles off the coast of Fukushima as helicopters went back and forth, seeking survivors and transporting food and supplies.

The Americans at sea were on their own.

A Growing Fear

For Quartermaster Enis, the wait for decontamination was a completely unexpected turn of events. The quartermasters had two main responsibilities: navigating the ship, and operating the signal flags attached to the mast, which let others in the fleet know what the flagship was doing. Enis had been ordered to bring down the American flag, which had been flying atop the mast for two weeks, and bring it to the Captain’s quarters.

“I brought it down,” he said, “and folded it respectfully and tucked it under my right arm, next to my body. I carried it inside, put it away, and thought nothing of it.”

After dinner, he was walking past a sensor “and the alarms all went off,” he recalled. “And they began yelling at me not to touch anything or anyone and to go straight to the decontamination area.”

There was a line in the cordoned-off “decon” area with men and women waiting to be checked. But Enis didn’t have to wait — he was already marked and was ushered to the front, where a tableau was playing out under the watchful eyes of the Reagan’s executive officer and senior medical officer. The naked sailor in the center of the room was given a towel to cover himself and left. They called Enis.

“They had told us that there was no radiation,” said Enis. “When they started putting up the stations along the ship to check for radiation they didn’t say why they were there. They checked my boots and nothing happened. Then they checked my hands and the machine goes crazy.

“The guy doing the checking freaked out and said to ‘Step away from him!’ Next thing I know, I got plastic bags on my arms and they are telling everyone to get away from me. I almost had an anxiety attack because they were treating me like I had the plague. They weren’t touching me. They were yelling commands to where I had to walk and what I had to do. I had to scrub my hands and my right side with this gritty paint remover and it took off a couple of layers of skin.”

Enis was not told, then or later, exactly what his radiation reading was.  They did say his was the highest level recorded among personnel on the ship. At that time, however, the radiation level was not his main concern. Fear of the unknown consumed his attention.

The officers were watching him and barking orders. His fellow sailors — men and women — silently watched him from the edges of the decon station while waiting their turn to be checked for radiation.