US 5th Fleet awards sailors who aided car crash victims in Oman last month

Manama, Bahrain - The US 5th Fleet honoured four sailors with awards for providing assistance to four victims of a car accident in Oman last month.

Vice Adm Brad Cooper, commander of the US Naval Forces Central Command, US 5th Fleet and Combined Maritime Forces, presented the awards to the three Navy divers and a medical corpsman during a ceremony at the US Embassy in Muscat on May 10, according to the official US navy website.

Chief Navy Diver Davin Jameson was travelling on a highway in Oman with three other sailors on April 23, when they spotted four victims of a car accident, who needed medical assistance.

Without hesitation, Jameson along with Navy Diver 2nd Class Nicolas Arpaia, Navy Diver 2nd Class Benjamin Ching and Hospital Corpsman 2nd Class Alec White, stopped to help.

“Being of service that afternoon was a humbling experience,” said Jameson. “The corpsman on our team is trained for a lot of different scenarios, but it was the first time the rest of us were responding to an emergency situation like this.”

While waiting for Omani medical services to arrive, the team provided first aid to the victims suffering from shock, heat stress and traumatic injuries. Although one of the accident victims died due to the severity of his injuries, the Navy dive team’s life-saving efforts were crucial to the survival of the other three.

“It made me appreciate the training we do because it made responding to the crash much easier,” said Jameson.

The sailors are members of US 5th Fleet’s task force for expeditionary combat forces that operate across the Middle East. Expeditionary combat forces specialise in explosive ordnance disposal, naval coastal warfare, naval construction, expeditionary intelligence and expeditionary logistics support.

The US Naval Forces Central Command and US 5th Fleet function under the Combined Maritime Forces, the largest multinational naval partnership in the world.