Sailors who died in Japan ranged from 19-year-old firefighter to 19-year veteran
First came the crash, then the rushing waters — and then, the wave of grief.
The grief swelled after divers found seven bodies in the wreckage of the USS Fitzgerald off the coast of Japan this weekend. It washed across the United States, through dire phone calls, texts and solemn visits.
It reached the family of a 19-year-old firefighter who had enlisted in the Navy the year before, and the wife of a 19-year veteran who had been planning his retirement, and fell upon households from Connecticut to the southern end of Texas — people with little more in common than a sudden, immense loss on the other side of the world.
A Navy chaplain brought the news to Halethorpe, Md., where personnel specialist 1st class Xavier Martin had lived.
On Father’s Day, Martin’s bereaved father stood in front of a CBS WJZ news crew and covered his mouth with his hand.
“He’s my only child,” Darrold Martin said. “He’s all I have.”
The father looked at the tattoo on his arm. His son, 24, had one to match, he said.
He looked at his phone. “He was trying to — all the comms were down. He was trying to call me,” he said.
The Fitzgerald collided with a ship four times its size off the coast of Japan in early-morning darkness. Military officials still don’t know what happened exactly, but it is clear that sailors tried to save each other in the aftermath. A woman told the Associated Press that four of those killed slept in the same room with her son, who had repeatedly dived into the flood trying to save them.
As rescuers searched for 37-year-old Gary Rehm Jr., a shipmate stayed on board
the listing Fitzgerald and texted reports to his wife in the United States, Rehm’s mother-in-law told The Washington Post.
“She said she wasn’t leaving the ship until they found him,” Joan Braniff said. “They kicked her off, and she stayed on the pier until they found him.”
Now Erin Rehm is a widow. They had been married for nearly all of the fire controlman’s 19-year Navy service, Braniff said.
“You could tell right from the start he just adored her,” she said. They sang karaoke on a PlayStation in Hampton, Va., when he was home. They talked many times each day when he was deployed, as he had been on the Fitzgerald for nearly two years, according to the Navy.
“He was supposed to be coming home in September,” Braniff said.
And next year, she said, Rehm was planning to retire from the military and stay home for good.
“I assumed they would be together forever,” Braniff said.
Two hours up the highway from the home that Rehm will never return to, the Lake Monticello volunteer fire department held a news conference over the weekend to announce the death of Dakota Rigsby — 19 and one of their own.
An assistant chief called him a “good kid” and good firefighter, the Richmond Times-Dispatch reported. He’d left tiny Palmyra, Va., last year to become a gunner’s mate seaman. Stars and Stripes reported that Rigsby got to meet the secretary of the Navy before his last night on the Fitzgerald.
In Oakville, Conn., the sister of 25-year-old sonar technician Ngoc Truong Huynh remembered him as a quiet, sweet, selfless man who had not always desired a military life.
“But he wanted to do something adventurous,” Huynh’s sister told the Hartford Courant. So he enlisted about two years before his death.
From the town of Weslaco near the Texas-Mexico border, gunner’s mate Noe Hernandez had spent eight years in the Navy, and in that time impressed his family with photos from Italy and the Pacific Ocean.
“We all came from poverty in Guatemala,” Aly HernandezSinger told CBS 11. “He was the one who made it.”