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Ship returns
to newborns’ cries
After waiting six months,
families hope the destroyer
can avoid quick redeployment
Shiena Dunlap is six months pregnant and is expecting a girl whom she has already named Daisy.
She is just hoping that her husband, Petty Officer Ollie Dunlap, and his guided missile destroyer USS Hopper will not set sail before she gives birth in March.
"It would just be terrible," said Dunlap as she and friends Danielle Resso and Erin Rice waited for a tugboat to bring the 505-foot Hopper to its Pearl Harbor berth yesterday.
The Hopper had just spent nearly six months in the Persian Gulf, the Red Sea, Gulf of Oman and Gulf of Aden conducting anti-smuggling and anti-terrorism operations. The destroyer left Pearl Harbor June 8 as part of the USS Belleau Wood Expeditionary Strike Group.
After most of the Hopper's 325 sailors and officers left on shore leave, Cmdr. Michael Selby told reporters that under normal conditions the destroyer would not set sail for another 18 months.
But under the Navy's new Fleet Response Plan, six carrier strike groups, escorted by warships like the Hopper, must be ready to sail on 30 days' notice to support contingency operations around the globe.
During its deployment, the destroyer visited eight countries and served as "the cop on the block," Selby said, deterring pirates and terrorists from even thinking about going to sea.
"The idea is to keep them bottled up on land," Selby said.
Petty Officer George Moran got his first look at newborn daughter Alysha after stepping off the USS Hopper yesterday. Alysha, with mother Sabrina, was born while Moran was on a six-month deployment. The couple have three other children: Joshua, Timothy and Brandon.
On the Hopper's return yesterday, six new fathers got to see their babies for the first time.
"She's beautiful," Petty Officer George Moran said as he cradled his 3-month-old daughter, Alysha, in his arms. "After three boys ... finally," he sighed.
Three months ago, while the Hopper was patrolling the Persian Gulf, Moran received an e-mail from his wife telling him that Alysha was on her way. Her water broke, and she was being rushed to the hospital.
But Moran said it took at least a day before he got the message that he was a father.
"The hardest part was not knowing," said Moran, a storekeeper on the Hopper. He has been married to Sabrina for 11 years, and they have lived through three deployments.
"Every one is different," she said. "This one was particularly hard with the baby being born" even with Sabrina's mother, Dianna Fisher, moving here from Baraboo, Wis.
Raising the Moran boys -- Timothy, 4, Joshua, 5, and Brandon, 8 -- "can be a handful," Fisher acknowledged.
Danielle Resso, who was also waiting for the Hopper yesterday, said she had been sending her husband, Daniel, a lot of e-mails with pictures of their month-old son, Darrian.
"He was very excited to see him," she said. His deployment was tough because "(Daniel) wasn't here when I gave birth," she said.
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