POLARIS POINT, Guam -- The Mayor of Piti, a small village in Guam, and students from local
schools participating in a summer school program, visited the submarine tender USS Frank
Cable (AS 40) for a ship tour, June 19.
Mayor, Jesse Alig, and students came aboard to observe ship’s operations, and get hands-on U.S.
Navy Sailor experience.
“One of the reasons that I wanted to do this was that none of the kids have ever been on a ship
before and it’s a good experience for them to know what you guys do for us,” said Alig, who
visited Frank Cable in the late 90s.
They toured areas around the ship such as the machine shop, medical and dental spaces, bridge,
mess decks and ship store. One student expressed how she felt about the tour.
“It was fun and cool and awesome,” said Zania Castro, a student in Piti’s summer program.
Castro said she enjoyed the tool demonstration in the machine shop, and also the cookies from
the mess decks.
At the end of the tour, the children were able to practice hose-handling with members of the
Damage Control Training Team and duty fire marshals, Sailors who train often for shipboard
fire-fighting.
“Working with kids makes the job feel new and exciting. Where we take hose handling training
to be mundane and boring, a child looks at it with excitement and something that seems fun,”
said Hull Maintenance Technician 1st Class Patrick Shearer, of Frank Cable Fleet Indoctrination
Training Team. “They want to hold the hose, the want to play in the water, they want to be
firefighters. Just talking to them about being a firefighter is fun. We had a great time working
with the kids today because to them, we are the cool guys. We are the ones who have the fun job of being a fire fighter and it makes the job feel more rewarding and fresh when you see it
through their eyes.”
Alig said he was glad he could come back to Frank Cable and bring the children along.
“It’s always heartwarming to know that they (Sailors) are prepared for anything, prepared for
battle,” said Alig. “It’s one of the reasons why I am a proud American and I want children to
know that they should be proud Americans too.”
Frank Cable, forward deployed to Guam, repairs, rearms and reprovisions deployed U.S. naval
forces in the Indo-Pacific region.