Continuing Promise '09 CAPT Lineberry's Favorite Question

The best question on Tuesday came from Beth Wilson - She asked about the SeaBees aboard USNS Comfort. CAPT Lineberry really warmed to this question and gave his most enthusiastic answer.

CAPT. LINEBERRY: Yeah, Beth, and you know what, you can come back, Beth, and hang out with the Seabees any time. Yes, our construction battalion here, 21 hard-charging -- their motto is, they live it, they sweep it, they eat it, they drink it, they feel it, is can do and, matter of fact, their commanding officer came aboard yesterday, Commander Wendy Halsey, along with their command master chief and their operations officer just to pay a visit to our Seabees here and tomorrow, I'm going to actually go visit them out at the site they are working on what's called the mental hospital here in Antigua & Barbuda and they have kind of gutted out a dormitory for females and when I was here in October, it was in what really looked like disrepair.

So they went in the very first couple of days, kind of tore all the walls, all the structures, everything out, doing a little bit of repair to the roof, but mostly just inside and I know they've been working on it for nearly a week now, it'll be a week tomorrow and it's just that kind of work that they're doing, along with the Rotarian international folks here, along with also the host nation, Antigua engineers here.

So it's a great effort and that's just at the mental hospital. The other thing that they're doing while they're here is working with the public works engineers here in Antigua and sharing information. The first couple of days they worked on -- the rest of this week they're working on electrical, as well as some carpentry skills and, again, they're not teaching, but they're sharing information with the engineers here.

I think last week, I want to say some water works and some project planning sort of thing, and again, they sit down with a room full of engineers and did some stand up training, as well as sharing information. So the Seabees are very well rounded, they can do anything that you ask of them. A couple of other places when we were in the Dominican Republic, they went to the national reference lab, which holds one of two places on the island there in the Dominican Republic, holding blood for research and what they had was a lot of different refrigerators that were just kind of sitting around holding their blood samples and their blood stores and what the host nation, as well as the embassy asked us to do back in October of 2008 when we came here to look the site over, they asked us to come up with a drawing, come up with a plan to build them a room, kind of an addition where they can house all of the refrigerators in a highly air conditioned, they keep it like 42 degrees in there, all these refrigerators, so they could keep these blood samples, one, safe, it's all locked up, it's all projected and keep it where it's very effective and efficient for the samples to be coming in and out of the national reference lab. So, again, just another thing that the Seabees do and then just to throw out what they did, a big project. They're only doing a couple projects everywhere we do, but the big project they did in Haiti was the hospital, the main hospital in Port-au-Prince had a pharmacy there and when we visited in October, it had been basically condemned and what they did, once again, they go in and just gutted out and they just kind of start from scratch and they repair the roofs, they repair the ceiling, they put together kind of an office area for them and a waiting area for the pharmacy and the prime minister, the ambassador was there. They're very appreciative of the great work that the Seabees do.

I could talk all day about the Seabees, and again, thanks for bringing them up, Beth, because they are some of the unsung heroes, but we love them.