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USS Gravely returns home Monday after border mission

Families cheer as they welcome home sailors from the USS Gravely after a three month mission to the southern border.
Steve Walsh
Families cheer as they welcome home sailors from the USS Gravely after a three month mission to the southern border.

USS Gravely, with its 330 sailors, returned from a roughly 90-day deployment. The destroyer worked with an embedded U.S. Coast Guard team.

“We fly the Coast Guard flag, and then we're able to do law enforcement operations as the Navy, which is not typically the way that it's done for the Navy,” said Capt. Greg Piorun.

USS Gravely had just returned from the Red Sea with the USS Eisenhower Strike Group, less than six months before being deployed to the border. It was the first Navy ship to deploy as part of President Trump’s executive order, which increases the number of active duty forces used on the southern border.

On May 25, the ship seized 840 pounds of cocaine in the Caribbean. The ship used a Navy Seahawk helicopter to force the 20-foot-long boat to stop, so the Coast Guard team could board the vessel and detain three suspects, while sailors from Gravely used small boats to fish parcels of cocaine out of the water, Piorun said.

“Once the vessel that we interdicted was determined to be a hazard of navigation, we did sink it with some of the armament, obviously, nothing that we used in the southern Red Sea,” he said.

The Arleigh Burke class of guided-missile destroyers is just over 500 feet long and carries an array of weapons, including Tomahawk cruise missiles. On its starboard side, the Gravely has pictures of eight anti-ship missiles, nine drones and two waterborne drones, each with lines through them, depicting the Houthi attacks the destroyer repelled during its time in the Red Sea.

The border mission using Coast Guard teams is not typical for the Navy, but USS Gravely remains on call as the maritime homeland defense ready duty ship, Piorun said.

The Gravely was replaced by the USS Cole on the South/East Coast. While Navy destroyers from San Diego perform a similar mission on the West Coast. Gravely left Hampton Roads March 15.

“We got underway for this deployment with less than 96 hours' notice, while we were in Yorktown. That's exactly what this crew did. And I couldn't be prouder of the work that they did and what they accomplished,” Piorun said.

Steve joined WHRO in 2023 to cover military and veterans. Steve has extensive experience covering the military and working in public media, most recently at KPBS in San Diego, WYIN in Gary, Indiana and WBEZ in Chicago. In the early 2000s, he embedded with members of the Indiana National Guard in Kuwait and Iraq. Steve reports for NPR’s American Homefront Project, a national public media collaboration that reports on American military life and veterans. Steve is also on the board of Military Reporters & Editors.

You can reach Steve at steve.walsh@whro.org.

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