During the deployment, Montpelier's crew members served as ambassadors for the United States Navy during port visits to Souda Bay; Bahrain; Jebel Ali; Aksaz, Turkey; Rota, Spain, and the first North African port visit by a U.S. submarine in 12 years to Bizerte, Tunisia.While I think a Tunisian port visit would be pretty cool, I could also imagine there were fairly restrictive liberty rules. USS Pasadena did a WestPac; let's see if she did any better than the recent boats in terms of liberty ports:
Pasadena departed Pearl Harbor Oct. 31, for a regularly scheduled six-month deployment. Making the deployment more special for the crew, Pasadena departed with a portion of the cremains of retired Rear Adm. Eugene Bennet Fluckey, who passed away in June 2007, for a burial-at-sea. Fluckey, a Medal of Honor recipient, served as Commander, Submarine Force U.S. Pacific Fleet from 1964-1966. During the six-months, Pasadena made port visits to cities in Guam, Japan and Malaysia.While Malaysia can be interesting (I pulled into Port Kelang / Kuala Lumpur when deployed on USS John C. Stennis in 2000), it's still not Australia. Hopefully SubGru SEVEN will keep working to get regular WestPac boats some Aussie liberty.
To the Sailors on both boats -- Welcome home and enjoy some well-deserved I & I.
