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Pirates beware — Petty officer Tedrow wants you
By Denise Dick
Valley native enjoys his assignment
By DENISE DICK
BOARDMAN
A Boardman native serving in the U.S. Navy is working aboard a landing-dock ship that apprehended several pirates last month in the Gulf of Aden.
Devin Tedrow, 22, a Navy petty officer and a 2007 Boardman High School graduate, serves as an information systems technician aboard the USS Ashland, which is conducting routine patrols as part of the Navy’s Fifth Fleet operating in the Middle East. Tedrow is a son of Pam and Dennis Tedrow of Boardman.
“It’s been a dream of mine to join the military,” Tedrow said last week, speaking on a satellite telephone aboard the ship.
Early last month, he participated in the capture of six pirates while the USS Ashland was doing anti-piracy operations in the Gulf of Aden in the Arabian Sea.
The gulf is called Pirate Alley by some because of significant pirate activity in the area.
Tedrow usually begins his workday at 6 a.m., but on April 10, he awoke early to the sound of much activity.
The ship had taken fire from a skiff carrying six pirates. The USS Ashland returned fire, the skiff caught fire, and the pirates bailed into the sea.
“I’m part of the VBSS — Visit, Board, Search and Seizure — and they manned us up,” Tedrow said.
The team boarded an inflatable boat and traveled out to the skiff.
“We checked around to see if there were any personnel still onboard,” Tedrow said. “There weren’t.”
The crew didn’t see anything else, so they contacted the ship.
“The ship spotted them a little ways from us,” Tedrow said. “There were six of them in a circle, floating.”
The VBSS team radioed to the ship for another crew to help get the pirates out of the water. The pirates didn’t put up any resistance, he said. They were taken to the ship for medical treatment.
“It was frightening, but I was more excited than frightened,” Tedrow said. “I went to school for VBSS before I was deployed. It was cool to do what we trained for.”
His mother, Pam, said her son, the youngest of the couple’s three children, started talking about a military career in his junior year of high school. He wasn’t sure which branch.
Pam Tedrow believes one reason her youngest child chose the Navy is her.
“He thought I’d be too upset if he was on the ground in Iraq or Afghanistan,” she said.
Being in the Navy has allowed him to serve his country and to see the world.
“He’s been to different ports, to parts of the world where I’ve never been,” Pam Tedrow said.
While she’s still concerned about him, Pam Tedrow worries less about her son than when he first joined the Navy. She knows he’s well trained.
“It’s in God’s hands and I pray that he’s going to take care of it,” she said.
Tedrow will mark three years in the Navy in July. He deployed on his current assignment in January and is expected to continue that work through mid-August.
He described the VBSS as a side job. His day-to-day work as an information systems technician involves controlling the computer network of the ship.
He also handles communication between ships and between the ship and the shore.
Tedrow lives among the 270 Navy crew members and more than 300 U.S. Marines aboard the USS Ashland.
“We all get along,” he said. “It’s like one big family.”
They sleep 30 to 40 people in a berthing area with beds stacked three high.
“It sounds bad, but it’s not at all,” Tedrow said.
While he wasn’t able to talk about the specifics of his mission, he said it involves patrolling for illicit activity in the waters of the Middle East. The crew also listens for distress calls from other vessels.
After nearly three years in the service, he believes signing up was the right decision.
“I just love it,” he said. “We are making a difference. I’m not just at home working a 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. job. I’m defending our country. There’s less than 1 percent of the American population that actually joins the military. It’s cool to be part of that 1 percent.”