United States Department of the Navy

She lay at her berth by the wharf at Plymouth until the 27th of October when her name was associated forever with one still more glorious.

Of course the navy department could not count upon this long inaction and so long as the Albemarle lay substantially unhurt at Plymouth she was a source of constant anxiety to the squadron in the sound.

They had no ironclads of sufficiently light draft to cross the bar at Hadris Inlet.

Several were in course of construction but it was not safe to wait for their completion.

The most prudent had retired with their gains, and the business was no longer what it had been.

The government of the United States might have been satisfied with the results of the blockade but for its tremendous expense.

To watch the port of Wilmington required a vast armada, and it was for this reason fully as much as to put a stop to contraband trade that the Navy Department and the President constantly urged upon the military authorities a joint expedition of the Army and Navy against Fort Fisher.

Mr.

Despite additional cleanup, this spring, more radioactive materials were found at the shipyard.

Acting Special Agent in Charge Brian Merkel of the NCIS Economic Crimes Field Office said, "...by falsifying work claims and manipulating critical data, Tetra Tech put its own financial interests ahead of its commitments to the Department of Navy, potentially placing the health and safety of the American people at risk." That's our podcast this week.

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We also knew that General R.

B. Mason had been ordered to California, that Colonel John D. Stevenson was coming out to California with a regiment of New York volunteers, that Commodore Shubrick had orders also from the Navy Department to control matters afloat, that General Kearny, by virtue of his rank, had the right to control all the land forces in the service of the United States, and that Fremont claimed the same right by virtue of a letter he had received from Colonel Benton, then a senator and a man of great influence with Polk's administration.

So that among the younger officers the query was very natural, who the devil is Governor of California? One day I was on board the Independence frigate, dining with the wardroom officers, when a war vessel was reported in the offing, which in due time was made out to be the Cayenne, Captain Dupont.

After dinner we were all on deck to watch the new arrival, the ships meanwhile exchanging signals, which were interpreted that General Kearny was on board.

Her timbers, extraordinary as they were, were not immortal.

The Navy Department commissioned surveys.

The surveys returned reports.

The reports concluded, with the measured language of official documents, that the ship was in need of significant repair.

and that the cost of those repairs might not be justified by the service life remaining in what was, by the standards of the day, an elderly vessel.

In 1830, a junior officer in the Navy Department wrote a report recommending that USS Constitution be broken up.

She was, the report concluded, not worth the expense of repair.

The word used, in the clinical terminology of naval bureaucracy, was that she should be raised, dismantled, her usable timbers and fittings salvaged, her name retired.

And I, of course, ran across them many times over my reporting trips and wanted an opportunity to tell their stories because it's their lives that are most directly impacted by these strategic decisions that I've covered for so long.

And I got an opportunity, the Navy Department reached out to me.

The most recent Medal of Honor recipient at that time, a couple years ago, was a Navy SEAL named Britt Slabinski.

And I just, in the interviewing Britt Slabinski, I was just so amazed at the story.

Tell us more about that.

I worked for the Department of Navy for 27 years.

And frequently, the sailors...

In the beginning, it was in a Navy school.