Montrose - Daily Press

The filter on his Sonoma Full-Flavor burned a deep orange. He sucked in the fire-cured taste, listening to the hum of conversation around him.

The smoke pit of the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln buzzed with the anxious chatter of about 30 Navy sailors. David Church stood apart from the others, staring into the endless stretch of dark blue waters.

Suddenly, a deathly silence crept through the small smoking area. The crowd huddled near the edge of the ship, the chatter replaced by the sound of waves slapping against the smooth steel.

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Church leaned over the side too, straining to see what had caught everyone’s attention.

Then, he saw it.

Floating through the warm waters of the Indian Ocean, just a few feet from the aircraft carrier, was a body.

Church couldn’t rip his eyes from the lifeless form. Neither could anyone else.

A few minutes later, three or four more bodies slid alongside the ship.

He was too far away to make out the ages or genders of the people. But he knew one thing for sure.

They were dead.

Less than 12 hours earlier, Church and his fellow officers at the naval base in Lemoore, Calif., received orders to board the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln. The destination: Banda Aceh, the provincial Indonesian capital located on the northeast tip of the island of Sumatra.

In the early hours of Dec. 26, 2004, a series of towering waves slammed into the Sumatran coastline. Naked and vulnerable to the volatile Indian Ocean, more than 160,000 people died in the coastal areas near Banda Aceh.

Destruction wrought by a tsunami triggered by a powerful ocean earthquake was of biblical proportions: Nearly 230,000 dead. Thirteen countries affected. Millions left homeless.

Church, a 34-year-old Montrose man, knew the bodies slowly drifting out of sight were just the beginning.

He tossed out the cigarette, forgotten and smoldering near his fingertips. He tried to shake off the pin pricks itching the back of his neck.

After all, he had a job to do.

For more than a month, the naval crew stocked helicopters with water, rice and other supplies for the tsunami-affected countries. As soon as one chopper took off, another landed.

From the ship, Church saw what TV news cameras could never fully capture. Helicopter pilots returned with snapshots of overturned cars, homes reduced to rubble and children wading through knee-deep mud where streets once stood.

Soon after docking, an officer asked for volunteers to help on land.

Church was torn.

That day, he sent an e-mail to his wife Bobbi back in Lemoore. Sometimes going weeks without hearing her voice, he wanted her approval before signing up to leave the ship.

Later that evening, on the other side of the world, Bobbi Church sat in her small naval base home. Married just four years, she thought she could handle the months away from her husband.

As an Air Force brat, she grew up everywhere and nowhere. When she met David Church on a blind date in Lake Isabella, Calif., an hour from where he was stationed at China Lake, she told him she didn’t mind military life.

But now, his e-mail blinking across her computer screen, she was nearly frozen with fear.

“No,” she wrote, her fingers pounding the keys, while her toddler played at her feet. She didn’t want him flying into Banda Aceh, running the risk of catching malaria or other Third-World diseases festering from the piles of dead bodies and rotting debris.

David Church didn’t put up a fight.

“I wanted to make sure he would come home in one piece for our kids,” Bobbi Church said. “I wanted him to come home, period.”

Nearly a month later, she got her wish.

After getting another e-mail from David – one of nearly 1,000 the couple wrote while he was out to sea – she wasn’t expecting him back in Lemoore for at least another three days.

As she was heating up a pizza for lunch at work, Bobbi Church looked out the window to see her husband walking up the sidewalk.

Screaming, she ran outside and jumped into his arms. She wanted to be angry at him for not telling her that he was back early.

Now, nearly three years removed from the horrible aftermath of the tsunami, David Church sits in the garage of his Montrose home, taking a drag off his Marlboro Red.

Earlier this month, Church retired from the U.S. Navy. At a ceremony held at the Montrose National Guard Armory, he closed the chapter on 20 years of service.

After touring the world, docking at ports in France, Italy, Bahrain and Abu Dhabi, watching cherry blossom festivals in Japan and seeing dolphins and Man-of-Wars swimming in the Pacific Ocean, Church was ready to come home.

He left Montrose more than 30 years ago, a wide-eyed 17-year-old kid who didn’t want to end up working construction like so many of his high school friends.

He’d gotten his parents to sign consent for him to join the military after graduation. A few days later, he left for basic training and didn’t look back.

Along the way, he served in Operation Desert Storm and was among the first American military responders after the Indian Ocean tsunami.

“The military is not all about fighting wars,” Church said. “We are there to help people.”

Members of the Navy play important diplomatic roles in keeping peace across the world and aiding in disaster areas, said Dan Puleio, public affairs officer for the Navy Recruiting District in Denver.

 After Hurricane Katrina’s destructive course along the Gulf Coast in 2005, Puleio said the Navy salvaged homes and offered support to those displaced by the storm’s fury. The same happened a year earlier in Banda Aceh and other areas along the Indian Ocean.

“We are helping people, and most of the time without having to fire a weapon or even show a weapon,” Puleio said. “A young person who wants to leave the town they grow up in and see the world can be a diplomat and peacekeeper across the world.”

In the end, Puleio said, the Navy teaches young men and women to contribute to their communities when they return home.

If not for enlisting, Church said he was headed down a destructive path of partying and dead-end jobs. He now works at Western Skyways, floating between jobs like tearing down aircraft engines and clean up.

He’s tired when he comes home each night around 5:30. But pulling into the driveway of the one-story home he shares with his wife and family, he knows he couldn’t have had any of it without the military.

“When you are in the military, you have to grow up real quick,” he said.

Walking up the pathway to his front door, seeing the dark blue and golden colors of his U.S. Navy flag flap in the wind, he puts out his cigarette and walks inside to the sounds of his laughing children.

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