 I'm Captain George Vassilakis, commanding also USS Baton. The crew here was recently involved in the rescue of over 275 migrants here in the six-lead area of the responsibility. Now the following is an account from the folks that were involved firsthand in the rescue this past weekend. The day was not an ordinary day. About four o'clock we got the call that there was going to be about 40 migrant folks that were floating you know just off the I think the starboard side of the baton and that they were sending a starboard out and that they were going to be looking into if any of them are injured or needed to come aboard. Initially it was it was so fast nobody really knew what was going on at the time deck department as a whole we just reacted and went into went into our normal operation mode. At the time we were told that there was a personnel already in the water and that there were additional additional personnel and the boat was sinking. My guys are all well trained they did exactly what they were told everybody topped the bottom line handlers on the david to line handlers in the well deck line handlers in the PL the david captains everybody boat coxons everybody did exactly what they were supposed to do and exactly what they were trained to do. As soon as we got there we started uh started letting the star swimmer get out the boat being too as ready there was a swimmer at that time. Well we arrived on scene and I analyzed the situation looked to see what was going on and saw that the HSC-22 crew member was already in the water aiding the sinking raft victims. Initially I inflated my LP-28 my flotation handed it off to the first survivor and I just started taking them out one at a time loading them into our boat. Before I knew it though the the rib was full couldn't put any more people I loaded up 14 survivors already and then the PL came around with which was carrying the second rescue swimmer BM-2 stethem. He uh he also arrived on scene deployed immediately and I we briefed real quick as to what was going on and worked together as a team uh just started pulling people out of the water. We calculated about a solid hour to an hour and a half just non-stop swimming all I can remember is just making continuous trips back and forth back and forth. What I did was I contacted my MAs and told them I gave them a briefing of what I knew what was happening. We armed up which is standard protocol and I divided my team up I had my flight deck triage team and then I had my well deck because I was told that they would be bringing personnel alongside. Finally we got our word to pull them all into the well deck and unload them. We all had kind of guessed that at one point or another we'd be going back out to get the other two boats that were around from the first sinking boat we could see them sitting off to the side and we knew they would linger around. We had the initial 75 again we thought okay we're gonna you know things are calming down we're gonna bed them down that's when we found out that we were getting an additional 200 200 personnel. When they called away the second boat we were getting cleaned up cleaning up our gear we always take it into the head into the shower to rinse off fresh water when rinse our gear and all of a sudden the boat coxing my boat coxing for the rib came in and said hey we're going out to get the other two and we immediately you know got dressed out ran out to the rib david and waited for us to to deploy the boat again to lower the boat to the water and we got in myself and BM2 were on this one went out and searched for the two other zodiacs that were still out there. We signaled them over with chem lights and told them to follow the boat and we gave them instructions as to what to do and pulled the first craft right up onto the stern gate into the well and disembarked the crew. For the second I want to say we were out for maybe five-ish hours mixed emotion for everybody just relieved nervous I'm sure they had to be wondering what was going to happen to them next and just the excitement of them being able to step onto our ship and out of their small craft into the well deck there was definitely a sense of excitement we kept having to tell them to slow down take your time we don't want anybody to to get hurt obviously and they just couldn't wait to get out and into our ship it seemed like. Our responsibilities to make sure that they they remain calm they remain contained and that we would escort them as needed to wherever they needed to be. We figured out that hey we'll line them up kind of like an assembly line we'll get them through the initial screening process my MAs between doing security screen screenings and helping with the stretcher bearers they were pretty much getting involved in every aspect once they were through us that was when we would ensure that they got a something to eat some water most of them were pretty dehydrated we determined that we would have a security area once they were determined safe and everything we put them in a security area the medical would come in and do their evaluation. We started going to work setting up medical because we have different layers of medical care down there so just to like make it kind of make sense we have like a whole trauma setup so we set up five trauma bays ready to receive like critically injured patients we set out three ORs and then moved to setting up all 15 ICU beds and then 40 ward beds ready to receive. During any kind of medical emergency mass casualty my job is to amend the ICU and wait for patients to come to me. So we have our whole medical department is integrated so we have blue corpsmen we have green corpsmen who work with 22nd MEU and then we have actually two fleet surgical teams on board so we kind of dispersed everybody out. We were all just kind of we went into mode like we've trained a lot for this and so we just kind of are working back and forth trying to get patients to breed it get them comfortable make sure that they've got fluids water food. We had a few people coming up trying to ascertain where the people were from what languages they spoke we tried speaking some French some people knew a little bit of Arabic. We saw a gentleman from Nigeria who had told us that he had actually gotten on a truck had been on a truck packed with about 60 other people and had ridden for like two days up to catch a boat and the boat was going to take him to Italy. The first sinking boat had one one young man who was in pretty bad condition. They brought in a patient who we never found out what his name was or where he was from none of the other people that we talked to seemed to know who he was and he was not doing well at all. Our senior chief I said Ramaki you needed in the ER he barely palpable pulses down in the well deck we couldn't get IV access on him because he was so dehydrated he was not responding to any verbal cues. Realized that the patient was like silk and wet and he was shivering he was very cold so we stripped all his clothing off and we got an internal temperature of 88 degrees which is hypothermic which is bad news that's really really low. Once we identified him other patients started you know kind of like letting us know like hey I've got burns I've got burns here I've got burns there and then we started seeing the magnitude that people were actually injured. We started ushering people in and noticing that the first 40 that we brought in had pretty significant burns. I found out later that they were their boat had caught fire and they were actually sitting in like diesel and then the diesel mixed with the saltwater had kind of caused their skin to peel away. In the states if you have a second degree burn you're going to spend whatever that percentage of burn is plus 30 days in a burn center and we had people with 20 30 percent burns 40 percent burns on their bodies that had had those for several hours. Our corpsmen actually went to work instantly and they all kind of assumed care of different patients and they started the debriefment which is actually a very painful process. They did the dressings they applied like all the special we have silvidine cream on the shirt they applied the silvidine IV access and then we had the one critical patient the John Doe who all night was kind of touch and go like about 2 a.m. he started doing really poorly. He was in and out of consciousness he had burns about 18 to 20 percent of his legs and almost all the corpsmen in the ICU and I are all like kind of like looking at ourselves like what's going to happen if this gentleman doesn't make it because he was so significantly burned he was hypothermic. He ended up being a true intensive care unit patient we had to intubate him we had to get arterial line a central line through his neck so he was in really rough shape and then about 3 a.m. he started like turning a corner and that was like the most awesome feeling. His core temperature was 88 when we first got him by the time we medevacked him out at five in the morning it was right up at 95 right back getting close to normal so he was stabilizing and as far as I know from the medevac Lieutenant Commander Shrek told us that he had made it in the same state that he left which is always our goal. Had we not picked him up he was hours away from death for sure like he definitely would not have made it and then when he left here he was actually doing phenomenally. Once they were done with their medical screening then our main focus then is what we were going to do with them afterwards. On Saturday morning around six it tells the man the boat decks who's going to transport the migrants over to the multi-ship lower the stern gate and started embarking personnel on to the boats that took a couple hours once they embarked the multi-ship it was a smooth sailing after that. It was very humbling to see the lengths of folks will go for more opportunity I mean to put yourself on a life raft and just out in the ocean I'm going to take my chances and shark infested water with the sun for however many days in a zodiac boat that's not built for that number of people because wherever you're leaving is so bad that you feel like that's your best option. Something like this uh this was the first time I'd ever had anything uh like this and it was definitely a it it brings to home on on just how lucky we as Americans are just thinking about the whole situation the real life situation that was going on and how lucky we actually are as Americans and the things that we take for granted every day.