 Good afternoon, my name is Commander Craig Liddy, originally from House Springs, Missouri. I'm the commanding officer of PCU, South Dakota. And this is my 26th year in the Navy and we're currently underway on board PCU, South Dakota. So before I joined the Navy, I was pretty much an average American kid, interested in sports and did college for a little while and didn't really have a purpose for that college and my father had served in the Navy. So I decided to join the Navy and get some experience and kind of figure out what I wanted to do with my life. That was 26 years ago and I never would have imagined I'd be here today, but I'm still here and still loving it every day. My role as a commanding officer is ultimately I'm responsible for everything that occurs on the ship and I'm responsible for all the sailors on board the ship too. So that's quite a bit of responsibility, but it's a very exciting challenge every day. So in those responsibilities, I'm responsible for training the crew with the years of experience, about 16 years of experience that I have now in the submarine force through the variety of different mission sets that we do. And then also looking out for their health morale and welfare as well. So that's kind of the key, I think, to what guides my leadership style. I wanna create a culture here where everybody's enjoying their job, enjoying being in the Navy and even if they decide that they don't wanna stay for a long time, they still take the most out of it that they can. So the capabilities of PCU South Dakota, it's the 17th and newest Virginia-class submarine in the fleet, very capable platform, covering a wide variety of the US Navy war fighting areas including anti-submarine warfare, anti-surface warfare, strike warfare, as well as some other areas such as mine countermeasure, mine interdiction warfare. So we're a very capable platform. We can deliver both the Mark 48 heavyweight torpedo as well as the Tomahawk land attack cruise missile. So those are the weapons platforms that we can deliver. So the primary role of the submarine force in general and PCU South Dakota as well is to really stay forward deployed, undetected, be on scene, unseen, and be ready to deliver war fighting capability when we need to. Inconsistency between movies and submarines. I think the biggest one that I would say the biggest inconsistency between what the movies have and what we actually do here is in general, Hollywood depicts it as a one guy effort and that is absolutely not the way the United States Submarine Force works and certainly not here on PCU South Dakota. It's team effort every day. We rely on each other, we train together, we eat together, we sleep five feet from each other. So we really rely on that teamwork and camaraderie to make the ship successful. Kind of person that makes a good Submariner is a dedicated and driven person who's open and honest and not afraid to admit their own mistakes and really driven to learn how to correct those mistakes. That's what makes all of us so successful. So my experiences in the Navy up to this point have really taught me the importance of patience and being calm under pressure and how that impacts the crew members around you. They really look to a leader who can maintain calm under high stress situations and still deliver the actions that are required to fight the ship or to combat casualties on board the ship. Our culinary specialists in the Submarine Force are incredible sailors and certainly the ones here on PCU South Dakota are just phenomenal. I think people underestimate their importance on board the ship because they truly do directly relate to the morale and welfare of the crew. Not only do we need to provide healthy meals for the crew, but we also need to provide food that everybody enjoys eating. So we can be underway for a very long period of time and just the service that we get and those guys are always happy and smiling and ready to greet you with a smile even when you're having a bad day and then serve you a hot delicious meal on top of that. Very underestimated. I would tell you that we have one of the best restaurants in the world right here. Pizza night on a submarine is great. So routinely we have pizza night every Saturday to kind of signify the end of our week of training and operations. And then traditionally we always have a submarine the night before we pull into a port as well just to get back into that feeling of hey, we're gonna be on land for a while and get to enjoy life. I think my favorite sea story is an interesting one that I obtained through doing art take operations on ISEX 2014. So at the time I was serving as the exo of USS New Mexico, which means I had a different sleep cycle than the rest of the crew. So about two o'clock in the morning I was one of very few individuals that was actually awake and I had the opportunity to go top side and be on the Arctic ice pack by myself, which was an incredible experience and still a story that I tell my family all the time because you can't estimate the silence that's up there and the beauty that's up there. And even though it's two o'clock in the morning it's still bright daylight. So that was really awesome experience.