SANTAQUIN, Utah — Randy Butler has lived here for 50 years, and even he didn’t know there’s a USS Santaquin.
When he learned about the ship recently, the patriotism flowed.
“When I watch any of the World War II movies that they made of the landings during D-Day and stuff,” Butler told FOX 13, “and they had Utah Beach, that made me feel pretty patriotic.
“And so does this.”
At the moment, the USS Santaquin is the only active vessel in the U.S. Navy with a Utah name. A submarine, the USS Utah, was christened in October and is still undergoing construction and testing.
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The Santaquin isn’t the kind of craft anyone writes sea shanties for. It’s a tugboat ported at Naval Station Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.
The Santaquin has been in service since 1973. For years, it was ported in Virginia.
That’s where Dalyaness Martinez served aboard the Santaquin in the mid-1990s as an enlisted sailor. Martinez, who spoke to FOX 13 from her home in Arkansas, said the tug would assist larger ships in docking and undocking and worked with Navy Seals.
The Seals would practice being dropped “on the water, and we would just have to be standing by making sure that none of them got hurt,” Martinez said.
Sometime prior to 2009, the Santaquin was moved to Guantanamo Bay.
So, if the Santaquin was a marine animal, what marine animal would it be?
“I want to say a leopard seal,” Martinez said, “because they're aggressive, they're nonstop, relentless.”
“You don't get to see them dead,” she added.
Most Navy vessels are decommissioned after two or three decades, but the Navy has given no indication it plans to retire the Santaquin anytime soon.
Both the town and the ship are named for the son of a Native American chief. Ben Fellingham, owner of Santaquin Barbershop, drew a comparison between the tug and his town.
“I feel like Santaquin is strong and powerful,” Fellingham said. “It’s kind of like the little tugboat that could — that story.”
“I think it would be cool to commemorate or have a plaque in the city building that commemorates that tugboat,” he added.
