these are seven sailors who were sent here to serve two or three-year tours of duty. they won t be seeing their ways home. they come from across the country all the way to california. the youngest just 19 years old. the oldest 37 years old. all of them dying in what would have otherwise been a routine operation for the navy aboard a guided missile destroyer which collided in the early morning hours of saturday morning locally in japan with the container ship some three times its size. we re now told by the commander of the seventh fleet that the bodies of those seven sailors were found in the blooded sleeping compartments below deck when divers were sent down to search for them. listen to this. you can t see most of the damage. the damage is mostly underneath the waterline and it s a large gash near the keel of the ship. so the water flow was
the pentagon? any sense for how this happened? a lot of bewilderment. this doesn t happen. the navy doesn t have these kinds of catastrophic collisions at sea. what we re learning is how catastrophic it really was. think of what this crew was facing. it was dark. they had been in a collision. water is pouring into the ship, both beneath the waterline. they have damage above ground. the container ship and the navy ship hit exactly where the berthing compartment was and where communications were. the ship lost communications on board, dark, trying to struggle to survive, to save the ship and can t even communicate properly with each other. it was a catastrophe that befuddled everyone now, how it happened, but it will be fully investigated. john, help the rest of us to understand. aren t there radar systems on
tremendous. so there wasn t a lot of time. reporter: the rest of the ship s crew is being credited with keeping the ship from sinking. originally this was a search and rescue mission. those seven sailors were reported missing. it then turned out that their bodies were later found inside the ship. in the early hours president trump tweeted that his thoughts were with the families of the sailed lors. hope was being held out that the sailors would be found alive. no public word from the president or the white house since the navy confirmed the deaths of those seven sailors and their identities. an investigation will be conducted by the navy. the coast guard also looking into this. alisyn? alexandra, thank you. we have cnn pentagon correspondent barbara starr and cnn military and diplomatic analyst rear admiral john kirby. barbara, what s the sense from
board, collision avoidance equipment that should have been sounding alarms or doing something? there are a fabric of sensors that a sur sfas ship will use in order to naf vaet in open water to preserve and protect the safety of the ship. yes, there are radar systems on board. the investigators will make sure they were operating properly. there s also the human eyeball. you ll have lookouts posted fore and aft on the ship also looking out. it s nighttime. things don t always look the same at night as they do during the day. there s a whole suite of sensors and capabilities. so then what went wrong in your mind? i don t know. i don t know. we ought to be very careful not to get ahead of this investigation or speculate. obviously something went wrong. i suspect a lot of things went wrong. i suspect they will find that there were decisions that were made minutes before the collision and probably decisions that should have been made that