U.S. sailors from the destroyers Hopper and Monterey rushed to the aid of five Iranian mariners who became ill while fishing in the Persian Gulf on Tuesday, according to the Navy.
A statement said Monterey received a distress call from the small fishing dhow and sent its helicopter to investigate, after which sailors from Hopper sent a boarding team to the dhow to give the fishermen medicine.
The Navy says it has assisted mariners more than 30 times in the Central Command area since 2012, and 13 of those incidents involved Iranians.
The news comes one day after reports surfaced that members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps trained one of their boats’ weapons on a Navy MH-30 Seahawk helicopter flying from the aircraft carrier Dwight D. Eisenhower in the Strait of Hormuz. No one was harmed in the Saturday incident.
On Nov. 18, the destroyer Nitze came to the aid of three Iranian fishermen whose boat was dead in the water, the Navy said. After confirming that the boat’s battery had died, the destroyer’s crew gave them a new one and a case of water. In August, four IRGC boats harassed that very same destroyer in the Strait, prompting the ship to sound its whistle and fire flares into the air.
