BATH — Brian Carpenter figured the Navy would never send him home.

After all, the son of longtime Lewiston police officer Ed Carpenter had managed to see the world and even serve in the White House. His luck ought to run out, he thought.

Then new orders came.

“I was like, ‘No way.’ I never thought I’d get back here because Brunswick Naval Air Station is gone,” Brian Carpenter said. “And there’s nothing for me in Portsmouth because that’s a sub base.”

Instead, the chief electrician’s mate applied for a Navy unit that readies new ships for duty. And he landed in Bath.

“You go through a screening process,” Carpenter, 35, said. “If you qualify, your name gets submitted. The captain ultimately picks you.”

Last fall, he arrived at Bath Iron Works, gazing at the massive hull of the Zumwalt. It will be the first in a new class of Navy destroyers, sleekly designed to evade enemy detection and armed with state-of-the-art sensors and weapons.

“It was a little overwhelming at first, coming from a little teeny ship,” Carpenter said of the job.

The ship is 610 feet long and will displace more than 15,000 tons of water when it is fully loaded, according to the Navy.

It sits in the water at the Bath shipyard, attended by around-the-clock workers. When it joins the fleet in 2016, it will also be the first destroyer to run on electricity created by gas turbine engines.

The engines will produce 78 megawatts of electricity, enough to power a small city. By comparison, one megawatt can power about 1,000 American homes.

“Electricity runs everything,” said the chief electrician’s mate. “My job is the whole ship. It is everything.”

It’s a long way from his days as a teenager in Lewiston, where he grew up playing hockey. After graduating from Lewiston High School in 1998, he briefly attended Plymouth State College in New Hampshire. He left school, worked a few odd jobs and enlisted in the Navy in August of 1999.

The Navy fit him.

While he was still in boot camp, he was offered a chance to serve in the Navy’s honor guard, one of the military’s ceremonial units.

He quickly accepted.

Much of the work was spent at the national cemeteries, including Arlington, on burial duty. There were also parades and VIP escort duties at the Pentagon and the White House.

“I’m from the small town of Lewiston and got to see all of these people,” he said. “There were kings, queens and princesses and all of that.”

Mostly, he felt like a kind of living decoration in his dress white uniform.

“We’re a showpiece,” he said of the unit. “When you have Pentagon arrivals and the president’s state dinners, we’re always in the background doing things, escorting.”

Time was spent with President Clinton and the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

At home in Lewiston, his parents would tell him that they saw him in the background of some event on CNN.

The job lasted until just after 9/11. After that, it was time to be a sailor.

He went to school as an electrician. He served aboard a small rescue ship and with a unit that did naval ordnance disposal. He was looking for a job change when the Zumwalt position appeared.

After he was chosen, he quickly moved to Brunswick with his wife, Jen, and their daughter, Teagan, 2.

Here, he gets to have a lasting impact on the Navy.

Though the Zumwalt goes nowhere yet — it won’t carry the “USS” designation until it is commissioned — Carpenter is working hard to learn the ship and how its electrical systems will work.

There are almost never-ending classes and practical work on a simulator in Philadelphia. At first, he worried that he might not have enough knowledge of the new systems. Then, he realized there are few practical experts.

“Everybody’s on a level playing field because this is a first of class,” he said. “Even the trainers don’t really have all the answers. We’re really learning together.

“In a year I have learned so much,” he said. “There are a lot of safety protocols and procedures to put in place. You can’t just clone it from the last destroyer.”

He will also be known as a “plankowner,” a Navy term for a member of a ship’s first crew. Historically, plankowners or their widows could request an actual plank of their ship if it were decommissioned.

The term persists in the modern Navy.

“There’s a lot of pride in it,” he said. “You’re the first person to turn this nut or that nut.”

First, BIWs shipbuilders need to complete their work.

And Carpenter gets aboard when he can.

“What we can do is observe, go on the ship and watch them operate certain things,” he said. “That’s the best we can do until we get our hands on it and play with it.”

dhartill@sunjournal.com