Xmas at sea

The 1986-87 deployment was the first of two times I was ever under way on Xmas Day. The nuc ET chief donned one of the white coveralls from the Otto fuel spill kit, trimmed with EB Red, and then added a red drill-monitor ball cap and an incredibly cheesy fake beard. He and the COB set out through berthing just after midnight local time, waking people up and passing out (if I recall correctly) candy.


Inevitably, someone objected to having his valuable rack time intruded upon. This may be the only time in the history of the world that Santa was ever heard to exclaim, "It's Christmas, you f**k - wake up!"

RIMPAC

I see in the news that RIMPAC 2008 is currently in progress. This exercise, involving the navies of various nations around the Pacific rim (RIM of the PACific - get it?)* and held every even-numbered year, was the first major exercise I was involved in.

Oly arrived in Pearl Harbor in early '86, having done a homeport shift from Norfolk (via Seattle, Olympia WA and Nanoose Bay BC). In November of that year we departed on our first WestPac. In between, we did all the usual submarine-preparing-for-deployment things; as the newest submarine in Hawai`i, it was probably inevitable that we would also be selected to play in that year's RIMPAC, which involved the US, Canada, Japan, the UK (which at the time still owned Hong Kong) and Australia.

Every morning at 0800 all traffic on base stops as the national ensign, which was taken down at sunset the night before ("evening colours"), is raised again ("morning colours"). Vehicles in motion stop; people walking come to attention and salute. In those days, at least, the national anthem was played during morning colours at Pearl Harbor every day except Sunday, when the bugle call was played instead.

The first foreign ship to arrive was a Brit fast boat; morning colours the next day or two included one verse each of "The Star-Spangled Banner" and "God Save the Queen." Then the Japanese contingent (a diesel boat and a couple of skimmers, as I recall) showed up, and we got a day or two with "The Star-Spangled Banner," "God Save the Queen" and, presumably, "Kimigayo." Then the next ships came in - and they switched to the bugle call for the rest of the time the visitors were in port.

To enable all exercise messages to be placed on the broadcast, but to keep the two sides from reading each other's traffic, different crypto was issued to each side. We started out assigned to one side, and were issued the correct crypto, but shortly before the exercise started we were switched to the other side and issued new crypto - but the first lot wasn't recalled, so when we went to sea we were still carrying both sets. Seeing no reason to let such an opportunity go to waste, we radiomen loaded both sets; "our" traffic went on the boards for dissemination, as usual, and the "enemy" messages were printed out and collected in a binder. The original idea was that we would give the binder to the Nav at the end of the exercise, but he was looking so depressed after the first few days that we ended up sharing the "intel" with him about halfway through.

(I don't know what he had to be depressed about; it certainly wasn't the tactical situation. Amongst the other "enemy" messages was a daily locator message giving the last known position for each of "our" ships. It's hard to hide those big grey things, of course, but throughout the entire exercise the last known posit given for Oly was pierside, the morning we got under way.)

Part of our mission for the exercise was to land a SEAL team on one of the other islands. There were five or six SEALs altogether, but I can only remember three of them: A young-looking ensign, a scrawny little BMCS and a very large HM1. (My first thought on seeing the latter was, How the heck did he get those shoulders down through the hatch?) We carried them around with us a few days, then surfaced late one night and put them over the side in their little rubber life raft. Mission accomplished, on our part and (as far as I know) on theirs as well.

SEALs go through some interesting stuff, including survival training - one result of the latter being their long-time nickname of "Snake Eaters." Somewhere in the middle of the exercise, some staff wienie obviously found far too much time on his hands, because one message we received referred to the "Special Navy Advanced Karate Experts and Extraordinary Action Team for Environmental Reconnaissance (S.N.A.K.E.E.A.T.E.R.)."

That was far from the silliest thing about RIMPAC '86, though. The prize-winner has to be the umpires' decision that a Cimarron-class oiler** was given credit for "killing" an "enemy" destroyer. I'd love to see that....

Speaking of destroyers, part of this year's RIMPAC will be the sinking of the former USS David R Ray (DD 971). I always did a double take when I saw that ship mentioned anywhere, because we had a David Ray on Oly. No idea if they were related.

Update 1340 25 Jul: Ex-USS David R Ray was sunk by a MK 48 Mod 7 Common Broadband Advanced Sonar System (CBASS) torpedo from Collins-class submarine HMAS Waller (SSG 75). ZUI this article from the Sydney Morning Herald, this one (with video) from The Age and this one from Adelaide Now. H/T to Joel.


* The Netherlands is one of the nations taking part this year. They still have territory in or near the Pacific?

** USS Willamette (AO 180), if I remember correctly.

Corn

My old shipmate Blunoz ('scuse, please, I mean Mr Blunoz - he's an O-ganger) was reminiscing last month about where he'd been and what he'd been doing on each of the anniversaries of his commissioning. For 1998, he said:

4 Years: USS PROVIDENCE (SSN 719), Groton, CT. While my fiancee, LW, is back in Boston planning our wedding, I'm now on my second deployment. This time it is to the Persian Gulf as part of the JOHN C STENNIS battle group. I pin on LT soon and let the extra pay accumulate in my bank account to pay for our honeymoon and stuff.

This led to the following exchange in the comments on his post:

RM1: I seem to remember a #10 can of corn somewhere in there.... 8)
Blunoz: RM1 - I'm surprised you remember that. Man, that creamed corn gets into EVERY bodily crevasse!!! That was extremely nasty. Thanks for the memory

Corn? Yes, corn. I've talked before about Halfway Night, the celebration that marks the midpoint of a deployment. One of the traditional events during Halfway Night is "Corn on the COB."

The corn, in this case, is a #10 can* of cream-style corn, which is auctioned off to the highest bidder.** The COB is the Chief of the Boat, the senior enlisted man on board (the submarine equivalent of a skimmer*** command master chief or an Army command sergeant major). After the auction is completed, the COB reports to the mess decks if he's not already there, the can of corn is opened and the winning bidder gets to pour the whole thing over the COB's head, to much applause from the rest of the crew.

So what does this have to do with Mr Blunoz? Well, during the '98 Halfway Night the bidding for the can of corn was so intense that they decided to auction off a second can - and then announced that the target could be anybody in the crew (only the CO was exempt). The winning bidders for this second can were a pair of JOs, and their target of choice was none other than Mr Blunoz. Something to do with his having missed the first month or two of the deployment, I believe....

I had hoped to post a picture here of Mr Blunoz in all his corn glory, but my pics from that deployment are packed away in one of the boxes in the basement, and my accomplice didn't get one. Oh, well....


* A #10 can holds around 12-13 cups (US measure), or around three litres.
** The money raised in this manner goes to the Rec Committee, to be used on the next ship's picnic, Xmas party, or what-have-you.
*** Surface fleet.

The right tool for the job

My first boat was under construction when I reported in. In fact, it didn't even have a name when I got my orders - I was to report to Commanding Officer, PCU SSN 717. By the time I rang my sponsor a few days later, though, he was able to tell me that I would be serving on USS Olympia. (My reaction: "Just what I wanted. A boat named after a can of beer....")

Oly was built at Newport News Shipbuilding & Dry Dock Company (now Northrop Grumman Newport News). Being on a new-construction boat had its good and bad sides. To begin with, it made qualifying interesting - "Okay, that component is going to be right here, and this component will be over there." Or, "Picture, if you will, a valve right here." It also meant going places where most people wouldn't be able to go on a normal boat; all four hatches were choked with ventilation ducts, power cords, air lines, &c, so access to the boat was through either a hull cut over the CO's stateroom (a ladder right where his desk would eventually be), a hull cut over the Nucleonics lab, or a hull cut over the reactor compartment (a ladder leading down to the top of the reactor vessel). On the other hand, I'd just finished nine months of schools designed to teach me how to operate, troubleshoot and repair equipment that wouldn't even be on the boat until several months after I got there*, so I managed to forget quite a bit.

NNSB&DDCo didn't just build boats; they repaired them, too. This meant that there were a lot of techs on shipyard payroll, and their duties included installing and testing the equipment. As I was an HF tech, I dealt with the shipyard's Great God of HF (whose name, of course, I have totally forgotten in the intervening 23 years). He came down to the boat one day to do a little testing of some sort. Unfortunately, I was off the boat at the time, so I missed all the fun....

At the aft end of the shack was a fuse panel. It was labeled as holding six fuses, but as this was three-phase power, there were actually six sets of three, with each set holding one fuse for each phase. These fuses are nothing like the fuses you have in your house, mind you; each one was around four inches long, and close to a half-inch thick. Due to the current they carried, we radiomen weren't even allowed to touch them - we had to call an electrician's mate forward from nukeland to pull or replace them for us, and he had to take all sorts of precautions when doing so.

I returned to the boat that day to find that the Great God of HF had decided that he needed to secure power to something, and had started to pull the fuses himself. (Great Gods, of course, do not need the assistance of mere electrician's mates - right?) Whilst pulling one fuse, though, he'd accidentally turned it slightly so it made contact with the neighbouring fuses - thus shorting across the phases. I recall being told that A Gang had been snorkeling at the time, but the resulting power surge caused the diesel to shut down.

This caused plenty of excitement, of course. The Great God of HF explained what had happened, and there didn't seem to be any permanent damage. Someone did ask a potentially embarassing question, though: What had happened to the Great God's fusepullers? Had he been using proper fusepullers? Of course, he said. So where were they? Well, he said, naturally he had been startled by the arcing and sparking and had jerked his hand back from the fuse panel; the fusepullers must have flown out of his hand and - ah - gone outboard?** There were a few dubious looks, but no-one called him on it.

And life went on, and life was good.

Fast-forward five or six months. My LPO decided we needed to inventory and restow the contents of the toolbox at the aft end of Radio one day, and drafted me to help him. He knelt by the toolbox and, starting with the top drawer, pulled everything out and handed it over his shoulder to me. After we finished restowing the top drawer, he proceeded to the next, and so on, until we reached the bottom drawer. The LPO started pulling stuff out, and there, amidst all the rest of the junk in the bottom drawer, was a shiny new pair of channel-locks. The kind with bare metal handles, sans insulation.

He picked up the channel-locks and held them out for me, but I didn't take them. He waggled them to get my attention, but I still didn't take them. "Y'know, I think we just found that idiot's fusepullers," I said.

"Huh?" He turned to see what I was looking at. Shiny new channel-locks? Yeah, the side that had been facing up while they were lying in the bottom of the toolbox was nice and shiny-new, but when he'd held the channel-locks out to me, he'd rotated his hand so the other side of them was facing up. And that side wasn't shiny - it was black. Scorched. Partially melted, in fact.

Fusepullers, my arse.

The channel-locks went up the chain of command, LPO to RMC to Commo to Nav, but there wasn't anything officially to be done. There was talk of mounting the channel-locks on a plaque and presenting them to the shipyard HF shop, but I don't know if they actually did that....


* There wasn't even a Radio Room door - just a rectangular hole in the bulkhead - the first few months I was on board.

** Behind the equipment racks.

Coffee

Got an e-mail the other day from a guy I went to boot camp (Great Lakes) with many, many years (almost 26!) ago. That got me thinking about boot camp, and about this and that, and I ended up on the subject of coffee. The Navy runs on coffee, of course - consider the stereotypical CPO with his index finger permanently crooked to hold his coffee cup - and I've certainly done my bit through the years to help support the world's coffee growers.

My mother was a tea drinker, and I've been drinking tea ever since I was a kid. I didn't start drinking coffee until around the time I dropped out of high school, and that was out of desperation - it was a cold, snowy, blowy day in northern Illinois, and the restaurant where I stopped to thaw out didn't serve tea and had run out of hot chocolate (or maybe it was the other way round). So I ordered coffee, diluted it thoroughly with cream and sugar, and started a lifetime habit....

I drank it blond & sweet the first couple of years, but then switched to blond & bitter to silence all my health-food-junkie friends who kept making pointed remarks about all the refined sugars I was poisoning myself with. A year or two later I went out to dinner with friends and ordered my usual; the waitress delivered the coffee, but not the cream. After the second reminder, and subsequent failure to deliver, I gave up - the coffee was getting cold and I was getting thirsty - and drank it straight. I've been drinking black & bitter ever since.

Sometime in '75 or '76 I read a magazine article about the dangers of "excessive caffeine" consumption - the stuff buggers up your liver, stomach, blood pressure, &c, &c. All through the article, the author kept saying "excessive caffeine," but he didn't get around to defining this term until the final paragraph: More than two or three cups of coffee (or the equivalent) a day. Now, in those days I was drinking anywhere up to 16 cups a day. To begin with, my cup was never empty at work; when it got down to a quarter-inch or so, I'd top it off. That accounted for 8-10 cups a day, and then I'd go out to dinner and drink several more cups. (This, obviously, was long before I ever had to start worrying about drinking coffee after 1500....*)

Then I joined the Navy, and for the first time in years was in an environment where I couldn't grab a cup of coffee whenever I felt like it....


Nowadays, I think, they call them Recruit Division Commanders (RDCs), but when I was in boot camp they were Company Commanders (CCs) and every company had two of them. Ours were an IC1 and an EN1**, and both were coffee drinkers. And whenever one of them needed a refill, he'd grab a handy recruit, hand him a coffee cup, and send him down to fetch it.

Of course, this being boot camp, we couldn't just ask for a cup of coffee. Do that, and you'd be sent back to your CC with his cup full of damp, firmly packed coffee grounds. The procedure was to knock on the office door, take three steps in, come to attention, turn to face the CC who was there (eight companies in the barracks made for 16 CCs to take turns manning the office off the building quarterdeck), and say, "Sir! Seaman Recruit [insert surname here] reporting, Sir! My Company Commander has sent me to get for him a cup of freshly brewed, hot, black, liquid refreshment from the coffee pot, SIR!" This speech, and only this speech, would lead to the desired results.

One day EN1 handed me his cup and told me to get him some coffee. So off I went, cup in hand, to the quarterdeck. I knocked, entered, sounded off, received a cupful of coffee, and walked out of the office, to find another recruit from my company standing there, holding IC1's cup and looking extremely nervous. Seems he couldn't remember the speech, and since I obviously could***, he wanted me to get the product for him. "No," sez I.

"C'mon, man, I can't remember all that! You know how to do it. Get some for me, please!"

We argued back and forth for a minute or so, and then I saw the door behind him open - and IC1 tiptoed in, holding his finger to his lips for silence. I returned my attention to my fellow recruit, who was still pleading for my assistance and almost jumped out of his skin when IC1 tapped him on the shoulder and said, "Recruit! Where's my coffee??"

Heh, heh....


Hawai`i is a beautiful place, and I'm glad I got to go see it, but I was ready to leave by the end of the second week - three years was much, much too long to be there. (Odd thing about Hawai`i - everyone I know who's lived there either absolutely loves it, or absolutely hates it. No middle-of-the-road feelings about it at all. But I digress....) One of the things Hawai`i is noted for is the Kona coffee that's grown on the Big Island. We had a QM2 who would come in to work every morning with a baggie containing enough ground Kona to make one pot. He'd go down to the crew's mess, carefully rinse out the coffee pot and the filter basket, brew his potful of Kona, fill his cup, and walk off, leaving the rest of the pot for those of us who were circling like buzzards.


One of the things I found really strange about the skimmer was that the mess decks were secured between meals. On the boat, of course, the crew's mess also serves as lounge and lecture hall; the coffee pot, milk machine, &c, are always available for use. Not so on the target. Instead, each division maintained a coffee mess (or few) in its divisional spaces, and S2 (the cooks) would issue coffee periodically, each division receiving a set amount based on the number of people in that division. Coffee messes were secured at night (electrical fires not being considered a Good Thing), so the only place one could get a cup of coffee before/after watch in the middle of the night was the Lifer Locker (First Class mess), which of course was only open to E6's; E5 and below were out of luck.


Had an RM2 on Jax who liked to load up on caffeine. He'd take a large travel mug, pour in two or three packets of cocoa (yes, chocolate contains caffeine, too), add five or six packets (or second's worth) of sugar and a bit of milk, and then top it off with coffee. Called this concoction a Speedball, if I remember correctly. One of these at the beginning of a watch would keep him buzzing for the entire six hours. (The kid drove me crazy, but I had to congratulate him when he got orders to transfer. Who ever would have thought that there was a Reserve Centre somewhere in northern California with a billet specifically for a submarine-qualified RM2...?)


One of the duties of the Messenger of the Watch on a submarine is to run coffee for the Dive, the COW, the OOD, and the rest of the Control Room watchstanders. I can't vouch for this tale personally; it was something I read years ago in the Naval Institute Proceedings, or maybe in the "Humour in Uniform" section of Readers' Digest. Seems there was a certain seaman on a certain boat who was famed for his ability to reach the bridge with a full cup of coffee for the OOD, no matter what the sea state. Until he was caught one day. Seems his secret was to pause at the bottom of the bridge access ladder, take a big mouthful of coffee, climb the ladder, pause at the top to spit the coffee back into the cup, and then pass it up to the OOD. Ingenuity at its finest, I say....


When I stood my U/I watches for Chief of the Watch, I'd often fill in for the Messenger in this regard if he was needed for other things. One day on Jax the Dive sent me down for a refill. I listened to his careful instructions - so many seconds' worth of milk, so many seconds' worth of sugar - then went down to the crew's mess and fixed the brew in accordance with. I made sure the lid was on tight, took the cup back to Control, and when the Dive reached for it I shook the cup vigorously and solemnly said, "Shaken, not stirred" - and then had to wait for him to finish laughing so he could take the cup.


One of the bad things about the place where I work now is that they don't provide coffee....


* Actually, caffeine refuses to work in the normal manner for me. Drinking coffee is no help at all when I need to stay awake for a midwatch or some other reason; I can fall asleep with a cup in my hand. It's not until I'm through working and ready to go to bed that it makes its presence known. I go to bed, go straight to sleep with no problem - and twenty minutes later, I'm suddenly wide awake for an hour or few.

** An Interior Communications Electrician First Class, and an Engineman First Class, for you non-USN readers.

*** And still do.

Steel beach

On a submarine, having a "steel-beach picnic" means taking your meal up topside to eat it in the sun. We did a couple of steel-beach picnics when I was on the tender; for those the cooks actually had grills which they set up on the weather decks; they cooked hamburgers ("sliders") and hot dogs, and the rest of the crew queued up and went past the grills, collected their food, and then picked a spot to sit and eat. The problem with this procedure was that with only one serving line, it was so long that there was no chance of trying to go back through for seconds if you were so inclined. On the boat, all the food was cooked in the galley, as for any other meal, and we just filled our plates and took them topside.

We had three steel beaches during my last deployment. The first one wasn't planned; we were on our way south through the Suez Canal, and the northbound convoy had gotten delayed for some reason, so we (as part of the first southbound convoy) had to pull aside in the Great Bitter Lake and wait for them. The skipper decided that as long as we were sitting there, and we would be able to see anything approaching us well before it reached us, he might as well let off-watch personnel go up for a little sun.

We kept an armed topside watch stationed as a welcoming committee; here he stands up forward, with several targets - excuse me, I mean "surface ships" - visible beyond him.


The chap in civvies is a reporter from the New London (CT) Day. He and a photographer rode us for a few weeks, sending stories and photos home every day by e-mail.






Two months later, we were in the Med, somewhere over near Italy, and the captain ordered another steel beach - a proper one, this time, complete with food.






A lot of people stayed topside after eating to enjoy the sun, of course. (When we went through the Suez Canal northbound in '98, I didn't even go below to hit the rack; I just stretched out in the shade of the sail and slept there.) The fellow all the way forward with no shirt is one of the ship's divers, standing by in case someone is stupid enough to go over the side. And that appears to be the XO with the khaki belt, leaning against the starboard side of the WLR-9 fin.

A month after that we were somewhere off to the west of Sardinia, and the skipper decided to combine a steel beach with a little 9mm familiarization. Here TM1 supervises whilst the skipper fires a few shots.





The Nav, the Weps and a couple of JOs - plus an SCPO rider - waited for their turns with the pistol.








We had the usual collection of loiterers catching some rays, of course, including the diver (with his little booties). And the XO seems to have claimed the WLR-9 again....






YN1 takes his turn with the 9mm. Earlier, we'd had a target - a face drawn on an inflated rubber glove, attached to the top of a five-gallon milk box - but by this time it had sunk, so he's just aiming at the water. I love pictures like this that catch the ejected brass flying through the air.

This was actually rather an unusual deployment, with this many steel beaches - I think the only other time I had that many opportunities to catch the sun was during the '98 deployment, in the Persian Gulf. Those pictures are packed away someplace, though, along with the Suez Canal pics and photos of the few swim calls I was present for. Maybe someday I'll dig them all out and scan them in so I can post them....

Rack time

In my experience (which I admit is limited to 688s), the best racks on a boat are the top ones; you get a little more storage space that way, up amongst the pipes and cable runs. (As long as nobody comes along and tells you to clear that rubbish out - or clears it out for you - because it's causing sound shorts, anyway.) Middle racks are next best, and bottom racks are the worst, because you have to get down on your knees to get your stuff out or crawl into the rack, and back in the days of major pre-deployment load-outs, your bunkpan might disappear behind all the #10 cans that were used to repave the deck in berthing. Most of the racks on a 688 are the same size, but there are some that are just a wee bit different the rest. Some racks (outboard aft in Aft Berthing, for instance) suck because they're tucked in behind a locker or something, and you don't have easy access to your entire bunkpan.

And then there are the top bunks in the outboard row of Aft Berthing. Most bunks are nice, neat rectangular spaces, with more or less vertical walls at both ends and along the back. Due to the curvature of the hull, though, those four bunks have back walls that slope inward at the top, cutting down on the amount of space in the interior of the rack. And unless you're anorexic, you can't lie on your side in one of those racks without having your back (or front) touching that slanting back wall.

And thereby hangs a tale....

First WestPac, early '87. Hong Kong. We'd been under way for several weeks, and now we were parked, not at a pier, but out at an anchorage. A hazmat anchorage. (Nuclear wessel, you know.) The hazmat anchorages, of course, are the ones farthest out in the bay, so we had a pretty healthy ride from the anchorage to the pier. A good half-hour ride, if memory serves me correctly.

Naturally, nobody wanted to waste time on long liberty-boat rides. So those who could, took hotel rooms. And one of those-who-could was an STS2 named Mark. Who, for the past several weeks, had been living in one of those outboard top bunks.

Mark and another STS2, Steve, got themselves a room, and then went out and partied a wee bit before returning to the hotel to get some sleep. And about 0200, Steve woke up to find Mark pushing his bed (his own, that is, not Steve's) across the hotel room.

Steve watched this activity for a moment, then asked a perfectly logical question: "What the hell are you doing?"

The somewhat surly answer? "Trying to get some sleep."

Seemed that during all those weeks in that top rack, Mark had gotten so used to having his back up against the back of the rack that he couldn't get to sleep in the hotel bed. So he was pushing it up against the wall of the room, so that he could lie down with his back touching the wall....

Tourists, arriving

Back in the days before pier security was tightened up, we used to get the occasional person (or few) dropping by and asking for a tour of the boat. Sometimes it would be a fellow submariner, from a different class of boat; other times it would be a skimmer, or perhaps a member of one of the other services. In Groton, SubScol students were fairly common.

The POOD would call below to get permission from the SDO, and the SDO would usually say yes, provided a tour guide could be found. I was almost always willing to volunteer; in part because I was proud of my boat and of what I did, and in part because I remembered two young men who were willing to take the time to give me the same courtesy. (One was on a diesel boat - Blueback, I think - when I was going through RM 'A' school in San Diego; the other was on HMS Spartan, which spent a week or so in Groton when I was in SubScol.)

I'd usually take 45 minutes to an hour to give a tour. I'd start out topside, talking about the ship's size and pointing out whatever masts and antennas* happened to be raised. Then we'd go below and I'd show them the CO's stateroom, Control and the Nav Centre, and let them look through the deadlight into the fan room. Down to middle level for the crew's mess and galley, Countermeasures (where I'd talk about the doc), berthing (where if possible I'd open a convenient bunkpan to show how much storage room we didn't have for personal effects), the weirdroom and officers' staterooms, and the goat locker. Then down to lower level for the machinery room and the torpedo room. And somewhere along the way I'd pause to talk about the EAB system and how it worked, and about other DC gear.

Skimmers often have (or at least use to have) open house, where they'll throw the boat open for the general public to come aboard and look around. I've only seen a submarine do that once.

We were doing our homeport shift from Norfolk to Pearl, and along the way we stopped off for a namesake-city visit to Olympia, Washington. Just getting there was a trip in itself. On Thursday we transited the Strait of Juan de Fuca, mooring for the night in Seattle. (Cinderella liberty!) We got under way early the next day for a full-day transit of Puget Sound, arriving in Olympia early in the evening.

Back in those days the city of Olympia loved us.** Official (and unofficial) representatives of the city had been at the commissioning ceremony, and when we pulled in to Roosevelt Roads and St Croix during our first underway as USS (vice PCU) Olympia, there were Olympia citizens waiting on the piers.

To start with, they had arranged a big party for us in a warehouse not far from our berth, though I was unable to attend as I had duty the first night in.

There were a few dozen protesters on the pier when we pulled in, waving signs and chanting ("Take the toys away from the boys!"). I had the first watch up in the bridge, with an M-16, and I sat up there and chanted along with them ("More nukes, less kooks!") Besides the protesters and the party-goers, there were also quite a few people who just came down to the pier to have a look at the boat.

The next morning I went up topside to have a look around in the daylight. The protesters were gone, but they'd left some of their signs propped up to remind us of their displeasure. One of these signs caught my eye, and I wasted no time in going below and dragging a couple of my nuke buddies up to see it: WE WELCOME THE PEOPLE BUT NOT THE NUKES. ("See, Joel? Even the damn' hippies know the difference between nukes and real people!")

After duty-section turnover I went out with a handful of others (all nukes, as I recall), looking for breakfast. We found it in a hotel restaurant, and after eating, we went next door to the hotel bar. There were seven or eight of us, and we hadn't gotten three steps inside the door when a man seated at the bar looked up at us and announced, "I'm buying these boys a drink." The bartender bought the second round, and I never did see who paid for the third round; the bartender just came over and started setting glasses in front of us again. I figured if I wanted to see much of the town, I'd better get out of there quickly, so I drank the third one and left.

It was like that the entire time we were there - almost impossible for us to buy our own drinks. I don't think many people wore civvies the entire time we were there; most of us wore our dress blues whenever we went out into town. And the response was amazing: People driving by would honk and wave. Or they'd pull over and ask if we knew where we were going. If not, did we want directions? If we did know, did we want a ride? If we didn't care, would we like to go with them? There were reports of crewmembers being taken out to people's cabins, deep-sea fishing, up for rides in private planes.

And the party the first night wasn't all. Sunday afternoon there was a parade, followed by a reception at the governor's mansion. And Monday was brewery day. The Olympia brewery loved us, too; during new construction they'd shipped us several cases of beer mugs, enough for every man in the crew to get one, and they'd provided some nice glasses for the commissioning banquet, too. When we went out to tour the brewery, we discovered that they had some keychains for us, engraved with with out names and ranks, and the date. And it wasn't a matter of telling them your name, and then waiting while they did the engraving. No, someone had sent them a copy of the sailing list, and the keychains were all ready and waiting; all we had to do was dig through the bowl to find the right one.

And then there were the tourists. The decision had been made to throw the boat open to the public. Members of the duty section would be posted at various locations throughout the forward compartment, and the visitors would come below and be directed along a set route. At each stop, the tour guide posted there would give a brief talk, and then the people would be given a chance to buy something from the ship's store before being escorted off the boat. Officially, the tours ran from 0800 until 1700, but....

To begin with, any time you went up topside, day or night, you'd find people - plural - standing there, just looking at the boat. By the time duty-section turnover started (0700, if I recall correctly), they'd be queued up a block long. So the duty officer would sigh, and as soon as turnover was complete, say, "Okay - take stations and start bringing them down."

By 0900, the queue was a good two blocks long. And it stayed that way. All day. Around 1645 we'd send some poor sap from the duty section out to the end of the queue to start turning people away. "We're sorry. We know you've been waiting a long time, but we have to stop the tours for the night. Maybe you can come back tomorrow...."

And still they'd keep coming. The official tours stopped, but crewmembers would be bringing folks down for private tours. Finally, about 2200, the SDO would put his foot down and say, "That's it - no more tours." And the last tour would finally go down about midnight.

I was responsible for a few of those private tours, too. I was sitting up in the bridge with my M-16, mostly watching the water for swimmers or other threats, but also keeping an eye on the crowd on the pier, and I noticed a cute young lady sitting on a bollard looking at the boat. She sat there for what must have been two hours, just looking, and just before I was due to get relieved, she stood up and started to walk away. So I called out, "Miss!" She looked back, and I asked, "Would you like a tour?" She nodded, so I told her to wait, I'd be getting relieved in fiteen minutes or so and would be happy to provide. So she did, and I did. (Her name was Tina, and I got several letters from her over the next few years; in fact, I believe she was the one who sent me the teddy bear you can see in the picture here.)

As far as I know, I was the one to give the final tour during that visit - at 0200 Wednesday morning, to two young ladies who I'm pretty sure had been amongst the protesters the night we pulled in. They asked a few leading questions ("Is the crew politically aware?"), but they seemed to be genuinely interested in what I was showing them. Though I'm not quite sure how interesting they would have found it if I hadn't been standing right in front of the 21-Man door when a certain ET2 started to walk out, stark naked, on his way to the head....

Wednesday morning we were up early to repeat the trip in reverse, stopping for another night in Seattle before continuing on up to spend a few days in Nanoose Bay, BC.

The semi-official estimate I heard was that we put around 5000 people through the boat during that port call. And I've never seen anything like it since.


* According to the book we used when I was learning antenna theory in SETTS, radios have antennas; insects have antennae.

** Though it seems they have undergone a somewhat drastic change of opinion since then.

Quote

"You know, I've never met anyone who takes as much pride in being unhelpful as you do." -- ET2(SS) on Prov, talking to me

Forever and ever

I was having a chat with somebody at work the other day, and something she said reminded me of a couple things from my Navy days, and how the Navy can affect the rest of your life.

For instance, there was an STS2 on Jax who was looking forward quite eagerly to his EAOS. Couldn't wait to get out, and get as far away from the Navy as he could. But, he said, he did have to give the Navy credit for making him grow up.

What my conversation at work actually reminded me of, though, was the more deleterious effects the Navy had had on a couple other people, such as a girl* I knew on the tender. We were sitting in her shop one day, talking, and she said, "You know, I used to be a lady before I joined the Navy. Now? I fart, I scratch, I burp, I cuss."

Didn't seem to be much I could say to that.

Then there was Roger. Roger was another RM2 on Oly (he'd been one class - two weeks - ahead of me going through SETTs and "C" school), and he was one of those religious types. Didn't cuss, drink, smoke, or engage in any of the other activities which are often, for some reason, associated with sailors. At first, that is. After a year on the boat, he still wasn't doing any of the other things (that I knew of, anyway), but he was swearing just as much as anyone else was. He actually said "f***" more than I did, I think.

And then one day, around two years after he'd reported in, he put in for three or four weeks of leave in the summer so he could go home and be a counselor at church camp.

A few weeks later he was doing maintenance on something or other, and it was being uncooperative. So much so, in fact, that he finally threw down his screwdriver and said, "[Expletive Deleted]!"

"Damn, Roger," I said, looking up from the teletype. "I sure wish I could be at that church camp with you this summer. I'd just love to see their faces the first time you open your mouth and start talking like a sailor."

Lasting effects, indeed....


* Oh, all right - "woman," if you insist. But she's a good fifteen years younger than I, so at the time she really wasn't much more than half my age.

I'm so queasy; my head is spinning.

It's a well-known fact (amongst submariners, anyway) that "Happiness is four hundred feet in a state-six sea." According to this, sea state six involves waves from 13.5 to 19 feet in height. However, all of that wave action is at the surface; go deep enough, and you can't even tell that they're having weather up there on the top of the ocean.

I was only seasick enough to puke once; that was when I was on the skimmer, and I blame it on the meds I was taking at the time. I admit that I did find myself feeling a little uneasy a few times, but I found out early on that two things would make that feeling go away: Get something solid into my stomach, and lie down.

Other people, of course, reacted differently. On the Oly, for instance, we had the FTG1 who would be running for the head before the boat was even fifty yards away from the pier.

And then there was a certain young ensign on the skimmer. (Note that I wasn't there for this incident, but I had several people swear to me that it really happened, so....) Repair Department wasn't really a part of ship's force - it was actually a separate UIC, in fact - and most of Repair didn't stand watches when the ship was under way. R-4 (Tron Repair), however, supplied two of the three watch sections for the Combat Information Centre (CIC).

Now, skimmers don't follow the sensible six-on-eighteen-off watch schedule that submarines do. They do four-hour watches instead. Three watch sections standing four-hour watches in a 24-hour day, of course, means that people will stand the same watches every day (ie, the same section will always have the midwatch). They correct for this by "dogging" the afternoon - splitting it into two two-hour watches, thus making seven watches during the day. This means that depending on where you are in the rotation, you'll get four, six, or eight hours off between watches. And since they only serve three meals a day - no midrats - it's a little difficult to work meals into your schedule. But I digress....

This ensign (whom we'll call Smith, because after all these years I haven't the faintest notion what his name really was) was standing watch on his first underway, and the weather was a little rough. And one of the watchstanders was an ET1 named Jeff, who was munching away on a snack or two between plotting contacts. Noting that the ensign was getting a little green around the gills, Jeff called out, "Hey, Mister Smith - want a cookie?" And ENS Smith looked up to see that Jeff was offering him a sort of sandwich, made of two Oreos and a sardine (with mustard sauce).

They said the ensign set a new speed record running from CIC to the nearby head.

Submarines, of course, normally stay deep. But there was one time on Oly when we were out providing services, and the OpOrd for some reason called for us to be on the surface for an hour or so at one point. And the weather started getting rough....

We surfaced right around the time the cooks started serving lunch. I was in the first group of four called to the mess decks - and one of only a dozen or so people who actually did eat lunch that day. Lunch was Mexican-style that day: Frijoles and burritos (or something similar) from the serving window, and a huge bowl of serve-yourself taco salad sitting on the counter at the forward end of the mess decks. I went in, got my plate, sat down at the table right next to the scullery door, and commenced chowing down. I'd just finished eating when we took a roll to starboard, and I had to grab my stuff to keep it from ending up on the deck.

Then we rolled back to port. I more or less teleported the length of my table, bounced off the chap seated at the outboard table, and ended up sitting on the deck with everything off my table in my lap. Everything, that is except for my plate, which had successfully made the jump from my table to the outboard one. So I stood up, dumped things back onto the table for the mess cooks to take care of, handed my plate, &c, in to the scullery, and went up to Radio to relieve the watch.

Remember my rules for coping with seasickness: Eat something and lie down. After the offgoing RMOW departed, I shut the door behind him and stretched out on the deck, me feet braced against the door and my head next to one of the equipment racks. And I stayed there, watching all of the paperwork slide out of people's in-boxes onto the deck as we continued to slosh back and forth.

Over the white rat I could hear the XO in control, calling out the clinometer readings - and some pretty interesting reading they were, indeed. I missed the OOD's watch relief, but I heard about it later from those who had been in Control. Normally, after the new OOD has taken the watch, he calls out, "Helm, Quartermaster, this is Soandso; I have the deck and the conn." This time it was the Weps, and his announcement was "Helm, Quartermaster, this is Lieutenant Russell; I am on the deck and I have the conn." Seems he was seated on the deck at the time, with his back firmly up against the QM stand and his feet braced against the coamings of the scope wells.

We finally went deep, the rocking and rolling stopped, and I stood up and took a good look around. And the first thing I noticed was the gigapig. This piece of test equipment - a spectrum analyser, as I recall - weighed around seventy pounds, and lived in a puka at the top of one of the equipment racks. The one I had been lying under. It wasn't bolted in, but was instead held by two honkin' big tie-wraps (you know, those plastic zip-strip thingies) and two pieces of white line (string, to you).

Ever see tie-wraps pull loose? These two had. Both of them. And those two little pieces of white line were the only thing that had kept the gigapig from falling out of the rack and landing on top of me as I lay there on the deck.

I was still standing there staring at the gigapig when the 1MC announcement came: "All hands not on watch, lay to the crew's mess to assist with cleanup." I was out the door like a shot, and down the ladder to look at the mess decks. And then I ran for my rack to get my camera, so I could take a couple of pictures* before returning to Radio, secure in the knowledge that I was on watch and didn't have to get involved.

Everything off the tables - tablecloths, condiments, plates, &c - was on the deck. The coffeepots had emptied themselves onto the deck. The bug-juice machines had sloshed out onto the deck. The ice-cream machine had emptied itself - out the top - onto the deck. That big bowl of taco salad I mentioned? On the deck. A couple of lockers had popped open, and there were packages of napkins and other things on the deck, too.

And then there was the soda syrup. Back in those days we had a soda dispenser, just aft of the scullery window, by the bug-juice machine. It was fed with #10 cans of syrup, which were kept between the bench lockers in the crew's mess. A score or so of those cans had come adrift during the rocking and rolling, and at least a dozen of them had had holes punched in them as they banged against things. So all of the other items on the deck were connected by this huge puddle of brown goo....

Clean-up efforts were successful, of course, and all the off-watch people got to go back to their racks. But it was a couple of months before the last of that brown goo stopped leaking out from behind the CRES trim around the edge of the deck.


* That was one reason I waited to write this post - I was hoping to find those pictures and get them scanned in so I could use them to illustrate this post. No such luck.

Another good sea story from Bothenook

Read it here.

Fortunately, I was on leave the day my division had to go to the dump to dig for the crypto....

Sniff, sniff...

Back in '75, I started working in a bakery, with all the fruits and spices and other things. It was interesting work, and I enjoyed it while it lasted, though since I am not a morning person, the hours - 0400-1200 Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday (I had Wednesdays off); 0300-1100 Saturday; and 0200-0800 every second or third Sunday - kind of sucked. Around the same time, I started working in the nursery at church every Sunday, with all of the diapers and, ah, other stuff. And after about three months of this sensory overload, my nose said, "That's it - I'm not playing any more." And while I left the church in '78, and the bakery in '80, my nose still doesn't work properly.

They say that the sense of smell is a very important factor in enjoying the taste of food. I haven't noticed any real problems in that regard (what did affect my enjoyment of food was boot camp, where we had to rush through each meal in order to make room in the galley for the next company - I still haven't kicked the habit), but when it comes to sniffing flowers, or perfumes, or whatnot, forget it. Often I'll get a faint whiff of something the first time I try it, but after that, nothing.

Anosmia ("no sense of smell") can actually be a blessing under certain circumstances. For instance, on my second boat, I was standing U/I watches as COW. Our ETC had the Dive in that section, and he'd be sitting there the entire watch, merrily farting away. Those were some fairly noxious fumes he was creating - even the guy in the far corner of Control was gagging - but I could sit right next to ETC and not notice a thing.

I'm not the only one with this sort of thing. Did you ever hear that old line about "don't put beans up your nose"? On my first boat there was a chap whom I'll call Michael*, whose parents used to tell him that when they would go out for the evening, leaving him at home alone. Now Mike probably wasn't what you'd call an average child to begin with - he has a scar on his lip that he says is the result of his biting a lamp cord when he was a toddler - but even he wouldn't have come up with such a ridiculous notion if his mother hadn't suggested it. But she did, and of course he had to try it.

And so one night his parents came home to find him with a snootful of beans. They removed the beans, and chastised him thoroughly, and that - theoretically - was the end of the matter. Except that a few days later, Mike came down with a headache. Which turned into a bad headache. Which turned into a really bad headache. They took Mike to see a doctor, who asked questions, poked and prodded, and finally reached a conclusion.

They'd missed a bean.

To quote Mike: "The bean didn't know anything about noses. All it knew was that it was in a warm, dark, moist place." So it did what beans do when they find themselves in warm, dark, moist places - it sprouted. And it was the bean sprout, trying to drill through the bones of Mike's skull, that was causing the headache.

The legumectomy was successful, but when the bean came out, Mike's sense of smell went with it. Permanently. Which all, I suppose, goes to show that if you really don't want your kids to do something, maybe it's best not to tell them that....


* Because according to my almanac, Michael was the most popular name for American boys born around the time he was.

Mess cooks

Sometime back, I made mention of "my two-bit senior chief on the Oly," and promised to explain that description of him. So....

As I understand it*, the Royal Navy, back in the days of wooden ships and iron men, divided those men (the ratings, that is, not the officers) into groups of four. When it came time for swill - excuse me, I mean "food" - to be served, rather than having the whole crew queue up, each of these groups-of-four would send a representative to collect the rations for himself and for the other three. Such a group of four men was called a "mess," and the chap who was doing the fetching was called a "mess cook." And when the newly established US Navy drew upon the Royal Navy for its traditions, mess-cooking was one of those it adopted.

Times change, and navies change, and men's duties change. In today's Navy, a mess cook** is a very junior person, recently reported in to his/her first ship, who is assigned temporarily (usually for a period of 90-120 days) to assist the cooks by doing things like dishwashing, veg prep, general cleanup, &c. On submarines, mess cooks also serve as waiters, fetching drinks and desserts for their shipmates, in order to cut down on the number of people moving around in the cramped confines of the crew's mess. Almost no-one escapes this duty.

(I, as it happens, did. My first boat was in new construction; it didn't even have a galley when I arrived. By the time the first person assigned as a mess cook - an A-gang FN from Massachusetts - started those duties, I was already a PO2, and I had my dolphins long before they ran out of E4-and-below and the first non-qual E5 was sent mess-cooking.*** But I digress....)

On the skimmer, it was unheard of for petty officers to mess cook. That was reserved for E3 and below. As soon as a mess cook was frocked Third, he was sent back to his division - even if he'd just reported to the mess decks a couple days earlier, and even if it meant recalling some poor E3 who'd already completed twice his normally allotted time as a mess cook, to take his place.

Now, a six-month deployment on a submarine can really drag on. One of the things that's done to make it more bearable is Halfway Night: A celebration held somewhere near the midpoint of the trip. The cooks prepare a special meal, and other events take place, such as Corn on the COB (a #10 can of cream-style corn is auctioned off, and the winning bidder gets to pour it over the COB's head) or Pie in the Eye (pie shells filled with whipped cream are auctioned off, and the winners get to shove them into the faces of the chief, JO, or other person of their choice).

One such traditional event is Crank Night. I have no idea when mess cooks were first called mess cranks - it was certainly long before I joined the Navy - but Crank Night is another auction, and the winners/victims take the place of the regular mess cooks during the Halfway Night meal. The bidding starts a week or few before the Night, and progress is closely monitored by all; very popular contestants, such as the Eng or the COB, can bring in a few hundred dollars each. (The money collected for this and for other auctions goes to the boat's rec committee, and is used for ship's picnics, the Xmas party, &c.) Normally five people are selected; the one with the most "votes" - almost invariably the Engineer (because he has the largest department to annoy) - gets trash-compactor duty, the next is assigned to the scullery, the next two work as waiters on the mess decks, and the fifth serves as wardroom steward for the evening.

So. 1988, and we're on our second WestPac - port calls in Japan, the Philippines, Thailand, South Korea and Guam. And somewhere in the middle of all that, we have Halfway Night. Crank Night bidding starts, and everyone thinks that RMCS is a very likely winner. The ETs take up a collection (back in those days the ETs, nav and ESM, were together in one division, separate from the RMs), and come up with the amazing sum of twenty-five cents, which they put down on RMCS. And there it stays - everyone is gunning for other targets, and no-one else puts any money on RMCS. And after a week or so of looking at the tally, I started referring to him as my Two-Bit Senior Chief. (His response was to accuse me of having orchestrated the whole affair, just so I could call him that, but it just warn't so.)

And that's the explanation.

But it's not really the end of the story, because we had another lengthy underway later in the deployment, and the command decided to hold another Crank Night. Engineering had gotten enough fun out of their boss during the first Crank Night, so this time the winners were, in order, the COB, the Nav, the Commo, RMCS (hey, look - it's my chain of command!) and one of the riders, who had managed to very seriously tick off the rest of the riders.

And so here we have the COB**** washing dishes, having escaped from the trash room, while the Nav brings out another stack of plates.










The guy in the yellow Hawaiian flowerdy shirt, scrubbing the deck, is the Commo. (As I've said before, I do better with given names than with surnames; he was an LT, and his name was Jon, but I can't for the life of me think what his last name was.)






And presenting RMCS, two-bit senior chief and mess cook extraordinaire, in all his glory (with Weird, Wild Wally laughing in the background).





* And there is, of course, no guarantee that I understand it correctly.

** Technically, there are no mess cooks in today's Navy. Apparently someone decided that was a pejorative term, and they are now officially known as "food service attendants," or FSAs. Pfui, as the great man would say.

*** It wasn't until I was on my third boat that I had a COB who kept people on the mess decks to finish out their time after they got their dolphins.

**** QMCM, with (at the time) just over 34 years on active duty. One of the two best COBs I've ever had.

What did you do in the Navy, Daddy?

Back in '92, I got put on medical hold because of a couple episodes of "probable kidney stones" while I was on the tender. None were actually found, and I ended up getting a waiver after several months, though in the meantime I lost my orders. (I'd been in the process of reporting in to Gato when Squadron Medical noticed the entries in my medical record.)

Whilst waiting for Medical to dedigitate, I hung out at Squadron, making myself more or less useful. After doing odd jobs for the first month or so, I was assigned to duties that I continued until I finally transferred back to a boat.

In those days, the recycling dumpsters here at the Groton sub base were fairly new. Now, if you tell the average mess cook* to put the cardboard in the brown dumpster, the bottles and tins in the blue dumpster, and everything else in the green dumpster, what's he going to do? Yep, you guessed it - walk up to the closest dumpster, no matter what colour it is, and throw everything in.

The obvious solution? Lock the dumpsters, and only unlock them when someone's there to supervise the people using them.

So I'd get in a pickup just before morning colours, drive to the first set of dumpsters, unlock the two (brown and blue) for recycling, and sit in the truck for 55 minutes. Then I'd lock the dumpsters, proceed on to the next set, and repeat the process. Until I'd finished my 55-minute stint at the last set, somewhere up near Pier Norwich, at which time I would stow the truck, turn in the keys, and go home. Five days a week, Monday through Friday.

Oh, and on Saturday I'd go in to the office from 0800 until 1200, just in case a boat had done a Friday-afternoon stores load or something and needed a dumpster or two opened.

Now, 55 minutes is a long time to be sitting in a truck doing nothing, so I took a book along. Not an RTM or some other piece of official, Navy-approved literature(?); whatever book I happened to have checked out from the base library. And I took my book to the office on Saturday, too. Got a lot of books read that fall and winter.

But wait - it gets better. Because, you see, there were two of us assigned to this duty. (Plus a chief. Can't get anything done in the Navy without a chief.)

Obviously, you don't need to have two people sitting in the truck watching the dumpsters to make sure the mess cooks aren't screwing up. So Mike (I think that was his name...) and I switched off; one of us would take the morning and the other would take the afternoon, and we'd alternate Saturdays.

It didn't take much to get the chief to agree that the one who wasn't in the truck didn't need to be sitting in the office doing nothing. He even agreed that the one who was taking the afternoon shift didn't need to muster - even by phone - in the morning, just as long as he did show up after lunch for his shift.

So we did it this way:

• One guy did Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings, and Tuesday and Thursday afternoons. The other guy, of course, took the remaining shifts.

• We alternated weeks, so that if I had Monday morning, &c, one week I'd have Monday afternoon, &c, the following week.

• Whoever took the Friday afternoon shift also did Saturday. That way the guy who did Friday morning got off at lunchtime, and didn't have to come back in until after lunch on Monday.

Which worked out to alternating 17-hour and 22-hour work weeks. With a 73-hour weekend, every other week.

And I did this for six months....


* More on those in another post.

That big hunk of metal back aft

Look - it's a skimmer!*



And here's another one.**



What do these two ships have in common? Well, they're both big, grey targets, of course. But besides that?

They're doing something that submarines almost never do - riding at anchor.

Sure, boats have anchors, but they don't use them very often. In fact, during my thirteen years on submarines, we anchored out exactly four times, thrice on my first boat and once on my last. One problem, of course, is that we only have the one anchor, unlike skimmers, which have backups, both forward and aft. Another is that anchoring out means keeping the plant up, which in turn means that while the coners are ashore having fun, the nucs are still on the boat working.

The first time I anchored out was at Frederiksted, St Croix (US Virgin Islands), in November or December of '84. They had a pier, but as I recall the story was that it had been damaged by the last hurricane that blew through (that would have been Klaus) and hadn't been sufficiently repaired by the time we got there. I couldn't find any pictures of the boat at anchor; I'm not sure if I even got any, though I do remember being topside the morning we got under way and taking pictures of the liberty boat alongside, and the work party transferring all the cases of booze aboard.

The second occasion was during our first visit to Lahaina, Hawai`i, in July of '86. It was a very enjoyable port call; I especially remember the banyan tree, and the free ride - with all the drinks I wanted - I was given on one of the harbour-tour boats because I was almost the only person aboard who was willing to give up his boat ballcap. (We'd run out during our visit to Olympia, Washington, a few months before, and the rec committee hadn't restocked yet.)


We visited Lahaina again the following year, but that time we had an AD with us - they did the anchoring, and we tied up alongside. (We'd done something similar when we visited Hong Kong in early '87 - tied up to a generator barge that provided power for us.)

The third time was off Pattaya, Thailand, two years later.


Pattaya was another interesting port. We were on our way ashore in the liberty boat when someone say, "Hey - look at that!" There was a lovely, sandy beach, with a row of palm trees separating it from the street that ran parallel to the shore. And just the other side of the street was a large A&W Root Beer sign. I think a lot of guys went straight from the liberty boat to a hotel, checked in, dropped their bags, and headed over to the A&W for a root beer float - I know Jay and I certainly did.

Here's another picture. We weren't the only Yanks in Pattaya that week - if you look closely you can see USS Towers (DDG 9) and USNS Mispillion (T-AO 105) at anchor in the background.



The final time at anchor was in Cartagena, Spain, in the summer of '01. This is one of my favourite pictures from that deployment.


Cartagena was really cool - the mediaeval cathedral rising straight up out of the ruins of the old Roman amphitheatre, the other Roman ruins, and even a section of the Carthaginian wall. There were some really nice restaurants, too; I'll never forget the gazpacho, the paella and the fresh Manchego cheese.


* USS Yorktown (CV 5), to be precise, in 1937.
** Hr Ms Sumatra, a Java-class light cruiser of the Royal Netherlands Navy, sometime in the '30s.

Rack, sweet rack

A while back, I posted this picture of my rack taken during my last deployment (USS Providence, June '03):


Here, for contrast, is the same bunk, different boat, other side of the world, fifteen years earlier (USS Olympia, June '88):

Reviewing the EM log

A brief note of explanation first, for those readers who aren't familiar with Navy terminology. The word "log" has two basic meanings* for sailors. The first is "a record of things or events." For instance, a roving watch will make periodic tours of his space, noting gauge readings and other things and writing them down; this is a log (and the action of recording the gauge readings is called "logging"). The Quartermaster of the Watch keeps a record of every speed, course and depth order the Officer of the Deck gives to the Helmsman, and the time said orders are given; this is also a log. Such logs are reviewed every few hours by senior personnel, to ensure that things are being recorded properly and that no dangerous trends (such as a system pressure going steadily higher and higher) go unnoticed.

The second meaning is "the ship's speedometer." I won't go into the history of why it's called a "log"**, but in olden times it consisted of a man throwing a piece of wood attached to a length of line into the water ("heaving the log"). Nowadays, it's an electromechanical device called, for some reason, the "electromechanical log" ("EM log," for short). Got that?

Another thing: Sailors reporting to their boat go through a lengthy process called qualification, in which they learn everything they can about not only their own job but also everyone else's, so that they can be of maximum effectiveness in the case of a casualty. This is a requirement, not an option; sailors who fail to qualify get thrown off the boat, to go to the surface fleet. And so each man's qual progress is also thoroughly monitored.

So.

Late one night, under way on the Oly, I'm loitering in Control shooting the breeze with SK1, who is the on-watch COW. The Messenger of the Watch is a young man whom we'll call Bill, mainly because that's his real name (though I haven't the faintest idea what the rest of it was). And during a lull in the conversation, SK1 turns to young Bill and says, "Where's the EM log?"

"I don't know," says Bill.

"You don't know??"

"No. What is it?"

Mistake. Big mistake. Bill should be much farther along in his quals than that. SK1 looks at him for a moment, then says, "Well, go find it. The Officer of the Deck and I have to review it."

"Where should I look for it?"

"Try Maneuvering." (This is the small space back in the engine room where the people who are operating the power plant are stationed.)

So off Bill goes, out the aft door to Control. And as soon as he's out of sight, SK1 grabs the phone and whoops Maneuvering to let them know what's going on.

We found out later that what had happened back in the Engine Room went something like this: Bill arrives at Maneuvering, requests and is granted permission to enter, and tells the EOOW that he was sent back to get the EM log for the COW and the OOD.

"We don't have it," the EOOW says.

"Who does?"

Someone suggests that the ERS might have it down in lower level. While Bill is en route, of course, Maneuvering whoops the Lower Level Watch to warn him.

Lower Level Watch says he hasn't seen the ERS, but he thinks the EWS has the EM log in upper level, near the starboard TG. So Bill goes off to upper level, preceded by a telephoned warning, and sure enough, the EWS is by the starboard TG. (Which, coincidentally, is just a few yards from Maneuvering.)

The EWS tells Bill that he'd heard about his quest, and had therefore dropped the log off in Maneuvering so he could pick it up. The people in Maneuvering look at Bill in surprise and say, "Oh, are you still here? We thought you'd gone forward, so we had someone take it up to Control."

So eventually Bill shows up in Control and tells SK1 that he was told the log was already there.

"No," says SK1, "I haven't seen it." He thinks a bit, then says, "Maybe the XO has it. Go look in his stateroom."

"Look in his stateroom?" Bill asks.

"Look in his stateroom. Just open the door quietly and look to see if it's on his desk. And whatever you do, don't wake him up."

It should be noted that this particular XO, when he went to bed, hung a sign on his door: DANGER - SLEEPING DRAGON. And meant it.

So off Bill goes, through the forward door to Control. And back he comes, a couple minutes later, to announce, "He says he doesn't have it."

He says he doesn't have it. The rest of us are still considering the connotations of that phrase when the forward door to Control opens again, and the XO walks in. He looks at the OOD, then at SK1, and mildly - to our surprise - says, "All right, guys. I know what you're trying to do, and I appreciate the humour - but next time, do it in the daytime!"

Nubs....


* Three, I suppose, if you count Seabees, who probably use that word to describe a large chunk of tree.
** If you're curious, you can look it up here.

How much longer...?

This is really my favourite picture from the '03 deployment.

I think it's pretty much standard on 688s for the chow line to go through aft berthing, the head and forward berthing when the boat's in port. Under way, though, things can be different.

On Oly, as I recall, the line usually went down the ladder into FCLL and around to the Torpedo Room door. There it broke off, and a short spur went to the 21-Man door; then the line broke again, to be continued into the Machinery Room, with everybody remembering "I'm after him" and "He's the end of the line." Back in those days, we had a couple of nightsticks stashed above the WSN-2, for use by the reaction force, and I remember watching a couple of bored nucs trying to see who could do the best job of deep-throating a nightstick.

Which brings to mind a TM2's Usetafish story of watching someone demonstrating his ability to deep-throat the emergency stick - just as the VIP and his wife entered Control during their tour of the boat. But I digress....

On Prov, the chow line just went straight forward, down the FCML passageway to the goat-locker door. That, of course, is what's shown here: A bunch of guys reading whilst waiting to be called in for chow. Went through a lot of books that way.

Every bubblehead remembers the drill, Meals were served every six hours (breakfast at 0500, lunch at 1100, supper at 1700 and midrats at 2300). The COW sent the Messenger down to start wake-ups 30-40 minutes before the cooks would start serving, to give people time to get up, shower (if so desired), and get dressed. The Messenger would make one sweep through all the berthing spaces, waking up everyone who was on the list for the oncoming watch. Then he'd go back again, and again, and again, until (theoretically) everyone was up, after which he'd return to Control.

I value my sleep time. I always took my shower before going to bed, and thus wouldn't need to get up early in order to take one before relieving the watch. So I would usually stay in the rack until xx55, then get dressed, fish my book out from under my pillow and go take station as the last man in the queue. (On Prov, of course, that sucked if the boat were rigged for low-level white, because the forward end of the passageway was too dark for reading, and I had to wait until I got closer to the wardroom.)

Had one YNSN who never could figure out that it didn't matter how many times he came to wake me - I still wasn't going to get up until xx55. If he'd just waited until then, of course, I would have gotten up the first time he called me, but instead he'd wake me up every time he passed by my rack. He seemed to get really frustrated at times when I acknowledged his presence and then just went back to sleep....

A man's bunk is his castle

When we went into post-shakedown availability on Olympia, we all moved out of the bunks we had been occupying. After all, the boat was going to be spending five months or so in dry dock, the crew would be working out of a building, and we weren't going to have much use for those racks. As the end of PSA approached, the COB put up a list and announced that we would be choosing our new racks - PO1s first, by seniority, and then PO2s. By that time, as I recall, I had somehow become the second-senior PO2 on board, so I went looking for a rack that would be good, but not so good that some First Class would claim it.

I found what I was looking for in aft berthing, just inboard the door to the head. It was a top rack, meaning that I would be able to use all the pukas between the cable runs and the piping as extra stowage space (as long as no KCB* noticed and told me to stow things properly). It had a convenient ventilation duct in the passageway right next to it, and a second duct inside the rack, which made it easy to get into; all I had to do was grab hold of both of those, kick my feet up into the rack, and then wiggle the rest of my body in. There was an air vent right next to the head end of it, meaning I would have extra ventilation. And I'm a good, sound sleeper, so the fact that it was in a high-traffic area next to the head didn't bother me.

Sure enough, when it came my turn to choose, that rack was still unclaimed. And I kept it for my remaining three and a half years on the boat, through the homeport shift (Norfolk to Pearl) and two WestPacs.

Then came my three years on the tender, where having a top rack was a bad idea. (Nothing above one to keep out the light.) When I reported in to Jacksonville, I was assigned a rack I didn't like at all - it was a middle rack (in the aft outboard corner of aft berthing), and access to half of the bedpan was blocked. So I went looking for the FT2 who had "my" rack.

I showed him the rack I'd been given and asked if he wanted to trade. His response was "Let me think." Five minutes later, he was back to say "Yes." So I had my rack back, for the rest of my two years on the boat.

I cut my one shore tour short by four months to go back to sea. When I got to Providence I was assigned a bottom rack, just the other side of a thin partition from where the chow line formed up under way. Unfortunately, the TM2 who had "my" bunk liked it as much as I did, and wasn't interested in trading. I could have bumped him, but he had a little less than a year left on board and I decided to just wait until he transferred. However, we all had to move out of berthing during Xmas stand-down, so the space could be painted, and I figured as long as he'd already cleared all his stuff out of the rack....

I kept the rack for the remainder of my time on board, right up to when I went on terminal leave. The photo above was taken during my last deployment. The pillowcase was decorated by one of my daughters, the photos are of my wife (with a friend's new baby) and the girls, and the piece of yellow paper is a family portrait drawn by my then five-year-old. You can see one of my handholds curving through the bunk, and the air vent just outside it.

On Olympia, as I recall, that vent was a bit closer to the curtain rail, and in addition to increased ventilation it also provided "white noise" to block out the sound of passersby. It also served to block out annoying 1MC announcements. And so it came to pass one day that I was snoozing in my normal position, with my face right up against the back wall of the bunk, when one of the other RM2s came to wake me up. "Hutch [our LPO] wants you to come up to Radio and explain why you weren't at battle stations," quoth he.

"Huh??"

I rolled over, opened the curtain, and looked out. Sure enough, all the lights were on in berthing, and people were climbing into their racks.... Surprisingly (especially since my battle station was in Control, about three feet from the XO), everyone accepted my explanation that I'd been sound asleep and just hadn't heard the general alarm when it went off.

I don't think I ever did take any pictures of the foot of my rack, so I had to borrow this one from a friend. You can see the little locker and the shelf next to it, with his shoes. For those of you who aren't familiar with 688s, personal stowage consisted of that, plus the "bedpan" - a locker the length and width of the bunk itself, and just deep enough to hold a cassette tape standing on its long edge. (The white bag hanging inside the bunk is a laundry bag.) There were also some common lockers scattered through berthing for people to stow coats in. And that was pretty much it. On deployments I kept my dress uniforms and my (empty) backpack underneath my mattress, and took full advantage of the above-mentioned pukas that a top bunk afforded. By the end of a deployment, things were generally a bit crowded, with souvenirs, new books, &c, stuffed in behind the laundry bag or under my pillow.


* Khaki-clad bozo (ie, chief or officer)