It was November 1973. My class graduated and dispersed to all of the Navy ports. i think it was the first Destroyer School department head class to be forecast for “split tours.” The new policy was an effort to spread the best officers into the the amphibious and service force ships with the superlative training at the Newport school.
i was not excited about that. i loved being an officer on tin cans, racing around at 30/35 knots, working maneuvering boards while executing a formation change, staying on station (100 yards was supposed to be the max one could be off station), playing hide and seek with submarines, firing those five-inch guns — my three favorite gunnery exercises were 1) gunfire support, 2) night gunfire support, and 3) i think it was a Z-44-G, where the destroyer would approach the beach at an angle (approximately 45 degrees) at 30 knots or more, fire both guns of the forward mount at a target, turn horizontal to the beach maintaining speed firing both mounts at the target, and then turn 45 degrees from the beach with the after mount firing both guns. What a kick.
Back then, you were even tested with the con to bring the ship to its pier side berth and get it underway without tugs. What fun.
i was hoping to land a job as weapons department head with my second preference being ops. i requested Mayport, Florida for my home port. Naturally, when our orders came, mine was to be the Chief Engineer (CHENG) of the USS Hollister (DD 788) out of Long Beach. Kathie and i weren’t too sure of being on the West Coast. We considered Long Beach the same as Los Angeles. But we were willing to give it a try. On a happy note, my home town buddy, Earl Major, would also be going to Long Beach as the Weapons Officer of the USS England (CG 22), which was in the Long Beach Naval Shipyard in overhaul.
i was starting over. All of my tours had been destroyers (and the XO of our Navy unit on USNS troop ships) in weapons, operations, and admin. During my middie cruise, i spent most of my time in the firerooms and engine rooms where i learned respect for the snipes. They worked hard. As OOD and conning officer, i appreciated their ability to respond to any command for speed changes down to two revolutions — i learned early on if you were keeping station on a oiler while refueling and the ship was creeping ahead just slightly, main control would ignore the order for a one revolution change of speed…so i would order lowering the revolutions by three, wait for just a minute, and ordering an increase in revolutions by two: voila! one revolution less than our original speed. But until destroyer school, engineering was really a mystery to me.
After the two weeks of shipboard training in Norfolk — again, i got a mismatch and was being trained on a 1200-pound ship rather than the 600-pound steam plant on the Hollister — Earl and i shared driving his Porsche 911 to Tennessee. Then Kathie, Blythe, the old English sheepdog, the cat, and i in a Toyota Corona station wagon, headed to Paris, Texas, her parents’ home. From there, we visited the painted desert, the petrified forest, and the Grand Canyon, before spending the night in Las Vegas: a grand way to get to Long Beach.
i reported aboard the Hollister before quarters one morning. She was berthed about halfway out the mole pier. The guy i relieved was waiting for me on the quarterdeck. i cannot remember his last name, but he went by “Bud” and was a NESEP officer after being a corpsman. He was a legend on the ship because when the ship was on the firing line in Vietnam, a number of auxiliary steam lines leaked. He fixed them by personally putting casts like he put on broken limbs as a corpsman. They held. Bud also shaved his head long before it was a trend. And he made his division officers kiss him on his skinhead before granting them liberty.
He was a character. Somewhere during all of this palaver and meeting the CO and XO, i learned my role as CHENG was going to be difficult. Bud informed me the ship had just been assigned to be a reserve ship. That meant that i would have a skeleton department about two-thirds of the complement with a reserve component filling the empty billets one weekend each month and during a two-week cruise each year. That didn’t strike me as difficult. i soon learned how difficult it would be.
It looked like i was in pretty good shape. My main propulsion assistant (MPA) was George Lynch, and my DCA, whose name in eluding me due to an old man brain fart, had been in the saddle for a while and were more than competent. As for chiefs, i was loaded. There were two MMCM’s and one MMCS — for landlubbers, this means two were master chief machinist mates and one was a senior chief machinist mate. There were also two more MMC’S. In the firerooms, there were two BTC’s (Boiler Tender Chiefs) and one BTCM.
On the negative side, i went through the entire propulsion plant and all of the engineering spaces. For most folks who have not tried this ordeal, just getting through was a rough go; going through and documenting the condition made it worse. My new ship had an incredible record in Vietnam during four deployments there. She had taken a beating, including receiving over 250 rounds of enemy fire in August 1972. Many of Bud’s casts on auxiliary steam lines were leaking. He had done what had to be done to keep her operating, but those casts and many other leaks needed major work.
Commander Phelps, my CO and a good one, was old school. In the good ole days, CO’s with weapons and operations experience did not get involved in engineering. It was my job — there are some really good things about that and some really bad things. He told me fuel shortages and the budgets had greatly limited the regular fleet from going out for drills, tests, exercises, etc. He added the reserves had no such problem with fuel and were picking up a great deal of those assignments. That meant, as well as i can remember, reserve destroyers spending about 30 days a quarter at sea. i thought the reserve destroyers would spend a lot of time in port. After all, they didn’t deploy. Wrong.
Then came the hammer. Within three months, i lost every one of machinist mate chiefs except the one master chief (he was with me through the INSURV inspection, a sea story unto itself) and all of the BT chiefs except the master chief who stayed aboard through my tour (thank goodness).
It was sometime when all these things hit me when i determined i had two goals: to get the ship to overhaul in the fall without missing an operational commitment and not getting anyone killed.
It was time for me to prove i was a real Surface Warfare Officer.
By the way, that respect for snipes i mentioned earlier in this post was more than warranted and grew during this tour.
The adventure continues (Thank you, Remo Williams).
