This segment is a bit out of sequence, but it is a nice fit as follow-on to the previous post in this series.

Notes from the Southwest Corner: Not all liberty is created equal

SAN DIEGO – In my last column, Navy liberty slipped into the subject matter again.

Today’s Navy has greatly reduced liberty calls. Ship crew swaps at sea, security considerations due to terrorism, and shorter deployments to improve the sailors’ “quality of life” have cut down liberty calls.

In my time at sea, long deployments (nine to ten months was the norm) were simply the way it was. Married officers and sailors groused about being away from their families. But they also considered they had two inalienable rights:

“A griping sailor is a happy sailor” was one such right. Complaining about everything, including long deployments, was exercised vigorously. Another right was hitting liberty ports with gusto on long deployments. Sailors simultaneously bragged and complained about these “arduous” adventures.

Now, from what i observe, they can’t.

In previous columns, I have extolled my liberty ports, even bragged some folks might claim. But all liberty was not equal.

Allen Ernst, my leading sonarman on the USS Hawkins recalled one which for me was not so wonderful.

In 1969, the Hawkins was in Guantanamo Bay for three months of refresher training. Days started at 4:00 a.m. to check spaces for watertight integrity before the inspectors arrived.

By 6:45, I reported to the bridge to stand Junior Officer of the Deck (JOOD) at Sea Detail entering and leaving port. Once at sea, I was in a five-inch gun mount, in “Underwater Battery Plot” for submarine exercises, or on the bridge for General Quarters. We would get back to the pier around 6:00 p.m., have the wardroom meal, and write training reports, usually hitting the rack (bed) around taps. The process was repeated each weekday.

On weekends, the ship was in “port and starboard” duty sections. One-half of the officers and crew stood duty while the other half went ashore Saturday and Sunday. Liberty consisted of going to the Officers Club pool and bar and an occasional softball game.

When Ocho Rios, Jamaica was announced as our liberty port, I was excited. In addition to the great beaches, the Caribbean Playboy Club was there.

We dropped off the trainers 5:30 Friday and turned toward Jamaica. During Sea Detail, the Captain informed me he had qualified me as Officer of the Deck (OOD) underway, and I would be in charge of the ship in one three-section watch rotation. Being the most junior OOD, my first watch was the “Mid-watch” from midnight until 4:00 a.m.

Sea Detail secured about 7:00 p.m. I grabbed a bite, retired to my stateroom, compiled after-action reports, and hit the rack around 9:30. I awoke at 11:15 to go on watch. Being relieved at 3:45 a.m., I went for some much needed sleep. It was 4:15.

Reveille sounded at 4:30 and Sea Detail was set.

The ship reached pierside about 8:30. As the morale and welfare officer, I greeted local representatives to set up tours for the crew. I was then informed my duty would be Shore Patrol officer for Saturday. I met the local police coordinator and took a tour of potential trouble spots. The tour ended at a police station downtown designated as Shore Patrol Headquarters, where I coordinated patrols and the return of offending sailors back to the ship.

After some wild evening events, the day’s shore patrol duty concluded. Reporting aboard, I then had to deal with a drunk torpedoman who wanted to go AWOL. Sleep claimed me at 3:00 a.m.

Thirty minutes later, reveille sounded. An ore ship came in early, and we had to shift to a mooring.

During this five-hour Sea Detail, the watch coordinator informed me the officer assigned Sunday Shore Patrol had not been told and had stayed in a room at the Playboy Club. Consequently, I went back to Shore Patrol.

Liberty ended in the early afternoon. Sea Detail was set, and looking aft, I watched Ocho Rios become smaller and smaller, just like my liberty. We secured Sea Detail at 6:30. I had the evening watch (8:00 p.m. until midnight). I slept like a rock until 3:00 when we set Sea Detail to return to Guantanamo and begin our training day: no liberty and five hours of sleep in 72 hours.

I thought then, “Nobody is going to believe this.” I am still not sure you will. But I know all liberty is not equal.

Been a while with this installment. The world’s going a bit fast for this old man. Appointments; medical checkups — all are relatively okay for a man my age but checkups are still required — home projects are increasing; Thanksgiving before, during and after; Christmas decorations beginning; gift buying; and, of course, golf.

So this episode has taken longer. In truth, i’ve been wrestling with it for almost two weeks, trying to get it right when i realized i was trying to include too much, a common problem for my writing.

So let’s get it on.

One of the oft repeated parts of GTMO REFTRA, was gunnery exercises. More about all of them a bit later. There was one that i found dizzying in its complexity…and fun, really.

i no longer am sure of its nomenclature. The Allied Tactical Publications (ATPs) from my time are long gone. i think it was Z-44-G. Perhaps some old gunner’s mate who reads this can give me the right name.

Boy, was it a hoot.

The old destroyer would come steaming over the horizon at 30 knots on a 45 degree angle with the shoreline. The forward five-inch guns, two in Mount 51 on the FRAM 1 tin cans and two on both Mounts 51 and 52 on FRAM II’s would be blazing away at some target on the shore — unfortunately this was one gunfire exercise i experienced with live fire; all of the ones i saw were simulated fire.

Then at a designated distance from the beach, a mile or two, the ship would turn parallel to the beach and the after Mount 53 would also open fire. All six big guns on the FRAM II’s and four on the FRAM I’s would blaze at the shore for about a mile at high speed. Then the ship would turn away 45 degrees and head for the horizon with the after two guns of Mount 53 firing until cease fire was ordered.

It was absolutely thrilling even without actually firing the guns. Oh, how i wish i had done that once.

This is a column i wrote for The Lebanon (TN) Democrat in 2009. The incident occurred in March of 1969 while the USS Hawkins was conducting ASW exercises with the USS Chopper (SS-342) during refresher training out of Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Just after the incident, one of the GTMO trainers told me a second class submarine machinist mate was next to the diving plane control as the sub went into its out of control dive. The machinist mate could not move the locked planes, finally kicked them, the planes flipped from from the locked down angle to the up angle, which also was locked. The move eventually broke the back of the sub, but it saved a lot of lives.f

Notes from the Southwest Corner:

SAN DIEGO – With August madcap doings in the Southwest corner, I postponed my trip back home and missed a unique reunion in Newport, R.I.

Several sailors from my first ship, the USS Hawkins (DD 873) held an ad hoc reunion in Newport, RI. I was honored they asked me to join as they had been enlisted and I had been a junior officer. Allen Ernst, my leading sonar technician when I was Anti-Submarine (ASW) Officer, had found me in the intergalactic space of the internet about a year ago. I suspect he instigated including me.

Regardless, Allen, Robin Lewis, and Norm O’Neal took the lead, and R.J. Beihl, Bill Durbrow, Bill Carey, Bruce Coulture, and Rik Tuinstra completed the group.

They sent pictures and reports. Then last week, Allen forwarded me an email train from a discussion they had had at the reunion. The email detailed an incident I will never forget, including a seven page breakdown of the Navy investigation.

After completing a major overhaul in February, 1969, the Hawkins sailed to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba for “refresher training,” two-months of intense exercises to get the ship’s company back up to speed before operations.

ASW exercises with a real submarine were included. The USS Chopper (SS-342) was assigned to Guantanamo for these exercises.

The ASW exercises were actually a respite for me. Other duties required grueling 18-hour days. The ASW part was exciting and fun, and my first with a real sub.

Hawkins stood out of the channel February 11 and conducted engineering drills in the morning. General Quarters 1A (for ASW operations) was set immediately after the morning drills. I moved from the bridge to the small ASW/Sonar space in the after section of Combat Information Center (CIC). There was no time for lunch.

Quicker than expected, we gained sonar contact and began to track the Chopper.

Just finding a submarine with sonar remains magic to me. The sonar transmits sound beams, and if the beams hit the submarine, the returning echo alerts the sonar crew to the contact.

By maintaining contact, a good sonar team can track the sub, deducing course and speed and producing a solution to fire an anti-submarine weapon, such as a torpedo with some probability of actually hitting the submarine.

This did not occur often. We spent more time talking to the whales on “Gertrude,” our underwater telephone designed to communicate with other Navy ships and submarines, than actually locating submarines.

But this particular afternoon, we had good luck, establishing solid contact. We could actually see the submarine blip turning in circles on our fire control system.

Then the blip became progressively weaker and disappeared. We were stumped as to the cause, wondering what kind of maneuver the Chopper could have employed.

Within two minutes, the bridge reported the Chopper had shot almost completely out of the water, 100 yards off of our starboard beam, crashing back into the sea. It disappeared again briefly before bobbing to the surface.

The Chopper had lost its generator and electrical DC power. The sub’s down angle had increased to 15 degrees, then to 45 degrees and beyond. She had plummeted to over 1,000 feet below the ocean’s surface, dangerously close to her “crush depth.”

The emergency actions of the sub’s personnel finally took effect. The Chopper ceased its descent and began to rise. The crew couldn’t control the reverse ascent, and the sub was almost vertical in the water when it cleared the surface. She re-submerged to about 250 feet before finally bobbing to the surface.

Amazingly, she returned to port under her own power. The ensuing investigation determined she had suffered structural damage, and the Chopper was decommissioned a year later.

More amazing, no one received any critical injuries. This is even more startling in that the report reveals steel deck plates were not secured and were crashing about during the violent descent and ascent along with anything not tied down. The officers and crew carried out emergency procedures 90 degrees off the normal plane. It would be like doing house work in an emergency mode standing on the wall instead of the floor with furniture flying around.

The Chopper was just one of many impactful incidents during my Hawkins tour with those sailors. It was quite an introduction to anti-submarine warfare for this young officer.

I am still amazed.

NOTE: Sadly Allen Ernst, that fine young man who played a significant role in getting our division through the overhaul and all of our sonar evolutions, passed away in 2011.

i plan to include a sea story about dice games in officer’s clubs (and elseware) in these tales. There were two games we played almost exclusively, but i am old and have forgotten the name and the rules of one of those games. The one i remember is “ship, captain, and crew.” i also played “sheriff” with a bunch of factory men in a bar in Fall River when these guys had me drink a bunch of shots and i would choose to forget. i think we played the other game at the officer club bars much more frequently. If anyone recalls that game, i would appreciate you jogging my old man memory.

When we hit the weekend after the arduous (and that’s an understatement if there ever was one), we looked forward to our weekend liberty, or rather our one day of the weekend we had liberty because we were on port and starboard duty.

As limited as it was, we maxed out on escapism either Saturday or Sunday. There were numerous activities Morale Welfare and Recreation had created. Many of the officers and crew pursued those. i went to the officer’s pool but spent most of the time in the officer’s club bar. You see, they had a special drink. It was called the “añjeo goodie.” It featured Bacardi Añjeo Rum, some liqueurs, and a whole bunch of Caribbean fruit drinks. They were very tasty.

Paul George was the Hawkins’ CHENG, and a very good one. He also loved to play cribbage and gin rummy. So did i, and since we were in the same duty section during GTMO, we played a lot of both but played gin rummy a bit more in the wardroom. During one weekend when we had Saturday off and duty on Sunday, we went to the officer’s pool in the morning, and yes, we played gin rummy. We then went to the officer’s club for lunch, sat at the bar, and, of course, drank an añjeo goodie. While eating our sandwich and enjoying our drinks, we decided they were so good, we should have another. Somewhere between the first and third round, we somehow came up with a bet. We decided which one of us could drink the most añjeo goodies.

i’m not ever sure there was a sum to pay if we lost or if there was some prize. i don’t think so.

We began our contest in earnest. The orders slowed as we stayed there for dinner. After dinner, we had one more and decided to call it a draw. We both had consumed 13 añjeo goodies. A bit wobbly, i returned to the ship around 2100.

The next morning as we assumed the duty, CHENG revealed he had gone back to the pool and had two milkshakes before ending liberty. i declared him the winner because after 13 añjeo goodies, volume counted.

The Hawkins was going back to sea.

The sea and the Navy kept me busy. It was not only my top priority, it kept me from dwelling on my personal problems. We were headed to sea. All of the grungy old shipyard workers had left. The miles of pneumatic tubing, the pneumatic tools were back in the yard’s tool shed with the manager there wearing a spiffy new olive green foul weather jacket.

And the Hawk was underway for refresher training (REFTRA).

The transit south would have been uneventful except, of course, passing off of Cape Hatteras our first night at sea: the weather turned bad, the seas turned nasty, and sailors turned white and blew seasick blues and barfed a lot, the normal Hatteras impact on north-south transits along the eastern seaboard.

We arrived in Guantanamo Bay in early February (if i remember correctly). The Navy facility is now home to the US detention camp that will be closed soon. Today’s folks would be aghast at what we did in 1968 and how we did it. We were greeted by the senior members of the “Refresher Training Team” for a litany of what we would be doing for the next two months. We began that regimen the next morning. Early next morning.

I arose around 0330. Before 0400, I started inspecting all of the spaces for which the ASW officer was responsible to ensure Material Condition YOKE was set properly. When the training team came aboard later, they would check and the ship would get dinged if the team found any discrepancies. We found out they were very good at finding discrepancies.

i finished my tour of spaces usually with just enough time to grab a bite of breakfast in the wardroom before heading to the bridge as the sea detail JOOD. i would get to the pilot house as the quartermasters were completing covering all of the ports and windows with old navigation charts. Before we were ready to get underway, the “mobile training REFTRA instructors would arrive and inspect YOKE. Their bridge team would be on the bridge as we got underway and conducted limited (as in no) visibility. The navigator, quartermasters, and CIC would take radar ranges from objects to advise the conning officer, OOD, and Captain on how to proceed out of the bay. Once clear of the bay, the chart paper would come off and our training day would begin in earnest.

Usually, we would set General Quarters (GQ) immediately. It seemed engineering drills nearly always were the first of our exercises. The mobile training team (MTT) would put the engineers through all sorts of causalities. That meant the rest of the ship would spend a lot of time without power. We all were learning.

Every facet of our capabilities were tested. i was the GQ Junior Officer of the Deck (JOOD) and Sea detail. i was the check sight observer (to be explained later) in the forward 5-inch 50 caliber gun mount, Mount 51, for gunnery exercises, and was in under water battery plot for the ASW exercises. In other words, except for about 15 minutes for the noon mess, i was busy.

The ship would return to Guantanamo around 1700. i would eat at the evening mess quickly, return to my stateroom to assess the reports from the day, read the radio messages, and then prepare for the next day’s training. i would hit the rack around taps, then rise the next day around 0330 to repeat the process the next day.

Ahh, but did get a break…except it wasn’t. About every fourth or fifth day, we would pull gunfire support duty, this included weekends. This was 1968. To say the relations between the United States and Cuba were strained would be a slight understatement. There were fears Castro forces would attempt to take the Guantanamo Naval Base away from the US by force. So, the Hawkins, would go to anchor to be the duty gunfire support ship. There the sky one director would be manned by a junior officer and one gun mount would be manned to conduct fire if the Cubans tried to attack the base. They didn’t but it sure did add to more work.

It was long days and seemingly would not end, but it would end in about two months.

* * *

Then, something occurred that impacts me even today.

In those days, Filipinos were not allowed in any other ratings than that of stewards. Stewards served as valets, butlers, cooks, and waiters for officers in the wardroom. One of the best of the stewards was a young man, i’m guessing about 20 years old. He was very good at his work and just a good guy.

This ship was conducting engineering drills in the afternoon. Material condition Zebra was set meaning the maximum physical security. All ports and hatches were dogged shut. Permission had to be granted to open any hatches. The young steward was in the forward damage control team, which mustered in the wardroom. Part of the engineering drills was exercising the damage control teams. The steward was sent aft with a message for one of the other damage control team. Shortly after he went aft, the drill was concluded.

No one noticed the steward was missing. He had not arrived at the other damage control party. He was missed when he didn’t show up for preparing the evening mess in the wardroom. His missing was reported to the bridge. A muster of all hands was called for immediately. The steward did not show up.

The ship immediately began combing its track backward. He apparently went overboard. We finally came to the conclusion, he must have decided to open a hatch to the weather decks to deliver the message. What occurred next will forever be unknown. We didn’t know of any problems he had that would have make him to decide to jump overboard. We guessed a wave washed down the main deck when the ship made a sharp turn and that might have swept him overboard. As i wrote earlier, i will never know.

We continued to search the seas down our track until the next morning. Navy helicopters first arrived to help in the search. Then, the Coast Guard came on station to relieve us. i’m not sure how long the search continued, probably several days. But the young man was never found.

The incident still haunts me.