Long Beach

   We arrived in Long Beach on Halloween 1064. The moment I stepped off of the ship I though I like this place. I want to stay here. We had bought a new 1964 Turbocharged Corvair Monza Spyder Convertible in Seattle. It was a fantastic car. To this day, I still love that car. In December, I went out and bought a Christmas tree. I hauled it to the car and thought, oh shit, the trunk is in the front of the car. I then thought here I am in California in the middle of December and it's 72 degrees outside. So I dropped the top and stuck the tree in the back seat. I love California.

   One of the first things we did after arriving in Long Beach was to take on a load of 39 missiles which took most of the day. When loaded, some sandcrab handed me an IBM punch card and told me to sign here. On the card was the description Missile Unit of issue Each quantity of 39 and on the upper right hand corner it said 5.7M. Nothing else. Now by now I was familiar with these cards but normally it would show the cost $3.95, or whatever. I asked the sand crab what the hell the M stood for and he said "Million". Now this was 1964 and that was a hell of a lot of money and I was only 21 years old at the time but what the hell, I just made the largest purchase of my  life. Now that we had some toys to play with, we went playing. I was the only guy in the Missile Division that had mad a missile shot so they wanted me upstairs in the missile control radar room to man the console. Everything went along just fine until the end of the shot. The warheads on the missiles were the continuous rod type. The most effective "hit" is actually a four of five foot pass by.  This gives the rod bundle a bit of time to start forming its buzz saw shape. The missile passed by the target but the drone came to a full stop from 375 knots to zero all at once and just hoovered there. I grabbed a pair of binoculars and went out on what we called "the patio" a small weather  deck just outside the radar room. The director was not moving at all and still tracking the target. I sighted up to where the director was pointing and said oh. The Missile Officer was standing next to me and asked what I meant by oh. I passed him the binocs and he looked up and said oh. A chief was standing next to him and grabbed the binocs looked up and said oh and so it went down the line. The jet propelled drones that they use as  targets aren't cheap so they pop a parachute for recovery. The bird apparently made skin to skin contact with the deone and knocked the chute loose and with no weight on it, it just floated around way up in the air.
   After that we spent time off of San Clemente Island learning the intricacies of the 5"/54 naval gun and it's associated fire control system.
   We spent quite a bit of time operating out of San Diego learning  

   

Becoming a Tincan Sailor

   When I first saw my new ship she was laying alongside a pier at Todd Shipyard.

   Her hull was haze gray, aluminum and the superstructure was green zinc chromate. There were no barrels in the 5" guns and the was a thousand electrical cables and hoses laying everywhere. She looked a mess much like a woman two hours before going out for the evening. I was part of the precom, precommissioning, crew. The precom guys job was to learn every square inch of the ship from the bilges to the missile radar room. It was very interesting being most sailors rarely get beyond the spaces where they work, eat and sleep. I arrived in Seattle in February of  1964 and until I got out in 1968, every time that ship moved,  I was aboard her. We went out on several yard trials with the yard birds, shipyard personell, manning the engines and steering etc. This was a bit unnerving for the few sailors actually aboard as we all felt that only real Navy people could man a war ship. The future captain was particularly nervous as was his nature. He was only a speedbump up on the bridge. I suppose that he could  see his beautiful new ship meeting every maritime disaster known in the Western World. But, in fact, the yardbirds did a reasonably good job and we made it back in one piece every time. The USS Stoddard DDG-22  was  being built next door at the Puget Sound Bridge and Drydock Corp. DDG-22 was not only behind DDG-24. But had to be towed in most every  time she went on her yard trials much to our collective amusement.  The last trial was the most fun. We blasted through the Strait of Juan De Fuca at full flank speed for several hours. The actual speed was classified information and maybe still is, but it was way faster than I though was possible for a  4,500 ton ship. I was told by a yardbird that they had a monitor on the shafts for the RPM. It supposedly could tell at what point the screw would twist itself off of the shaft. Then a throttle stop was brazed on as the wartime emergency stop. Then they would back off a few turns and attach a plastic stop that could be torn off in an emergency. 

   In August, the ship was towed, cold iron, to the Bremerton Naval Shipyard. There were only five, or so, people on board for this evolution. This is before the Navy had crowes on the blue work jackets. I was all by my lonesome up on the forward line and we had no power for the winch. I was sweating like hell and some brand new Ensign was screaming at me to heave around or some such bullshit. I, at that time, was the youngest E-6 in the Navy and a young looking 21 year old at that. As I ripped off my jacket and flung it to the deck I and turned to him and hollered back that "You could give me a fucking hand". He was about to practice ass chewing but then noticed all of my stripes and sheepishly said "What can I do to help?" We finally got the mother tied up and I lit up a smoke and he bummed one off of me. We stayed chummy after that.

    On 28 August we commissioned the old girl and she became officially United States Ship Waddell DDG-24. DD for destroyer and the G denotes guided missile armed. Eighty per cent of the crew was straight out of NTC, boot camp and had never seen a real ship. Now that I was an "old salt" we screwed with the boots a lot which is part of naval tradition. I was assigned to helm/leehelm train the helmsmen how to steer a ship. I had steered a ship, a small ship but a warship, on Lake Erie when I  was in the reserves. Me and this other first class a GMG, Gunners Mate Guns as opposed to a GMM Gunners Mate Missile would come up to the bridge eating porkchops and the boots would end up barfing into a shitcan, a trash can. It was good clean fun but like most really good things, it didn't last long enough. The boys turned into men way too fast. 

Next Long Beach California.

DOWN TO THE SEA IN SHIPS

In November of 63, I finally went aboard a Navy warship. An aircraft carrier USS Constellation CVA-64. It was docked at North Island in Coronado CA across the bay from San Diego.
  By now, I was a Missile Technician second class with a hashmark on my uniform, for every four years in the US Canoe Club you added a hashmark. I don't know the official name for them, probably service stripes, but everyone called them hashmarks. When I came on board, everyone assumed I had considerable sea time, which I didn't. No one asked me what my prior duty stations were and I never volunteered. A school, C school, shore duty and B school weren't real duty stations. I kept my big mouth closed and listened a lot and soon could talk a pretty good game as a real sailor. The adventure was finally beginning.

    I was very glad that I was now actually a crewmember of a ship but I didn't like life aboard a birdfarm. There are several navys. There is the submarine Navy, the battleship/cruiser navy, the gator Navy who transport the Marine jarheads to the beach head, the CBs, the aviation Navy and then the real navy, destroyers.   

    There are actually two vastly different Navys on a carrier, or bird farm. There are the black shoe guys who run the engines and make the electricity the engineers, or snipes. The bosun's mates, gunner's mates, signalmen, radarmen and Missile Technicians and all the others who make the ship run, supply the food and supplies are also black shoes.

    Then there are the aviation personell for which the birdfarm exists. In all fairness, it is their ship. Why the name brownshoe for aviation you may ask? I'm glad that you did. Pilots and other aviation officers wear green uniforms with brown shoes, hence the name. The captain of an aircraft carrier, by law, is a Naval Aviator. If you are an aviator you can't get promoted to Admiral if you hadn't had command of a birdfarm and you can't have command of a birdfarm unless you had command of a deep draft vessel. 

    Deep draft vessels are mostly supply ships that carry food and other stores, oilers that carry the fuel that the ships and aircraft need to have and ammunition ships that keep us supplied with munitions and bombs. Any time we went along side of a supply it was a good bet that the skipper of the auxiliary was a naval aviator. Naval Aviators are brave, smart men but quite frankly, they don't know shit about commanding a ship. Especially an aircraft carrier.
   On the destroyer one day over in WestPac we were coming along side an ammo ship. Mount 52, our after five inch gun was pointing up at an odd angle with a fire hose  stock in the muzzle splaying water all over the place. The skippers usually chat to one another via bullhorns and the brown shoe ammo ship captain asked what was up with the after gun mount. Our skipper hollered back "hot gun". The brown shoe usually has a black shoe commander right at his elbow. We could see him ask the black shoe what the hell a hot gun was. The other officer explained that a hot gun is when a projectile gets stuck in the barrel due to overheating. The gun gets a hose stuck down in it's barrel  to cool it down. When cooled down, a gunners mate sticks a long brass rod down the barrel and drives the projectile back down and out through the breach. A task I would be reluctant to do. The ammo ship did an emergency breakaway and got as much water between us as fast as he could.
   But I digress.
   Life on the carrier is like being on a cruise ship. You can eat twenty one hours a day. There is a one hour break between meals and they are back in business. There was closed circuit TV and you could go up on the oh eleven deck, IE 11 stories up and watch flight ops. It is an amazing sight to see but pretty soon you realize that you don't want to know what is going on "on the roof". Also like a cruise ship, it gets crowded. With an airgroup aboard, there is over 6500 sailors aboard. I was volunteered to be the Messdeck Master at Arms. Essentially the cop who keeps the peace and enforces good behavior and manners on the messdeck. Twelve hours on and twelve hours off. It was long hours but being I was bunked with the commissarymen, the real cooks, I and we ate real well.    
I spent about six months on the bird farm with a MidPac cruise to Hawaii. Did a few missile shots when one day I was summoned to the ships personell office. I had to have one of my strikers guide me to the office being the ship was so large. We passed a big compartment which looked like a Walmart. I asked the kid who was an older hand on the ship and he replied that it was the ships store. I said what the hell was that place back by where we slept sold cigarettes and lighters and watches and he replied that it was like a  quickey mart. This huge place was the ship's store. I was told at the personell office that I was going to new construction in Seattle and I was needed in three days.
   I packed my seabag and left the ship, went to where my wife was working and gave her the news. I didn't know how long I'd be there or where the ship was going to be home ported so we had our furniture and other belongings stored in San Diego the lucky wife went to her parents in Cleveland and I was Seattle bound.