Navy Days

The year was 1969. I had been out of high school for a year, working at a machine shop and hanging around town with a small band of friends. The preferred gathering spot was a wall surrounding a church in downtown Maynard, Massachusetts. The police drove by occasionally and yelled “Get off the wall” over a speaker, so we walked around the triangle created by the three downtown streets and ended back at the wall a half hour later. The Vietnam ‘war’ was raging, consuming men of fighting age at a rate that had all the college students enraged enough to have the National Guard called out to restore order on campus. That summer, my friend George got called up. The night before George ‘shipped out’, we threw him a great going away party where we all got wasted and slept on the floor of the small apartment my dad and I shared. So it was with some surprised that I saw George sitting on the wall the next evening. “I’m not going over there,” he claimed. One of the local miscreants, who had already served his time, enlightened George on what they would do to guys who just didn’t show up to be sent to Vietnam. Weighing the two alternatives, George reported in at the Boston Army base the following day and got a flight out the day after. He called from Seattle to say goodbye and I asked him what the Army did to him for reporting a day late. “The sergeant made me dump his trash. It’s not like they can do anything worse than put you on a plane to Vietnam,” he answered.

President Lyndon Johnson, along with his other noteworthy accomplishments like increasing welfare roles, increased the ‘peacetime draft’ numbers and in 1969 the Selective Service department came up with a lottery system for picking who got drafted when. Three hundred and sixty six dates were written on slips of paper and put into ping pong balls that were picked out of a bowl. When your birthdate was picked, you got the next draft number. Mine was 65, and they drafted up through 195 in 1970. Not being the type of person to just sit around and let things happen, I drove to the common in Waltham, Massachusetts where the five branches of the military had set up recruiting trailers. I started at the Coast Guard and just went down the line.

The Coast Guard recruiter informed me that there was a nine month waiting list and being on the list would not prevent me from getting drafted. On to the Air Force, where the recruiter asked me why I was enlisting. “Well, I don’t want to go to Vietnam,” I answered, thinking it would be obvious ”Oh, most of our guys are in country anyway,” he said. Next.

The Navy recruiter was somewhat straight forward about the process. He asked how my grades were in high school and if I took any college prep courses and set up a date at the Army base to take some tests. These are known as the GCT/ARI tests and give an approximation of your IQ. “Take the tests and come back in a couple of weeks and I’ll tell you what Navy schools you can get into.” Going to school and having the government pay for it sounded like a great idea.

Seeing as how I was there, I stopped at the last trailer, which was being shared by the Army and the Marines. The Army recruiter was a real salesman. Rubbing his hands together, he started into his pitch. “What are you doing for work now, son?” he queried. I responded that I was working in a machine shop and driving trucks.

“OH! I can get you a great job driving trucks,” he exclaimed.

“Where would I be driving these trucks?” I asked

“You know. Southeast Asia.”

“No, thanks,” I replied.

Undeterred, he continued. “Hey. Ever want to be a pilot?” I nodded faintly. “We have this great pilot program called WOP - Warrant Officer Pilot - we teach you to fly helicopters and you skip the enlisted crap and go right to a rank of Warrant Officer.”

“Where would I be flying these helicopters?”

“You know, Southeast Asia”

“What’s the life expectancy of a Warrant Officer helicopter pilot in, you know, Southeast Asia?” I asked.

At that point, the Marine recruiter piped up. “About three months,” he said.

After a good laugh I left the two grunts arguing about whose helicopter pilots are better.

Returning to the Navy trailer a couple of weeks later, the recruiter informed me that I did well on the tests and he could offer me any career the Navy had. I’m pretty sure he said that to everyone who takes the tests, but as a 19 year old with no real career prospects, it sounded pretty good. I said “whatever career doesn’t go to Vietnam is fine with me.”

“Oh, even if you go to Southeast Asia, you’ll be 30 miles off the coast. You won’t even see it.” I guess someone forgot to tell him about the patrol river boats. He laid out three possibilities; advanced electronics, nuclear power and, because I scored very high on the language portion of the tests, cryptography - a.k.a. Spook School. The only gotcha was that advanced electronics and nuke school were six year programs.

At the time, they were building about 12 civilian nuke plants a year, so learning to operate a nuclear power plant sounded like the best deal. In hindsight, either one of the other two choices would have been better for a guy getting out of the Navy just before the tech boom in 1975 in San Francisco. As it turned out, by time 1975 rolled around, they weren’t building nuke plants anymore. Nevertheless, the Navy education got me a good job at a prestigious engineering firm in Boston where I got interested in computers. I took a few courses, got a job programing and in the early 1980s, if you could spell Intel, you could get a job in the Boston metro area. It all turned out just fine.

I ‘shipped out’ on December 1st, 1969 for twelve weeks of boot camp at Great Lakes, right on Lake Michigan north of Chicago. In my life until then, and not since, have I ever been so cold as I was standing gate guard at midnight at Great Lakes. Boot camp was designed to be as humiliating as humanly possible without causing physical harm to the recruit - most of the time. Nothing was comfortable; beds, chairs, standing at attention in -20° F weather, hour long chow lines. It was all Hell. One could have predicted that when, upon getting off the bus from O’Hare, you were greeted by other recruits with the favorite boot camp line; “You’re in a world of shit.”

Going home for two weeks after boot camp, I got married, and went right back to Great Lakes for Machinist Mate ‘A’ school. In this school, you learned the basics of naval propulsion plant operation and how to polish a tile floor. My new (pregnant) wife joined me and we eked out an existence on less that $200 a month in a studio apartment in Waukegan. ‘A’ school was three months, so at the end we were very close to becoming parents. My next stop was Vallejo, California on the north end of San Francisco Bay to attend Naval Nuclear Power School at Mare Island Naval Shipyard. I had 2 weeks to get there and it seemed wise to drop my wife off with her sister in Ithaca, New York to give birth while I got established in the Bay area. Our daughter was born just a few days after getting to Ithaca, so I guess it was a good decision.

Staying with the family as long as I dared, I made a wild cross country dash with a fellow ‘A’ school graduate and checked into Nuke school. I was hoping for a little less “world of shit”, but alas, our barracks were right next to the NIOTS barracks. This group manned the patrol river boats in Vietnam, a.k.a. the Brown Water Navy. They trained like SEALS, as in they ran several miles every day. Starting at 5 am, they would muster just outside our windows and start the chant “Nukie, Nukie don’t be blue, we’ll go fight the war for you”. Our response was “NIOTS, NIOTS go and fight, we’ll go screw your girls tonight”.

Nuke school was hard. In six months you took courses in math from algebra up through calculus and partial differential equations, electrical theory, thermodynamics, nuclear theory, chemistry and polishing tile floors. All the texts and study materials were classified, so you needed to study in the school building. The barracks were pre-World War II and pretty nasty, so I found a small apartment in Vallejo with a view of Mt. Tamalpais and moved the new family to California. Still trying to live on less than $400 a month, we managed to explore quite a bit of the northern part of the state in our GMC pickup. Of course, a gallon of gasoline was only 25 cents, so it was cheap entertainment, even at twelve miles per gallon. I made a camper shell for the truck out of a surplus canvas liberty boat cover and we took weekends to go camping in Tahoe and the central valley. Times were hard, but life was fresh, and I wasn’t pounding mud in you know, Southeast Asia.

The next stop in the journey was Idaho Falls, Idaho. You might be asking what the Hell is the Navy doing in Idaho Falls, Idaho. About an hour and a half bus ride west is the National Reactor Test Station located in the middle of the Idaho high desert. Here, the Navy runs prototypes of submarine and aircraft carrier power plants to test new technologies and procedures. The prototypes also provide a safe and effective means of training new power plant operators before being sent to the fleet. We packed everything we owned into the GMC and drove straight through to Idaho, found a place to live and waited for classes to start. If Nuke theory school was hard on the family life, Nuke prototype was worse. The shifts were 12 hours long with an hour and a half bus ride on either end. Day shift started by getting on a bus at 0630 and ended with getting off a bus at 2130. You did that for seven days, then you had a day off. The next week was swing shift. On the bus at 1030 and home at 0130 the next morning. Two days off and you started the mid shift - 2230 to 1330. After four days off you started the whole thing all over. This was repeated for 6 months. If you qualified on all of the equipment stations early you could shorten to eight hour shifts, so everyone hustled to get it done. In true Navy fashion, you were assigned a mentor, referred to as your sea daddy. If your sea daddy liked you, he helped you get qualed early. If he did not, your sea daddy did everything in his power to make it impossible. Happily, I finished up a month early and got to spend more time with the family, which was good, because the next stop was going to sea. I moved the family into a cheaper house and reported to Naval Air Station Alameda (California), home port of the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise, the worlds largest warship.

Of course, the ship was not home. She was actually steaming up and down the coast of North Vietnam for 30 days at a time launching aircraft to blow holes in rice paddies and tropical forests, and would be for the next six months. Unable to get an answer as to when I would join the ship, I found an apartment in Oakland and retrieved my wife and daughter from Idaho. A few days after getting settled into the apartment, I was on a Military Air Transport plane to Clark Air Force Base in the Philippines. A harrowing bus ride on donkey paths from Clark to Subic Bay and an even more harrowing plane ride to the ship rewarded me with view of my home for the next 4+ years.

For the next 2 years I worked my way through the various qualifications in the power plant to become a Chief Reactor Auxiliaries Operator. There are several equipment stations where you are responsible for some aspect of keeping 2 - 235 megawatt nuclear reactors making power and driving one of the four propellers, making steam for a catapult to launch aircraft and making electrical power to keep the ship operational. You had an absolute duty to keep making steam. In order to do that, a thousand minute details needed to be attended to every day in four 6 hour shifts by 20 sailors per shift with an average age of 23. Pumps need to run, turbine generators need to produce electricity, magnets need power to hold control rods and the proper quality of water must be fed into the steam generators. In order to condense the unused steam, sea water must be ingested at a huge rate into a condenser. Sea water changes temperature depending on where you’re sailing, so power output is different in different oceans.

Pressurized water reactors are more or less self controlling once they are producing as many neutrons as they lose. Take heat out by starting a steam driven piece of equipment, the reactor inlet temperature goes down, denser water attenuates more neutrons increasing the rate of fission and increasing power. Close the main engine throttle, the reactor inlet temperature increases, less dense water lets more neutrons escape thus reducing power. There are a lot more factors in how reactors work, but that is the basic premise. Non-water moderated reactors, such as Chernobyl, do not self regulate, which is why there are no reactors of that type in the US. Pressurized water reactors are most susceptible to human error as what happened at Three Mile Island. And that pretty much covers the accidents in commercial nuclear power plants. The world is losing out on a lot of non-carbon producing power because of Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. Imagine if a hundred years ago that we shut down coal burning because a mine collapsed on some miners.

The mission - keep the nuclear fires burning - was topmost on every Nuke’s list. Extraordinary efforts were sometimes required to keep the reactor up and running. A good watch stander knows what can be done and when to just let ‘er go. It was a personal failure for a plant to shutdown automatically or because of the failure of a piece of equipment needed to keep the fires burning. This mindset - do what is necessary - is the most important lesson I took from my six years in the Navy.

As far as “join the Navy, see the world”, I guess that’s true if the world you want to see is water, water and more water with occasional stops at ports with bars, scam artists and hookers. A typical nine month deployment, which was always touted as six months (really, six months this time, no shit) left Alameda and put into Pearl Harbor for a few days, then the long Pacific crossing to Subic Bay in the Philippines. Crossing east to west, you lose a day. Seriously, you’re steaming along on Monday and at midnight it turns into Wednesday. We would hang around Subic for a week, taking on supplies and letting the crew re-connect with their bar girls from the last cruise. Then we’d head for Yankee Station, 30 miles off the coast of North Vietnam and steam up and down the line for 30 days. This was referred to as a line period. It was scheduled so that you always had a line period during every month so you could collect combat pay, an extra $75 a month. Also, when on the line, cigarettes were 25 cents a pack. Yay. I often wondered if the Tonkin Gulf got shallower from all the trash generated by warships with up to 5500 sailors aboard. After we dropped all the bombs we had aboard and the ones we took aboard from supply ships, we’d head back to Subic. Maybe the next port of call would be Singapore or Hong Kong, but other than that, the routine remained the same.

After my first western Pacific (WestPac) cruise, instead of a line period the Big E and her escorts entered the Indian Ocean through the Straights of Malacca. Once in the Indian Ocean, we would “project the power of the United States Navy”, i.e. play chicken with Russian trawlers that followed us everywhere we went. On one such excursion, we put into the port of Mombasa, Kenya to compare the bars, scam artists and hookers in Africa to those in Asia. Samo-samo Joe.

One of the ‘benefits’ of being a nuke on a ship was early leave. You can’t just shutdown a nuclear reactor and walk away. A crew needed to man the cooling pumps and the equipment needed to supply cooling water to the reactors to dissipate the decay heat. Therefore, a shutdown watch crew from each of the four power plants was sent home ahead of the ship for shore leave at home, and you were to report when the ship retuned home and manned the cooldown watch for a couple of weeks so the rest of the nukes could reconnect to wives and bar girls. It was two weeks of back-to-back 12 hour shifts, but it was worth it to see your family two weeks earlier.

Our deployment was scheduled to be over in March of 1975. We all knew it would be extended because South Vietnam was in the process of falling to the north and we would need to stick around, you know, Southeast Asia. That realization apparently never occurred to the brain trust that ran the reactor department, because they asked for and got volunteers for early leave, leaving for home on March 15th. So we flew home, spent a couple of weeks with the family and went to the credit union to get a loan against our pay. We were pretty sure that the ship would not be back in Alameda on April 15th as scheduled. The way we saw it, we’d check in off leave, be assigned to transient barracks and basically call in once a day to prove that we were still alive. Life was good.

Checking in off leave, the yeoman looked down a list and said “You’re on the list.”

“What list?” I asked.

“The list to go back.”

“Go back where?”

In a few days, the entire early leave party was on a C-130 for a four day trip across the Pacific to Cubi Point Naval Air Station in Subic Bay. Every place we landed, the plane crew found some issue with the Hercules that necessitated an over night stop, first in Hawaii, then Guam. Of course, the ship was not in Subic Bay, but was steaming on Dixie Station off the coat of South Vietnam. After several attempts were made to fly us aboard in a C-2 COD (Carrier Onboard Delivery), the Navy put us all on a tank carrier ship that was headed up the Saigon River to pick up refugees. So, I said to myself, the recruiter lied. I was in the Navy and I would actually see Vietnam, and not from 30 miles off the coast. As senior petty officer of the group, it was up to me to raise a stink, so I mentioned to the executive officer that the Big E was waiting for their nukes and would not be happy if they lost any in country, considering that they’ve spent $2 million training us. The XO managed to transfer us to the aircraft carrier Midway, which got close enough to the Big E the next day to helicopter us over. The early leave party left Alameda on April 16th, we stepped aboard the Enterprise on April 28th and on May 4 we left for home. And we still had to stand two weeks of back-to-back twelve hours shifts.

After the fall of Vietnam, the Navy slowed their carrier deployments and the Enterprise was not scheduled to deploy again until after I was discharged in December. I was able to coast the last eight months in training division, getting new nukes ready to do their stint in ‘the hole’.

December 1st came around and I got my discharge papers, Special Services packed up our stuff for shipment to storage in Massachusetts, and I was out. We hung around San Francisco for one day so I could get a picture of the Enterprise going under the Golden Gate Bridge for the first time in four years without me aboard.