My First Time in the Navy

Every good Sea Story starts with this is a no-shitter, and this one is one of those. In Nineteen Seventy-Nine, I was a Nuke Power student. When I graduated from ET School in the Great Lakes, my class was not ready, so I got a transfer to the USS Vogelgesang, DD 862, before Nuke School in Orlando. I was green. I was more green than a freshly cut Pear Tree.

My first duty section did not go well. From Norfolk, a Tender ( A Tender is a mobile repair shop) was there. We were in a nest of ships. When we held a muster that evening, I was to get training on the portable pump and the inductor. I had no idea what those were, let alone operate one. When the muster was over, we watched a movie on the mess decks. Then, we hit the rack.

One of the ETs from the shop woke me up.

“Hey, aren’t you in this Watch Section? Get up and muster on deck, now.”

Everybody was racing around. I got dressed as fast as I could and mustered on the main deck.

I said to the crew member next to me I said, “What the hell is going on here?”

Duty Chief said, “Shut up. You will be quiet while in ranks.”

Looking over to the tender, I saw them running around with rifles and taking defensive positions. As a matter of fact, there were armed men on the deck of our ship. I slept through what?

Bong Bong, “Vogelgesang, arriving,” Bong.

When ringing Bells, it is done in sets of two. The officers get Bongs according to their rank. The Bongs correspond to the number of side boys the rank gets. The last single bong happens when the officer coming aboard foot touches the deck. Two bongs for officers below the rank of Commander. Most of those only got the title of “Staff Gang way.” Four bongs for a Commander or a Captain. Six for the two Rear Admirals. One-star admirals were called Commodore. I am not sure that is still true. For a Vice Admiral, they got eight. The President receives twelve. His title announced is the United States. I found that using the title of their job when passing the word, not a name, sometimes the title is hard to do. I would have done for a Captain commanding destroyer squadron number two by passing the word as ComDesRonTwo.

The Captain came to where we were musted.

“OOD (Officer Of the Deck), What the hell happened to my ship,” the Captain said?

“Sir, someone exploded a hand grenade between the ships.”

For me, this was not good but staggering. I had slept through an explosion.

My first cruise was pretty strange, too. There were Nuke School candidates on board, and we got a bunch of Officer candidates for a cruise. When we went to sea, it was by the grace of God. The ship always ended up running on one engine and one boiler. My first Watch was in CIC (Combat Information Center).

I said to our Chief before the Watch, “What am I to do?”

I had never been in CIC.

He said, “You are to log the messages over the radio so if anybody asked, you can read it back. It’s not that hard. Just get up to CIC, and the Watch Officer will tell you what to do.”

I was unprepared for what I found when I opened the hatch. Among the various strange objects was a surface radar repeater. It in itself was not abnormal. It was the three Officer Candidates sitting on tall chairs around it. They were beeping.

The Watch Officer, an OS-1 (Operation Specialist), looked at me, and before I could say anything, he said, “Aah ET-3 Stigers, right?”

I said, “Yeah, What the ….”

He cut me off and said, “Look, the audio Section on the repeater is out again. We have the Officers beep, so we know that there are targets out there. Here is your log, and we have a speaker set up for you over at this table.”

CIC on an old Fram Destroyer was not that big. I had trouble hearing transmissions. These clowns were beeping too loud. After like the sixth message I missed, I wanted to tell them, would you fools, shut up. You are being f with. Then the OOD (Officer of the Deck) walked in from the Bridge. He was a full lieutenant.

He said, “What the hell is going on in here?”

He looked at the candidates, then at me, then to the CIC Watch Officer.

Officer candidates looked up like, are you pulling something on us?

The Watch officer said in a squeaky voice, “The Audio Section is out on the repeater, Sir. They are beeping to tell us that there are targets out there.”

He got a frown on his face and said, “Well, tell them to speak up. We can’t hear them on the Bridge.”

Then he slams the door. Yes, it was a door, not a hatch between CIC and the Bridge. They beeped louder. It was impossible to hear the fleet coms. For three days, they beeped. Each Watch would brief the next set of eager beepers.

I had often wondered, what happened when they got to their ships?

Ensign Doofus to some poor OS on Watch said, “If the Audio Section is down on your repeater, you need to beep for us.”

The OS said, “What the hell are you talking about, Sir?”

Ensign Doofus said, “You need to beep so I can know if there are targets out there.”

The OS said, “Excuse me, Sir, where did you get that idea?”

Ensign Doofus said, “I was on a ship before. I stood your Watch. I know all about it. We had to Beep for the CIC Watch officer.”

“I see,” the OS said, “Was the Watch Officer an enlisted man?”

“Yea, it was an OS-1. Why?”

Everybody in CIC starts laughing uncontrollably.

The Ensign Doofus, “What?”

OS said, “You Ensigns are so gullible.”

After a few minutes, when they get done laughing, everybody goes back to work and ignores the Ensign.