First Lieutenant

[bill_schubert]

I was 26 years old when I graduated from OCS and was commissioned an Ensign.  Much like Ensign Pulver in 'Mr. Roberts' I was sent to a Reserve ship.  In my case it was not a support ship but was a World War II destroyer, USS McKean, DD 784.  Guns fore and aft and really a relic.  I was First Lieutenant, in charge of the deck force, the Boatswain Mates.  Swabbies.  We didn't talk a lot about Yeats and Sartre.  But that's a different story.  This one is about my first day.

I reported to the ship and was taken to the Executive Officer who gave me my first collateral assignment.  Officers typically have three or four collateral assignments in addition to their primary duties (in my case the primary was maintaining the exterior of a 45 year old ship, maintaining good order and discipline in the ranks of the sailors assigned, etc).  I was collateral duty legal officer having been through a two week school teaching the Unified Code of Military Justice.  Two weeks is plenty to be a lawyer, right?  I  was also in charge of tracking drug offenses and rehabilitation.  And, since I was the junior Ensign, I was in charge of setting up the projector for the evening's movie.  As we didn't get underway much this was not a huge thing to worry about.  Until we got underway.  Then it was a nightly chore.

But my first day the XO pulled me aside and told me that there had been an incident on the ship and I was responsible to follow up on the remediation.  The ship was moored at pier 91 in Seattle.  Pier 90 was where the Toyota car carrier came in and offloaded onto a parking lot the size of several football fields a huge inventory of cars.  Turns out the wind blows north to south some days.  Such as the day when someone decided it would be good to spray paint the hull.  One of the people in my division, in fact.  The small particles of Haze Gray paint created specifically for the Navy to adhere and coat and be part of the ship's skin for a year in foul weather also floated very well on the wind.

There was an army of summer employment kids whose job it was to ferry the cars from the end of the parking lot where so very many of them had received small barely noticeable dots of the Navy's finest Haze Gray paint to the area where their exteriors would be cleaned of the gray dots.  I was supposed to be sure that this operation actually happened and that Uncle Sam's money was properly utilized.  Which meant my walking over there in my brand new Ensign uniform and inspecting the operation.

Fortunately it went well.  The kids were happy to be employed and the rest of the port workers had seen a lot of things, pretty much shrugged their shoulders and just patted me on the head.  Fortunately it was the beginning of the Regan era and even Seattle was supportive of the Navy.

Personally I think they should have sold the Haze Gray speckled version of the Toyota Corolla as a high end specialty item.  Limited edition.  But they didn't ask my opinion.

Comments

[susandennis]

i love that story so much.

[bill-schubert.livejournal.com]

I'm fleshing out my Google autobiography.... didn't have this story in it

[msconduct.livejournal.com]

Are you able to say what places you visited, or would that be classified?

[bill-schubert.livejournal.com]

It was hardly classified at the time. Anything you wanted to know about ship's movements could be found out from the women in the port bars.

The problem now is my memory. We pulled into a lot of ports. I should make a list anyway adding to the list of the six ships I was stationed on.

In your neck of the woods I was in Bunbury, south of Perth, WA. Singapore (several times). Hong Kong. Madagascar (I can't remember the port name but can maybe find it online — we arrived after a Typhoon and did some humanitarian work. Subic Bay, the Philippines (many times, at least twice every deployment). And further away, Diego Garcia, Bahrain, [we were supposed to stop in Karachi, PK but there was some state department kerfuffle that put a stop to it.. at the time I had no desire to see it, now I wish we had made it], Busan, South Korea, Japan (and I can't remember the port we stopped in ... I'll have to work on that one too). Then I was on an East Coast ship out of Mayport, Florida and we went to a bunch of Caribbean ports and then made what is known as the Great Lakes cruise where we went down the St Lawrence seaway into the Great Lakes stopping just short of Thunder Bay, Ontario while making a dozen port visits.

We did a combined exercise once with US, NZ, UK and AUS ships after which we would have likely made a port visit to NZ but the country does not allow nukes, as you know, and the Navy position was and is "we can neither confirm nor deny nuclear weapons are contained in this ship" so that was killed. That turned into a visit in WA.

While working with the NZ forces we did talk, bridge to bridge, and maneuvered with them. It was really fun hearing the four different accents over the bridge to bridge radio while looking at 20 or so ships all around us. I'll have to write about that. It was fascinating.

[msconduct.livejournal.com]

Oh, wow! Lots of cool stuff! Did you get much chance to see anything of the countries, or were they just short stops?

Yes, indeed, I and all New Zealanders are very well aware of the nuclear ban. I remember the massive protests here back in the 80s when the Truxton was trying to dock. I'm sure to you guys it's a very silly position to take, and practically it's completely meaningless, but it means a great deal to us because of the French nuclear tests in the South Pacific. That caused a massive amount of ill-feeling here and the Rainbow Warrior bombing didn't help that either. We're so attached to the nuclear free policy that when one right wing (by our standards) potential Prime Ministerial candidate was found to have assured the US ambassador that when he was elected the nuclear free policy would be "gone by lunchtime", he was...gone by lunchtime. The US heavied us relentlessly for years to try and make us change our minds, but in the end they had to give up and let us back into the security alliance. Nothing personal to the sailors, though! Lots of people here when we did have the ships visiting used to take them on tours and stuff like that.

[bill-schubert.livejournal.com]

I'd forgotten about the whole Truxton thing. Yeah, our port visit time period was only a couple of years after that so we were in the middle of the discussion. I'm positive it would have been a great port visit. The Aussies were wonderful (they remember the Battle of the Coral Sea) and I'm sure a visit to NZ would have been the same.

I always had a lot of respect for NZ and their stance on the issue and so was only disappointed in missing the chance to visit.

[stainsteelrat.livejournal.com]

Lovely story :-)

[mrdreamjeans.livejournal.com]

When you visit Susan in Seattle, do ya'll visit some of the sites where you spent your Navy years?