What Happens When the Air Force Mistakes a Third Class Petty Officer for a Bird Colonel?

All sorts of hilarity ensues.

(H/T)

The Fourth

235 years ago text at the link.

Aquaflage

Last weekend, I was in the same restaurant where this scene took place. Also there were three men in aquaflage.

They looked stupid in that uniform. They looked like mall ninjas.

I know that I may sound like a broken record on this topic.[1] But I remain unshaken in my opinion that the aquaflage uniform is one of the dumbest looking uniforms around.[2] I predict that neither aquaflage or the new enlisted service uniform will be around by the end of this decade. And those clowns that recommended adopting them will luckily escape the flogging that they so richly deserve.

It could be worse, I suppose. At least the Navy didn't adopt the "Working Uniform; Blockbuster Best Buy" that the Air Force has adopted:

It definitely could be worse.

________________________
1. It's my blog.
2. The new enlisted service uniform with the black pisscutter cover is almost as bad.

The Return of DASH?

I wrote briefly about DASH (Drone Anti-Submarine Helicopter) in this post.

DASH was a failure for several reasons. It was too cheaply-made, with multiple sources of single-point failure which would result in the loss of the drone. Because of DASH's small size and the fact that no transponders were installed, they had a propensity to disappear from radar and once that happened, they were effectively lost. There was also no feedback from the drones to the ships; so the controllers had no idea what a drone might be doing at any given moment.

35 years after DASH was canceled, the Navy began trying again to operate drone helicopters rom ships, though not for ASW. But that'll probably come to pass in the not-so distant future.

CASREP

A "CASREP" was a "casualty report." CASREPs were not sent out for people being hurt, but for equipment damage/failure.[1] There were two categories: Combat systems readiness (C) and engineering (mobility) (M) readiness.

C1 and M1 meant that the ship could sail and fight. A 2 level meant that there were minor, but serious degradations. A 3 level meant that there were damn serious degradations. A 4 level meant, in common parlance, that the ship was broke-dick and wasn't going anywhere.

Actually, it wasn't that clear-cut. While a M4 CASREP meant "we ain't getting underway, or if at sea, "send the tugs", a ship might possibly sail with a C4 CASREP. The combat systems CASREPS were by warfare area, so for ASW, the ship might be completely dead, but it could still shoot its guns or fire missiles.[2] If part of the mission was armed diplomacy ("showing the Flag"), then it didn't matter if the Tartar launcher was broken.[3]

CASREPs were sent by teletype radio message. The effect could be like kicking over an anthill, often as the shore establishment scurried around to fix the things that they should have fixed anyway. A simple lack of repair parts could trigger a CASREP, which was really embarrassing to the supply pukes if that part was supposed to be in ship's stock.

CASREPs could also request technical support. This was common in serious leaks in the main steam piping, as repairs required highly certified welders and X-ray quality control examination of the welds. Usually the staff pukes confined their assistance to expediting parts and technicians and refrained from offering their idea of helpful (and unsolicited) advice, but not always.

If a part was needed and not available, the supply system would sometimes send the "next higher assembly". I once saw an entire antenna assembly delivered for a SPS-49 because the radar repair guys needed one part from it.[4]

The more twisted mess was when the supply system's records indicated that there was no part available. Sometimes the divisional supply petty officer would go over to the supply center and do a physical stock check. That could be embarrassing for the supply pukes if they really did have the parts.

This is no shit: There once was a minesweeper in drydock that needed a new dunce cap. The supply system said that there was not one available and that one would have to be manufactured. So one day, one of the more worthless division officers went to check out with the XO and go home (this was around 1300). The XO felt like screwing with that junior officer, so he told him that he could leave after he drove over to the supply center and got a new dunce cap.

This kid was dumb enough that he had no clue what the proper procedure was to go get parts from the supply center.[5] What he did do was to drive his car to the base supply center and drive around until he saw where those parts were kept. He asked the grizzled chief there if they had any dunce caps for that class of MSO. The chief said: "Yeah, I got them, how many you want, sir?" The kid signed where the chief told him to sign, the chief had a couple of guys put the dunce cap in the kid's car (they weren't that big) and the kid was soon back at the ship, showing the dunce cap to the stunned XO.

The supply system was also good at losing parts. I knew of one double-ended cruiser which had one of the motors in its aft launcher burn out. They CASREP'd the launcher and a new motor was sent. It disappeared en route. The supply system said that it had been delivered, the ship denied receiving it. Now this was no tiny motor, it was a big-ass 440 volt motor with a fair amount of horsepower. A second motor was sent and installed. Six months later, the first motor mysteriously appeared on the pier alongside the ship. There was no tracking paperwork, nobody knew who delivered it or where it came from. It was just there.

CASREPs could be (and often were) amended. A CASREP level might be reduced if the ship's force was able to jury-rig a partial repair. When the casualty was fixed, a CASCAN (casualty cancellation) was sent out.
____________________________
[1] I believe that the CO of an AO or AOR did once send out a CASREP for undermanning.
[2] And maybe the Soviets didn't know that the best ASW ship in WestPac had all of the ASW capability of the Staten Island Ferry.
[3] My recollection is that the USS Compte de Grasse was sent on a "show the Flag" cruise to France soon after she was commissioned, interrupting the ship's training at Gitmo.
[4] The techs just cannibalized the part from the antenna on the pier, took the broken part off the installed antenna, installed the new part and it worked. They then put the bad part into the antenna on the pier, marked the thing as "unserviceable" and sent it back. The supply pukes ashore were not amused and complained. The ship had, by then, cleared the CASREP and nobody gave a damn.
[5] Fill out a Form 1250, have the XO sign it, take it to the ship's supply department, where they would then type out a Form 1348 and take that to the Supply Center. Doing this when the ship was in-port could alleviate the need for a CASREP. If they would give you the part. Sometimes they wouldn't.

Brown Shoes, Brown Pants?

The SH's in the ship's laundry had better have some pre-treatment stuff to use on that pilot's skivvies (and flight suit):



In the part of the video with cross-hairs, being in the center of the screen is to be on line-up and on the glide slope. That jet got pretty low close in, much lower and that guy would have smeared his jet all over the stern. It looks as though he attempted to abort at the last second or so (or got a wave-off) and then snatched the number 1 wire in flight, but what the hell, I was a black shoe, so what do I know about such things.

And Then There Was One

Claude Stanley Choules, the last known combat veteran of World War I, died on Thursday in a nursing home in Western Australia. He was 110.

There is one known veteran left alive: Florence Green. She was in the Women's RAF.

Flight Deck Fire

First, watch the video on Defense Tech.



I'm not going to address the reliability issue of the F/A-18s. That's outside my wheelhouse.

Note that the fire crews don't approach the burning jet from the rear. That's probably because there must have been at least 30 knots of relative wind over the flight deck, which might have increased if the Captain or OOD ordered up more speed to keep the flames blowing away from the flight crew. Spraying foam onto a fire is rather difficult if the wind is blowing in one's face.

You can also see that burning JP-5 dripped down into the catapult shuttle track.

The fire never reached the forward end of the jet, so the crew stayed with it. A flight-deck ejection might throw the crew over the side, which has its own risks.

Good work by the flight deck fire crews. That's what they practice for and it paid off.

(H/T)

The Convincer

Ships were supposed to have safety-themed events from time to time. The Damage Control Assistant on one ship, who had the collateral job of Assistant Safety Officer*, arranged for a program of traffic safety. One of his ideas was a hot-dog cookout on the pier, offering free hot dogs and soda.

The catch was that anyone who wanted the free food had to first take a ride in the Convincer. If you didn't click the link. the Convincer is a gizmo that you ride in; the seat slides down some guides and then slams into some bumpers to give you an idea what a low-speed crash feels like (and why you should wear your seat belt).

The Chief Engineer thought it was a good idea if he rode it first. After being slammed to a stop, the CHENG had a revelation and an idea. The revelation is that the shoulder strap for a seat belt naturally goes over the collar points of a uniform shirt. If you were wearing a shirt that had what the Navy calls "collar devices" (rank insignia), the impact drove the collar device into your collar bone and it hurt.

The idea was to combine the Convincer with a demonstration of why it was a good idea to get a car seat for kids. He told the DCA to have someone get two 5-lb bags of flour or sugar from the cooks, to put them into a plastic bag and to wrap them up with duct tape to make a simulated baby. You'd ride the Convincer, hold onto the "baby" and see the "baby" go flying out of your arms when you jolted to a stop.

That turned out to be a great idea, for it developed into an informal competition to see who could hold onto the "baby". Hardly anyone could.

So the XO came down to make an appearance and ride the Convincer. He got in and strapped in. The CHENG and the DCA were watching. The DCA asked the CHENG if maybe he should tell the XO to put his collar over the shoulder belt. The CHENG smiled and said: "Nah."

The XO rode the Convincer, it slammed to a stop. He said: "Kee-rist, that hurt." afterwards and rubbed his collarbone. But he didn't drop the "baby"; it spun out of his arms and he was able to catch it.

Oh, and when the Captain rode the Convincer, the XO didn't tell him about the shoulder belt.
__________________________________
*That was true for all ships. The DCA had the collateral duty of serving as the Assistant Safety Officer, the Chief Engineer was the Safety Officer. They did those jobs in their copious spare time.

1911

A century ago today, the U.S. Army officially adopted the M1911.

As I've written elsewhere, both the .45 ACP cartridge and the M1911 set the gold standard for self-defense handguns.

Attention to Colors

I've mentioned before that I was on shore duty at a facility in the DC metro area for a spell. A large number of people worked there, the vast majority were civilians. The commander of the facility was a captain in some engineering career path. The facility also had about a dozen or so naval officers of varying designators; the idea was explained to me that we all brought real-world fleet experience to the job the facility did.

We were sort of dispersed around the various departments and, brother, most of the civilians that we worked for were scared of us. For instance, my boss had at least three people in his hierarchy between himself and the facility commander, maybe four. He knew, as did all of the other bosses who had naval officers detailed to work for them, that in the "blue suit" chain of command, we all reported directly to the facility commander. It griped the living shit out of my boss that he couldn't make an appointment directly with the facility commander, but I could.

He really hated that once a month, there was a "military lunch" in the executive dining room at the cafeteria, where all of the blue-suiters had lunch with the base CO. When I realized that seriously gnawed on his liver, I made a point of telling him when the lunches were scheduled and reminding him on that day that I'd be gone for an hour or so.

We all stood a 24 hour watch as the Command Duty Officer. We didn't have to sleep at the facility, but we had to be available by phone or pager the entire time. (I think in a 30 month period of time, I had to go in maybe four times.) Turnover was at 0745 and at 0800, the ongoing and offgoing CDO stood in front of the administration building and saluted the raising of the Colors.

Now at most naval bases, all traffic stops for morning and evening Colors. Even if you don't know it's going on, you can see the pedestrians stop, face towards the Colors and salute while the Colors are raised. Even if they can't see them, they can hear the bugle call.*

But not at this facility. We would be standing on the steps of the Administration building, saluting the Colors and watching the traffic drive by. It bothered every one of us.

So one day, when I was ongoing or offgoing CDO, I don't remember which, when the four-note "Attention" call was played, we smartly marched right into the middle of the street, blocked traffic, and when the bugle call for Colors played, we saluted the Colors. When the "Carry On" played, we executed an about-faced and marched out of the street.

From then on, that was part of the drill for every duty day. I don't think we ever were honked at, for they probably believed that we'd just drag them out of their cars and beat the shit out of them. And we might have done just that.
_____________________________
* Bugle calls were pretty much only used for morning and evening Colors in the Navy. The Army and the Zoomies were, of course, big on bugle calls.

Dustoff!

A videographer embedded with a Medevac unit in Afghanistan for ten days. This is the documentary that resulted. It is well worth the 25 minutes that you will spend watching it.



The Army has to be proud of these guys. This video could be used as a recruiting tool. Hell, it should be.

The kicker is that it aired on al-Jazeera.

Uniform Disasters

While I was quite proud of referring to the new naval working uniform as "Battle Dress Oceanic," I have to admit that a commenter on "the Stupid Shall Be Punished" came up with a better term: Aquaflage.

Aquaflage. So it is written, so it shall be.

Sea Legs

The old Grumman documentary about carrier aircraft from the 1970s.

Happy Birthday, Brown Shoes

100 years since Eugene Ely made the first arrested landing on a warship (USS Pennsylvania, ACR-4)

Ely wasn't in the Navy, but his shipboard landing is now commonly regarded as the birth date for naval air. The first American aircraft carrier was authorized just after the end of the Great War and was commissioned in 1922.

Last Pilot From the Doolittle Raid.

The last surviving pilot from the Doolittle Raid has died.

Col. William Marsh "Bill" Bower was 93.

Garbage Out, Garbage In

Ships generate a fair amount of garbage and trash (which our cousins in the Royal Navy refer to as "gash"). In port, it was handled as any other business would; it was thrown into a dumpster on the pier.

I don't know how the Navy handles garbage and trash at sea now. Submarines supposedly compacted it and then ejected it overboard, so it would sink. Back in the day, surface ships would just throw it from the fantail; naval ships pretty much left a stream of garbage bags floating in their wakes. [1]

When a ship was at an anchorage, typically a civilian firm would be contracted to come by the ship once or twice a day to pick up the garbage. In some countries, a garbage lighter from a local navy base would do the honors and there would be impromptu trading of goods between the sailors on the warship and the crew of the lighters.[2] The lighters were supposed to take the garbage ashore and then it would be trucked to the local dump.

In Italy, of course, it didn't work that way. The garbage lighters would wait until it was completely dark. Then they would go several miles out to sea and throw all of the shit over the side. This often had one bad diplomatic ramification: Garbage with papers bearing the name of the USS UMPTECLUTCH would then drift ashore onto beaches favored by tourists. The mayor of that town would either complain to his foreign ministry or sometimes just call the local consulate directly and scream at the consular officials about American ships fouling his pristine beaches.

That usually resulted in a cable going to Foggy Bottom, which then was passed along to Fort Fumble. Some desk-bound captain or admiral would then send a message of inquiry to the offending ship, with the message copied to the commanders of the Second Fleet, the Sixth Fleet, the home cruiser-destroyer group, CTF 60, CTG 60.1 (or 60.2) and the home destroyer squadron. That was usually answered with a message that explained that garbage services were contracted through the local consular agent, or "we did what we were supposed to, whaddaya want from us?"

So one time (probably more than one time), there was an American naval ship anchored a mile or so off the coast of an Italian town. Garbage services were arranged as I described above. The garbage was handled by the lightermen as I also described. There were currents that took the garbage from where it was dumped into the Mediterranean Sea (more precisely, the Tyrrhenian Sea) back towards that town.

And back towards that ship.

When the garbage had floated back towards that ship, the garbage bags had taken on water. Some of them had submerged and were floating along about twenty or so feet under the surface. That put them right at the level of the sea chests[3] for the generators, the evaporators and the fire mains. The suction from the sea chests sucked the garbage into the sea chests, where the garbage clogged the inlet screens.

All that stuff kept tripping offline as cooling was lost. The cure was to connect a fire hose to the sea chest and backwash the shit back out. The chief engineer and the captain soon realized that the time might come when all of the firemain pump inlets were clogged at the same time. So the captain ordered that the Sea and Anchor Detail be set, the anchor was hauled up and the ship headed out to sea.

This happened around midnight or so, stranding several dozen sailors ashore. After it was fully light out, the ship came back in, though well away from the garbage current and sent in its boats to retrieve the rest of the crew. The boat crews were told to keep a watch out for garbage so that the sea chests for their engines weren't fouled.

In due course, the sailors who were ashore were recovered and the ship went off to its next mission.

_______________________________________
[1] Classified material was put into burn bags. Stuff classified as "secret" or above was supposed to first be shredded and then burned.
[2] In Muslim nations, a very desired trade good by the lightermen was American porn.
[3] A "sea chest" is the point of salt water inlet for a given system. For generators, sea water was used for cooling the condensers and sea water also cooled the air-conditioning plants. For evaporators, sea water was the raw material for making fresh water. Water for fire-fighting was also sea water.

Now Hear This: Happy New Year!

That is all.

Food, or a Reasonable Facsimile Thereof

see more Very Demotivational

An explanation.

69 Years Ago- The Second Happy Time

69 years ago today, the first of five German U-Boats sailed to begin commerce-raiding operations off the east coast of the United States.

The U-boats were able to sink so many ships with so few German losses that the period from the arrival of the U-boats to about August of 1942 became known as the "Second Happy Time".

The reaction of the US Navy to the U-boat campaign, as well as the local governments in coastal cities, bordered on criminal neglect and dereliction of duty.

The Navy fought the institution of a coastal convoy system, despite the lessons learned during both the First World War and the high losses the British suffered at the onset of the Second World War. The Navy was extremely slow to react and resisted the formation of civilian aerial antisubmarine patrols (a measure that proved to be an extremely effective countermeasure). Until the Navy pulled its collective thumb out of its ass, many merchant vessels were sunk, most with the loss of their crews.

Merchant ships sailing independently tried hopping from anchorage to anchorage, sailing only in darkness. The U-boats were able to see ships operating inshore silhouetted by the lights of towns and cities. Civilian governments resisted the institution of a coastal blackout, because the local governments feared the impact of a blackout on their merchants, preferring to see ships on the horizon burning from U-boat attacks.

Keep in mind that although the film stock from the war shows the U-boats executing torpedo attacks, U-boats sank a lot of ships by surfacing and firing on those ships with their deck guns, because submarines of the day carried maybe 12-20 torpedoes. Surfaced U-boats were vulnerable to air attack; the later formation of the Civil Air Patrol, light aircraft armed with small bombs, forced the U-boats to discontinue surface attacks.

Between the CAP flights, convoying and Navy blimp patrols, merchant sinkings went down and U-boat losses climbed, making operations off the U.S. coast a lot more hazardous for the U-boat crews.

The Troll Under the Bridge, cont.

Navy Times is reporting that CAPT Graf's continuation board recommended that she be forcibly retired with a general discharge.

I read through some of the comments that CAPT Graf was favored because her sister is an admiral. I don't know anything about that.

But a long time ago, I knew one admiral who was so dumb that he should have been watered twice a week and the only reason anyone could figure out that he had gotten so far was that his father and his uncle were both admirals. Maybe a cousin and a brother as well, I've forgotten. There were weekly stories going around the waterfront about what stupid thing that admiral had said or asked in the weekly staff meeting.

So yes, nepotism did exist in the Navy and it probably still does. Idiot offspring who are legacy admissions isn't confined to douchebag sons at Ivy-league universities.

(Original post.)

Thanksgiving at Sea, or "We Sail to Defend, What We Hold So Dear. "The DDGs, Welded to the Pier."

I hope that you are having (or that you had) a nice Thanksgiving, Gentle Reader. Please spare a moment from your day of food (and football) to think of those men and women in the Armed Forces who are away from home on this day, with a special thought to those on the ground in Afghanistan and Iraq, and those who are sailing into uncertain waters off the Korean Peninsula.

I've spent a Thanksgiving or two at sea, it's not terribly uncommon in the Navy. If the cooks are halfway good, the meal is a feast like none other[1] (though cigars and cigarettes were no longer provided). It was a good idea to reflect on one's underway watch rotation before sitting down to eat, as showing up for watch ready to fall asleep from overeating was not a good idea.

On larger ships, a VIP might show up to thank the crew. A DoD or USO entertainment group might perform, which resulted in a sort of "mandatory fun" if not enough sailors showed up to watch the show.[2] Smaller ships were luckier, usually they got to be on their own. Unless it was truly wartime, Thanksgiving was a day of holiday routine; no work was done other than sweepers, watchstanding and cooking. Everyone could sleep in if they didn't have to be up.

I was surfing around, saw the usual press releases, and found this Plan of the Day from a warship's Thanksgiving thirty years ago.

I don't know the story behind it, but it sounds as though the USS Joseph Hewes had to leave for Thanksgiving to cover something that the USS Sellers was supposed to do. Probably one of the crewmen, or more than one, wrote that poem. If I remember correctly, only line officers could qualify for surface warfare pins back then, so it is possible that one of the wardroom rats had a hand in that.

Covering another ship's commitments was a bittersweet thing. The bitter was that it meant more time away from home.[3] If it was over a holiday, your plans, the plans of your shipmates and everyone's families were ruined. The sweet was that there was considerable unit pride in being on a ship that could be told, on very short notice, to get underway and do someone else's job. [4] That was a hard thing to sell to one's family, but it was still true. The reverse was that the waterfront reputation of a ship that was indeed "welded to the pier" was not good. The higher-ups in the squadron and the group could be counted on to lavish the sort of extra attention on that short of ship which nobody on that ship relished receiving.
_____________________________
[1] If the cooks produced a terrible Thanksgiving meal, that may result in the Supply Officer and the chief cook getting fired.
[2] "You will attend and you will have fun."
[3] Between deployments, exercises and in-port duty days, it was common to sleep in your own bed maybe 60-70 days a year.
[4] I have no doubt that copies of that POD were mailed to the USS Sellers.

Lockout and Tagout

One of the jobs I had before I went into the Navy was cleaning machinery in a factory. Each one of us on the cleaning crew was issued a padlock and a lockout hasp.

The first person on the job turned off the power to the machine, inserted the lockout hasp on the power switch and then locked the hasp with a padlock. Every additional person on that job added their lock to the hasp. Only the individual worker had the key to his or her own lock. The machine could not be cleared to run without everyone removing their locks. It was a suspendable offense to leave the site without clearing one's lock. Working on a machine without locking it out was a termination offense.

That didn't work that way in the Navy. There were redundant sources of power to a lot of machinery. There could be several inputs of things that might hurt someone working on a piece of equipment.

What there was, instead, was a tagout system. Yellow was used for caution, red for danger. Most of the tags that one would see were red tags. Sometimes there were a shitload of red tags. Tagging out a boiler required tagging out everything that fed into the boiler, was operated to service the boiler or fed from that boiler. Tagging out a boiler required over sixty red tags.

To do a tagout right, a sailor had to bring all of the proposed tags and the piping/wiring diagrams to the EOOW or the Duty Engineer, as well as a tagout sheet, which listed each tag (now they are serialized) and its location. The Duty Engineer (since most tagouts were done in port) was supposed to go over the tagout sheet and the diagrams with the worker, then they would sign all of the tags and the tagout sheet. After the equipment (valves, switches) were all tagged, the tagout sheet was logged into the Tagout Log in DC Central.

Tags were supposed to be inspected daily by the workcenter supervisor, the LPO in charge of the relevant work center. A missing tag meant that the work had to stop until both the thing tagged out was checked and a new tag procured and hung.

To remove the tags, the worker brought the tagout sheet to the Duty Engineer, who signed to authorize removal. The worker then removed all of the tags and brought the tags and the sheet back to the Duty Engineer, who would inventory the tags. Both the worker and the Duty Engineer signed each tag for removal and signed the tagout sheet. Once that was done, the sheet and the removed tags were entered into the tagout log. Then, and only then, was whatever was tagged out cleared for operation.

Violating tagout was a big Bozo No-No. It was a damn near certain guarantee of getting maxed out at Captain's Mast (demotion, restriction to the ship and extra duty for 45 days and loss of half-pay for two months). The tagout system was at the heart of plant safety; I know of no Chief Engineer or Captain who had any sense of humor about tagout violations.

A Rifleman Went to War

I picked up a copy of "A Rifleman Went to War" from inter-library loan.

The author, Herbert McBride, was an interesting fellow. He clearly was eager to go to war, somewhere, as he wrote that he tried to get into the Boer War and the intervention into Mexico, both without success. When World War I broke out he had to have been in his early 40s, yet he went to Canada and enlisted. He fought in France until he was medically discharged in 1917 for what appeared to be a combination of battle wounds and shell shock.

Two decades or so before the war, he was living and working in Colorado to get over a case of tuberculosis. Working as a cowboy and for a coal company, he became acquainted with some of the famous gunfighters of the Old West:

From these men I learned many things, the most important of which was the point which they all insisted was absolutely vital: the ability to control one's own nerves and passions--in other works, never to get excited.

(pg. 5)

If you want a cold, unsentimental yet proud look at life in the trenches, then the book is well worth reading.

If you have ever seen the somewhat execrable movie "Enemy at the Gates", you might recall a scene where Vasilii Zaitsev is talking about the unnatural actions of a German sniper in not relocating after reach shot. McBride machine-gunned a German sniper who didn't move after firing; he saw where a litter party was shot down and was able to triangulate back to a likely firing point.

McBride believed that the problems that occurred with the Ross rifle were due to substandard ammunition that was made in the rush to ramp up production for the war. He hinted at a manufacturer on the Hudson River, "National something or other", which unless he was referring to the Watervliet arsenal, I have no clue as to who he meant.

Update: National Conduit and Cable Co., Hastings-on-Hudson, NY.

Career-Limiting Move

Running your submarine aground:



(Um, you couldn't figure out a way to try and steady your camera??)

Dear John

Dear John letters were a fact of life in the Navy. Typically, they came roughly mid-way through the deployment. To be fair, it wasn't all the sea duty sailors being broadsided. There were sailors who met someone else and fell in love when visiting foreign ports and who then dumped their stateside spouses. But for this post, let's talk about those who were dumped. Also, for the purposes of this post, I'll refer to the sailors in the male gender and the spouses back home in the feminine gender, though the opposite cases were becoming true (and now are certainly true).

The reasons why the dumpings happened were fairly similar. There were the wives who realized after a few months that their husbands were scum and didn't want them back. There were wives who fell for newer models, an appalling number of whom were other sailors. There were wives who already had new boyfriends lined up and used the deployments to carry out their plans.

The commencement of the breakup was stereotypical: There was the letter. The recipient would react in varying ways: In stoic silence, tears, screams of anguish, smashing fists into bulkheads (never a good thing to do) or smashing things. If the letter came during a port visit, the recipient would find a telephone exchange and try to call home. Those who had the money (usually officers) would try to take leave and fly home. Sleeplessness was common. So was heavy self-medication during liberty ashore.

Where the wives strayed often wasn't unusual. While some husbands were known to regard their marriage vows as being suspended once the ship passed the sea buoy out-bound, the wives, in turn, sometimes became "deployment widows". For example, the Friday night dance at the NAS Oceana Officers' Club was notorious for being a place where single officers, especially airdales, could go to find a deployment widow for some fun and games.[1] Every naval community had a place or three like that, some off-base, some on-base. Probably most of the time, what happened was a short fling. But not always.[2]

Sometimes there wasn't even a Dear John letter. The husband would come back to find his place cleaned out, his bank account emptied and his family gone. That was usually facilitated by a trusting husband who gave his wife a legal power-of-attorney. I knew of one wife and boyfriend who wound up in prison for forging a power-of-attorney to sell the home.

There was one guy who came back from deployment and, like everyone else, was eager for the reunion. What happened was that another one of the wives sorrowfully gave him his car keys and told him that his car was in the parking lot. It was, jam-packed with all of his stuff.

There was another guy who, also eager for the reunion, was met by a process-server with a set of divorce papers.

There was the guy who found out where his soon-to-be-ex was with her new boyfriend. The sailor and a few of his buddies rode up on motorcycles, shot the shit out of the boyfriend's house and rode off.

The ones that were probably the worst to see were the ones where the wife broke the news and took her leave right there on the pier.[3] Those probably set the record for the amount of spirit-crushing that took place. It was bad enough when the sailor had suspicions that the relationship was in trouble. It was terrible when the sailor was deluded or had no clue whatever that his marriage was imploding.

The aftereffects could be, well, interesting. In a good and supportive unit, the dumpee was looked after and helped, under a theory of "there but for the grace of G-d go I". In most commands, however, the attitude was "it sucks to be you". Self-medication with alcohol and other women was common.[4] If things went well, the dumpee would recover and move on. But many times, there was enough self-medicating to hurt one's job performance, or if the captain was a self-righteous prig who regarded any family drama as career-limiting, then the dumpee had better plan on drafting a resume.

Dear John letters and their aftermath probably ended more careers, whether the sailor opted to leave or left after career suicide, than any other factor.

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[1] Not just deployment widows, too. Lots of single women came to such places on the hunt for their own "officer and a gentleman" (I cannot tell you how much I hated that particular movie.).
[2] Even the flings could be destructive. I knew of one marriage that ended when the returned husband found a parking ticket in his car; the parking ticked was issued at the Oceana O-Club on a Friday night six weeks after he had deployed.
[3] I've seen it go the other way, as well, when the sailor told the wife right there on the pier that the marriage was over.
[4] In an interesting twist of fate, such sailors often pursued deployment widows for some meaningless sex.

The Future for the US Navy

I had some thoughts on my home blog. You may be interested. Or not.

Nothing Ever Changes

Once again, the Air Force is taking knocks for largely being a bunch of civilians in uniform, with their fine whines of: "It's dusty here!" "Our laundry is damp!" "Do we have to share with the Army?" ("no" on that one)

It was a standing joke back in the day that when the Air Force was given money to build a base, they'd spend all of the money to build the Officer's Club, the EM Club, base housing and one runway (in order to fly in the booze) and then go back to Congress for more money for incidentals such as repair shops and hangars.

It doesn't sound as though much has changed.

Volunteering the Army Way

I posted this over on one of my other blogs, but it seems a shame not to have it here.

Operation Clusterfrak, Not the Video

I don't think that Operation Clusterfuck would have been anything like this: