Vic Socotra

28 April 2008

Bagging Traps

I had the event on my calendar for weeks. The local outlet for National Public Broadcasting was hyping it big-time, and in view of my support for their radio station, I received an invitation to the gala premier here in Washington, though my schedule did not permit me to attend.

I saw a note that the Chief of Naval Operations sent a couple weeks ago to help his leadership get their minds around what was going to be shown. Of the thousands of hours of footage, only a minute or so was cut from Director Maro Chermayeff’s final cut, for security reasons. Otherwise, the resident’s of the floating high-school get to have their say. One of them comments that the whole thing is about oil.

Another gets his girlfriend knocked up before deployment. One comments laconically that "Nimitz" stands for "Never Imagined Myself in This Zoo."

That is an echo of my Navy, long ago, and even though so much has changed, the color of the steel has not. That is why I watched.

“Carrier” is what the mini-series is named, and it is ten hours of finished footage covering the 2005 combat cruise to Operation IRAQI FREEDOM. It was the eleventh deployment for the lead ship of the CVN-68 class carrier, and it took me back.

Way back. She was commissioned in 1975, so forgive me if I still think she is new. The ships are designed to last a half-century, with proper maintenance. She came over the horizon in spectacular fashion late 1979 to join us in the waters of the Northern Arabian Sea.

Flanked by three nuclear cruisers, Nimitz made best-speed from the Atlantic around the Cape of Good Hope. Intelligence sources revealed a South African’s astonished report that she was throwing a rooster-tail in her wake from her speed.

My squadron was embarked in the majestic blue-collar Queen of the Western Pacific, USS Midway, which had been motoring about in the region when the US Embassy was occupied by the buddies of now-President of the Islamic Republic, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

If you watch the show, you will know exactly the sort of numbing repetition of effort that a floating airfield requires. We saw land once in one hundred-plus day period. We burned ourselves black under the tropical sun, since there was little else to do except work and eat and sleep. The pilots were lucky. They got off the ship, and got to see the sun and bag traps- their jargon for carrier arrested landings.

We were joined on station in short order by the conventionally-powered USS Kitty Hawk, on accelerated deployment from the West Coast. That enabled Midway to cut back on our alert posture, and planning commenced behind the blue curtains for what would become Operation EAGLE CLAW, the hostage rescue attempt that came to grief at DESERT ONE.

One day, I got a chance to get off the ship to bag some traps of my own. A change is as good as a vacation after all, and I connived a seat on the C-2 Greyhound to make the routine round-robin between the American islands and bag traps on Midway, Kitty Hawk and Nimitz. The Air Transportation Officer on Hawk was nice, and let me get off the flight deck.

Then there was the next catapult shot, and the arrested landing on Nimitz. I was not permitted to get off the airplane, since she was so new and proud. The Air Boss announced he did not want tourists.

Consequently, having had such a formal introduction to her, it was more than a little weird last night to watch the great ship letting it all hang out, strolling around in its underwear, so to speak.

My eyes bugged out a little when the film crew got around to the bridge. The Skipper of the Zoo on this deployment is Captain Ted Branch, who did not screw up and made flag out of the job.

He might be the last guy young enough on Ship’s Company to be someone I served with. I noted that the Battle Group Commander and his haughty staff are prominently absent from the coverage, as though “Twig” and the Zoo were just off to the war on their own.

“Twig” Branch is how I knew him, since that was his call sign back then, bestowed on him in his nugget days.

I don’t know if he managed to change it later. One Air Wing Commander I worked for started out as “Bambi,” and wound up as “Wizard” by sheer force of will.

I deployed to the Med with Twig in Forrestal- he was A/Nav, ship’s company and I was the Air Wing SIX Spy. It was the only peacetime cruise since Vietnam, as it turned out, marking the Fall of the Wall and the brief uncertain period before Saddam’s bizarre invasion of Kuwait. Peacetime or not, there was a little tension there, which I will have to get to that later this week.

Still, that long-ago vacation visit to Nimitz was my first time aboard, and with a couple ships in between, was not the last.

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