This is an unusual morning. It started with a note from one of the Old Salts about submarines.He had been to an exhibit called “A View From the Periscope.” It was a collection of twenty images depciting life around the Bubbleheads. None of us at the Writer’s Section except DeMille were bubbleheads, and our limited experience as Airedales with the submarine world made the first shared note in the queue quite remarkable
Our jobs only had a single experience under the waves, that being Rocket’s assignment as escort for a Congressional Staff visit to USS Los Angeles (SSN-688) whose skipper got underway to demonstrate an “emergency surface” maneuver that was pretty damn remarkable. “Down, gently. Up, radically!”
The images from San Diego and bubblehead art showed this as The View From the Periscope:
In the swirl of response, the Wound Treatment Nurse dropped a note saying she had more patients and three Piedmont counties to visit today and hoped we could accommodate her schedule or an early visit. We said, “Sure.”
In the course of trying to identify the subject for The Daily, we then saw the note from Joe, with the pictures from travelogue master Jim. He is one of the distinguished Old Salts whose stories are magical about life afloat on the World Ocean. That lead to Splash’s compilation of his Steel Mobile Homes. It wasn’t a project of idle boasting, since many of the Old and New Salted members in the long line of sailors had more or different experiences out there. But this was one of ours. We had been looking up pictures of Midway, Forrestal and Coronado the other day to put together a short collage of the boats- the homes, really- one of us had a chance to ride on deployment. Two of them are gone now, and there were more, of course, dozens of them, but these were the homes for one.
Splash laughed. “It was an ordinary career in that regard, and there were were other great ships to ride briefly in the three 3RD Fleet tours I shared with my son Eric. I remember requesting- and being granted- “leave” to fly on a helpful SH-3 from Midway to Nimitz without any ostensible purpose (except to purchase a CVN-68 Zippo lighter) and walk around on some different-textured steel floating in the Northern Arabian Sea back in the GONZO days. Dean and I came up with that name one afternoon over the usual at-sea coffee down in the CV-41 CVIC spaces and laughed about that, too. There was much laughter and sometimes tears out there.”
The three boats in question had dramatically different service lives. Midway was commissioned in 1945, and proudly greets the dawn today as a museum in San Diego. Forrestal is deconstructed in assorted small bits of steel distributed as scrap around the world. Coronado is three miles deep beneath the waves in an ocean trench far away. They were happy familiar hulls in Splash’s short time in them, excepting the memory of that horrible day other sailors lived- and did not live- when FID caught fire in wartime.
The two carriers in question had service lives around the World Ocean doing what a century of Naval Aviation ordered them to do. “Predictable projected amazement” was their trade. The last of the three ships- AGF-11- was different. She was configured with advanced communications and the ability to command nautical operations. Commissioned in 1970, she became the Flagship of Admirals around the world, and in Splash’s time a laboratory for what was billed as “The Most Advanced Command Ship in the World!”
She is now a reef in the Marianas. In September of 2012 she was sunk by a joint live-fire demonstration in waters 18,270 feet deep 102 miles south of the island of Guam. She was 42 years of age at the time of her passing, and had some notable history, including crews of composed of men and women at a time when such a thing was unusual. Splash summed it up this way: “Thinking back to that time brought back another striking memory, one of the best of my working life.”
“It involves the time when an artificial reef was afloat and living, and a family living in a lovely little red-tile-roofed stucco house at 1221 Alameda Boulevard in Coronado, California. From there, I could walk across the street to the Class SIX store when necessary, and amble just a block or so beyond that to the berth for USS Coronado, our Fleet Flagship. It took ten minutes, tops. It was unquestionably the best commute of my life.”
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