(This image is from a gray day on the Texas coast just a few years ago. The long gray shape is that of an aircraft carrier named for the first Secretary of Defense, James V. Forrestal (CV-59). When her steaming days were done, she was sold to an enterprising scrapping company for $1. She is now distributed in much smaller pieces of metal all over the country).
These words- or some of them, anyway- popped up in the review of the manuscript that is being transformed from old files into a recollection of the end of the Cold War. We were looking at the context of the diary of the Last Cruise of the Cold War, so some of them are from 1990 and written on the way to Homer’s Wine Dark Sea. It had been another of those nights of uncertain sleep and I awoke bleary in the cozy darkness of the Air Wing Intelligence Officer’s Stateroom on the 03 level of USS Forrestal (CV-59), the world’s first Super Carrier constructed to project American power on the world ocean wherever required.
This morning, in this time, she has long been returned to random chunks of steel and HAZMAT material. There is a certain poignancy to the memory of times when they were all still attached in a fashion in which the bottom of a catapult track formed part of the ceiling.
Bells rang over the 1MC, Forrestal’s internal communications system, informing us we had crossed another time zone, and suddenly it was lunchtime without the luxury of sleeping late. We were headed I crashed though a quick shower and headed up to Mission Planning to unlock the Tippy-Top secret materials for the crew of happy Cold War planners and the eighteen-hour day began.
Our responsibility was to complete contingency strike plans for a long list of nationally-approved targets in the European area. It was not that we are actually going to hit them, but we were supposed to be ready to do so on a moment’s notice. Therefore, all the targets had to be meticulously planned and briefed to the Admiral commanding the Battle Group before we enter the Mediterranean Sea.
It is a lot of work, and they will not disclose the list to us before the ship pulls away from the pier in Jacksonville and begins the ten-day transit across the Atlantic toward Gibraltar. We will be working around the clock to make it happen. Some targets are easier than others. For example, aerial mining operations tend to be fairly straightforward, and the air defense picture opposing the aircrews is normally less complex than attacking a land-based target. We got the last of the seven mining plans out late that afternoon and the Grownups began an assault to standardize the first twenty messages we had sent out two weeks ago.
It was a standard part of Cold War planning, and we had no idea the whole thing was about to end after more than forty years of adversarial fun and games.
Mission Planning has been jammed by aircrew and the intelligence team, shredding maps, inking new ones and running programs through the Joint Munitions Effectiveness Manual for validation. Floppy discs- remember those? were being jammed into computers and pulled out again. There are multiple versions of the plans on multiple discs. There is mild confusion, and it seems way too soon to be this burned out.
I thought about the family left behind in Jacksonville, Florida, and the six months it would take to put this cruise behind us. High point of the day was a walk on the flight deck from the catwalk above my stateroom back to the island. Wind was gusting down the flight deck between 50-60KTS. Grey day. The gale blew my rolled-up sleeves down again. 72 steel degrees that morning, not much different than this morning at the beginning of the Labor Day break. Not Fall yet. No flying either that day or this one. Then, we had the Atlantic Ocean to cross and targets to plan for incineration if required. We have no such contingency planning on this morning, even if Mr. Putin is attempting to roll back some aspects of the history we have come to accept.
But contingencies were how some mornings started back in the day. In this one, here in our current time, the sky is cloudless and blue and there is a hint of chill in the air. Out front, a small crew of Peruvian workers is plodding around the new porch cleaning up last details from the Porch Project (PP). It is interesting to recall the difference a few decades can make in perspective. Then, in old words called up on the laptop, FID’s mess decks were abuzz with rumors. President Bush will reportedly be on the Forrestal prior to the Saltwater Summit with the Soviets off Malta.
We did not know it would mean the end of one war and the adjustment to another. We were more concerned that the Summit would drive a schedule change (no port calls involved) that would pull us out of an exercise with the Tunisians.
Then there was a note of historic fact about a terrible accident on the Second Deck. The universal loudspeaker- the 1MC- crackled to life and I heard them call “Medical Emergency, Medical Emergency” just after noon. I didn’t hear them say it was a drill. Later they called “Now activate the Walking Blood Bank” which is a program by which selected blood donors run down to Sickbay and roll up their sleeves. I was walking on the first deck to the Ship’s Store and got stopped by the Master-At-Arms (MAA) while headed forward.
I went up to the hangar bay and went forward about seventy frames and down again. The Store was on the right side of the accident, whatever it was, and I got a $4.25 Seiko watch so I wouldn’t have to bang up my fancy Hong Kong-purchased Rolex on the bulkheads. Later, when I came back into Mission Planning in the Carrier Intelligence Center (CVIC), I saw the Ship’s Company Gang huddled around the computer drafting the operational report (OPREP) to the big Fleet Commander back in Norfolk.
The accident was more grotesque than I could imagine. A young Airman Apprentice was conducting Preventative Maintenance Service (PMS, the other kind) on one of the five-hundred-pound armored hatches. He had unshipped the safety locks and was applying graphite lubricant when the thing crashed down and crushed his head between the hatch and the knife-edge lip of the steel.
At last report, he was breathing mechanically. Body in good shape, but sadly brain dead. I checked the status posted by Navigation. We are just over half-way across the Atlantic and storming on toward Gibraltar, also known as the Pillars of Hercules.
This time travel thing contained in old files is interesting. That sailor whose accident colored a morning long ago has been resting in peace now for over thirty years. Most of the rest of us on that cruise have long ago put away the tools of the sea-faring life. The ships we rode are gone to scrap.
We talked about it down by the Fire Ring, marveling at how things change. The big deal at The Farm is that the trees are supposed to change color and later dump the leaves on the pastures. As a general point of agreement, we are pleased we have no armored hatches to maintain, no blaring loudspeakers or walking blood banks to deal with.
We did ask Splash to keep an eye out for any Master-At-Arms patrols. Seasonal change or not, it is useful to know what is going on in the fields around us.
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