Long-Suffering Readers, I have subjected you to a short series of tales from a book I wrote long ago, during the last Cold War cruise of a Carrier Strike Force in the Mediterranean Sea. I recently discovered the missing last third of the daily account, which has an eerie similarity to the Daily Socotra that is frankly un-nerving. It is a world away, and yet strikingly similar, if my Building at Big Pink were suddenly painted flat gray, all the door sealed up, the roof constantly abuzz with the sound of jet engines, and the food prepared in the basement with no water for the showers and mail delivered every couple weeks. Well, you know what I mean. Anyway, I am laboriously scanning and reformatting the manuscript that was originally typed in WordPerfect software, saved on floppy discs, and manhandled around the county. I will not inflict the account of life at sea on you- the reason we were so manic ashore was that things were a bit stressful while the ship was operating. Here is a sample, from the days when we first entered (“In-chopped”) the MED to commence operations as Strike Force SIXTH Fleet:

14 NOV 1989:

The Bongo-bucks are on sale!

CAG Richardson walks into mission planning with a wad of crisp Franc notes in his hand. The Disbursing Officer is selling currency in the Wardroom. Having been all over the ship in the mid-afternoon trying to find the wardroom cashier to pay the mess bill ($151.36 for November, including the Mess Share) and cash a personal check to finance the port visit.

No dice; the Cashier was off somewhere and Disbursing was closed for a pre-port call audit. I enquired skeptically how this thing was supposed to work. You just walk in, write in the amount of money you want on a rubber check and they give you in exchange the equivalent amount of cash in the local coin of the realm?

What a concept! I grab my check-book, drop my TOP SECRET messages on the desk and race for the ladder-way. What a gas! They let you write bad checks for real money! I gamble on the fact that my convoluted financial arrangements back Stateside have occurred as they are supposed to, and that there is actually money in my account. I kite a check on the prospect of tomorrow’s Payday (hey, they aren’t walking this to the Bank tonight to deposit, after all!) for $296 worth of multi-colored drink tickets.

‘Bongo Bucks’ is what we call them: multi-colored drinking chits.

Exchange rate on the ship is F6.2 to the greenback. I buy F1860. I am flush with Bongos and my money problems have gone away. This should work out very nicely. Then back to the salt mines.

Chained back to the word processor, I embark on the eighteenth revision of contingency target #18. Then, miraculously the last keystroke is entered and the contingency strike plans- CONPLANS, we call them crisply- are done. The last four go into the Admiral after dinner. The weeks of work are finally finished. Thirty one plans complete, one has been cancelled and twenty or so have separate day/night options, all planned down to the smallest detail, all neatly done with each “i” dotted and every “t” crossed.

The plans go into the Admiral four at a time, they tear each to pieces in the briefing and scrawl corrections over what we thought was a perfect message. I retype the messages to correct the errors personally. I won’t- can’t- trust this to the guys since we have screwed them up before, and DCAG leans over my shoulder as we do them. He carefully monitors the process and when he is convinced that I have got the right version suitably corrected he goes off to his real job.

Then comes the tricky part. I am no techno-geek, but I have learned a few tricks to overcome our systems architecture problems. The process is a nightmare of shifting through two computers. The plans are resident on the hard drive of a computer that will only copy to hard density hard drive. That poses a security problem for later, but we have a program that will erase the drive to DoD standards when this is all done. The problem is that I then have a high-density floppy since that is the only thing the machine can produce.

The COMM center can only read low density, so I then take the HD floppy and upload it on a second Zenith 248 with dual ports and swap the file from high to low density without getting it on the hard drive. Then I reformat from Word Perfect 4.2 release to DOSTEXT that the COMM machines can read. DCAG is satisfied with the versions I have fixed at midnight; formatting takes until 0030L. I take the precious and awfully Tippy Top Secret paper copies and magnetic disk to FLAG COMM and that project is complete.

Now all that is left is the mountain of registered publications on my desk that have waited patiently over the last four weeks and the piles of Tippy Top Secret material that have been generated by the planning and review process. I have to track down the 34-odd binders, classified videotapes, signature receipt copies of TOP SECRET SPECAT (Special Category) messages. There is stuff misplaced in the mountain of crap, of course, which becomes apparent as I take a stab at an inventory.

A complete accounting will have to wait till the morrow when I can screen every binder and all the stacks of waste paper that must go into the shredder. You can’t tell the day from the night in Mission Planning, save that at night the sweating body count is lower. I putz around trying to get organized until 0200L. First brief the next day is at 0530L, so we can bang out max sorties before we get too close to the French coast to fly. I don’t yet trust the Briefers to get things right without my ominous visage in the background, and I am still experiencing some Situational Awareness problems with Stevie Ray and Sucker.

Yesterday they didn’t even bother to read the message board before the brief. It makes me crazy, and I assured them I would fire them in a heartbeat if that sort of casual attitude continued. If we rack up a flight violation before Toulon I’ll get crucified and it won’t matter that I have been beating my brains out for the last five weeks on something else.

I point out to the guys that the incident report from the inadvertent bombing of the cruiser Reeves (CG-34) by an F/A-18 Hornet off my old ship Midway (CV-41). The accident investigation naturally placed first blame on the Air Intelligence Officers for failing to brief them not to bomb U.S. units in company with the carrier. Or, words to that effect anyway.

It is a cold world when someone’s career is on the line. Pondering this and other landmines, I cram the last of the TOP SECRET charts into the vault and toddle off down the passageway forward toward my shared stateroom and dreamless darkland.

Airman Lynch, the kid whose head was crushed by the collapse of an armored hatch during the big General Quarters drill, was flown off yesterday morning to the Naval Hospital at Rota Spain.

He died as I slept.

(CV-59’s nickname “FID” is derived from the motto “First in Defense,” which pays tribute to our namesake, first Secretary of Defense James V. Forrestal. FID had her ups and downs, but she was a good feeder and always answered all bells).

Copyright 2016 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303