There is a little wiggle room this morning in the Commonwealth of Virginia. Not that we are wiggling that dramatically. The Patio Space- once known as “The Lanai,” is not quite ready for that yet this morning, and the excesses of some in the evening hours last night is still playing out on the margins of grunted “Good Morning’s.”

Yesterday, we ran a picture of some old Service Buddies taken on one of the big catamarans parked for the tourists down on the Waikiki Beach. For those who were there, or those who knew some of those standing in the long line of seemingly happy folks, some memories came flooding back.

There was a discussion of the structure of how we all lived. One of the issues was what we called the Watch Bill. That is an Old Salt thing about how working hours were set to maximize utility of the Sailors and Zeros who appeared every eight or nine hours to continuously man the consoles of the crude computers linked together in a global network intended to track the ballistic missile submarines produced in significant numbers by the superpower known as the Soviet Union.

There was some discussion yesterday in the various strings about the transition from the four-section watch to the more relaxed five-section watch bill that stretched out effort based on the division of labor into five units. Those “Sections” stood the watch divided in Days, Eves and Mids across the 365 24-hour days contained in a year. Or a Leap Year, since those have to be accommodated, too.

There were large pale charts on the walls of the center of operations on the top floor of the Fleet Intelligence Center- Pacific (FICPAC). That was a special place kept separate from the daily business of the FIC. All sorts of activity was contained there, some of which we are still supposed not to disclose.

Those include Beach studies, to enable Amphibious Forces to drive mechanized vehicles ashore as the generations before had done in the big war in the Pacific. Studies of what the Russians- the Soviets, back then- were constructing in shipyards in the Eurasian far north and which would deploy east across the Arctic Sea to join us in the Pacific. That included a fleet of surface combatants intended to rival that of America.

And those pesky subs that came in a variety of shapes and sizes. The letters before their class-names signified their missions. For example, a “Yankee-Class” submarine was known by what it could do. They were “SSBNs,” which includes the ‘SS’ signifying ‘Submarine, followed by the ‘B’ meaning a sub that carried a war-load of atomic-armed Ballistic Missiles aimed at America. The “N” that represented “Nuclear-powered.”

One the Watch, we followed a “normal” array of activity across the middle and eastern regions of the Pacific Ocean. Coming in on a Mid-Shift, late afternoon in Oahu’s delightful clime, we might have taken the kids swimming before sitting at one of the Watch Positions and looking at the ladder of activity posted on the maps. There might be three YANKEES on patrol in EASTPAC, the senior one rising to the northern tip of the pile before preparing to return to home port on the Kamchatka Peninsula. The one in the middle would cruise north to replace it, while others would deploy to slide into the southern position to begin the patrol rotation.

Sometimes other classes of SSBNs would join in the rotation- “DELTAs” were newer and considered a higher threat platform. Identifying their class and operating characteristics was a challenge to pass along to units of our Pacific Fleet, the hunter-killer ones known as SSNs, or “Fast Attack Nuclear Subs.” The two Fleets played their own games out there below the blue waters, mostly unknown to us, since the details would only be reported upon return to port over at The Sub Base.

It is funny how the duty assignments get jumbled up by the other side of family life. Getting to Hawaii involved a couple years on an Aircraft Carrier supporting the roar of a squadron of F-4 Phantom jets and their bold aircrew deployed in those times to Japan, the Philippines, Australia, Kenya and to within visual distance of Iran in 1979. We hitched a ride on one of the flight events out there one time just to see it in person. “The Strait of Hormuz” is a remarkable thing, pale blue water and brilliant sand reflecting the desert rays of the sun.

Our system decreed two years was as much of that sort of fun as was necessary. In order to match up with a three-year rotation of duty assignments, some of us were ordered north from Japan to Korea, and a year in Korea to demonstrate resolve against the periodic violence of those who lived north of the De-Militarized Zone. On that assignment, we looked at giant maps protected by clear plexiglass on which we marked events with grease pencils. Inadvertent mine detonations, occasional unprovoked shootings and attempted infiltrations were the usual items on the menu for a shift on Watch in Seoul, Republic of Korea, and that has been going on for over sixty years.

With the time complete in the RoK, the Personnel System in Washington issued orders to proceed to the Naval Base at Pearl Harbor. There were two sequential assignments there that totalled five years in duration. It accommodated a marriage and the arrival of children, as demonstrated in the image of a watch-stander in a lovely place.

The strings about those times enlivened the traffic yesterday with old stories. Some of them are still painful. Others represented transfers to other key elements of the National Security System. Those included eight years in various cubby-holes in the vast Pentagon, or Bureaus in the old formal buildings on the bluff above it. San Diego, America’s nicest little city, or Jacksonville, a nice place to park an aircraft carrier to prepare for periodic deployment to the Atlantic, Caribbean or Mediterranean Seas.

It is evocative to look back to those times and some of the things we are still not supposed to discuss. There was another conflict that nestled up to the Cold War. It was known as “The Global War on Terror,” which began without prelude in 2001. Apparently the authorization to conduct it is still in effect, and there is some discussion in the Congress about ending it this week. We only served a couple years in that one before filling out our retirement papers. There seems to be another one in progress in Ukraine at the moment. It doesn’t have a name that personalizes it for those who are serving now, but we commend them for being in the long line of Americans who have served even if they only looked at the charts on the bulkheads.

We are hoping this one does not evolve in scope and horror to earn its own name. We wonder if our grandchildren will learn to call it something different with the rise of Chinese activity off Taiwan (a perfectly nice place to visit) or the militarized South China Sea. The vistas there are lovely, or least they are when there is no shooting going on. That would be a matter on which to talk to those standing watch. They would know all about artificial dashed-line markings on charts, and moving ships and submarines.

We will see how this one goes in these times. We are hoping Peace breaks out. As a general matter, that is much easier to handle than the alternative.

Copyright 2023 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com