27 January 1990.

We were up at 0800 to arrive at the Elephant Cage- the circular AN/FLR-9 Wullenweber antenna array that helped track high value targets in the European Theater. The are nine of them scattered around the world, providing HF/DF direction-finding on high-value targets to the Fleet Ocean Surveillance Information Facility (FOSIF Rota). We are there and inside the array at 0900.

Burning the candle at both ends while ashore is a challenge to good order and discipline, but iron professionalism drives us on. The only thing that saves the day is the blessed wonderful free flowing steaming hot shower. We take a base cab to the FOSIF and the watch is ready for us. A large screen display over the watch floor says:

“WELCOME Vic Socotra:
WARRIOR
AUTHOR
SYCOPHANT”

Around the wall one of those moving displays is flashing: “BIG GUYS UPDATE: WELCOME VIC, LUTT-MAN AND THE CTF-60 SPECIAL STUDIES GROUP.” It is great to see the vast amount of taxpayer dollars spent on the technical miracle of Rota put to good use.

We give the brief on how we are going to defeat the Soviet Navy in the MED, and it appears well received. Then informative meetings till the afternoon. The FOSIF bodies are clearly eager to go about their weekends, so we go to Exchange and change clothes and go out to the Playa de la Luz to have a beer and a sandwich and watch the angry grey ocean pounding the seawall. It is a grey day as grim as steel. The wind cuts hard through our thin jackets.

We elect to take a quick nap before John H picks us up. First we stop at the FOSIF to use the phone to call home, everything else is too hard, and this very nearly is too as they claim my credit card number is no good.

Lutt-man can’t get through at all and Josh gets bummed and doesn’t even try. It is a good call but now I just want to go home.

A beer and a snack at the John’s casa serves to change the somewhat pensive mood, then off to a fine dinner at the Bar Jamon in Puerto. Natalie wears leather pants and looks great. We bar hop later and get back to the BOQ at a reasonable hour (Puerto is still raging). Showtime for the flight is 0630 and we do not want to screw this one up.

28 January.

It is still way too early but the shower is great; there are boundless torrents of hot water. We get down to the terminal and are briefly disconcerted by the troop who isn’t sure he can get us on the airplane. We make it, though, and after breakfast John returns our TS brief material from its vault at the FOSIF to return to the ship.

Against all odds, this flight is a miracle. It takes only seventy-seven minutes, door to door, versus the twelve-hour marathon it took to get here. We are in a Navy mini-van, listening to the Doors on the cassette player by 1015 and on the ship before 1100.

Lutt-man takes his Lladro china to his room (boy do I hate that stuff!). I advise him he should have bargained for pre-broken ones and saved himself a lot of money. I swing by CAG Admin to see if there is any mail.

Then to Mission Planning, where I see the Captain’s departing port brief, chat with the Deputy and hear about the big anti-nuclear demonstration scheduled by local activists for later in the day. Then the planners start showing up for the briefs to be given to the SHAPE guys and we work straight through lunch.

The 1MC crackles to life and I hear that the brows have been secured. I assume this means something is going on down on the pier and I race up to the flight deck to check it out. I look out at the slate grey skies and I start to walk out but not so fast.

There has been an episode of rock throwing at the fantail and MAA’s are getting everyone off the weather decks and out of sight. I’d hate to miss a good demonstration, so I take a chance and head up to the Flag Bridge. There is no one around except for a Master Chief and he doesn’t throw me out so I have a grand view of about 160 people shouting and waving fists and supporting five or six large banners. Six or seven Spanish National Police confront them from behind the thin rope barrier. The crowd seems much bigger than it is because there are literally a couple thousand people down on the pier out for their Sunday stroll and a look at the American warship.

Things get interesting after about ten minutes when a knot of the protestors break down the rope and begin to march behind one of the banners toward the after-brow. The cops rush to stop them and then more people surge across the line and then fists fly and truncheons begin to flail and there is a pretty good brawl going on. First chairs and then stanchions and stones are hurled and the innocent people are fleeing and banners are being ripped down.

After a few protestors are clubbed down they run away but reform and the stuff is really flying and they are advancing and the cops are going at the ring-leaders and I have a ringside seat for it. Maybe the high point came when a red-headed girl who had led the initial advance tried to punch out one of the cops and was clubbed down as were the two men who came to her assistance.The girl was dragged by her red hair to a police car.

Very colorful.

Someone set fire to a bundle of cardboard hat boxes (the ship must have sold about a zillion FID ball-caps to the crowd) and I watched the media types hunker down behind the little bonfire to try to shoot the image of the Carrier silhouetted by the flames.

A kid picked up one of the banners- I think it was one that
mentioned Panama (the Spanish had such a wonderful human rights track record in Latin America)- and threw it on the little fire. With the exception of a couple more rocks and cops chasing isolated rascals that was it. It was the first riot I had seen since about 1970.

Interesting. Then the Sunday promenade resumed and the strollers
and the Moms and kids were back as though nothing had happened.

Once the cops arrived in force there doesn’t appear to be much chance of further action so its back to work for a few hours.

My glands are still charged, though. I like this place. Liberty expires at midnight; DCAG has offered the use of his car if any of the staff wants to go to dinner. Doc Flynn has to make a phone call home and a small group of hardy souls determine to have a last dinner and a glass of vino tinto ashore. I make a concerted effort to clean up the madness that is my room and slip into jeans and a sport jacket. We rendezvous in Admin after a slight delay caused by two SPECAT messages only I can pick up from MAIN COMM.

Then we are off the ship and into the darkness.

Which is filled by thousands of Spanish citizens, apparently attracted by the excitement and publicity of the afternoon. They are a friendly crowd but it is so vast that it is scary. We can’t get the cars out without inching through the close packed mass of humanity. What could be so interesting about a simple 1000-foot long aircraft carrier?

The traffic jam takes an hour to negotiate. Dinner fades into a series of wonderful tapas (shrimp, olives, calamari, fried potatoes and garlic mayonnaise) and icy cold Aguilla cervesa. Doc misses most of it in a near successful attempt to contact the United States. After three hours and three thousand pesetas he finally gets through…..to her answering machine.

We call it quits at 2230 so we can make curfew and arrive back at the boat an hour before liberty secures to find that Scooter and the Command Master Chief have succeeded in getting the Super Bowl on Ship’s TV. The perfect end to the perfect day, which culminates in the Niners beating the Broncos 55-10.

Tomorrow we sortie from Valencia at 0800.

29 January.

Into one of the Monday-est of Mondays. I get up with Chop about 0630 and see CAG at Breakfast. He is less than sanguine about the day because with our customary elan we will be launching our first event into the Valencia Traffic Control Area, only ten miles away from the Palma TCA with only a narrow corridor where we can avoid the dreaded Flight Violations.

It is a gross morning. No one remembers how to talk with one another; conflicting agendas collide in mysterious tasking beyond mortal ken; airplanes are broken and sorties missed through malevolent intervention; we fail to find an export submarine of interest; my plan to relieve my watch-standers in SUPPLOT has been confounded by devious bureaucrats; a high level delegation of NATO functionaries requires tender care and feeding; the French send a Super Etendarde which flies by the ship without being intercepted and escorted. It is a thoroughly tiresome and disagreeable day.

On the positive side, I am pleased to discover I have not lost a single TOP SECRET message; my inventory is complete and returned to the Staff for their turnover. I suppose even a Monday under the Valencia Terminal Control Area (TCA) has got its positive side.

(The biggest battle-cruise in the world: the Soviet Kirov (CG-099)).

Tomorrow we run three separate exercises against three separate navies, we fly against the westward transiting Soviet Kirov Task Force and the SHAPE representatives must be briefed at 0900, the same time the French delegation arrives. DCAG has to cancel a morning flight in order to accommodate the schedule change and he is racing with the rest of the deployment to make his 1000th trap before his flying days are over. This will be his last tour in the cockpit, and he wants to make the list of immortals before he turns into a desk jockey. I have to find his log-book so I track his progress.

It could be fun. You never can tell.

30 January 1990.

I managed to hit the rack last night by 0300. Up this morning in time for the 0800 brief; then preparation for the Distinguished Visitors from the Supreme Headquarters- Allied Forces Europe (SHAPE). Had the space waxed and polished and it looked pretty good. Naturally, there were about fifty things going on at the same time and I am dragging already.

This could be a good day because I expect the Admiral will be in a good mood. He got the message that he received his second star. He is now a Rear Admiral Upper Half and entitled to two stars.

We are operating east of Palma Mallorca, generally a couple hundred miles south of Marseilles. The skies are clear; or appear to be so on the electronic window. There is a Royal Navy Task Group, the French Battle group built around the Carrier Foch and a group of Italians. We are playing games with all of them, and none of it is connected. So we are to run three different strikes and each has different specifications and pre-exercise messages.

The Soviet Dreadnought Kirov is transiting westerly just to the south of us and we have to lay on a TARPS mission to document her again. Of particular interest is the TASS news report that she has suffered a steam casualty and is being recalled to the
Northern Fleet. It reminded me of the old joke about how you could tell a Soviet Northern Fleet Sailor: “because they glow in the dark!”

We see ’em come and we see ’em go.

The three Attack Squadron CO’s Rocco (VA-176), Shaky Jake (VA-37) and Bobo (VA-105) briefed strikes and anti-air warfare plans to the DV’s and it seemed to go well. Except for Shaky, who is a general embarrassment, lurching in dense Navy slang through his plan and patronizing the Danish Major General. We get them out of the space with seconds to go before the second event brief. Of some considerable interest is the fact that the prospective skipper of the FID is in the party and he wastes no time in telling CDR K, the Carrier Intelligence Center Supervisor (CVIC) that he isn’t sure why that blue paint can is over in the corner and why doesn’t he write AirLant a message and tell them that they should upgrade the Strike Planning Space during the next SRA period?

If FID’s current skipper, CAPT Thomassy, knew I am fairly confident he would have a nice chat with the good PCO. I wind up doing some of the tasking which flies over at CAG, and then answer a screwed up Program Change message from JCS. I am running on empty by that time.

After lunch I am convinced my sleep quota is used up and I exercise the option to stand the General Quarters drill horizontal in my rack. Refreshed, I manage to get through the rest of the flight schedule and the three or four crash messages I have to draft responses as well. It is only a six-event day, which would normally mean an early end to the cacophony. It is not to be.

We manage to flail around with some of the day’s loose ends, like why the Italians didn’t want Sweetpea to fly the Sardinia Low Level until about 2200 and I really hoped the day was pretty much over when DCAG rolled in and began planning the next joint war-at-sea strike for tomorrow morning at 0800 sharp which we hadn’t quite got to yet.

No sense rushing into these things, so we did that for a while and finally had the operators out of the space by midnight. I don’t have to get up until 0530, but I imagine that means I should leave, too.

I got back to the compartment to discover that the engineers were just starting to have fun. The boat was shuddering and quivering in a manner that suggested we were on a high speed run. I dialed up the Ship’s Inertial Navigation Channel (SINS) channel on the TV and saw that we were inching slowly up through 28KTS, headed for 30, and that accounted for all the commotion. I switched back to a movie and chewed on some wardroom popcorn when the shuddering got worse.

I decided the FID wasn’t going to sink without a lot more of the same and turned out the lights. I discovered to my interest that what the rascals down below had done was back the ship down from 30KTS to full astern and then driven the ship backwards at 15KTS for 15 minutes. Wild stuff. You can never tell what sort of madness those Engineers will get up to. Like securing the flush water to our head to do preventative maintenance. Little jokers.

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