Anatomy of a Crisis

IN THE GULF OF OMAN

“USS Midway CV-41 relieved USS Constellation, CV-64 as the Indian Ocean contingency carrier on April 16, 1979. Midway and her escort ships continued a significant American naval presence in the oil-producing region of the Arabian Sea and Persian Gulf. She conducted naval exercises with the RAN off Perth, and made a port visit there and later in Mombasa, Kenya. On November 18, she arrived in the northern part of the Arabian Sea in connection with the continuing hostage crisis in Iran. Militant followers of the Ayatollah Khomeini, who had come to power following the overthrow of the Shah, seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran on November 4 and held 63 U.S. citizens hostage.”

These words are from a manuscript discovered in the Socotra archives and are as they were written in 1979. Some notions and terms reflect the insensitivity of the times. They are regretted but included in the interest of historical accuracy.

NOV 79- FEB 80

04 November 1979

I was going to chow an eon ago. It was another of the series of grey identical days that make up any deployment, but particularly any Indian Ocean Deployment. We were still sorting out the legacy of the visit to Perth; who did what to whom, why they did it, and how we would throw It All In for a good piece of land and a good piece of Australian Ass.

It was a monumental port visit. Never seen anything like that in my life. Some hangovers were lingering, and this was after the transit over to Diego Garcia.

We had been paying the night-time dues to the God of Night Landings. That Diety had been good, though, providing the Airwing with a fat Commander’s Moon and a decent horizon by which to judge the stately waving of Ma Midway’s stern. The addition of the big angle to CV-41’s original straight deck had produced a unique circular waddle in the motion of the stern, which I understood was disconcerting at first but something the pilots got used to and did not think about after a while.

We were starting to get everyone night qualified again, and Africa was looming up on the schedule less than a week away. So we were in that schedule interstice between beaches, heading for the warm beaches of Mombasa as the brilliant Australian sun faded into legend in the wake behind us.

I don’t remember what chow was that night. It would have been one of the ten standard menus: some sort of meat and over-cooked vegetables, relieved only by the prospect of lettuce barely wilted. “Grits” Wheatley came up behind me as I was descending the

Officer’s Ladder back by the E-2 Hawkeye AEW turboprop that was going into corrosion control work way back aft in the Hangar Bay. He said:

“Have you heard, Vic? They took the U.S. Embassy in Tehran.”

“Who did? Where did you hear that?”

“Some bunch of Ragheads. They took hostages, I guess. I heard it from Jim back in MSI.”

“Wonder if we are going to do something?”

“Dunno.” An aircraft snagged an OK-2 wire on the flight deck above our heads and the hangar bay echoed with the crash of the arresting grew rolling out and about fifty thousand pounds of jet tugging on it. I walked down the ladder, careful not to touch my wash-khaki-clad knees to the assimilated grime on the treads. You gotta make these uniforms last more than a couple days, you know?

Chow was the usual. Some kind of meat, some kind of semi-cooked potatoes, and the lettuce wasn’t too gamey yet. Which is to say that you could avoid the black spots without making a public spectacle of yourself. The aft wardroom was full of the familiar crowd of dirty-shirts in flight suits and engineering coveralls, and a few khaki-clad fugitives from the Big People’s Mess up forward where you have to be attired in the full uniform of the day. I like eating with my Airwing buddies, particularly when there is good gossip to pass out.

Midway’s Dirty Shirt has two long dining tables that are ideal for shouting and carrying on. The topic of this one was not hard to discern. Mostly it dealt with the possibility of getting Silver Stars, which are awarded to aviation types for flaming a MiG. Or, in this case, maybe the pride of the Grumman Irons Works, the F-14 Tomcat.

I had the feeling that things were going to go to high PRF for the evening, so I took my time over dinner, luxuriating in being the official Air Wing Gossip. I grabbed a cup of coffee and fed a couple quarters into the Space Invaders machine in the Officer’s lounge. The damned machines are amazing. They are arcade games that have made the S-5 Division (Wardroom Supply) over $20,000 bucks since they were installed back in Yokosuka.

Not much else to do out on the Bounding Main. Soon enough I had wasted all my quarters, and there was no hope for it but to go back to work.

I wandered back up the hangar bay and climbed the ladder to the 02 level where most of my two years on the grey lady have been spent. I cruised in through the camouflage painted door and saw Bedlam. The ship had received a call from 7th Fleet, Flag Privacy Channel, and about two minutes after we recovered the last airplane on the launch cycle we were northbound for the Persian Gulf.

As a direct reaction to that move there were more Commanders standing around than you could normally beat out of their racks with a stick. Apprehensive looking J.O.s were hanging around asking questions. The foremost dealt with the words “AAA” and “SAM.” I didn’t have any more than the superficial answers and felt inadequate, since I have learned my job well. Unfortunately, my job has been all peacetime exercises and flight ops, none of which have much application to blowing the shit out of somebody else’s homes, ships and, airplanes.

It got so bad that they had to block off the front half of the room so the Marine enlisted kids and Frank Oxsen could work on plotting the Order of Battle for Iran. I soaked up what I could and got the Word back to Skipper Hughes. Never hurts to keep the Old Man informed. I grabbed Mr. Sluggo, the XO for this Indian Ocean deployment. He was normally the Maintenance Officer, but we were not supposed to be here and the pipeline for the real XO was such that he would not arrive for a couple months.

I like Mr. Sluggo a lot, and tried to keep him as far ahead of the situation as is possible from my humble position.

It also makes me feel important to grab the Heavies and drag them over to the corner and whisper the few facts to which I can get access, so shoot me. Unfortunately, the movie started and I watched a reel or two of Pretty Baby to see Brook Shield’s pre-pubescent tits before I went back to Mission Planning to see what had come in over the Foreign Broadcast Information Service. I was trying to get Main Comm to pipe us All-India Radio as an alternative to AFRTS, but not making much progress. People thought the Indian media was kind of strange, like the News from Mars.

Reports were starting to filter in, and the situation looked grim. The Embassy had definitely fallen, the staff there was definitely being held hostage, and the Planning Spaces were definitely deserted, because we got another phone call that declared in no uncertain terms that we were going to go on to Africa as planned and the folks back in Washington would work on the problem and get back to us, thank you very much.

I was somewhat crestfallen that all the excitement was over, and that the great United States was going to pussy out again, like with the Pueblo and the EC-121 and the tree-chopping incident all the other ones. I so reported to the heavyweights and the situation went back to normal. We returned to a westerly heading for Mombasa, I watched the end of the movie, and eventually everyone went to their racks.

Africa was exactly five days away. It was very nice to have a schedule. We had not had one since the crisis began in Iran much earlier that year. Between the emergency Yemen deployment last Spring after the Ayatollah returned to Iran and the goddam Boat People, we never really knew where, when, or how long we were going anywhere, I had the sneaking suspicion that this wasn’t going to be any different, and without a quick fix, this thing was going to fuck up my chances for going to Singapore. But on the other hand, I might get to be at a point where the Balloon Went Up.

Never can underestimate the power that shit has. So we went through the motions of our exercises for the next couple of days as we moved west across the southern Indian Ocean.

We had a Passing Exercise (PASSEX) with the Kenyans before we pulled in. That is one of the tools we use to cement solid relations with our international associates throughout the military; give the developing powers a chance to perform against the Air Power of a Carrier. This one was almost done in our sleep. They sortied a couple patrol boats (the only ones they had in an Up status that week) and we sorta worked looking for them into the air plan. No big deal; we have to do that stuff anyway. At length, by the morning of the 8th of November found us ready to drop the hook outside the Mombasa Reef.

They set the special sea and anchor detail and after a while the pins got knocked out of the links and the giant chain snaked and crashed across the foc’sle and I woke up. We were in Africa again (yawn) and I made preparations to go ashore. I packed a suit, as I had received an invitation to the Marine Ball that evening to commemorate the 204th Birthday of the Corps.

Actually, all I wanted to do was get smashed. I don’t believe in premonitions, but all the same there was a definite dreamlike quality to this port visit. I am not sure why. Maybe Africa just affects me that way. The stark poverty and the eyes that look at you, Still, it is a very beautiful place, and although expensive, can provide a few good times for the discerning traveler,

Boating was not bad, for a change. They called the boats away as they were ready, and for once I wasn’t in a Liberty line for eight hours. Officers and Chiefs went first, of course, and we were in the motor whaleboat in twenty minutes. It was thoroughly uneventful. The sun was blazing and we pulled up at the Kenyan Navy Base after about forty minutes.

It was spooky. The base looked like it had been a typically squared-away Brit Colonial place about fifteen years before. Now, it looked overgrown and seedy. We were searched at the gate by some unsmiling and very large African police in uniform shirts and shorts. This was a first in all my travels since arriving in Asia. The only other place in the world anyone had ever looked into my baggage was in the United States, Which has done it every time.

We then commandeered the CAG’s car, on the assumption that he wasn’t going to be off the ship until the afternoon and wouldn’t miss it.  I was ensconced at the poolside bar of the Mombasa Beach Hotel by noon. Very tasteful. I was drunk by two-thirty, and remained that way until the morning before the day we pulled out. It seemed like the only sensible thing to do.

I have never been accused of not having my heart in liberty, but I was just going through the motions. I shopped with the Kenyan shillings I won at the Casino, bought some bullshit brass objects that had curiosity value- an old tribal bracelet and a little case they told me the locals used to sling on a lanyard around their necks to carry their papers back in the colonial times. A sort of metal wallet for the Masai, I guess.

I was back in my rack on the ship eighteen hours before liberty expired.

Another first, but I sort of felt I needed to be ready. For what I was not completely sure. The scuttlebutt said we were finally going to head north, and take a position where we could do something to the Iranians.

Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com