Well, the usual happened. I got distracted this morning for a variety of perfectly god reasons, and plowing through the Great Events of the Day: What is happening to Hillary, who is going to be left standing after the Nevada and South Carolina primaries, why it is that NSA can’t seem to crack into an iPhone 5C after all those billions of dollars…

You know, the usual. But it is going to be in the 60s for temperatures today, and I think it is high time for a jaunt down to the farm and do some country things.

In the meantime, the old manuscript still is tugging at me. It is a technical challenge, but sort of fun to play with between paper, scanner and ancient incompatible formats. I was considering the fact that life at sea is kind of boring. I mean, there are adrenaline rushes and stark boredom and sleepless days and all that- but in a way they are all the same.

I inflicted the Israel port visit on you to show how manic we get when ashore, freed from the steel box, and considered doing just the port visits. But then you might get the wrong idea- that these things are sort of like an extended Carnival Cruise, which they are emphatically not. But the bulk of the time isn’t as interesting as careening around France or Italy or Spain or Egypt.

But I may compile those anyway. It was, in many respect, one of the experiences of a lifetime in times that were every bit as strange as they are right now.

Here is what it was like on the day we pulled into Toulon, France:

15 NOV, 1989:

France tonight.

Two hours of sleep and the alarm goes off on the ledge next to the rack. Twenty minutes to brief. No time to shower; I splash water on my face and scrape the razor over the stubble of my beard. My eyes are puffy and I look like hell. I drink world-famous CVIC coffee and my biorhythms get the kick in the ass they need. The fatigue doesn’t go away, naturally, but the concentrated caffeine puts the manic light back in my eyes.

Only three events before we pull in; low levels and bombing at Sardinia on the second and third launches. The brief goes fairly well, although I still don’t sense a feeling of urgency in the presentation. We are two hundred miles away from Algerian FOXBAT aircraft and there are real Russians driving around to the South.

The Soviets prove to be the first crisis of the day. Seems there was an ELINT hit on an emitter that could have been a Soviet Frigate about dusk the night before. Could one of our A-6 Intruders have seen it and failed to report? We research the issue and brief CAG before the morning meeting. The answer is a definite maybe. I wait for the shit-storm to happen but amazingly, the meeting comes and goes and no one puts us on report. The issue is tabled and the recriminations don’t start.

By 1030, we are well into several other serious helmet fires and other deficiencies in the operation. I still have to go back and complete the TS inventory. This refers to my in-basket management theory. In the Pentagon, the Senior Officers always have a dead space in the middle of the day: all the action items they have farmed out in the morning will return just about coincident with the conclusion of the Action Officer’s day, which is what drives the famous long Washington hours.

Our Crisis Management system works in a similar but inverted way. When an exercise or Helmet Conflagration begins, the decision makers task someone to conduct the investigation or write the report. While the action officers are completing the action, the Decision Maker has moved on to some other issue and is tasking it even before the previous action has 
been completed.

The new, emerging Crisis normally arrives with no more than three quarters of the work done on the last one. It makes it near impossible to keep your head above water; you are constantly in a daze. How many balls can you keep juggling at one time? You don’t know until they start dropping on the deck. The coffee stops working about 1100L. I drag on through the last brief and a Staff Meeting is called.

I am filled with trepidation; things aren’t going well. The Morning Meeting has become RADM “Sweetpea” Allen’s arena for ritual bloodletting. CAG has been verbally beaten up and surprised on several issues by the all seeing eyes and ears of the Admiral. We are confronting two radically different management styles, and it appears that the Admiral’s is going to drive us all nuts.

Our Staff meeting is held in CAG’s House, a relatively nice Senior Officer Stateroom on the 01 level, just below the Flight Deck. We are all seated around the new, smaller conference table that actually fits in the room.

We get a long discourse on Staff communications from the Deputy, which concludes with the admonition that we have got to do better. Everyone breathes a little easier when we discover the real thrust of the meeting. The CNO has mandated an unprecedented
48hr Safety Stand-down for the entire Navy: every unit, every ship, every squadron.The rash of mistakes and errors have continued throughout the Fleet. Aircraft are falling out of the sky because of a series of dumb-shit mistakes.

Navigators were shot on the bridge of Amphibious ships; there was the horrific turret explosion on the USS Iowa (BB-61) that killed 47 sailors and had an unpleasant motive; bombing our own cruiser in the Indian Ocean; even our own Airman Lynch’s tragic and grim death made the CNO’s message. Everyone is to stop doing whatever it is that they are doing for two days and talk about things. Try to reinforce the idea that doing it safely is what must be done.

When my turn comes in the around-the-table portion of he meeting, I get to spin out my piece of information on the Lockerbie Pan Am 103 bombing that ties things rather neatly to the PLFP/Syria/Iran connection.

President Bush had announced that when the smoking gun was found, he would take decisive action; well, I reasoned aloud, here is the weapon and here is the smoke. As the forward carrier, every piece of news seems to have a potential personal consequence. One thing is sure. We are not going to do anything until after the Summit between President Reagan and Mikael Gorbechev off Malta, so for the moment the matter is all academic. We will do nothing for now.

The Staff troops down en masse to chow in Wardroom One after the meeting, which goes 55 minutes almost to the second. I eat a slider and some fries and make plans to escape to my rack for a nap immediately after. When the group heads on back aft to work I dawdle.

I catch Scooter’s eye and he clearly has similar plans.

We break in different directions toward separate ladders and make good our escape. We pass in the passageway as we arrive at our Staterooms. I strip off my wash-khaki uniform and climb, socks still on, under the afghan. Blessed unconsciousness.

The residual caffeine coursing still through my veins does not permit more than two or so hours of dozing. That, and the prospect of being in La Belle France for dinner. I get up, still puffy and suffering acute spatial dislocation. I feel generally like hell warmed over, and more specifically like shit. I pull my uniform back on and locate my ball cap, which we will have to wear once the hook drops and we shift colors.

Time to Go Outside and check things out. I walk up the ladder to the 03-level and emerge into the light. What waits is a spectacular view of jagged white peaks and quaint villas strewn along a rocky coast. The boat is anchored; and colors have been shifted to “in port’ mode. Joggers are out in force. I see Scooter puffing around the circuit. I’m too wiped out to do anything constructive. I duck back down below and get my camera to record more images of distant real estate.

France looks not at all as I had expected. It is gorgeous. It is rocky and it looks like
Arizona crammed up against Southern California. The sun gleams on the mountains. Liberty fever begins to pump in my debilitated brain but is almost- but not completely- counterbalanced by the desire to go back to bed.

Where is the old Liberty Hound, the scourge of Asia? Maybe a shower and civilian clothes will fix the bill. I descend once more into the grey steel cubicles and begin to get ready for France.

“Lafayette, we are here.”

The TRANSLANT is over. The deployment begins.

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