(Most of the 1980 USS Midway Intelligence team on the flight deck, in front of two F-4 Phantoms from VF-151 and VF-161).

Legendary Key West resident and Intelligence Officer CAPT Dave Carrington, USN-Ret passed this first note on the web more than a decade ago. It struck me, even at this distance. We ran the Arrias piece on “Words” this morning, which looked at meaning and consequences of language in definition and diction. The title says it all for this tale, and emphasizes the criticality of words and meaning. As a point of clarification, a NOREX was an important thing, a Nuclear Operational and Readiness Exercise. Failing one had real and immediate consequences. I need not tell you that the word today still has the power to send a thrill up the spine. Here Dave’s note from 2007, and then a memory of a significant moment on our own ship:

“A young ensign is working late at the Pentagon one evening. As he clocks out of his office at about 8 P.M. he sees the Admiral standing by the classified document shredder in the hallway, a piece of paper in his hand.

“Do you know how to work this thing?” the Admiral asks. “My secretary’s gone home and I don’t know how to run it.”

“Yes, sir,” says the young ensign, who turns on the machine, takes the paper from the Admiral, and feeds it in.

“Thanks,” says the Admiral, “I just need one copy…”

In our case it wasn’t an Ensign, but a motivated, hard-charging young ISSN onboard Midway (CV-41) in 1979. The Airwing Team, supporting CVIC Supervisor Vince “The Man” Fragomene, had just completed the detailed planning process for a graded NOREX, one of those dreaded events that combined every element of the scariest part of the carrier strike group’s ultimate mission.

Failure could result in decertification of the ship from the Single Integrated Operational Plan, the SIOP, and career ruin for all hands.

It was an immensely labor-intensive process, being at the dawn of the computer age. The nuclear authorization wafers had to be drawn from their two-man control safes, and compared with the incoming strategic message for instructions. Inspectors hovered, hoping to distract the team from their sensitive process and cause a mistake.

In mission planning you could smell sweat when the directed target was revealed, clock running on the exercise. The routes on the charts were mostly hand-drawn, precisely cut from the larger maps, annotated with threat information and range-rings for hostile missiles. Then it was taped into a delicate narrow folding package to fit in the knee-board planning box. The pilots would strap it to their legs to have a work-surface to use enroute the target, waiting to lower the Golden nuclear visor reserved for this most special of missions.

Plans for communications, fuel, target ingress and egress with threat data carefully annotated with data laboriously extracted from the dreaded IBM mainframe back in Search and Retrieval, that worked only on a schedule known to itself.

The effort involved every member of the team, Main Comm SAS authentication team, embarked Staff, S&R, aircrews, special ordnancemen and all the AI’s.

Once the target was received, the plan was devised: tight, executable, and in conformance with all standards of nuclear security. The package was ready to go to the Flag Spaces for evaluation, and there was no question that the CARGRU-5/CV-41/CVW-5 team were going to turn in another bravura BOHICA performance of effortless professionalism under stress.

CDR Fragomene shouted” “Somebody burn this package!” in preparation for the briefing to the examiners, and we breathed a sigh of relief as we slid the special security curtains back from around the planning tables, and dreamed about unbuttoning the top button of our khaki shirt collars and pulling our trouser legs out of our socks.

To this day I do not know why you are forced to look ridiculous at the moment you are at the closest to meeting your Maker.

Our dauntless Seaman bounded up to the occasion. He literally bounded, head down like a fullback over the knee-knocker that guarded Mission Planning in his haste to help the team.

We heard the shredder run about one nano-second after we realized that there may have been a slight miscommunication.

Copyright 2007 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com