“Life Is Too Unpredictable To Live By Schedules”

Many of you probably remember me talk'n about the CIWS Phalanx weapon system in some of my earlier stories! The CIWS, or Close In Weapon System is well known as the last ditch effort to smash into an incoming cruise missile and cause it to blow the hell up. To do this it uses a 20mm gatling gun which when loaded for wartime fires sub-caliber (saboted) tungsten projectiles made to rip a target to shreds. That's where the "R2D2 with a gatling gun for a hard on comes from!

CIWS was pretty much a maintenance intensive system. It had a lot of intricate movable parts. So there was a lot of tedious work involved to keep it up 100% of the time. You see each Division was broken up into Workcenters and CIWS had one for each mount fore and aft. We also had these things called PMS checks but it wasn't the kind that women have, although some people might have a different view on that. PMS in Navy terms stands for Planned Maintenance System checks. It was my job to list all the PMS checks for the quarter as well as the weekly boards. This PMS schedule was hand written on paper in pen back in those days. Now it's all done on computer, much easier on your carpal tunnel than it was back then! The schedule was signed and approved by the department head. Each work center had a laminated weekly schedule that showed each day and what checks to do. With over three hundred checks to do on a quarterly basis you can see how gaudamn monotonous this could get.

It was also my job to assign the maintenance to the guys in the Workcenters. I was responsible to make sure it got done and done right. Any division that didn't complete their maintenance by the end of the week got a real good ass chewing from the Chief. We also had spot checks done by every khaki under the sun. We had to show that we had the required tools, procedures were verified and performed correctly, and if for some reason we didn't do it exactly as prescribed on the card then our sorry asses would get hemmed up for 'gundecking!' That's another special word in the Navy lexicon that means signing off for maintenance that didn't actually get done.

Maintenance was easy to gundeck if spot checks weren't being done right. We probably had as many as four or five a week just for good measure. But it was up to me to make sure everything was laid out and done up right so when the spot check khaki came along to try to catch us gundecking we were in the right place at the right time doing what we were suppose to be doing. I can say I've always had a pretty damn good track record.

But sometimes shit just happens and you can't be everywhere all the time. I remember once when we did a gun tear down and one of my guys laid the gun barrels in salt water. Now keep in mind, in the kind of environment out at sea there are a myriad of components, electrical connectors, and gun parts that get corroded in that salt air. But when one of the guys lays the damn barrels in salt water for two or three days that shit will eat right through the bluing and pit the gaudamn things. This was when I learned from one of the fellas how bluing was discovered.

"Back in the days of the Civil War soldiers use to dip their rifle barrels in horseshit to keep them from rusting. After all the manure dried on the barrel it would turn blue, hence the name bluing!"

I don't know how much of the horse shit story is actually 'horse shit' but I still remember it to this day!

Then we had this Salt water Strainer System that was used to keep all the sea life out of the CIWS Heat Exchanger. But the damn thing would corrode all to hell and always leak like a sieve! The handles would freeze up so damn tight from the corrosion you'd have to put your whole damn body into it just to turn the gaudamn thing!

"I love it when I get my fingers into it!"

This was Sauce-man's common remark when turning one of those crusty old valve handles. He always had something smart ass to say that was usually sexual in nature. I guess that’s why we got along so damn well.

With all these problems CIWS had it was a wonder we ever got anything done right and on time! Things would happen at the most unpredictable times!

Just like the time we had a gun jam in the middle of a Drone shoot! We had fifteen minutes to get on deck and figure out what the hell happened. Apparently FC3 "Marcus" Cool tried to use cottar pins to hold down the firing sector back plate to the gun. Unfortunately it was supposed to be wire wrapped and the cottar pin just vibrated out upon firing! I don't know how we did it but we managed to get that damn gun up and running in record time!

How many of you fellas remember swapping cards between fore and aft CIWS at 0200 in the morning trying to isolate a fault that just didn't seem to make sense? I believe we ended up hijacking the whole weapons computer drawer out of one mount and hauling to the other in the cover of darkness just to figure out if the problem was in the cabinet! We were suppose to have our forward mount up as per the Battle Groups marching orders until we were scheduled to bring it down for maintenance. The Skipper at the time would've shit all over us if he found out what we were doing! He-he!!! Those were the days...

But with crazy shit like that happening, life was too unpredictable to be living by a schedule. Sometimes you just had to do what you had to do.