In an
earlier romp through my Crackerjack memories I’d fiddled a yarn about being a
twidget and working in the MK68 Director on the ol’ Baglady FF 1069! Boy
those were some memories!! Looking back there are a number of skills we’ve lost
out on over the years with computer aids and the streamlining of training and
such!! Message Traffic Hieroglyphics has become obsolete, no more Skivvy
Waivers, and what about gundecking?!?
Now as a Fire
Controlman, I’d seen weapons go through a variety of phases from the ol’ salty
mechanical whizbangs to the analog synchro & servo umpty squats to the
digital binary two step! And on the Baglady, we were well equipped with the
finest technology the 1950s had to offer!! But as a good ol’ boy Crackerjack
Sailor, our job was to show off what this crumbling rust bucket could do!!!
The Baglady
weren’t no spring chicken, no Sir! That ol’ girl had saggy tits held up by
loose burlap potato sacks and granny panties high enough to hide her girdle if
you know what I mean!! She’d had plastic surgery conversion so many times in
her old age she was akin to Joan Rivers!!!
To make
matters worse, this newly drafted rookie had to be one of the dumbest Fire
Controlmen ever to gradiate the hallowed halls of Great Mistakes FC ‘A’ School!
I bet I still hold the Guinness Book of World Records for the most modules
failed in a full year of training!! Not sure how I got through or what they saw
in me… I guess they found out my parents weren’t related and I could count all
my fingers and toes!!!
They tried
to get me to wear my thinking cap down in Gunplot learning the 53F Radar
Console! I’d get lost right after the ‘Enter the diathermic frapazoid ... press
the dingus key ... push the middle button down and the antenna thingy that
radiates goes round and round!!’ I was a hands on kind of guy and much
more interested in soaking up the rays in Sunny Southern California!!!
That must’ve
been why they kept me tethered to the Director & Barbette with about fifty
feet of anchor chain! I fed off of live seagulls & flying fish and was
thrown a banana every so often!! So it was T-shirts topside doing the deck grey
shuffle and earning my world class suntan!! More times than not it was like
epic epidermal incineration looking like a boiled lobster at sunbreak!!!
The place
was my very own built in armored treehouse! It was like poking your head out of
a tank turret looking out the bubble end!! We were told the radiation from the
radar side lobes could shrink your gonads and change the pitch of your
voice!! And sitting in the silly contraption you could manipulate
yourself to the point that five minutes in any one position could cut-off the
arterial circulation of your upper torso from communicating with any part of
the lower half of your body!!!
Manned
directors like this were out of date, even back in those days! Modern directors
are just radar antennas!! But the MK68 was nice because it stabilized for
rolls!! It was the only place on the ship you could get away from constant
rocking if you felt seasick… but you had to Crisco your ass to move around in
the damn thing!!!
Now most of
my shipmates were raised by wolves at best! Their comedic sadism became evident
on a regular basis and being the new dumb guy I caught the bitter end of many
attempted fool’s errands!! That just came with the territory of being on the
lower end of the bottom-feeding enlisted community!!!
On one
particular sunny day, Randy Hansen and one of the other senior techies made
their way up to the nose bleed section of the ship for some magnetron tuning
fun! Now the magnetron was a high powered vacuum tube used to make radio waves
to transmit out the radar antenna, and it sat on the back bulkhead of the
director!! It was then they tried to convince me the magnetron was a flux
capacitor and wanted me to head down to Gunplot for the triceps tuning wand!!
Okay, I’d seen ‘Back to The Future’ enough times to know I was being
hoodwinked… but they made a hell of a go at it!!!
Now it
doesn’t take long before a Nineteen Year old red blooded Crackerjack realizes
the operating advantages of the 'out of sight, out of mind' principle of human
behavior and being topside all of the time presented itself with such
benefits! There was plenty of time for goofing off in the barbette with
the door closed, reading skin books or some other means of screwing off!! This
was my own personal space… my home away from home!!!
But Chief
Petty Officers can’t stand the sight of a sailor not engaged in productive
work! I would typically get lectured on inappropriate skylarking on a regular
basis…
"Petty Officer Swing, the United States Navy
is not here for your amusement and this is not your personal treehouse for
seagoing shenanigans! When you get that through your thick fuck’n skull you
might end up a fine Petty Officer one day!"
He gave me a
set of instructions on what was known at the time as a ‘PMS’ card which was a
new concept to this fine young boot! I’d just assume he told me how to do the
job and I’d get it done!! But what did I know… I had less sea time than just
about the whole gauddamned crew and I was still green as could be… so I went to
work!!!
Well the
Navy had this thing with springing bullshit surprise inspections to check
meaningless instructions on this maintenance card to be sure we kept with the
spirit of doing good work within the confines of the words contained therein!
If I neglected my preventive maintenance, the Chief would have known beyond a
shadow of a doubt exactly what butt pocket to plant his size twelve
boondocker!! So I was to be very careful and crafty at which end to slide my
ass cheeks should he catch me coloring outside the lines!!!
Now one of the
maintenance checks I regular got spot checks on was greasing the gears on the
supporting yokes of the director! The Director’s roll pivoted on a cross level
gear attached to this supporting member!! It was a bi-weekly maintenance check
to degrease and paint on new grease with one of them fancy schmancy acid
brushes!! It took maybe an hour to get the job done!! And let me tell you, that
director was a real bone crusher and could’ve probably smashed me into a bloody
pulp on several occasions!!!
Now on this
particular long and mundane sunny day I was to stick a speed wrench into the
breaking mechanism and wind the director on its yoke one gear at a time! This
was a long and monotonous task and I thought the problem could be solved simply
by pushing in the brake hard enough with the speed wrench so it would just spin
a little faster and I could catch it about every foot!! Boy I couldn’t of been
any dumber as the weight of the director came crashing down at ‘Mach Speed!!’
Not only did my heart skip a beat and my arm about got torn off, but five
gallon cans of General Purpose & Aircraft Grease went flying all over
tarnation with acid brushes and rags in tow!!!
I don’t know
if any of you old salts remember what General Purpose Grease could do?!? The
stuff was all thick and black and once it got into your chambray shirt, it was
only good for the rag bin!! I had grease in my eye brows, in my ears and
everywhere else within a twenty foot radius!!!
Now can you
imagine the whole topside from the signal shack to the stack saturated from
port to starboard?!? There was so much grease it was like kudzu vines on a
Georgia road cut!! It took me three pounds of armpit salt encrustation and a
half gallon of working up a sweat to keep the Skivvy Waivers off my back!!!
In
hindsight, I’ve come to realize a retarded monkey could have done a better job!
But that’s just the way it was!! I’ve also come to realize over the years that
when it came to 'games of chance' it’s simpler just to follow the gauddamned
directions than try and take shortcuts!!!
I guess a
lesson was learned… yes indeed! But in those days we were like a bunch of
misfit hobos not fit for normal society… hell I wasn’t alone!! And we steamed
on a ship already scheduled for the scrap heap!!!
No, the
Baglady wasn’t whiz bang sexy... but we kept that old dinosaur going with a lot
of cussing, sweat and cumshaw parts that wouldn’t meet INSURV standards on a
rainy day, that’s for damned sure!! In short… we embraced the suck!!!
I never
quite understood the inferior hand-me-downs we were given and it seemed we were
shortchanged when it came to replacement parts! Later in my career I learned a
lot about supply being a Repair Parts Petty Officer!! But then we were
operating on new and improved updated gear!!!
If you were
on one of them over the hill rust buckets, you know it was operated by young
fellas who had to develop armadillo hides to fend off derogatory horse shit
from the crusty ol’ salty bastards wearing the scrambled eggs running the
gauddamned zoo! It was long ago… the sounds, smells and sights!! Just another
chronicle of one of my pain in the ass escapades for all to see!!!
