by Jeff Noonan
Then I noticed that he had the personnel folders for both Bob and I on the podium in front of us. He knew who I was, but he obviously wasn’t going to let that fact be known.
He came to the podium, sternly declared, “Executive Officer’s Mast is now in session.” and immediately asked us to describe the circumstances that had brought us there.
I looked at Bob, and he started talking. I have to give Bob a lot of credit. He told the straight truth and took full responsibility for everything that had happened. When he finished, the Commander looked at me, and said, “Do you agree, Noonan?”
I said, “Yes Sir, except that I deserve some of the blame. None of this would have happened if I hadn’t dumped ketchup in his beer.”
The Commander looked stern and talked a bit about the seriousness of the offenses that we were charged with, and really chewed us out for “disgracing our uniforms and not acting like petty officers.” Then he, with a perfectly straight face, talked about both of our service records and the fact that neither of us had any prior offenses. I learned that Bob had been in the Fleet for four years, stationed on an aircraft carrier.
Finally, the Commander wound down. He told us both that, because we had been honest about the circumstances, and because we were both obviously remorseful, he was going to drop the charges. But, he added, “If you so much as step an inch out of line for the rest of your time here, I will resurrect this, and you will go to Captain’s Mast. I guarantee you that the Captain won’t be nearly as lenient as me. Understood?”
We said that we understood, and he dismissed us.
As we came to attention and prepared to salute, the XO turned back to us, looked at Bob, and said, “Did you get that eye in this fight, Sailor?”
Bob involuntarily touched his face and said, “Yes Sir.”
The Commander went on, “You have only served on aircraft carriers, haven’t you?”
Bob replied “Yes Sir.”
Commander Moore then looked at him with a slow grin coming over his face. “Son, you just learned a lesson. You should never pick a fight with a destroyer sailor!” With that, he walked out the back door and left us there with our mouths open.
The Master Chief, who had been in the room the whole time, escorted us out of the office and told us how incredibly lucky we were. I agreed with him. But I never, ever, told anyone that I knew Commander Moore. I just let everyone think that we were the luckiest two sailors on earth. Maybe we were, at that.
CHAPTER TWENTY THREE
Bath, Maine
The rest of the school went well. Then about a month before we were to graduate, we received our orders. The rest of the class was going to ships on the East and West Coasts. But my orders were to a ship that was just being built in Bath, Maine. The ship, USS Leahy, was the first of its class, a brand new ship-type that was to have Terrier Launchers on both the bow and the stern of the ship. There were to be four of the Mark 76 Guided Missile Fire Control Systems (Mk 76 GMFCS)aboard, each with computers that were to be a whole generation newer than the one we had been studying.
This new ship concept was a bit of a shock to me, since I had only served on the one very old destroyer in the past. But I got ready for the challenge by asking the school to get me some documentation on the newer version of the computers. The documentation was all classified as “Secret,” so I had to study it in the confines of a specific school classroom during the evening hours since I was still in the regular school during the days. My old experience at studying technical manuals on my own really helped with this project. By the time I graduated from school and left for Bath, I figured that I was as ready as possible.
I took a few days and wandered around the East Coast a bit on my way to Maine. I fell temporarily in lust in a small northern Pennsylvania town, but left when the new girlfriend turned out to have a daughter almost my age (who I liked a lot better than her mother). Then I wandered up through Boston and drove around in New Hampshire and Vermont. It was pretty country and I found myself really liking the older homes and the history of the area. It was as if I was really seeing the history instead of just reading about it. I liked that.
My orders stated that I was to report in to the administrative office on the Naval Air Station in Brunswick, Maine. This confused me a bit, since my ultimate destination was to be USS Leahy (DLG-16), which was under construction in the community of Bath. But I did as told and reported to the Air Station. I was absolutely astounded when they gave me a check for a month’s “advance per-diem” and sent me on to Bath with instructions to find a place to stay and report to the Leahy’s Commanding Officer the next morning.
I had to ask someone, “What’s per-diem?” They explained that, since the ship was still under construction, and there were no Navy living quarters in Bath, we had to live in town, wherever we could find a place to stay. The per-diem check was for $12 per day to cover our living expenses. I thought that I must have died and gone to heaven! $360 per month was a fortune to me at that time.
I went from Brunswick to Bath and looked for housing. I was directed to a beautiful old mansion that had been converted to a hostelry called the Sedgewick Hotel. I went in, got a room, and paid for an entire month up front. I loved this place. It was an old, obviously historic, building and it had a very stable and distinguished air about it.
I have to admit that I was a bit intimidated by all of this. Everything that I had heard or read about New England told me that it was a very staid and formal place to live. I figured that it was the kind of place where the kids all wore formal uniforms to school and courtship was still carefully managed by the parents of the virginal bride. The atmosphere in the lobby of the Sedgewick Hotel just reinforced this concept. So when I got unpacked, I showered and then changed into my most formal clothes—slacks and a nice shirt under a cashmere sweater that I had bought during a weak moment in Hong Kong. Then I went down to the Sedgewick’s dining room and took a seat for dinner.
A motherly waitress in a starched linen outfit brought me a menu. The prices startled me, but I decided to play the role and go with it for the night. Obviously, I wouldn’t be able to eat all of my meals there and stay under my per-diem budget, but, I figured I could live with it for the evening.
I ordered a Manhattan, which I thought would be acceptable in staid New England, and then a steak dinner. I had never even seen a Manhattan before and it gagged me. But I fought it down as I maintained my dignified composure and ate the dinner in the style in which I was sure that every New Englander was accustomed. When I finished, I had a Baked Alaska for dessert, because—although I had never seen one before—I was sure that this was the kind of dessert that New Englanders routinely consumed. I was not about to embarrass myself, or Montana, in this new environment.
When I was paying the waitress, she leaned over and quietly asked me if I was with the Navy. I said, “Yes, Ma’am,” and she told me that they had a lounge in the basement where I could probably find some of my new shipmates. She pointed out the door, and I gratefully thanked her.
I went through the door and down a set of stairs and walked into a fairly typical hotel lounge area. There were several people sitting around and the jukebox was blaring. I sat at the bar, ordered a beer, and settled in to see what was happening.
I was within a couple of feet of a table that had two older guys and their wives or girlfriends. I heard them say a few things about “the ship,” and I assumed that they were senior petty officers of some kind that were attached to the Leahy. But I was still not sure of the protocol here in staid, stable New England, so I didn’t approach anyone or try to make conversation. I was too busy making sure that I didn’t disgrace myself.
One thing that I noticed was that all four of the people at the table had individual pitchers of beer in front of them. The two men had relatively empty pitchers, and the two women had full pitchers. Time went on as I took in my surroundings. Then I saw one of the men pour a glass of beer from the neighboring woman’s pitcher. What happened
next totally took away any fear that I had ever had about embarrassing myself in New England.
The woman said, “You motherfucker! Get your fucking paws off of my beer. You buy your own damned beer!”
These two F-words were the first F-words that I had never, in my entire life, heard a woman utter. In my wildest dreams, I couldn’t imagine that a woman would even know those words, let alone say them in mixed company!
But there was more: next, she reached in her mouth and took out a complete set of false teeth, which she proceeded to drop into her pitcher. “There, you cocksucker,” she said (another word that I had never heard a woman utter), “try drinking my beer now!”
I decided that there was something amiss about my understanding of New England. This was just too much to digest, and the day had been too long already. I went up the stairs to my room and went to bed.
The next morning, I put on my dress blue uniform, skipped breakfast, and walked to the building downtown where the ship’s crew was temporarily located. I was surprised to find them working in an older storefront, with a haphazard bunch of desks scattered around the old display floor. I walked in and was immediately approached by another second class petty officer that I recognized from Damneck. He had been in a computer class that graduated a couple of weeks ahead of mine. His name was Dan Prateau, and it turned out that he had been waiting for me to show up.
With Dan guiding, I reported to the ship’s personnel office (which consisted of one older yeoman sitting at a desk in a corner of the floor) and got the necessary checkin sheets. I found out that only a small portion of the crew was located in Bath. The rest of the crew was in training in Norfolk; they would arrive when the ship’s construction was completed and they could go directly aboard the ship to live.
I was taken to see my new division officer, a Navy lieutenant. From his appearance and the rack of ribbons on his chest, it was obvious that he had well over twenty years in the Navy. His name was Cohen, and he seemed to be fairly friendly for an officer. He took me to meet the Commanding Officer, a Navy captain.
The Captain was obviously a spit-and-polish, by-the-book, kind of guy, and I reserved judgment on him. He gave me a welcome aboard speech that made a huge deal out of the fact that this would be the first ship of its kind and would be “watched very closely by the Navy, including the Fleet Commanders. So we had better be on our best behavior here in Bath, and we should plan on keeping a taut and immaculate ship.”
I made a comment about being happy to be there where the Navy’s newest guided missile systems would be tested, and he flatly told me that the main priority on this ship would be on its appearance. He seemed annoyed that I even thought about such a mundane subject as missile systems. I decided right then that this guy was nothing like Captain Moore.
When we left the vicinity of the captain, Lieutenant Cohen seemed to relax a bit. He talked to me about my background and what he expected of me while we were in Bath. He wanted me to be primarily concerned with the computer systems and the rooms that the computers were located in, the Missile Plotting Rooms. He wanted me to watch the system installations and report anything that I considered deficient in the installations. He also told me that we had “a pot of money” that we could use if we saw something that was needed but was not on the ship’s plans. Our job was, in short, to make sure that our workspaces and our equipment were put together in such a way that we could maintain them when they were turned over to us.
The Captain had made a really big deal to us about ship cleanliness. I was confused about this, since we did not own the ship, and the shipyard people were responsible for it now, so I asked the Lieutenant about it.
“How are we supposed to keep the ship clean, when the shipyard still owns it?” I asked.
The Lieutenant smiled at me, “I’m glad that you had the sense to ask me that. You aren’t. We have absolutely no control over the yardbirds or any of the messes they make. The Captain knows this, but I think he just wants to emphasize that he intends to run an immaculate ship, and he’s preparing us. But as long as the ship is in the shipyard, we’re just guests of Bath Iron Works. We’ve got to be diplomatic, and telling them to clean up after themselves ain’t diplomatic. But I’m not worried about any of that. Just make sure that your spaces and equipment the best that they can be technically, and we’ll get along fine. Do you have any questions?”
I replied, “No, Sir.”
I was amazed at the ship when I got aboard. Compared to my previous ship, the Leahy was huge. Where the old Cogswell had displaced 2,100 tons of water when afloat, the Leahy displaced 7,800 tons. When I arrived, the physical construction was almost done, and the ship’s systems were in the early stages of testing, so it actually looked like an operational ship, except for the hordes of shipyard workers aboard.
Dan Prateau showed me our spaces aboard the ship and introduced me to some of the workers who were testing and upgrading the new systems. There were a good number of engineers aboard, some from the Navy Guided Missile Station in Port Hueneme, California. Others were factory representatives from the companies that had made the equipment. The computer center had engineers from Ford Instrument Company (no relation to the Ford automobile company) and the radars were being worked by engineers from Sperry Gyroscope Corporation. Other engineers, from a company called Vitro Engineering, were responsible for the interface between all of the different equipment. There were also engineers from Western Electric and a host of other companies.
After a day of walking around and meeting the people working with these missile systems, I decided that I had really stumbled into a big deal. I had never before seen such an assemblage of obviously intelligent, talented, people in my life. If this number of these types of people could dedicate themselves to this equipment, it was obviously the most important project that I had yet been exposed to.
Mom had told me a million times that, if I wanted to escape from the old life, I had to find something important and then work my butt off to become a part of it. “That’s the only way that you’ll escape, Jeff—by finding something that interests you, then working your fingers to the bone. If you use your brains and work harder than anyone else,” she had promised me, “you’ll escape. If you don’t, you won’t.”
I decided that I had finally found the thing that she had been talking about—the thing that I could put my teeth into and make mine. At that time, I couldn’t imagine a better life than being one of these engineers, doing something as important as this with my life.
The next few months were intense. The engineers and technicians working on the missile systems were working twelve-hour shifts, five days a week. I stayed with them aboard ship as much as possible, watching their work, studying how they accomplished their testing and how they troubleshot and fixed the problems they encountered. I spent hours listening in on their conversations on sound-powered headsets as they worked, trying to follow their work in the system technical manuals. At the same time, we had other work to do to get the ship’s documentation ready for the crew to come aboard. I also submitted a lot of change requests to the shipyard for such things as lockable bookcases for technical manuals, storage for test equipment and tools, and similar things.
The days were very busy, and so were our off hours. I continued to live at the Sedgwick Hotel and as I got to know my way around the town, I made some very good friends, both with other Leahy sailors and with some of the local townspeople. Bath, Maine, was a small town. Not as small as St. Regis, but close enough that I felt at home there. The local people were wonderful to us.
The only cloud on my horizon was a master chief who was my leading chief petty officer. His name was Martinez, and he was a total ass. He had converted to fire control technician from boatswain’s mate as a master chief and had not bothered to learn anything about his new job. He was an absolute disaster, a little man with a Napoleon complex who saw his job in the Navy as one of keeping ships clean and sailors in constant fear.
I had a continuing
series of run-ins with Martinez while we were in Bath. He just couldn’t seem to get the fact that the Navy did not own the ship yet and we were not in charge of the shipboard spaces. He wanted us to clean the shipboard spaces even while the shipyard workers were working in them. Of course, we couldn’t do it, and when it didn’t happen, he would get mad. He was on my case all the time, and I didn’t have sense enough to ignore him. When, after one particularly bad session with him, I pointed out that the Navy had not even issued cleaning gear to us yet, he flamed out on me and put me on report for insubordination. Lieutenant Cohen squashed this, but Martinez was after me in a big way after that.
Staying involved in the work aboard ship kept me in close contact with the shipyard workers. One of them, a shipyard computer technician named George Lacroix, became a good friend, and we often left the ship in the evening and went to a nearby bar/restaurant for dinner and drinks. George was a single guy who never seemed to be without an entourage, including a girlfriend or two, so I did get to know a lot of Bath’s single people. One of them was a widow at least fifteen years older than me named Linda Bauer.
Linda seemed to almost literally adopt me. She was going out with another local guy, but she thought nothing of inviting me to her home for dinner and taking me along with her family when they went to a nearby lake for a holiday. She was a nice person and a great mother who had three children between the ages of ten and fifteen. I spent some wonderful days with them lying on the beach at the lake and going to their beach club in the evening.
She and her two young daughters would not accept that I didn’t know how to dance. They taught me to two-step and do the Twist, which was hot in those days. They didn’t let up until I was able to hold my own on the dance floor.