by Jeff Noonan
I was put in charge of the forward plotting room, with two computer systems. Dan Prateau had the after two systems. We had two third class petty officers working for each of us, and we both worked for a first class petty officer named McBee. He, in turn, reported to my old nemesis, Master Chief Martinez. Lieutenant Cohen was our division officer. With that organization in place, we took on one of the most grueling and heartbreaking challenges that I have ever encountered.
The computers and all of their associated wiring, cabling, and switchboards had to be completely ripped apart and rebuilt. We followed ORDALT instructions that reminded me of a set of Sears-Roebuck toy-assembly instructions, except that the ORDALTS were far more complex. Neither I nor either of my third class had ever touched one of these computers before, so just finding our way through them was a challenge.
My boss, McBee, was a good guy, and he had worked on these systems in the Fleet, but he had other responsibilities that kept him busy most of the time. The Chief was a total waste—a guy who knew nothing about the systems and didn’t bother to learn. His biggest contribution was to come around about once every day, screaming at us because we couldn’t keep the areas clean enough for him when we had the equipment torn apart and scattered all over the rooms. It was very obvious that his only function in life was to make life hell for those of us with a real job.
I became really good friends with a third class that worked on the Gun Fire Control Systems aboard. His name was George Kaplan, and he was always ready to go to town and have a beer or two with me. Whenever the Chief would get on my nerves too much, George and I would hit the town, usually drinking in the Westerner and other bars in the Combat Zone. I introduced George to Delores, and some evenings, we would just go to her place and play cards or watch television. George would sleep on the couch.
But we couldn’t do this very often because of the amount of work that I had to do on the missile systems. The entire missile fire-control crew was on twelve-hours-per-day, six-days-per-week, schedules that were basically self-imposed. We saw the amount of work that was ahead of us, and we dug into it. We didn’t feel that we had a choice. There was an engineer from Ford Instrument Company assigned to the ship, so he helped us with any technically difficult problems that we ran into and kept us pointed in the right direction when the workload got too big to handle.
Since we were on this kind of a work schedule, the Chief and his unyieldingly stupid demands were really getting to us. He was the worst leader that I encountered in my entire Navy career; a man that had no concept of the work that we were doing and just wanted everything shiny-clean all the time. It was impossible to make him understand us or what we were doing. If I tried to explain the technical work we were doing, he refused to even listen. Several times he walked into the room when we were in the middle of a system test—working via headphones with all the other elements of the missile system on tests that took days to get organized—and made us stop everything, get off the headphones, and swab the decks or shine the brass in the room.
Even the civilian engineers had a problem with this kind of thing, and they complained to the Commanding Officer that the Chief was interfering with their work. But it made no difference, and the problems went on.
I have never been one to suffer in silence, and I took my job, as well as my responsibilities to my men, very seriously. So I began regularly clashing with the Chief. He reported me regularly to our division officer, Lieutenant Cohen. The Lieutenant was a good guy who really did understand, but he couldn’t get anyone else to appreciate the workload requirements of the experimental missile systems that we were trying to assemble. The Captain had set the standards for the ship, and his priority was to keep things spotless, whether they worked or not. The Chief was content to just keep the Captain happy, and the rest of us were caught somewhere in the middle, trying to make a fighting ship out of a showboat.
The Boston-outfitting period finally came to an end, and the ship was commissioned. After the commissioning ceremony, we had a short period remaining in the shipyard before the ship was heading south for its shakedown cruise.
It was during that period between the commissioning ceremony and our departure that George and I ran into some real excitement. We had gone to Delores’s place for the evening and were playing cards on her kitchen table with her and one of her friends. I was idly staring out the kitchen window, waiting for one of the players to do something, when I thought I noticed something in the basement of the building across the alley from us. I looked harder, and soon we realized that the building next door was on fire!
Delores’s apartment was in a six-story apartment building located in a group of similar buildings in an older and somewhat rundown neighborhood. Fire in one of those buildings was no small matter. They were old frame buildings that would burn like kindling.
We knew we had to move fast, and Delores didn’t have a telephone, so George and I made a plan and moved. George ran to a nearby convenience store and called the fire department. At the same time, I ran next door and up the stairs to the top floor. I then started beating on doors, hollering “Fire, Fire. Get out now!” at the top of my lungs. People started emerging, streaming down the stairs wearing whatever they had on when I hit their door. I kept beating on doors, working my way downstairs a floor at a time until I encountered George who was working his way up to meet me. About this time, the Boston Fire Department arrived and took over. George and I went down to the street and ran into the people we had warned. The Fire Chief was with them and, of course, he had a group of reporters with him. They took our names and information and we talked to them for a few minutes before trying to go back to Delores’s place. But the Fire Department had evacuated all the adjoining buildings so, after a while, Delores took off to stay at a friend’s home, and George and I went back to the ship.
The fire gutted the first three or four floors of the building before it was under control. The building was permanently evacuated, and eventually, it was torn down. But no one was hurt.
By the time we got back to the ship that night, the land-line telephone on the quarterdeck was ringing off the hook. Every reporter in Boston was calling for us. We had become minor celebrities. We took one call that came in as we walked aboard. When we realized what was going on, we explained it to the OOD and asked him to just tell everyone that called that we were not onboard. He agreed, and we went below and went to sleep.
The next morning, we awoke to find that the local papers had carried the story of the fire, and reporters had been calling the ship all morning to try to talk to us. We decided that we didn’t want this publicity, so we asked the OOD to just give them a “No Comment” if they called again.
The mayor of Boston wrote us a nice letter, thanking us for what we had done. The XO made sure that the letter went into our official personnel records. But, in all honesty, I was too busy, working too hard on the missile systems, for it to make much of an impression on me at that time.
A few days later, we left Boston, heading south for the Leahy’s shakedown cruise.
The shakedown cruise for a new ship is a period designed to test the ship’s equipment as well as train the new ship’s crew. Most crewmembers on a new ship like Leahy have never been to sea, and, in this case, none of us had ever been to sea on a ship of this type, so intensive training was required. At the same time, the ship was still in the throes of trying to get all of the ship’s systems operational. In the missile systems, we carried a full team of the type of engineers that had been with us in Bath. We were now working twelve-hour shifts, six days a week.
But the Command still had no concept of this effort and treated it as if it were an undesirable annoyance. The ship stopped at every major port on the East Coast, showing the local dignitaries our beautiful new ship. At every stop, we had to cease work and train our equipment centerline so that it had a more appealing appearance. In every port, the ship hosted an Open House so that civilians could come aboard and wander through the ship. At every
stop, we were expected to have our equipment and the rooms it occupied spotless. In between, we were expected to stand underway watches and perform our military duties as if we had nothing else to do.
With all of this interference, the missile systems were not coming up to an operational state on schedule, and we were working longer and longer hours. The civilian engineers were under the supervision of a very knowledgeable Navy officer from the Navy Missile Station in California, but, even though he complained loudly to his command, the ridiculous dog-and-pony-show atmosphere continued, and the systems got further and further behind schedule.
On one unforgettable Sunday morning, about two hours after we had stopped work after a straight-through thirty-six-hour work shift, Chief Martinez came into our berthing compartment screaming about what lazy SOBs we were. He wanted the entire crew to get up and get out so that our berthing compartment could be shown off for an Open House.
I tried to explain to him that the crew was exhausted and needed the rest, but the Chief made a snide remark about how we could do better if we “stayed off the beach and out of the bars.”
I told him again that the crew had not been ashore—they had been working.
Apparently this fact was just beyond his comprehension. He started screaming at us again, “This is a direct order! Get your lazy asses out of those bunks, now!”
I lost it and told him, very quietly, to get out and let my troops sleep. He told me that I was on report, and he was going to make sure that I lost a stripe for insubordination. Then he charged out of the room.
I picked up the phone in our compartment and called Lieutenant Cohen and explained what had just happened. He thanked me and got off the phone as the Chief began pounding on the door of his stateroom.
The Chief was as good as his word. He put me on report for insubordination and dereliction of duty. I was restricted to the ship until the situation could be adjudicated.
The restriction was not a problem because we were working pretty much around the clock and straight through the week at the time. We were finding an incredible amount of problems with the new systems. The engineers were documenting them and sending daily missives back to the factories and the Navy guided missile centers. A senior engineer from Johns Hopkins University was now aboard, trying to sort out all the problems and coordinate their resolution. In the meantime, the Chief and most of the chain of command was engaged in the business of showing off the ship to anyone that would look at it. The ship’s internal technical problems just weren’t compatible with the command’s desire for a showboat.
In a way, the Leahy reminded me of my old Mercury convertible when I first saw it. The exterior was beautiful, but the engine didn’t work.
After a week or so, I was scheduled to go to the Executive Officer about the charges that the Chief had filed against me. I went to his office accompanied by Chief Martinez and Lieutenant Cohen. As protocol required, I came to attention, saluted, and went to Parade Rest in front of the XO. He then read the charges and asked the Chief for his comments and recommendations. The Chief described the situation that had occurred from his perspective, then said something like, “Petty Officer Noonan is a habitual malingerer, Commander. He is a prima donna who is always making excuses for not having clean spaces and his uniforms are always greasy and unkempt. In addition, he is regularly disrespectful. I consider him incorrigible and recommend that he be court-martialed, reduced in rank, and discharged from the Navy.”
The XO then turned to Lieutenant Cohen, who had been listening to this quietly, “Do you concur, Mr. Cohen?” The lieutenant looked distressed and replied, “Absolutely not, Commander.” He stopped to gather his thoughts and then went on, “Petty Officer Noonan is one of the hardest-working and most dedicated people that I have ever met in my Navy career. He has been one of the key people responsible for getting as much done on the systems as we have. Every engineer on the ship has complimented him for his hard work and intelligent analysis of our system problems. I recommend that we drop this whole thing and let him get back to work.”
The XO was absolutely speechless for a moment. For a division officer to contradict a master chief was pretty much unheard of, and his reaction reflected that fact.
“Mr. Cohen, I don’t understand how your assessment of this situation can be so radically different from Master Chief Martinez’s. Can you explain this to me?”
“Yes Sir,” the Lieutenant said. Then he looked at me and said, “But I would rather do it in private. I don’t think that my explanation would be appropriate in front of Noonan.”
The XO, who was a young, nuclear-trained, commander with very little actual leadership experience, was not buying this. “Ridiculous. We are in an Executive Officer’s Mast right now. If it needs to be said, say it now.”
So Lieutenant Cohen continued, “Commander, with all due respect to his rank, Master Chief Martinez is an idiot. He runs the troops like some kind of martinet and has absolutely no comprehension of the work that they are doing. If I had my choice as to which one of these two should be kicked out of the Navy, it would not be Noonan.”
With that, the XO finally saw the light. He turned to me and said, “Petty Officer Noonan, please step out to the passageway and wait by the door until I call you back.”
I waited in that passageway for what seemed like hours. I could hear voices being raised and heated discussions going on, but I couldn’t make out any of the words.
Finally, the Lieutenant opened the door and said, “Come back in, Noonan.”
I did, returning to my parade rest position. I could see that all was not well.
Both the Chief and the Lieutenant looked mad as hell, and the XO wasn’t happy either.
“Petty Officer Noonan, we’ve discussed your case and come to a conclusion. We’re going to give you a choice of punishments. You can go to Captain’s Mast, and take a chance on having a serious offense on your Navy record, or you can accept an informal punishment for insubordination from me. The informal punishment won’t go on your record. Which do you prefer?”
I thought for a moment, but the choice was obvious. The Chief was one of the Captain’s favorite people—one of the few that continuously supported the Captain’s showboating crapola. If I went to the Captain with the Chief after me, I could kiss my Navy career goodbye. “I’ll take the informal punishment, Commander.”
“Okay, Noonan. Here it is. You’re to report to Master Chief Martinez daily at sixteen-hundred hours for one week starting today. You’ll perform two hours of extra duty as assigned by the Master Chief each day. If I hear that you didn’t do the work so assigned, I’ll reinstitute the charges and you’ll go to the Captain for formal sentencing. Do you understand?”
“Yes Sir.” I said. I knew I was in a world of trouble. The Chief would use this to try to break me. My chances of surviving this were not good, but I’d do my best.
The XO then dismissed us and we went outside. The Chief was obviously pleased with himself, and at the same time, he was really pissed at the Lieutenant. He just kept glaring at Cohen, even as he told me to report to him at Chief’s Quarters at 1600. I said okay, and he left the Lieutenant and me standing there. Lieutenant Cohen turned to me and said, “I’m truly sorry, Noonan. You don’t deserve this, but it was the best that I could get for you.”
I replied, “Please don’t apologize. You saved my ass and I know it. It’s up to me now. Thank you, Sir.”
He said, ‘I will watch this, Noonan. If he does anything that I need to know about, call me. Don’t let him pull any crap on you.” I thanked him again and went back to working on the computers.
My fellow workers were solidly behind me at this point. Without my knowledge, they got together and decided to have one person each day check on me whenever I was on this extra duty. They were going to watch, from a distance, so that there would be witnesses to whatever happened.
At 1600 hours sharp, I knocked on the door of the Chief’s quarters and was admitted.
M
artinez was waiting for me. He said, “Come with me,” and he led the way to the Chief’s berthing compartment, then on through it to their head. It was a horrible mess. The Chief said, “Clean this up. I will be back to check on you.” He left me standing there.
I took a good look at the head and figured out what had happened. Multiple commodes were plugged up and had overflowed, with a liberal amount of feces in each of them. There was shit everywhere, and one of the toilets’ flush-levers was physically blocked open, making that commode overflow continuously.
I quickly went to the overflowing toilet and stopped the flow. Then I just stood there and laughed. This just told me how badly the Chief had underestimated me. He had called me a “prima-donna” when he was talking to the XO. Apparently he thought that, just because we were working on the missile systems, we were the kind of people who thought we were too good for dirty work. That was fine with me. If only he had looked at my record, as a good Chief would have, he would have known that I had dealt with a lot worse than this during my deck force days on Cogswell. This obviously contrived mess was not going to be a problem.
One of my third class subordinates stuck his head in the door when I was laughing. I explained to him what was going on and he offered to help, but I ran him off. I could handle this.
The Chief came down to the head about five minutes before my two hours were up.
The head was sparkling, and I was just finishing up on polishing some of the brass fixtures.
He immediately started yelling at me again, “What the hell do you think that you are doing? There is no sense shining that crap if the shitters are broken! How damned stupid are you anyway?”
I looked at him and said, “They’re all fixed, Chief.”
His face turned an awful red color, and he went to each commode, flushing all of them. Then he looked around, dragging his fingers over the tops of mirrors and stalls, looking for dust. He didn’t find any, and finally he said, “Okay. Report to me tomorrow at sixteen-hundred hours.”