by Jeff Noonan
I worked straight through the week, and when we reached a logical breaking point, I stopped the work and cleaned up the spaces. I figured that if I did that, maybe I wouldn’t run into the kind of problems that I had encountered on Leahy…but it was just not the same Command or crew here. The Yarnell was totally committed to making the ship into a fighting unit. My leaders appreciated that I kept things as orderly as possible, but they, like me, were more interested in getting the missile systems up and running.
The ship stayed in Boston for another month or so before heading south. I was so interested in my work that I seldom even went to town during this period. I did go out to visit Delores occasionally, but I was really into my work, so the visits gradually tapered off.
Mark Wilcoux had his radar crew on a five-day, twelve-hour, schedule. On the weekends, Mark religiously went home to Vermont to be with his wife and children. He told me that he wanted his six kids to have a normal life and not have to move every few years, so he had left them at home. He volunteered for these new ships because he could be close to New England at least part of the time. I don’t think that I’ve ever met a more dedicated family man.
Since Mark’s crew was on the five-day, twelve-hour work schedule, the computer crew had to roughly follow the same schedule, as much of our work was interrelated. But I mostly stayed on the ship and worked extra hours on the weekends, so we were getting a lot of critical work done. I measured our progress against what we had on Leahy, and I saw us pulling way ahead of where we had been on that ship. I was really pleased with our progress, even before we left Boston. After we got underway, Mark matched me, and we worked straight through the weeks, so we pulled further and further ahead of the planned schedule.
By April 1963, our Boston shipyard period was almost over, so we went to sea for sea trials, a period when the work done in the shipyard is tested. We were at sea on April 10 when we received word that a new nuclear submarine, USS Thresher (SSN-593), was missing in the area. It had been at sea for sea trials, much as we were, when all communications with the submarine were lost.
We immediately stopped all other functions and steamed at top speed for the area where the Thresher was last reported. When we got there, we went into a search pattern, much as the Cogswell had done when we lost the men in the typhoon. We searched for days, but all we found was an oil slick and some debris in the water. The Thresher had gone down with all hands on board. The submarine’s remains were later found at the bottom of the Atlantic, 8,000 feet underwater.
After we were detached from the Thresher search, we returned to Boston and prepared for the upcoming shakedown cruise. During this time, we did a lot of night work; doing a complete battery alignment on the ship’s sensors and weapons systems. We also aligned the missile radar beams, a time-consuming, rigorous, and precise process called collimation.
When we left Boston, we headed straight for Norfolk, where we were scheduled to do some work in Norfolk Naval Shipyard. Since most of the work being done was on the ship’s propulsion plant, we had a bit of slack in our missile work. When we could get off the ship, we often visited the local bars outside the shipyard gates on Crawford Street. Without a car, this was about as far as we could feasibly get. (Most of the single guys had put their cars in storage, or left them in Boston, for the duration of the shakedown cruise.)
Crawford Street was a two-block, freewheeling area much like the Boston Combat Zone, except that the bars were smaller and only served beer. I never particularly liked beer, but since this was where the females of the species congregated, I decided to stifle my taste buds and enjoy it anyway.
I knew from experience that when we left the shipyard, the schedule would get much worse. The remainder of the civilian engineering team would arrive en masse, and we would have a tremendous amount of missile system testing and trials work. When this was almost complete, we would have to go through the Guantanamo Bay crew training period. Then it was on to Roosevelt Roads for the ship’s initial missile firings. So I figured that I would take advantage of the slack period and get some studying done.
I had taken out several correspondence courses over the previous year and had been working on them whenever I had the time. But now, another deadline was looming on the horizon, and I had to get busy. That winter, I was going to have enough time in the service to take the exam for promotion to first class petty officer (E-6), and I had a lot of studying to do to prepare, so I started working on the courses and studying whenever I had time.
I didn’t really have much hope of actually being promoted to first class in the near future. I had less than five years in the Navy and that was too junior to be even thinking about such a promotion. But I’ve always been a dreamer, so I couldn’t see any reason not to try. I stuck my head back in the books and began studying seriously again.
The shipyard period was soon over. The missile system engineering team returned, and the serious work started anew. As usual, the team of engineers came aboard, led by a Navy lieutenant from the Missile Center in California. The Navy called this team the Ship Qualification and Training (SQAT) Team. They were all missile system experts, with some being civil servants and the others all engineers representing the companies that had manufactured the missile system equipments.
When the SQAT Team arrived, they brought with them another group of system alterations designed to improve the missile systems. We installed the changes and then went to work testing and aligning the systems all over again. This time, the systems were in good shape to start with, so the work went smoothly. The primary problems that we encountered were in the radar areas, because of the inherent unreliability of the complex, high-powered radar equipment. In 1963, guided-missile system technology was still in its infancy and the radars reflected that fact. Very seldom did we have all four systems online and operational at the same time. But Wilcoux and his crews still got continuous accolades from the engineers. They did good work.
The next few months were almost an identical replay of the Leahy shakedown cruise except that we were somehow much more relaxed as we did our training and went about getting the systems ready for our first missile firings.
About halfway through the eight-week training period, we took a long weekend and sailed the ship to Ocho Rios, Jamaica, where we all had a weekend of fun and relaxation. In 1963, there wasn’t much in Ocho Rios—just a huge jungle with a few plantations and a couple of primitive bars. We actually tied up to a bauxite shipping pier adjacent to the local bauxite mine, where, in later years, they filmed a famous James Bond movie. We went ashore in our dress white uniforms, which were red with bauxite dust before we left the pier. But we managed to raise a lot of hell and have a lot of fun before we had to head back to the training the next week. With a break like this behind us, we were more ready than ever to do our jobs.
When we finished the eight weeks of training, we proceeded to port in San Juan, where we took on supplies, made last-minute missile system tests and adjustments, and let most of the crew enjoy another Liberty port. The missile crew, including me of course, stayed aboard and agonized over last-minute missile system glitches as we prepared for our initial missile firings.
The Yarnell missile firings at Roosevelt Roads, in the days after we left San Juan, confirmed that we were on the right track with our efforts. We didn’t hit every shot, but no one expected us to do that with dummy warheads and the guided missile systems of that era. However, we did better than just about any other new ship had in their initial firings, and we were ecstatic about our successes. When the results were put out in the official reports, the ship got messages commending us from both the Naval Missile Systems Center in California and Commander, Cruiser and Destroyer Forces, Atlantic, in Norfolk. It had taken some long, hard hours, but the payoff was worth it to us. We were one happy crew!
The Yarnell returned to Norfolk after the missile firings, and we immediately went into the shipyard in Portsmouth for our post-shakedown availability. For once, we did not have a tremendo
us amount of missile work to do, so I turned back to studying, and on weekends, several of us began raising heck in the bars on Crawford Street.
During the late 1950s and early 1960s, Norfolk and Portsmouth, Virginia, had some extremely hard-nosed police forces that generated a tremendous amount of revenue for the cities through their enforcement of “Blue Laws” on the sailors and Marines who were unlucky enough to be stationed there. We had many names for these police forces, but very few that are printable. One of the more popular names was the “Morals Squad.” Whenever we were drinking in the areas, we always had our eyes peeled for any sign of the Morals Squad.
I had actually seen the Morals Squad arrest a sailor and a waitress because the sailor was seen giving the waitress a drink from his beer, so I walked a very careful line whenever we went to Crawford Street, or anywhere in the area, to have a drink. But it was for naught, because they did finally catch me, literally, with my pants down.
I had been wooing a young lady in one of the clubs for a few weeks, and I finally got a date with her on her night off. We went to dinner and a movie, after which we stopped at a bar on Crawford Street for a couple of drinks. Then, when the bars closed, she volunteered to make me some breakfast at her home. So we proceeded to have breakfast which, of course, led to other things.
I was peacefully sleeping when, at about 3:00 a.m., I was awakened by loud hammering on the door followed by two men charging through and coming into the living room only a few feet from where I was sleeping. “Get up and get dressed! You are both under arrest!” one of them shouted.
I sat up and groggily asked, “What in hell am I under arrest for?”
My girlfriend was also mad and was yelling that they had no business in her house.
One of them told her, “Shut up!” and then answered me with, “Look around you, Asshole! What do you think you are under arrest for?”
I sat up and looked at my surroundings. I was as naked as the day I was born, and so was my friend. We didn’t even have a blanket over us. Worse yet, we were lying on her couch, the lights were on, and we were in front of a picture window.
“Oh shit,” I said.
The bigger of the two Morals Squad cops grinned at me, saying, “Get up and get dressed. We’re all going downtown.”
I got up and started pulling on my clothing. When I got to my dress jumper, the cop stopped me with, “Jesus Christ, Kid! Are you really a second class petty officer?”
I replied, “Yes, Sir.”
He and his friend looked at each other and went into an adjoining room, whispered to each other for a minute, and then came back.
“Do you have a car?” one of them said.
I replied, “No.”
Then the bigger of the two said, “How would you like a sporting chance to get out of this, Kid?”
I jumped at the chance and replied, “Hell yes. What do I have to do?”
Both of them were grinning now, “Give me your uniform pants, and then get dressed—put the rest of your uniform on.”
I did as he directed and stood up, looking rather silly in my white hat, jumper with neckerchief, skivvy shorts, and shoes.
He handed me my wallet and said, “Okay, Sailor. Get out of here. If you can make it back to your ship without being arrested, you beat the game this time. If you don’t make it, we’ve never seen you before. If you aren’t in jail in the morning, I’ll deliver your pants to your ship. Good luck.”
By the time I made it out the door, both he and his partner were roaring with laughter.
I didn’t want to take a chance on them double-crossing me, so I broke into a dead run as soon as I was off the porch. To throw them off, I cut back in the direction away from the ship for a while, and then paralleled the shipyard fence from about a half mile away. It reminded me of the time that I ran through the pigpen in Olongapo, and I chuckled.
I found myself in a very poor, mostly black, section of Portsmouth. I cautiously navigated my way between rows of apartment houses. I went by one where an older couple was setting on the stoop.
“The Morals Squad is behind me,” I said to them as I went by.
I got a big laugh and a “Run, Boy, Run! We won’t tell them guys nothing.”
I kept going.
Finally, my circuitous route took me to a point where I was directly across the street from the main gate of the shipyard. I hid behind a pile of junk in an empty lot as I checked out the entry. This was the only gate open to the shipyard at this time of night, and there was a Marine guarding the gate. The rest of the shipyard was surrounded by an eight-foot chain-link fence topped with barbed wire. I knew that the gate was my only real chance.
I waited and watched for a few minutes. I was about ready to head for the gate when I saw a black car slowly coming down the road, parallel to the shipyard’s fence. I lay low and watched as my two favorite Morals Squad members slowly drove by, with a searchlight playing over the area.
When they got to where I was, across from the gate, they sped up and turned out the searchlight, apparently so they wouldn’t blind the Marine at the gate. They obviously expected me to try to climb the fence and sneak around the Marine. They were planning to get me when I did.
I waited while they passed me by and started down the other side of the fence, with the light back on and searching. As soon as they passed the gate, I jumped up and ran across the road, directly toward the Marine gate guard. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the black car stop and start a U-turn. When I was about ten feet from the guard, I slowed to a walk and approached him with my ID card in hand, as if everything was normal. He had a quizzical look on his face and was trying hard not to laugh.
I looked him straight in the eye, and said, “Not a word, Corporal…not a fucking word. I am not at my best right now.” I grinned at him and kept going.
He just stared at me, but he let me through.
I walked about another twenty feet and then looked back.
The black car was stopped outside the gate, and the driver was looking at me. After a minute, he gave me a “thumbs up,” and drove away. I walked back to the ship, crossed the Quarterdeck, and went to bed. The quarterdeck watch just laughed as I went by them.
The next morning, my pants were delivered to the ship by a police messenger.
The next weekend, I stayed away from that damned picture window.
The shipyard period was over soon, and we got underway again, this time again returning to the coast off of Florida, where we completed some specialized testing designed to establish the acoustic signature (underwater noise pattern) for our class of ships. Since this was one time when the pressure was not on the missile systems, I managed to get in a lot of studying. It also allowed Mark and I to make some finishing touches on the systems, touches that were nice to have, but were not the kind of things that we had found time for when we were bringing the systems on-line in the previous underway periods.
We returned to Norfolk in late November 1963, and we tied up to the piers for a break over the Christmas period. I was looking forward to some rest and relaxation and was debating whether to go home for Christmas. I liked being there for the holiday, but it would be a lot warmer and nicer if I waited until summer. Besides, Dad was usually away from home more during the summer months, and I didn’t look forward to having another Christmas run-in with him.
Early that December, I was in the after computer room working on a perplexing equipment problem when I got a call from the ship’s telephone switchboard operator. I picked up the handset and heard a deep, official-sounding voice say, “Is this FTM2 Noonan?”
“Yes.”
The voice went on, “I’m Lieutenant Masterson from the Bureau of Naval Personnel. My job is to provide personnel for new-construction Navy ships and I’ve just received a request from the Missile Center in Port Hueneme, California, for a few specific enlisted people. They’re picking a team for a new ship that’s going to be the first of a new class of missile ships. You’re one of the people that th
ey’re requesting. Are you interested?”
This came out of the blue. I had actually expected to stay aboard Yarnell and go to the Mediterranean the next year. Plus, I was not excited by the thought of going through the debugging of another new set of missile systems. I thought for a minute and then asked, “Can you tell me more about the ship and its schedule, Sir?”
“Sure. It’ll be USS Belknap (DLG-26). It’s under construction at Bath Iron Works up in Maine. If you take this offer, you’ll get to Bath in May 1964. The ship is to be commissioned in November, and it’s to be home-ported in Norfolk after that. The skipper is going to be Captain John Law. That’s about everything that I know. Are you interested?”
I had missed most of his explanation because I was quickly calculating the time periods. I knew that Navy per diem had just risen to $24 per day, and Bath was still a per-diem assignment. He was offering me about six months of per diem in Bath, Maine! That was enough to overcome my reservations.
I said, “Count me in, Lieutenant. If the Missile Center wants me, I’d be honored to support them.”
He signed off then, telling me that my orders would be coming within a week.
I just sat there looking at the phone in my hand and trying to sort out this latest development. This was definitely unplanned, and it would change my plans a good bit. I was still thinking about this when I heard the ship’s speaker system come on and the announcement, “FTM1 Wilcoux, please call the switchboard.”
I sat up straight as the obvious conclusion hit me: we had done well with the shakedown of the Yarnell, and now the Missile Center was hand-picking its crew for the next big ship program! I just knew that Wilcoux was having the same conversation that I had just had.