My Navy years never a dull moment, very exciting times....

Date:   6/5/2005 8:29:09 PM ( 19 y ago)

Well folks we left off some time in my Navy years...  Exciting times never a dull moment as they say...  The first part of the time I spent in was on a Destroyer Escort stationed out of Key West, FL....  Before it became one of the "Gay Hangouts" of the world... 

As I had said we were there to train; Fleet Sonar School...  M Thru R {4 days a week} the Haze Gray Navy buses would pull up on the pier, and we would take on our students for the day...  They were from many different countries, as well as the USA...  We had Dutch, Viet Namese, British, Australian, Turkish, Pakistani, and some other Asian countries....   Then along with another can; we would go out in the Submarine operating area just south of Key West  with one of the training Subs... Either the USS Marlin or the USS  Mackrel.....    The Sub would go under and then one of the Cans would start looking for the sub... This was the sonar training part..  The other Can would patrol around the Sub operating area, until it was their turn to hunt for the sub, then we swapped places.. 

This was the routine, until lunch time the sub would surface and we did lunch, til 13:00 Hrs... Then the Sub would go back under to play games til about 15:30 Hrs, when we would head back in.... It was normally just SSDD....  But some times things changed, and so it was...  What the sonar coning officer did was to coordinate the tracking and attack on the sub...  Many times we had a hard time understanding their commands, with language difference and all... 

 That was only part of the difficulty; one day as we closed on the Sub, and  got within firing range of the Hedge hog mount... {There were phosphorescent die on the projectile}  Once we fired the mount and the die hit the water there was a large bright green patch, the Sub was suppose to release a air slug from their torpedo tubes and the distance between each was how we saw if it would have been a hit...  Well one day the boys down below were not playing fair, they would not release the air slug soon enough so it looked like we were way off targe....  One of our Chief Sonar man was by the way a Dakota Indian, and get real mad that the Sub was making us look stupid...

So he went to the armory and obtained a hand grenade...   They then strapped it to the top of the next hedge hog we were ready to launch,  the garnade was placed inside a roll of toilet paper and the pin pulled..  So when the hedgehog was fired an hit the water the TP would begin to come apart...  Well we launched it and sure enough it came to rest on the Sub's deck plate, and about that time the tp was washed away and 30 Secs later a loud explosion went off and that got their attention..  We were right on target...  They did not cheat much after that....

We will continue with more real stories of this man Navy... Stay tuned ...

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