IN THE GULF OF OMAN
Reader’s Note: Second Case of Ebola among the health workers who treated Mr. Duncan. I choose to escape into the past for a few days.
– Vic
NOV 79- FEB 80
04 November 1979
I was going to go to chow an eon ago. It was another of the series of grey identical days that make up any deployment, but particularly any Indian Ocean Deployment.
We were still sorting out the legacy of the visit to Perth; who did what to whom, why they did it, and how we would throw It All In for a good piece of land and a good piece of Australian Ass. Hangovers were lingering, and this was after the transit over to Diego Garcia. We had been paying the night-time dues to the God of Night Landings.
That Deity had been good, though, providing the Airwing with a fat Commander’s Moon and a decent horizon. We were starting to get everyone night qualified again, and Africa was looming up on the schedule less than a week away. So we were in that schedule interstice between beaches, heading for the warm beaches of Mombasa as the brilliant Australian sun faded into legend in the wake behind us.
I don’t remember what chow was that night. It would have been one of the ten standard menus: some sort of meat and over-cooked vegetables, relieved only by the prospect of lettuce barely wilted. “Grits” Wheatley came up behind me as I was descending the Officer’s Ladder back by the E-2 Hawkeye AEW turboprop that was going into corrosion control work way back aft in the Hangar Bay. He said:
“Have you heard, Vic? They took the U.S. Embassy in Tehran.”
“Who did? Where did you hear that?”
“Some bunch of Ragheads. They took hostages, I guess. I heard it from Jim back in MSI.”
“Wonder if we are going to do something?”
“Dunno.” An aircraft snagged an OK-2 wire on the flight deck above our heads and the hangar bay echoed with the crash of the arresting grew rolling out and about fifty thousand pounds of jet tugging on it. I walked down the ladder, careful not to touch my knees to the assimilated grime on the treads. You gotta make these uniforms last more than a couple days, you know?
Chow was the usual. Some kind of meat, some kind of semi-cooked potatoes, and the lettuce wasn’t too gamey yet. Which is to say that you could avoid the black spots without making a public spectacle of yourself. The aft wardroom was full of the familiar crowd of dirty-shirts in flight suits and engineering coveralls, and a few khaki-clad fugitives from the Big People’s Mess up forward where you have to be attired in the full uniform of the day. I like eating with my airwing buddies, particularly when there is good gossip to pass out.
Midway’s two long dining tables are ideal for shouting and carrying on. The topic of this one was not hard to discern. Mostly it dealt with the possibility of getting Silver Stars, which are awarded to aviation types for flaming a MiG. Or, in this case, maybe the pride of the Grumman Irons Works, the F-14.
I had the feeling that things were going to go to high PRF for the evening, so I took my time over dinner, luxuriating in being the official Air Wing Gossip. I grabbed a cup of coffee and fed a couple quarters into the Space Invaders machine in the Officer’s lounge. The damned machines are amazing. They are arcade games that have made the S-5 Division (Wardroom Supply over $20,000 bucks since they were installed back in Yokosuka. Not much else to do out on the Bounding Main. Soon enough I had wasted all my quarters, and there was no hope for it but to go back to work.
I wandered back up the hangar bay and climbed the ladder to the 02-level where most of my two years on the grey lady have been spent. I cruised in through the camouflage painted door and saw Bedlam. The ship had received a call from 7th Fleet, Flag Privacy Channel, and about two minutes after we recovered the last airplane on the launch cycle we were northbound for the Persian Gulf.
As a direct reaction to that move there were more Commanders standing around than you could normally beat out of their racks with a stick. Apprehensive looking J.O.s were hanging around asking questions. The foremost dealt with the words AAA and Sam. I didn’t have any more than the superficial answers and felt inadequate, since I have learned my job well. Unfortunately, my Job has been all peacetime exercises and flight ops, none of which have much application to blowing the shit out of somebody else’s homes, ships and, airplanes.
It got so bad that they had to block off the front half of the room so the Marine enlisted kids and Frank Oxsen could work on plotting the Order of Battle for Iran. I soaked up what I could and got the Word back to Skipper Hughes. Never hurts to keep the Old Man informed. I grabbed Mr. Sluggo, the XO for this Indian Ocean deployment. He was normally the Maintenance Officer, but we were not supposed to be here and the pipeline for the real XO was such that he would not arrive for a couple months.
I like Mr. Sluggo a lot, and tried to keep him as far ahead of the situation as is possible from my humble position.
It also makes me feel important to grab the Heavies and drag them over to the corner and whisper the few facts to which I can get access, so shoot me. Unfortunately, the movie started and I watched a reel or two of Pretty Baby to see Brook Shield’s pre-pubescent tits before I went back to Mission Planning to see what had come in over the Foreign Broadcast Information Service. I was trying to get Main Comm to pipe us All-India Radio as an alternative to AFRTS, but not making much progress. People thought the Indian media was kind of strange, like the News from Mars.
Reports were starting to filter in, and the situation looked grim. The Embassy had definitely fallen, the staff there was definitely being held hostage, and the Planning Spaces were definitely deserted, because we got another phone call that declared in no uncertain terms that we were going to go on to Africa as planned and the folks back in Washington would work on the problem and get back to us, thank you very much.
I was somewhat crestfallen that all the excitement was over, and that the great United States was going to pussy out again, like with the Pueblo and the EC-121 and the tree-chopping incident all the other ones. I so reported to the heavyweights and the situation went back to normal. We returned to a westerly heading for Mombasa, I watched the end of the movie, and eventually everyone went to the rack.
Copyright 2014 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303