How does one tell the story of the greater part of the year in a few paragraphs?
I didn't cry when we left... not even when Michael waved goodbye from the pier as I waved back from the foc'sle to see him off. We weren't leaving for a while, and my Sea & Anchor station was in Sonar Control on the Fathometer. Wouldn't be able to see him as we pulled away. It was kind of a rainy, overcast, gray day. I was very ready to go. Had been preparing for this since boot camp, nearly 3 & 1/2 years before. It was time. I was excited.
The funniest thing that happened the first day at sea was the successful suicide of our printer. Although tied down, it decided to jump off the shelf and fly across the room, shattering itself right in front of the door to Sonar Control. The seas were a bit rough. I managed to keep my dinner down all through watch, and I thought I was good to go once I made it into my rack, but it was not to be. My stomach felt so twisted up and sick, that it wasn't five minutes I was laying down and I realized there was no hope but to run to the head. And only then was I finally okay.
Looking back at my emails to Michael, I see that I got really frustrated with things right away. I had to jump through numerous hoops to try and get a new printer for the division. And I was having a hard time with the person heading up the Second Class POs Association. She had asked me to be the secretary, and then started lording it over me when I couldn't meet her expectations because of my watch schedule or what not. So it started out with a bang.
There was one night on watch where we got to listen to some whales... that was the only time I've ever heard them; it was one of those unexpected moments of pure pleasure! Lots of things in the Navy are dull, monotonous and rather annoying. But the random times where you find joy makes it bearable.
We diddled around in the Atlantic for quite a while longer than we needed for crossing it. We were doing exercises as if we were preparing for deployment... not on it! Crazy! There was another destroyer that was having trouble and we stayed with her, going very slow.
But when we finally did cross, I was put on the permanent SCAT (small caliber arms team - I think that's what it stands for). So that meant that I was topside on the foc'sle, at the starboard .50 cal mount in a helmet and flak jacket with live ammo in case we were attacked while going through the restricted maneuvering of the straits transit. THE STRAITS OF GIBRALTAR! The day before we were just off the cape of Trafalgar, but I hadn't realized it... and I was thinking about Nelson anyway. "Nelson sailed here!" I thought. I didn't know that it was where he had died.
It was so exciting to see Morocco! and Spain to port! The lights along the shore gave a little definition to an otherwise dark morning. The carrier and cruiser were out ahead of us, so I had quite a view the whole time. Africa and Europe! I still couldn't believe it. And a little later on, after the sun had come up blazing red behind the mountains in Morocco and turned golden as she kept rising, I saw the ROCK. It was huge! I could only imagine what it would have been like to see it back in the day and feel comfort if you were aligned with the crown or fear if you were not.
So we were in the Mediterranean. It was sunny, and calm compared to the Atlantic in winter. The evening of the transit, I had my First Class Petty Officer Murder Board for ESWS (enlisted surface warfare specialist) qualification and pin. Ms Roberts, another sonar technician, was doing it with me. We were terrified, but managed to pass with only a few look-ups. Engineering killed us, because it's all so new, it was like learning a new language. We both had Weapons down pat!
It was a few days before we pulled into our first port. I think we had to move the torpedoes again while we sailed... we were either moving them from the magazine or just taking them out briefly to make sure the tubes still fired. Our first port was Souda Bay, Crete (Greece). I think it was my favorite, but that might have been because it was so. They were very stern on the Quarterdeck about how "Liberty is a mission!" and about how were were single-handedly representing the United States to the people of Greece... etc. That is true to some extent, but I just can't believe it's as serious as all that.
Us Sonar Tech Girls went out to a lovely cafe and had lamb and wine. I don't think I could have been happier. We walked around the town, bought some souvenirs, and found our way up a hilltop in the center of the town and had an unbelievably beautiful view of the city stretched below us and the green hills and towering mountains surrounding us. It was wonderful.
From that port visit, we transited the Aegean Sea to the mouth of the Dardanelles. I was again on SCAT for this, taking over just as we were passing the first city, Canakkale, Turkey. There were monuments to the ages past... castles guarding the way to Constantinople, and also a poem written on the hillside about WWI. I was in heaven. [Here are some more pics.] My watch lasted until we reached the Sea of Marmara (on the return route, I saw the beginning part I had missed the first time; it was very meaningful to me to see it all... my university's fight song was written just after WWI and includes the line, "it's harder to push them over the lines than past the Dardanelles." My Division Officer is also an alum of the University of Washington, and he mentioned it was exciting for him for the same reason.)
We visited Constanta, Romania [I took a sponsored bus tour with my friends that went to Peles Castle, Dracula's Castle, and included a lunch and dinner buffet of local sausages, cheeses, wines, etc. We had a very fun time]. After a short exercise with the Romanian and Bulgarian Navies, we also visited Varna, Bulgaria. I loved this port too, spending relaxed time out in town with my Sonar peoples. Varna has peculiar memories for me... on my duty day, my watch was manning the .50 cal at night. It was in the middle of the watch and I had to go! Got permission, but in my haste, I slipped on the ladder down to berthing and hit the inside of my left thigh on the bar supporting the handrail... I had a bruise about 10" square that took weeks to go away. I was lucky I didn't break my ankle or something.
We stopped by Souda Bay again on our way south, but this was just for re-fueling and a stores on-load. No liberty at all because it was only for a few hours. Our first Suez Canal transit was on my birthday, March 25th. And I spent two sets of three hours of it at the .50 cal, very hot in my gear. I had the first watch (from Port Said to the Peace Bridge - and I saw a train rattling alongside that had a horn like a duck) and the last watch of the transit, exiting through the city of Suez.
So, most of the excitement was over after that. We stopped some gun-runners, but that was more of a drag than anything, waiting for permission from other countries to do anything at all with them or their skiff. I continued work on ESWS, having my Chief's Board on April 4th (It was then that my life changed. If I could do this, if I could speak in front of the subject knowledge experts, I could do anything. Just before it started, one of my fellow Lay Leaders got on the 1MC and said the evening prayer... it encouraged me beyond words to know the Lord was with me and was going to help me. I was calm and ready then. My heart returned to normal.) And not many days after that, my Senior Chief nominated me for the Weapons Department Junior Sailor of the Quarter... which meant another Chief's Board. You walk in, say the Sailor's Creed by yourself, get inspected, then sit down and answer a couple questions from each of the dozen or so chiefs. Nerve wracking, but I was confident. Got pinned (ESWS) by my best friend on April 18th in the Gulf of Aqaba, and that was when they announced my name as the Junior Sailor of the Quarter.
That was over three weeks of sitting around in the Red Sea. Plenty of time to think about life and what a person wants out of it. Because there is nowhere to go... nothing to do but whatever keeps your mind off the boredom. After the all-consuming ESWS was done, I spent a solid week or so typing up my notes and putting them on the share drive so other people could use them. Then I spent another couple weeks planning how I would build my house back in Washington. Drew it out very carefully about five times. Went back and forth and around about if I wanted to re-enlist or not... but that's not to be finally decided until 2016.
But on April 19th, we pulled in to Aqaba! The next day I was able to go on the all day tour of PETRA! I rode a camel with my best friend (each on our own camels) and had a fabulous local lunch buffet at the end. It was a two-hour bus ride from the ship to the city. Slept a lot on the way back! I remember thinking as I walked the ruins of the ancient city... "This is why I joined the Navy." It was that cool! The day after that I took another tour, this to Wadi Rum, where we were driven around the desert in pickups driven by teenagers and managed to stay alive. Visited a site were Lawrence of Arabia stayed with the Bedouins, and had another wonderful Arab-style lunch.
In order to keep myself busy after ESWS, I had volunteered to take on the task of organizing the ship's library. We had over fifty small boxes of brand new books shoved under the tables of the library/career counselor's office. The Navy General Library Program sends us these boxes every so often... and they'd been stacking up. Took me about a week or two, but I went through them all, cataloging them and organizing them... over 4,000 titles I think. I found several awesome books to read myself while I did this, like On the Map, The Guns of August, The Hiding Place, The Killer Angels, and Code Name Verity. Overall, I read 36 books and started a few others. I had a bag full of books from home that I had brought along too.Although I had been sewing for people on board since the beginning of deployment, I made it official, putting it out to the crew after the change of command in Aqaba, when the new captain was going to allow us to use the old cloth crows on our new flame resistant coveralls... in an All Hands email, and also with a note in the POD (plan of the day) for an entire week around the first of July. I also offered coverall repair, and people started coming to me for putting badges and patches on their dress uniforms and working uniforms too. By deployment's end, I sewed for roughly half the 300-man crew. Kept me busy helping people... which is my happy place. I have a half-size sewing machine that I keep in one of our equipment rooms up forward.
I'll have to condense. In May we pulled into Muscat, Oman, (I stayed at a very swanky hotel resort with a couple friends, and then the next day we went snorkeling). Then we spent half a month in the Gulf with the carrier before stopping in glorious Bahrain. Played baseball against the US high school team there. We also had DITS, (division in the spotlight) where our spaces get inspected. We did great, but the chain of command WILL WORRY anyway. We left the Gulf in the end of July, in order to escort submarines through the Suez canal... We had a short break in the Med, pulling into Cyprus in the beginning of August. That was lovely fun. Stayed at another swank hotel with the ship's Navy Counselor, and I made sure to go swimming out as far as I could. There was a quick stop in Aqaba again near the end of August. That was when I got qualified for Sonar Supervisor and took over my own watch team. I didn't go on any trips this time, but did enjoy a morning 5K run with my friend the second day, and a very salty swim the next. September 1st was our last southbound trip through the canal; in total we completed 12 transits... 6 southbound and 6 northbound. It's safe to say that I know every inch of it pretty well.
It was another month and a half of patrolling the Red Sea, Arabian Sea, Gulf of Oman, and Arabian Gulf before our port visit to the United Arab Eremites at Abu Dhabi. I took a city tour on my day off. Got to see their huge grand mosque, and had to be covered up in a long black paper-thin dress and shawl. October 26th marked our last day in the Middle East. And then we steamed for France (so to speak). We pulled into Villafranche-sur-Mer, France, next to Nice, for a wonderful three-day visit. Took the train to Monaco while we were there, and saw the Oceanographic Museum; best I've ever seen. Had a very rocky trip from Villafranche-sur-Mer to Gibraltar... just as bad or worse than it was the first day back in February. This time I was wise to myself and didn't eat very much.
I spent the last week across the Atlantic obsessing about that book... Code Name Verity. It spoke volumes to me... it's about a couple of young women in the WAAF (Britain's Women's Auxiliary Air Force in 1940) who over the course of three years fight the Nazis in different ways and become best friends in the process. One ends up flying planes for the ATA, and the other becomes a special agent in the SOE. The book is narrated by the special agent who has been captured in France. As a teenager, I was reading 500-page history books about WWII before I read things like Jane Austen. Not only did it speak about topics I knew little about (plane ferrying and the French resistance), but it made me laugh about things only military women understand... and it made me feel less like a prisoner myself after reading about someone being tortured by the Gestapo. And I bought the follow-up novel (Rose Under Fire) that was all about Ravensbruck, the women's concentration camp... and that made me appreciate even galley food.
So yes, deployment felt rather like a prison sentence, but there were glimmerings of hope and happiness sprinkled liberally throughout it. And then we were released November 15th. What joy! God bless America!
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