Since Tofu asked...

It was about 36 hours prior to the run-up to the attack on Iran to rescue the hostages. We were near the Gulf of Aden, off the main shipping lanes under full signal security. That means no radar, radio, can't even use the ships intercom or even put power on aircraft without permission.

I knew it was going to be a different day when I woke up that afternoon. In my squadron we were on 12 and 12. 12 hours off and 12 hours on. Seven days a week when we were at sea. So our shifts ran 7 to 7, AM to PM or vise versa. I was on the nightshift at the time.

So why was this afternoon so different? I went to bed that morning with both hanger bays empty and upon arising both hanger bays were full of mines!

Now I'm not talking about little wussy mines that blow the toes off Armymen or give a Main Battle Tank a flat tire, but big honking ship killing mines. And no, they aren't round knobby things anymore. They look like big green hot water heaters on steroids. Came in two flavors. One laid on the bottom and waited for you to pass overhead before detonating, driving a column of water through your ship, (That whole liquids don't compress thing, lethal down to 110 feet) AKA Bottom Mines and another, which also lay on the bottom, that detected an enemy vessal and then launched a torpedo at it, AKA CapTor mines. (Captive Torpedo) The Connie and her sisters were going to mine every harbor the Iranians had. Thickly too.

Couldn't help but think, "Hmmm, looks like somebodies going to get hurt here."

Anyway, the UNREP was still underway and we were taking on stores long into the night. At 1 AM myself and another man, AT2 Dave Kalchik, were troubleshooting a gripe and I was standing on a tool box, armpit deep in the port side avionics bay. The Passumpsic (AO-7) was tied up to our starboard side giving us fuel and the destroyer theLangley was tied up to the far side of them.

When the 1MC came on and in an "excited" voice the airboss came on and announced, "Emergency break away! Emergency breakaway!" and they then sounded the collision alarm. (Which, as far as alarms go, is rather anti-climatic. Sounds like somebody doing morse code, four dots repeating.)

Dumb ol' me, I remember thinking, "What the heck? You don't do emergency break away drills at the beginning of the evolution, you wait until the end, when all the work is done, so you don't have to re-tie up with each other."

Well now. The first thing I thought was that the Passumpsic had lost steerage. Another carrier a week earlier in the Pacific had its attending oiler lose steerage and the venturi effect drew the two ships together. They were locked together in a mutually destructive, grinding dance for about 45 minutes.

So I thought was happening here. I went over to the starboard side and watched in utter amazment as the Langley did one of those supertight destroyer turns to starboard that leave the deck on the inside of the turn underwater. I've only ever seen that once, but I've seen it. If there had been any kind of a sea state she would have taken water down the stack.

Now the Passumpsic. It was still making headway, but it was bobbing hard left and right, which didn't disuade my first assumption, that she had lost steerage. Then, all of a sudden, she got her act together and turned hard astarboard as well. Without, I might add, wanting for the emergency break away to finish. She just pulled away and parted about five different high pressure fuel lines. (Wow, I just remembered how it smelled, hundreds of gallons of JP5 volitilising into the night air) Which hosed down the bosun's mates who were handling the lines. Sometimes you just don't want to be drenched and standing ankle deep in fuel. This would be one of them.

So now I'm standing back from the deck edge, inboard and aft of the island as we made a turn hard astarboard as well and I recall turning to Dave and saying, "Why is the collision alarm still on? The Passumpsic is making good head way away from us!"

When several things happened at once.

As I had turned my head to the left to say this I noticed a guy running aft from up forward with his arms over his head in a panic screaming, "In front of us! In front of us!"

Then we hit. I actually saw the ripple in the flightdeck move towards me. After it passed, my legs had that pain you get from jumping down from too high.

Then my brain went into that weird hyper-concentration mode. Things look like they are moving in slow motion.

The next thing that crossed my mind was bottomless cold horror. The only civilian ships we had passed for the last two days were liquified natural gas tankers. Ramming one of those would have constituted a Very Bad Thing. And for several moments that's exactly what I thought had happened.

When you really, really think you are about to burn to death or be blown to flinders your brain sort of compartmentalizes itself. Forebrain, midbrain, hindbrain. I was wanting for the sound of ruptured LNG hitting the water and freezing it and an overwhelming smell of gas (I know, the smell is added later, but I was "tense") when I saw the Big Black Cranes. It was here that my midbrain got all giggly with relief. LNG tankers don't have those four large cranes on each side.

Here's what those cranes were doing.

They looked like giant black skeletal fingers reaching over the port side deck edge. As the Bangler Joy passed down our port side the bobbing action caused the "fingers" to rise and fall and they took out the landing light system, which made a godawful mess of broken glass all over the forward part of the angle AND started shearing off the portside catwalk. Now that's a weird memory. The catwalk has a floor of perforated heavy guage steel 5/8th of an inch thick, with heavy tubular steel railings. It was curling up like an apple peeling. 400 feet of heavy guage catwalk curled into two full spirals. When this got even with me the was a pause as the cranes sheared off the earlier mentioned fire control radar, and the whole mess then fell away from me, thank God.

The Bangler Joy then stove in the newly replentished SAM warhead magazine, (Terriers, I believe they were) which I was standing on top of, then passed clear of us. The bulkhead in the magazine was pressed in to within two inchs of a pallet of warheads.

They then sounded General Quarters. I remember running to my shop in a dream-like state. I thought we might have been holed below the waterline. I got to the shop and tried to tell my people what just happened. My voice sounded curiously muted to my own ears. My shop chief, ATC Dave Baker, grabbed me by the shoudlers, shook me, and was trying to tell me something but I couldn't hear what he was saying either.

That's because I was so jacked up on adrenilin I was jumping up and down and screaming, "OHMYGODWEJUSTHITANOTHERSHIPANDITTOREOFFTHECATWALK ANDTHELANDINGLIGHTSANDITHINKWEAREHOLEDBELOWDECKS!"

The only injuries we sustained were the usual broken arms and noses we get every time we go to G.Q. for real, due to guys running through the hanger bay and tripping over tie down chains. Happens every single time.


No body lost their job. We had no radar, we were tied to another ship, we were off the shipping lanes. Our helo pickets saw the other ship but the entire crew of the Banglar Joy was asleep with no watch.

Our ship's captain was Bud Edney, who still made Admiral. He was good at his job.

We called him the Sea Fox. Which is really good when the peons come up with a cool nickname for you. But thats another story.

BD

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"The beauty of that discussion of averages is that you don't have to be an expert in Apollo or in photography in order to see where this time study "analysis" breaks down. You just have to be, well...not an idiot." -JayUtah