This from PC3 Barger
It seems everyone has a story to tell about their time on the ship; well here’s mine. I was on the USS LaSalle AGF-5 in the Persian Gulf and had received orders to Jesse and thought great now I am back stateside. We had been on alert due to the Iranians taking hostages from day 1 and Bahrain was our “Homeport “and we were out to sea forever, I packed my bags and headed to Indiana for a well-deserved break. Then off to Charleston and my new ship. When I arrived I found out that Jesse wasn’t there and no one knew where she was so I waited. After about 1 ˝ weeks I am on my way to Jesse but where I didn’t know. Right before I left they said she was in the Persian Gulf and the I/O....... yea Great here we go again.
Well I’ll be damned back to the Gulf I went, the opposite way. It was a long Journey, Calf. 2 days, Alaska 8 hours, The PI for a week, Diego Garcia 6 hours, then 3 more ships 1 overnight just to reach Jesse. Then the time came and off we went from a Carrier in a Chinook dropping people off different places then I was the only one left. As we flew I seen Jesse and noted that this big bird wasn’t going to land on “THAT “flight deck and I was told nope we are just going to toss you out the side door and I thought yea right!!!. He gave me a vest and proceeded to explain what they we going to do. I was to step out on the steps then just step off and they would lower me down on a cable and to let the people on the deck ground me with a rod but sit on my rear on the deck to be safe. I was the laugh of then day when the deck crew kept trying to get me stand but hey I was told to sit so I did, everyone had a big laugh. I was welcomed like a new Captain because she hadn’t had a Postal Clerk in a couple of months. She had a great bunch of guys on her and I made some good friends, its something I will always treasure. I have allot of memories and stories from the short time I was on the JLB.
Just a note 1 ˝ years later when I got out of the Navy low and behold we had gone back to the Persian Gulf again and I left Bahrain for the last time. 3 times I went to the gulf, I guess that was enough for me. I got out of the Navy in Philly and 1 year later I joined the Army but that’s another story.
Paul Barger PC3 80-82
These stories are from Phil Atwood, a Plank Owner and FTG.
Practical Jokes...
One neat little feature of the Gun Director's Dish antenna was that as well as focusing radar beams into the radar receiver, it could focus sound waves outward, traveling fairly long distances.
So, when pulling maintenance on the director while in port, we would sometimes find an unsuspecting person down on the pier.
We would aim the dish at them, stand in front of the feedhorn and talk into the dish, with the radar turned off, of course.
Our voice would appear to come from "out of the sky" and we could definitely see the confusion on their faces as they tried to figure out where this voice was coming from.
We never said anything mean, usually just saying we were down in the water, or this was "God" telling them we were watching them and they better straighten up.
So, if any of you had heard any "voices" from out of nowhere, I apologize.
It was, I hope, a harmless joke and didn't leave you feeling paranoid.
Dropping the Load...
Anyone on board during the First Med Cruise ( '74 ? ) remembers the time we Dropped the Load after leaving Naples with an "International Squadron made up of us, a Turkish Destroyer, a Canadian destroyer and an Italian destroyer, all headed for Marseille, France.
We had just left the port and lost all power aboard ship.
The backup Diesel just would not start.
The GM's even tried to use the high pressure in their Mount 51 Hydraulic Accumulator to start the diesel using some ingenious plumbing and piping valve setups, but to no avail.
We ended up being towed back to port by an Italian tug.
But, we were subject to the power outages even while in the yards in Boston before commissioning.
Evidently, the ship's electrical load was right at the edge of the source supplied by the shipyard.
There were times when starting up one of the electric hot air hand dryers in the forward head would trip the circuits. The EM's eventually disconnected those hot air dryers for the duration of our stay in the yards.
During commissioning ceremonies, I was stationed in the Gun Director to "spin it" when the 1089 was officially commissioned and called to active duty, in essence to show the ship "coming alive and ready for action".
Just before that occurred, I got a call over the 21MC to refrain from moving the director for fear that it might trip the power to the ship, an obviously bad omen for a new ship.
It was decided that the Air and Surface Search Radars could be rotated safely.
So, I watched the ceremonies from above and everything else, as they say, is history.
Grenades in Port Said...
We were one of the first US military ships to transit the Suez Canal after it was reopened.
We spent the night before anchored in Port Said, Egypt.
About every 10 - 20 minutes, we could hear a fairly loud explosion, that resonated thru the ship's hull.
The next morning it was explained that the Egyptian Police / Military would come out to the edge of the pier and throw a live hand grenade into the water, every 10 - 20 minutes or so.
This was supposedly to keep any enemy divers from swimming in the waters near the ships.
don't know if it's true, but that was what we were told.
We don't have enough fuel to make it to Africa
Posted on that site May 21st, 2005 by xformed
History, it’s fun stuff, especially when you are present.
Each year, the Navy sends a group of ships, to exercise with the navies of Central and South America. The cruise is named “UNITAS” and has been a long tradition of showing the flag in the southern part of the Western Hemisphere. While there is good professional, at sea experience to be had, and the opportunity to meet with your professional counterparts from other countries, there also is a requirement to enter port and attended “mandatory fun.” More on what that looks like is a topic to be reserved for a later post.
In the later part of 1983, two of the ships of the UNITAS task force were detached to go on the West African Training Cruise (WATC). One ship was mine, USS CONOLLY (DD-979), where I was assigned as Engineer Officer. The other was the USS JESSE L BROWN (FF-1089).
We had both been import in Brazil, in a port north of Rio de Janeiro. The BROWN was next to the pier, and we had been “nested” (moored to the outboard side) to the BROWN. The day before departure, both ships were scheduled to refuel. The hoses first went to the BROWN, and upon her completion of fueling, the hose would be brought across her deck to our fueling stations. I had my fueling team stay aboard that day, anticipating it would be our time to fuel about noon.
About mid-morning, the Duty Engineer called me and said BROWN was done fueling and we were getting ready to receive the hoses. I recall thinking that had been a very fast refueling, but, ordered the engineers to get us fueled.
We sailed east the next morning without incident, the BROWN leaving port right behind us. Our destination was Liberville, Gabon, and hers Equatorial Guinea. While we were “proceeding independently,” because our destinations were close together on the continent of Africa, we would end up sailing close to one another for about half of the transit across the Southern Atlantic Ocean.
We sailed in the warm, almost empty ocean for several days, when we received a message from the BROWN: “We don’t have enough fuel to reach Africa.” Exacerbating the problem tremendously was the fact that the USS SEATTLE (AOE-3), who had sailed south to meet the UNITAS group for exercises with the Brazilian Navy, had already headed back north the States. CONOLLY was the only ship within thousands of miles that could help.
No destroyer is designed to give fuel away. That being said, we have to get fuel down from the topside refueling stations, and it’s just a matter of pipes and valves, and having some sort of pumping system to reverse the flow. There is a very minimal capability to do this, in particular for a condition where you may have to de-fuel the ship. Having the competent crew that we did, I sat down with CDR Harry Maxiner (the Captain) and LT John Taylor, the Weapons Officer, and a few key players to figure out how to transfer fuel at sea to another ship. We had two options. One was to rendezvous with the BROWN, have one ship go to all stop and rig fenders, so the other ship could come alongside and moor together. Option two was to pass the fuel via connected replenishment while underway, using a manila “highline” and 2 ˝ inch fire hose as the delivery method. Option two had the least impact on the arrival schedule in Africa for both ships. In any case, the transfer rate of fuel would be very slow, so to stop at sea for a better part of a day would put us both behind in meeting our “show the flag” commitments.
LT Al Curry, my Main Propulsion Assistant and men of “M” Division got the plan together for using our fuel transfer pumps (used to take fuel from the storage or “bunker” tanks to the service or “day” tanks) to send the fuel about 50 feet up in the fuel piping, where it would cross over to the BROWN in the fire hoses. John Taylor put the Boatswains Mates to work laying out the lines, hoses and blocks necessary to make a RAS (replenishment at sea) rig.
We rendezvoused with BROWN and Captain Maxiner set it up for us to make the approach (meaning BROWN would sail at a set course and speed and we would come up from astern of her, off to one side about 120 ft, at a higher speed, until we were alongside her where the location of our fueling station and her receiving station were across from each other, then match BROWN’s speed). The best part about this is that meant our officers and crew would get the experience of shiphandling in close quarters, and all BROWN would have to do was make sure their helmsman steered his course.
The approach was generally uneventful except for our smirks at our peers, who, I’d conjecture, had been too anxious to get out for a last day of liberty in Brazil (and let me just add, liberty in Brazil is wonderful), than making sure they had been “topped off” prior to sailing. It is customary when a ship comes alongside a delivery ship, such as the USS MILWAUKEE (AOR-2), my first duty at sea, the delivery ship would announce over the topside 1MC circuit (the loudspeakers) something to the effect of “Aboard the USS JESSE L BROWN, welcome alongside USS CONOLLY. You are the first ship alongside this deployment. Standby for shot lines fore and aft!” After that, the receiving ship deck crew would have the fueling station supervisor blow a long whistle burst and direct the signalman to indicate readiness to accept the shot line. The delivery ship station crew blew a whistle and the directed the gunner’s mate to shoot. The passing of the hoses to the BROWN as planned and we pumped about 30K gallons of fuel to her in the next four hours.
It was history. No SPRUANCE Class destroyer had yet done this. To document the event, we sent a message off to Destroyer Squadron TEN, our parent command. In response, we got a message back, telling us they would log in the successful completion of a “Z-26-S Delivering Fuel” exercise in our training and readiness matrix. In the TREAD Manual, that was not one we had been required to do (for obvious reasons). They gave us a score of 100%.
The BROWN proceeded to Equatorial Guinea, making it safely. We still had plenty of fuel to arrive in Liberville on time. We had bragging rights for the first, and gloating rights over our counterparts aboard BROWN. We didn’t have any close interaction with them for the rest of the cruise, such as a port visit together, where I’m sure my “snipes” would have made the point of who was better in the local bars. Our homeport was Norfolk, and the BROWN’s was Charleston, so we went on our separate ways, returning home in mid-December of 83.
Our mistake on the CONOLLY was to not have the Public Affairs Officer write up the event for an article in All Hands, or Surface Warfare Magazine. A few years later, one of the Pacific Fleet SPRUANCEs did the same type of operation, and they took the time to grab that overworked junior officer and make him draft and submit the article to Surface Warfare Magazine.
I was there, I know who was really first.
