In The Navy (On the Boat), Part 10

The certification exercise was a big deal and includes multiple boats and ships. All of the bigwigs (Admirals) come out to watch, some ride Boats and some on Ships. The Control Room gets very crowded, but since I was fairly new, I was placed in the Torpedo Room. I had rehearsed and gone over the whole process with Dyke and had the system down pretty good.

A game of cat and mouse is played out between the surface ships and the Boats. They try to locate us and we try to get into a good position to blow them out of the water. At a later certification exercise, I was in the Control Room, which I would call slightly organized mayhem. It’s a good feeling to be up there when you get a “kill”, though. Everyone high-fives and a cheer goes out from the Control Room.

The Torpedoes are exercise weapons, they have nothing that can go boom, except the fuel, of course. The nose of the weapon is filled with recording and sensor equipment, so the whole event can be analyzed later. There is also a special modification made to the weapon, so it will (if all goes well) turn away from the target before it actually hits it. This is to avoid Torpedo sized holes in the sides of the Ships and Boats. This feature did not always work and every now and then, a Boat of ship would emerge from the exercise with some damage. I heard that once, a Torpedo actually lodged itself into a Boat’s Sail Plane.

Meanwhile, back in the Torpedo Room….
So there I am with a headset on in front of the Launch Panel with a TM who is operating the tubes. Other TMs are loading weapons or moving them around the racks. The tubes are preloaded, so while we are still pretty far from the ships, we flood them and get the Torpedoes warmed up. Flooding a tube is pretty noisy, so you want to do that ahead of time, if you know you are going to be in a fight.

The cat and mouse part of this can take hours and these exercises go on 24 hours, there were a lot of Boats back then that had to be certified. So needless to say, people started to get sleepy after 15 or more hours of this. We would wind up laying all over each other, which in any other circumstance would seem a little gay to me, but when you are that tired and want to grab a quick nap and are secure in your masculinity and not a knob jockey, I think it’s ok.

During my last cert, I was just leaning back dozing and at one point and had someone’s head in my lap, Smitty I think. I was dragged out of my haze by a loud “Oooouuuuch! Shit!”.

I straightened up and looked to my right to see the TM LPO (lead dude, called Taco) soaking wet and trying to hold a Torpedo guide wire in his hand. He dropped it quickly because it was shocking him. There was a plume of water shooting out of the tiny (maybe pinky finger sized, if that) hole that you feed the guide wire though. Inside the tube the wire it connects to the Torpedo’s guide wire housing.

It was surrealistic really, almost 3 Stooges like. Taco had managed to screw up the grommet (a washer like thing) that holds the wire in the tube and keeps water out. So water is shooting across the Torpedo Room, because the tube is pressurized and it’s hitting Taco as he flails around grabbing the wire, getting shocked, (400 hz) hollered and then dropping it, picking it back up, getting shocked, hollered and dropping it again. It was hilarious to watch.

Laughing like hell, I didn’t even ask permission, I called in the headset, “Closing outer door, tube 2, we have lost the guide wire.” They knew it upstairs too; there were indicators, so they had already started to power down the weapon. Taco was pissed because he knew he would be in trouble, but I didn’t care. He would never have been able to reconnect the wire like things were. After we closed the outer door to the tube, the Weapons Officer (Weps, for short) appeared in the room, very pissed off like I had never seen him before. He was screaming at the TMs and at me. We drained the tube and Taco got the wire reconnected, which required opening the inner tube breach (the door). Then we closed the tube and flooded it again.

If you are interested, you can read how a Torpedo Tube works here; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torpedo_tube In short; it gets pushed out by the water flowing up behind it when a big air powered ram pushes a few tons of water into the back of the tube.

The Weps hung around for almost an hour before being called back to the Control room. He was nagging everyone about every little thing before he left. Quite the ass he was. The look we got as he left was not good. When the Weps left Taco came over to me, still soaking wet and put his finger in my face and started lecturing me loudly, so I lectured back loudly. He was a 2nd class PO and I was still a lowly 3rd class, but I didn’t care, I was right to do it. Things cooled off pretty quickly, and in retrospect, they always do, they have to. We are all stuck together in a tin can, with nowhere to go!