My Harvard College and Yale— A young man’s learning curve at sea.
A year to the day after enlisting in the U.S. Navy, I flew from my native San Francisco to Philadelphia to report for duty on board the USS Leary (DD-879), then in the shipyard undergoing a fleet rehabilitation and modernization (FRAM) conversion. The return to the East Coast after a two-week leave meant Norfolk would be homeport for the remainder of my enlistment, three years and a wakeup.
The Atlantic and Mediterranean—especially the Med—beckoned to a landbound sailor weary of the classroom, eager to put to sea. The watery parts of the world would have to wait a little longer for this bluejacket though, since the Leary sat in drydock, looking worse for 19 years of wear. She was a ship in name only, welding lines everywhere, debris strewn bow to stern, and looking as disheveled and forbidding as the hardcore lifer manning the quarterdeck as petty officer of the watch.
I was an E-3, a 19-year-old seaman freshly graduated from Fire Control Technician A School in Bainbridge, Maryland. As I stood on the edge of the drydock, sweltering in my dress blues on a torrid early evening in August 1964, taken aback by the squalid epiphany just below me, I cursed my luck. Instead of a brand-new Polaris submarine—the reason I joined the Navy—I was to ship on board a vintage “tin can,” commissioned eight days before I was born, a Gearing-class destroyer whose fierce motto, “No Quarter,” had not been put to the martial test, too late for World War II and too incendiary for the Cold War.
Another venerable dime-a-dozen destroyer undergoing fleet rehabilitation and modernization, the Leary was a veteran of the 1958 U.S. invasion of Lebanon and the Cuban Missile Crisis. Logging hundreds of thousands of nautical miles over two decades, she was getting a ten-year life extension, with cutting-edge electronics married to a Westinghouse steam plant that had seen better days. The cutting-out was finished, and while a radar picket destroyer no longer, she was nowhere near antisubmarine warfare (ASW) completion, even if she did showcase an outsized sonar dome housing the new SQS-23 sonar. ASW was the name of the game, with the 400-foot vessel being equipped with acronym-laden antisubmarine equipment, ASROC (antisubmarine rocket), DASH (drone antisubmarine helicopter), and ECM (electronic countermeasures). She would be ready for the Battle of the Atlantic take two, armed with subkiloton weapons kept under guard around the clock, even at sea.
After lugging my seabag down the steep gangway, saluting the flag limp on the stern, and handing the gruff petty officer my orders, I was directed to the Delaware River “over there,” where I could find the crew barge. Hauling my deflated spirit back up the gangway, passing underneath the giant cranes, I made my way to the hulking gray dormitory, where I found a bunk but no one on duty. Nothing to eat either. So much for the first day of sea duty.
The skeleton crew was even more scant because of leave and school, so my first few months were ad hoc, clambering over the ship, standing fire watch, hanging out in the Mk 38 director, and hazarding Mk 25 radar operation under the tutelage of the forgiving yardbirds who were fine-tuning the fire-control system for the two 5-inch mounts, one forward and one aft.
The Tonkin Gulf incident had just occurred, so maybe there would be a need for the remaining four 5-inchers. I only had to walk out on the forlorn piers adjacent to the barge to get a whiff of cordite, since World War II cruisers, light and heavy, were tied up memento mori style, languishing in mothball fleet limbo, enveloped in an eerie reverie, their turrets still bristling with the big guns. I marveled at their diminutive size, not much bigger by half of the Leary, and crammed with firepower. I could only imagine the unholy din when all guns were firing. I could see them at a Burkean 31 knots, ramming the heavy swells of the Pacific, hellbent for the Japanese fleet; no quarter indeed.
Their crews, who had acquitted themselves with bravery and honor, stood in ghostly reproach to their Cold War counterparts, who complained of the lack of creature comforts on board their ships. The fore and aft berthing compartments on board the Leary were receiving a modest upgrade. One look at these World War II stalwarts told you their sailors put up with spartan living conditions not far removed from the days of “Beat to Quarters.” Compared to what they endured at sea, the otherwise severe penance of triple-tiered racks and bottom lockers seemed an indulgence, especially since the newly installed blowers took the edge off the sweat lodge in the tropics. Besides, the after head sported individual shower stalls and partitioned commodes.
The tumult came from the yard, from the yardbirds who swarmed the ship, welding, hammering, running cable, wrangling equipment, wresting a warship from a welter of schematics and blueprints. For the next four months I got to know the ship stem to stern, masthead down to fuel bunkers, an intimacy put to the test when I had to man a CO2 bottle as a welder worked on the other side of the hull, just above the keel. I almost bought it that day in the reeking bowels, the overpowering bunker fumes leaving me clawing for respiratory relief.
By and large I remained topside on the flying bridge, ensconced in the director, firing up the radar, and locking on to the 707s taking off from the airport just upriver, giving the Mk 38 amplidyne a port-to-starboard workout. The Mark One Able analog computer, a World War II electromechanical marvel housed just forward of the mess deck, had been modified to 800 knots. That meant the fire control problem had entered the supersonic age—all those cams and levers and resolvers commanding the amplidynes that powered the mounts and pointed the guns. Talk about mathematics. From the gimble gambol to barrel-rifling wear, the problem turned on any number of real-time variables. The solution was my responsibility, ensuring the workings of the electronics that aimed the guns true.
By late November, when the weather turned severe, the Leary was tied up to a pier, the day of liberation from the drydock something of an anticlimax to all those frenzied months being put back together again. For the first time, she looked like a destroyer. In early December, when the crew moved on board, she became a warship again, with a full complement of officers and enlisted. The captain, a captious ring-knocker, was not well-liked in the wardroom or on the bridge. He was a taskmaster, yet he knew how to get a tin can through the eye of a hurricane.
Getting to the Atlantic proved a challenge, since our second sally downriver into Delaware Bay shut down the boilers for almost three frigid days. No steam, no electricity, no heat, no visibility, enveloped in a cold gray miasma out of an Edgar Allen Poe story. Fortunately the steam finally got up and got us back upriver in one piece. Just before Christmas 1964 we took leave of the City of Brotherly Love and headed into the gelid, stormy Atlantic, bound for destroyer and submarine (D&S) piers in Norfolk.
The swells in the bay were bad enough, but the open ocean was something else. Meet your nemesis. Forget acquiring sea legs, mandatory in the gyro walk on board a tin can. To this day my gait inclines to starboard. I discovered, much to my horror, that I had no stomach for the sea. Mal-de-mer was to be my constant companion in the Atlantic, and though I learned to quell the worst of it by simply not eating, I did eructate my way through big blows, Hurricane Betsy, and the great gale of a winter Atlantic crossing, losing serious weight. I hit cadaverous 115 in a December gale off Narragansett Bay.
The abject experience of emetic adventure—seeing the roiling Atlantic from the deck-level of the stern quarter—put an end to any hope of a naval career. I had been recruited into the Polaris Program, or so I had thought, a six-year enlistment that guaranteed A School (fire-control technician, missile) and Sub School and Harvard College underwater. The commander-in-chief had prevailed upon his alma mater to give first-year credits to Polaris submariners studying in their off hours. After Harvard would come Stanford or MIT and a commission via the Navy Enlisted Scientific Education Program (NESEP). My brilliant naval career, seaman recruit to rear admiral, painstakingly mapped out when I was 17, a senior in high school.
Right up to the foggy day I reported to the federal building to take the oath and depart for boot camp in San Diego, I thought the career path was clear sailing. Seems my recruiter, a submariner himself and conspicuously absent that proud day, neglected to tell me that my uncorrected vision, the bane of my U.S. Naval Academy quest, would prevent me from joining the crew of a Polaris boat. Reeling from the duplicity, I had all of ten minutes to come up with Plan B. Forget Harvard, but MIT was still mustering bluejackets, and the NESEP was still an inducement to raise my right hand.
At Bainbridge, I envied the sailors and Marines attending Naval Prep, on their way to the Academy. So I sucked it up and marched to the A School drums’ heady cadence and began haunting the base library, rummaging through college catalogs. Absent Polaris, NESEP lost its allure. I began daydreaming about attending Harvard College on dry land. I would serve my hitch, preferably on board a ship homeported in Pearl. Vietnam was still over the mental horizon. Little did I know that what awaited me in that drydock in Philadelphia was an education better than anything found in Cambridge or New Haven. That World War II–era destroyer would be my Harvard College and Yale. Veritas was to be found in the DASH hanger, where I studied mathematics in my off-duty hours in the after berthing compartment, and above the starboard screw, where I read Shakespeare and cultivated my memories.
What few photos I did have of the ship at sea were in a satchel I lost years later in Berkeley. In fact, I have only one photograph of myself in uniform. But observe your 20th, 21st, and 22nd birthdays on board a ship and the memories remain too vivid by half. The night-long refueling in the teeth of a mistral, the captain refusing to break it off, wave heights to 30 feet in no time; the crossing of the Atlantic in winter in a full gale, of hullabaloo dimension from Virginia to Gibraltar; the shark feeding frenzy in Abaco Sound; the fatal collision at 25 knots with a whale off Hatteras; the total eclipse—who knew—at noontime off Morocco; the sinister eyewall of Hurricane Betsy. The watery parts of the world lived up to their storied reputation, and to this day I exult in the fact that I bore witness to their power and beauty.
The fact I turned 20 off Hatteras; 21 in Valletta, Malta; and 22 in the Tongue of the Ocean meant the ship steamed tens of thousands of nautical miles in the three years I was on board. I saw the Atlantic, the Caribbean, and the Mediterranean; only the mighty Pacific was missing from the seabag. But I had no interest in going to Vietnam, where the ship, courtesy of Operation Sea Dragon, later fired 5,000 rounds into North Vietnam.
The geography lessons I learned on site were sufficient to make me an amateur authority on a good fraction of the globe, including the Holy Land. Indeed, I lost my Catholic faith in Jerusalem, returning to a beautiful Beirut chastened by the rending revelation. The rites of passage of a young man were those defined by latitude and longitude, half the world the canvas on which I came of age. By the time I saluted the quarterdeck for the last time I had become an old salt, verdigrised from prolonged exposure to the saltwater domain, a sea dog whose education in first and last things has stood the test of time.
It was a privileged education, because the four years of naval service were spent in the heyday of the American Century, at the zenith of U.S. power and prestige.
They were prelapsarian days, blissfully oblivious to the dangers posed by human history. Global pollution, let alone warming, was not on the radar. The great seas were not in peril, only our radiant ship drilling for ABC warfare.
Inside the hull of a Cold War destroyer, the plan of the day was observed as from naval time immemorial. From 0000 to 2400 hours the ship steamed on a great circle course, heading for Key West or Santo Domingo or San Juan. From reveille to lights out the vessel saw watches stood, chow served, ship’s work performed, drills held, down time whiled away watching a movie on a sheet hung in the middle of the mess deck or reading recumbent, the din and vibrato of the screws a veritable lullaby in heavy weather.
A small warship on a big ocean is a marvel of human ingenuity. That it functions at all owes to its authoritarian structure and egalitarian spirit. Authority often as not fell on enlisted shoulders. Too, success in Sociology 101 meant keeping a wary eye peeled in the berthing compartments. Young males at sea are an experiment in bad manners and rude awakenings, not to mention ripened hygiene, and add race (budding estrangement), gender (female obsession), and class (pecking order) to the extremely tight quarters and witness the good, the bad, and the ugly. My shipmates, hailing from the U.S. hinterland, were as skilled and brave as any that ever put to sea in a U.S. Navy destroyer. They did the Leary proud.
I was fortunate since I had a large space all to myself after working hours. The DASH hangar—I had gone to drone antisubmarine helicopter school at Norfolk—was ideal for study, and I made the most of it. Of course, I turned and burned during ship’s work, keeping the QH-50C (drone) in flying condition. The vanguard of the digital revolution had arrived in the guise of a 13-foot-long counterrotational sub killer all too prone to drop out of the sky, along with the antisub torpedoes it carried. I was responsible for the electronics that guided the drone to its target, as far as 30 miles. It was ahead of its time. We lost three, but we set records for distance and number of hours flown.
I was privileged to serve under three outstanding men. Commander Ramon Leary was the commanding officer (since Malta), Lieutenant (j.g.) Felton G. Atwell III was the DASH officer, and Engineman First Class James R. Bielski was the DASH crew chief. Leary was a master mariner, lanky and laconic and imperturbable, the polar opposite of his predecessor. Atwell also was good-natured, very bright, and going places.
And Bielski—well, “Ski” was a grizzled lifer, a Queequeg look-alike down to the fissures engraved on his face, who took a heathen’s delight in his newfound marvel, the 60-second Polaroid. His memory palace was a large album filled with photos of Baalbeck and Pompeii and the Maritime Alps, which he fussed over with curatorial zeal. By day he was the avid photographer, by night the scourge of the shore patrol, and I see him to this day being dragged across the gangway, singing at the top of his lungs, a big smile on his face, a gob’s gob right down to the dragon liberty cuffs of his custom-made blues, with the skin-tight, flaring bell bottoms.
I also see my alma mater, which lasted a lot longer than anyone thought possible and had a third life as a Spanish destroyer. Med-moored for two decades, she wasn’t stricken until 1992. The great circle route has brought me back to graduation day, June 1967. The proverbial wakeup had finally come; goodbye D&S piers, goodbye Norfolk, goodbye sea duty for good. I would see the Leary once more, in San Diego, back from Sea Dragon and on her way to Norfolk, but as a civilian, embarked on higher education at the University of California. She finally had seen action (they fired back) and lived up to her martial motto. Force of habit, but I saluted the quarterdeck for the last time.
Sea stories from five decades ago require a FRAM conversion, since the Cold War Navy is another memento mori, enveloped in a nostalgic reverie. The 21st-century Navy is a different entity altogether, requiring state-of-the-art conversion. Or is it? Just as I can read Melville’s account of his 19th-century naval service and nod in recognition, so can a millennial, on watch in the after-steering of a Zumwalt-class destroyer, nod at this sea story.
Five decades later, five decades of terra firma, the Navy, the blue-water Navy, the Cold War Navy of my youth spins out its saga anew. Once a sailor always a sailor, the wake of that Gearing-class destroyer, cranking at 30 knots, even more impressive this time around.