WW-JanFeb 2022 issue.qxp_Pages-12-40-JanFeb WPD 06/01/2022 12:18 Page 34
FEATURE
Phillip Parotti
W
ith no disrespect intended and regardless of the fact that I grew up in the heart of America’s “Old West,” my heroes have never been cowboys. Instead, both during and after World War II, I spent my youth surrounded by active duty servicemen and veterans, and on the school grounds, my generation spent more time talking about armored vehicles, warships, and aircraft than any of us ever spent talking about baseball. Measured beside the immensity of WWII and the Korean Conflict which followed, we knew what had to be taken seriously and what did not, and that probably explains why, in the late 1950s, feeling a sense of obligation to “The Greatest Generation” for what they had done to make the world safe for us, I set my sights on being accepted into the United States Naval Academy so that I could try to pay back some of what I thought I owed. When I swore my oath at Annapolis in the summer of 1959, I suddenly faced any number of surprises. Rather than join a group of Midshipmen who were all my same age, I found that I had joined a collection of young men which included veterans of every service, many of them wearing campaign ribbons from Korea and the Formosan Patrol, men who had already been through one, two, three, or even four previous years of college as well as former civilians from everywhere in the country. Academics, physical training, and required sports proved rigorous, and as I recall we virtually ran everywhere knowing that if we were as much as ten seconds late for any evolution, we would be put on report and assigned punishment tours. Like everyone else, after a period of adjustment, I settled in, committed myself to the programme, and, after a fashion, thrived amidst the fierce competition with the result that in June 1963 I somehow graduated in the upper half of my class and received my commission along with a set of orders that sent me to San Diego, California for destroyer duty aboard a relatively new guided missile frigate, the USS Preble (DLG-15).
USS Preble underway at sea, probably when first completed, circa 1960. Note her ASROC launcher has not yet been installed. In June 1963, Parotti graduated and received his commission along with a set of orders that sent him for destroyer duty aboard Preble.
34 Warship World January/February 2022
Life as a regular officer in the Navy and aboard a serving ship turned out to be a great deal different from from the four years I’d spent at Annapolis. In the first place, without a car or connections on the beach, I lived aboard, sharing a stateroom with a much older, highly experienced Mustang, a former Chief Petty Officer who had come up through the ranks and who taught me more about the Navy than I could ever have imagined. And put bluntly, he wasn’t the only one. During my first meeting with the ship’s executive officer, something which took place within ten minutes of my reporting aboard, he quickly handed me a ship’s instruction to revise, a directive. At the time, I didn’t even know what an instruction was; we had never seen one at Annapolis. I revised it, returned it only to find the red ink corrections he appended went beyond anything any English teacher had ever made on one of my student papers, and then spent the remainder of my first day revising it several more times until I brought the document up to his standards. That was my introduction to what we called paperwork in the Navy, and it came as a shock. And, as I swiftly learned, everything we did aboard the Preble had to come up to the same high standards. Very swiftly, after the captain’s return to the ship, I found myself assigned to be the Assistant Anti-Submarine Warfare Officer and served in that capacity for the remainder of my time aboard. Although the ship sometimes spent weekends in port, we spent considerable time at sea training for our deployment to the Western Pacific which happened to be scheduled for the late fall.
In addition, we spent several weeks in the yards in Long Beach and came out in time to go through the exhausting evolution known as “Refresher Training,” four weeks of day and night exercises in which we honed every wartime skill that could be imagined and slept very little, inspectors sometimes coming aboard as early as 0400 in the morning before leaving as late as midnight, and in the midst of that, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, and both San Diego and the world shut down for an entire week. During that time I ran the ship’s liberty boat through dense fog and without a compass for six straight days, steering by the sound of fog horns and buoy bells. A week or two later, an engineering casualty sent us back to the yards and caused us, in December of that year, to miss steaming for the Western Pacific with the remainder of our squadron, so when we finally departed for Japan, we did so alone and only after the New Year had been celebrated.
