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A Recollection of Distant Seas
With no disrespect intended and regardless of the fact that I grew up in the heart ofAmerica ’ s “OldWest, ” my heroes have never been cowboys. Instead, both during and afterWorldWar 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). 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 NewYear had been celebrated.
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.
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Phillip Parotti grew up in New Mexico, graduated from the US Naval Academy in 1963, and served four years at sea on destroyers, before exchanging his regular commission for a commission in the US Naval Reserve. In addition to a number of short stories, essays, and poems, Parotti has published three well-received novels. His latest work of fiction ‘Splinter in the Tide’ is a page-turning historical portrayal of war, hardship and discovery of the true cost for sailors’ survival. Here we present memories and stories, as he recollects his time in service.
USS Bronstein off the coast of Oahu, Hawaii, on 28 August 1972.
Once back inYokosuka Parotti received orders transferring him to Bronstein.
The Preble ’ s voyage toYokosuka in 1964 turned out to be a gruelling experience. Given the vagaries of the weather in those winter seas, our captain caught cold on the way to Pearl Harbor, and then, steaming independently, by the time we pulled out of our fuelling stop at Midway Island, his cold had degenerated into a case of the flu. Directed to proceed at once by 7th Fleet, within six hours of leaving Midway, we found ourselves riding the edge of a truly dangerous typhoon. Never before or since have I seen seas of such immensity.Across the seven or eight days that followed, with green water crashing all the way back over the flying bridge, our aluminium superstructure cracked in more than 150 places flooding every topside space with four to six inches of water. Fortunately, our steel hull remained intact, but about four days from Japan, we were forced to shut down one propellor shaft owing to a hot bearing, and had the other shaft failed, we would have rolled over and gone down in less than a minute.
And by that time, our captain ’ s flu had also devolved into pneumonia owing to the sleepless strain he ’d been under.Throughout that entire voyage,he never once left his place on the bridge. “At what point, ” I remember foolishly asking my roommate, “does the old man turn it over to the exec so that the corpsman can give him the medical attention he needs. ” “When the captain dies, ” he laughed at me, “the exec will take over. ” It was the best lesson I ever learned about the final responsibility of command. Somehow, we survived the typhoon and made it to Yokosuka where, while the ship underwent repairs in the yards, the captain was taken to the hospital.After three weeks, he recovered but came back gaunt and drawn, looking like a spectre. Subsequently, the Preble steamed through the remainder of the winter and spring, operating with the 7th Fleet, but with a week spent in Yokosuka here, a week in Sasebo there, and a glorious week of R & R in Hong Kong, enough play came with our work so that all of us received an enduring taste of the Far East. And then, in June, as we steamed out of Tokyo Wan expecting to turn east and head for home where I intended to be married, we turned west and headed for theTonkin Gulf and Vietnam, and there, for nearly four weeks, we acted as plane guard for the USS Kitty Hawk as she launched air strikes over the Plain of Jars.
For twelve hours each day, broiling beneath a blistering sun, I stood my watches as the gun director officer, and when we were finally relieved by the Maddox and the Turner Joy which soon became famous for the Tonkin Gulf Incident, I heaved a sigh of relief and hoped my intended would forgive me for missing our wedding.To my shock, no sooner did the ship put back intoYokosuka than I received a set of urgent orders transferring me to the USS Bronstein (DE-1037) home-ported in San Diego, so after a quick turnover to my successor, a wrenching departure from the ship which had become my home, and a long plane flight, I landed in San Francisco, called my future wife, and managed to reset the day of our wedding. The Bronstein (when I reported aboard as her Gunnery Assistant in charge of ASROC, her 3”/50 guns, and her anti-submarine torpedoes), was barely a year old, new, and clean, and attractive, and the roommate I immediately acquired became a lifelong friend. Owing to my previous watch standing experience, not many weeks went by before the captain qualified me as an Officer of the Deck for Independent Steaming, and then, very swiftly, I found myself also qualified as an OOD for Fleet Steaming, so from that time forward and with a spot promotion to LT (j.g.), I began running my own watch sections while performing nearly every evolution that a ship could entertain from refuelling at sea to docking in port.
In the fall of that year, because the Bronstein carried the most advanced sonar then deployed by the navy, we found ourselves engaged in testing her equipment all over the eastern Pacific and subsequently spent two months in Hawaii running tests around the islands, gathering data for refinement of the sound device. Settled in San Diego that year, my new bride and I eventually welcomed the arrival of our first daughter, and two months after her birth and once again with a winter ship movement, the Bronstein departed for a long deployment toWESTPAC. Falling right in line with my previous experience, all the way from Midway toYokosuka, we endured a storm so heavy that every man not on watch had no choice but to keep to his bunk, but while horrendous, that storm never reached the proportions of the typhoon the Preble had experienced and the ship did
USS Joseph K.Taussig underway in the Mediterranean Sea on 16 September 1970.Without prior warning, Parotti received a set of orders directing him to report to Newport, Rhode Island where he would take over as theWeapons Department Head on the vessel.
not have to go in for repairs when we reached Japan. But once there, with only a few days in port for rest and upkeep, we steamed straight toVietnam where, with no missiles to provide air cover for a carrier and with insufficient flank speed to keep up with one, we found ourselves steaming in squares at 3 knots, five miles on a side, 50 miles south of Red China ’ s Hainan Island, acting as a radar picket for a seemingly interminable period that lasted nearly 50 straight days.
That duty proved more than miserable, and I doubt that one could find a man on board who hadn ’t been seriously infected with debilitating heat rash. In truth, we never closed to within fifty miles ofVietnam proper, never interdicted any NorthVietnamese junks or sampans attempting to carry supplies south, and never heard a shot fired in anger, and when our ordeal finally came to an end, we were granted a week’ s R & R in Manila before departing on a SEATO exercise in company with ships from Great Britain,Australia, New Zealand, the Philippines, and Thailand.That exercise, by everyone ’ s admission, approached more closely to what we imagined convoy duty during the Second World War to have been like than anything we ’d ever experienced as mock air and submarine attacks came at us from every direction on a daily basis.
In the weeks and months which followed, we did additional short periods of radar picket duty off the coast ofVietnam, rode out a typhoon in Subic Bay in the Philippines, ran more exercises with the 7th Fleet, spent a month on the Formosan patrol going in and out of Kaohsiung, and enjoyed an additional week of R & R in Hong Kong before, finally, returning toYokosuka from whence we steamed for the United States.At home and reunited with our families, rather than enjoy time off and a gradual slowdown from what had turned out to be a long deployment, the navy immediately hit us with such an array of administrative, material, and weapons inspections that we felt ourselves worked to the bone, and in the midst of that, without prior warning, I received a set of orders directing me to report to Newport, Rhode Island where I would take over as the Weapons Department Head on the USS Joseph K.Taussig (DE-1030).
Reaching Newport on 6 November 1966, my wife, small daughter, and I arrived just in time for the first snow, and indeed, from the time we arrived until the moment we departed in June of 1967, we never found ourselves without snow or ice somewhere, even if only still wedged into the crevices of the stone walls surrounding our house. By that time, relying on the accepted word, word that the US “had seen light at the end of the tunnel, ” everyone I knew or came in contact with thought that the war inVietnam was winding down, that it had been won and would soon be ended, so by that time, implicitly believing the accepted wisdom and, seeing no particular need for my wartime skills after my transfer to the East Coast, I’d made my decision to resign my regular commission, take a commission in the reserves, and enroll for graduate school. But first, I had to complete my four year obligation as a regular, and regular duty in Newport proved a wholly new experience.
The two coldest days I’ ve ever lived through, days in which I still don ’t know how I emerged without frostbite, were both afforded me by the navy.The first occurred when we Midshipmen were bused down toWashington DC to march in John F. Kennedy ’ s inaugural parade and stood on solid ice for several hours before marching off, and the second came when the Taussig ventured into the North Atlantic for what was supposed to have been a winter gunnery practice in 1967. There, the plane assigned to tow a target sleeve for the shoot could not fly owing to the intense cold, and after waiting for hours beside an open gun director and without regard to the layers of arctic clothing I had worn, I still don ’t know how I was able to climb down after the shoot had been cancelled. All I can remember is feeling frozen to the bone.
In what to me has always seemed like a unique experience, not a month after I joined the ship, the executive officer, in response to a family emergency, took a six month leave of absence from the navy, and to my shock, in the moment he left the ship, I learned that my duties were to be increased. Not only would I continue to serve as the ship ’ s Weapons Officer, I would also take over as the Executive Officer during the period that the real exec remained away. And then, when the captain was called to a conference in Norfolk,Virginia a few weeks later, I suddenly found myself signing for the ship as Officer in Charge to act as the ship ’ s temporary captain while he was gone.Two nights later, as a hurricane blew rapidly up the coast, I spent all night on the bridge with steam up, waiting for the order to sortie, but blissfully, the hurricane missed Newport, struck Long Island like a cue ball, and bounced directly east into the mid-Atlantic without ever forcing me to take the ship to sea.
In order to train in the winter, Taussig was then dispatched to Puerto Rico for a six week period of exercises, but two days before we returned to Newport, not an hour after I had come off the mid-watch and retired to my bunk, an electrical connection in the wardroom directly overhead shorted and set the wardroom on fire with the result that my roommate and I had to crack the hatch over our heads and race up two long ladders and onto the bridge, holding our breath in order to avoid inhaling the acrid smoke.And then, one night later, as we prepared to enter port on the following morning, I stepped onto the bridge at 0400, a cup of wake-up coffee still in my hand, to find myself immersed in total darkness.No matter,I knew my way around the bridge in the dark, found my binoculars in their case,and began trying to adjust my night vision. But after ten minutes of fruitless effort, I finally heard the captain who I had not imagined to be sitting in his chair tell me to crack the hatch and see if things were any better when seen from the bridge wing.
By that time, hearing a titter here and there, I had finally tipped to the joke, cracked the hatch, found the bridge instantly flooded with moonlight and stepped out to the sound of laughter behind me to find that I’d been trying to look through nearly three inches of solid ice. Indeed, the entire ship was so encased with ice that the captain had become concerned about stability and been on the bridge for at least an hour, and when we finally steamed into Narragansett Bay but before we could make up to the pier, we had to stop the ship in order to clear away enough of the ice so that we could handle lines.
With regard to paying the debt that I thought and still think is owed to “The Greatest Generation ” . . . ,well, I don ’t suppose that is a debt that can ever be paid, but for the fact that it stimulated me to serve my years in the regular navy and in the reserves, I will always be grateful.While, in the end, I did not elect to make the navy my career, my time in service nevertheless gave me the firmest of foundations for my life.
At the height of the Battle of the Atlantic, young EnsignAsh Miller takes command of a new submarine chaser, brings together the untried crew,and leads them in the desperate fight against the German U-boats. During rare breaks in operations, provided for upkeep and overhaul,Ash enters a developing relationship with the spirited Claire Morris who, as he learns, embodies the peaceful ideal for which he has been fighting. Splinter on theTide is the engaging story of a young American naval officer undertaking his first command, in the middle of WWII. A vividly imagined and beautifully drawn depiction of life aboard a USN submarine hunter.
