Battleship Boys

by Paul Lally

  Just one level below, sitting in another leather-cushioned chair in the flag bridge, resides the god-of-all-gods, Zeus himself, but better known as the flag admiral of Task Force 75. While the Rock’s captain oversees the battleship’s day-to-day operations, the admiral and his staff manage the much bigger picture of fighting an unconventional war using conventional methods.

  With Vietnam, it’s proving to have no end in sight.

  Call it a proxy war between the United States and Red China and you’d be closer to the truth than you’d like. But bullets are bullets and blood is blood. And on and on it goes, without an end in sight, either politically or militarily.

  Geopolitics and battle strategies are of no current concern to two of the ship’s orchestra “players” who stand high above it all on the battleship’s flying bridge, sneaking a quick smoke before going on watch. This open-air space—the “Dashboard” as the young officers call it— is located directly above the ship’s navigation bridge. With an unobstructed view forward, aft, and port to starboard, it contains the necessary instruments--radios, a compass, and watch binoculars—for the captain or OOW (Officer of the Watch) to conn the ship during docking and close-in maneuvers.

  But everything’s stowed away at the moment because the Rock’s on the gunline. Nobody’s here at the moment except these two young ensigns, doing their best to shield their cigarettes from the brisk wind caused by the Rock’s near 30-knot passage through relatively calm seas.

  They’re an unlikely pair, these two: the tall, lean one on the left could stand to put on a few pounds. He’s Ensign James Joseph Lewis (“JJ” to his friends, except he doesn’t have that many). An Annapolis Naval Academy graduate (#15 in his Class of 1968) he’s smart, ambitious, and at the tender age of 22, has earned a coveted spot on the Flag Admiral’s staff.

  Cerebral, calculating, and happier with his mouth shut than talking a blue streak, JJ’s the polar opposite of the other “butter-bar, Ensign Thomas (“Tommy” to his friends, and he’s got zillions) Alloysius Riley. The proud product of the University of Maryland’s Naval ROTC program, the auburn-haired, round-faced, buoyant-spirited officer points up at the two 30-foot-high whip antennas mounted on the port and starboard corners of the flying bridge.

  Integral parts of the warship’s AN/SLQ-32 (“Slick 32) electronic warfare system, they provide key data to the Mark 38 Main Battery Control Director, which in turn, relays data to the Forward Main Battery Plot, which in turn, aims the mighty guns inside her four main battery turrets.

  “Knights of the Roundtable,” Tommy says. “Am I right?”

  JJ acts like he didn’t hear him. He takes a long drag, exhales, then says, “Repeat your last?”

  “Like lances. Those big-ass antennas up there. We’re sticking it to the Vietcong the way medieval knights stuck it to each other when they jousted.”

  “Ensign Riley, you never cease to amaze me with your imagination.”

  Tommy shrugs. “Just doing what comes naturally—uh, oh, be advised it’s salvo time. Plug your ears and open your mouth—wide.”

  “I don’t see why—”

  “Didn’t they teach you anything at the academy, Ensign Lewis?”

  “This ship was in mothballs the whole time, Ensign Riley.”

  “Nary a moth in sight now—open wide, plug your ears, and hold on, brother.”

  A faraway warning “whoop” of the ship’s siren. And then night becomes day and the ocean catches fire as twelve, 16-inch naval guns roar out in perfect unison, blasting twelve high-explosive shells high into the air. The concussive shockwave vibrates the Rock like a tuning fork from bow to stern, rattling the deck and tingling their feet.

  The billowing, reddish orange-and-white flash of light fades as fast as it came. As the projectiles start their fifteen-mile journey through the night sky toward the target, the gun barrels droop five degrees below level. As they do so, jets of compressed air send white puffs of smoke out from deep inside to expel residue and noxious vapors from the high explosives.

  “Clearing their throats,” Tommy says. “Am I right?”

  “Relentlessly so.”

  JJ checks his watch. “Duty calls, Ensign Riley. You have no idea how much I’ve enjoyed our quality time together. But all good things must come to an end.”

  “How’s it going? The job, I mean. Working for all that brass crammed inside a tiny flag bridge. Must be easy to kiss two or three asses at once.”

  “Very amusing. In my case, however, I do my best to stay out of the way and do as I’m told.” JJ gestures toward the forward turrets. “Certainly not as dramatic as being a mighty gunnery officer like you.”

  Tommy laughs and “slaps leather” as if pulling up six-guns. “Ride ‘em cowboy!”

  “Yet another skill you acquired at your so-called institution of higher learning. University of Maryland, as I recall. Some kind of teachers college, as I recall,”

  “Go Terrapins!” Tommy brandishes the class ring on his left hand. “Just as good as your fancy-ass Naval academy.”

  JJ draws himself up. “We shall discuss the relative merits of our Bachelor of Science degrees at a later date. Time for me to attend to my duties, Ensign Riley.”

  “Don’t kiss too many asses down there, Ensign Lewis. You’ll get chapped lips.”

  “Your ribald humor is nonpareil.”

  “What’s ‘ribald’ mean? And what the hell’s that other word?”

  “My point exactly. Go Turtles.”

  “Terrapins.”

  “Whatever.”

  Three minutes later, after descending three decks, Tommy arrives at the entry hatch of Turret 2, his duty station immediately aft of Turret 1. Both are still rotated to port as the Rock continues her northward progress. That will change soon, since she’s flirting with the DMZ (Demilitarized Zone) that separates North and South Vietnam. Any minute now, she’ll reverse course and continue pounding the target.

  Tonight, it’s an overrun U.S. Marine observation post that needs rescuing. The Vietcong are desperate to wipe it out and the Marines along with it. Task Force 75 is equally determined not to let that happen.

  Ducking down, Tommy undogs the hatch, enters, dogs it behind him and scrambles up the narrow access ladder to reach the turret officers “booth.” As he does so, he can feel the rumble of gears as the turret swings slightly to starboard in response to a faraway command from the forward Main Battery Plot.

  His assigned working space inside the turret is located behind a transverse bulkhead separating it from the three big guns. Should the Main Battery Gun Director high above them fail for any reason, they can manually fire the Rock’s guns from inside the turret. Each one’s equipped with range finders, analog computers and an experienced crew who can do the job.

  To use Tommy’s medieval knights’ analogy; while the two AN/SLQ-32 antennas up on the “dashboard” are “lances,” the officers and men working the Forward Main Battery Director high above them in an armored tower are the “knights.” Two decks below, in the protected bowels of the ship, the Battery Plot guys are the “horses.” And the Rock’s big-ass 16-inch guns? They’re deadly “broad swords.”

  Every time Tommy pulls duty here, he can smell the turret officer’s booth long before he arrives. Within minutes after arriving, his nose will adjust like it always does. But for now, it’s a pungent blend of male sweat, machine oil, smokeless powder, and farts (depending on what the cooks served for evening chow).

  But only a small part of his brain registers olfactory data like this. Reason being, he’s got the dreaded Lieutenant Baker to deal with on his watch. Considering the turret OIC age, he should have been tracking for lieutenant commander long ago, but scuttlebutt says he’s stuck in neutral. Nothing worse than a frustrated officer who wants a career more than he wants to serve his country. Baker is that kind of schmuck (as Stanley would describe him). And he rides Tommy like a rented mule.

  Which is not all that bad.

  Sometimes having somebody breathing d
own your neck gives you the opportunity to learn how to protect it. Tommy’s good at that, seeing as how he came from a working-class Irish family living on top of each other in a tired and weary Baltimore three-story “alley house.” He spent more time growing up (and fighting) in the narrow streets than he did sharing a tiny bedroom with four older brothers.

  But that bedroom seems spacious compared to where he now stands, squeezed inside the aft section of a main battery turret jammed with computer operators, sound-powered phone talkers, and rangefinder pointers and operators.

  He stands close enough to the current on-duty junior turret officer to smell his breath. Not bad. Spearmint chewing gum. Of equal rank, he doesn’t need to salute.

  “Ready to relieve,” he says.

  “Be my guest.”

  Tommy shifts his eyes toward Baker. “How’s the good lieutenant on this fine evening of massive destruction?”

  “Watch your Irish ass, Riley.”

  “Roger that. Both cheeks.”

  Tommy keeps his eyes averted as he squeezes past the turret officer, a young petty officer busy with paperwork. Then past the enlisted guys yakking on their sound-powered telephones, then the rangefinder operators, ever alert, should they need to shift to local control for any reason.

  Meanwhile, on the other side of the transverse bulkhead the three-gun symphony of destruction continues unabated. No different from when Stanley Albertini and his gun crew were doing the same thing twenty-five years ago. The enemy has changed, but they’re still “the enemy.”

  Lieutenant Baker stands to the left of the center gun position, just ahead of the rangefinder operator station, watching the gun-ready lights. When everything’s working properly, he’s nothing more than a glorified traffic cop. He’s even got colored lights that go with the job. They tell him when the guns are locked and loaded and ready to fire. When they are, he pushes a button.

  Two decks below in Forward Battery Plot, tucked behind the Rock’s armor belt, matching lights appear. Seconds later, the chief gunnery officer on duty there squeezes the triggers on brass pistol grips that remotely fire the guns singly or in salvo.

  When everything is working properly, that is.

  But based on what Lieutenant Baker’s doing—pounding on the ready panel—it’s all of a sudden, not. The numbered lights, 1, 2, and 3 flash in unison. Tommy’s never seen anything like it before.

  “Piece of shit!” Baker swings around and looks past Tommy like he’s invisible. “Confirm we got ready-guns.”

  Three sailors nod as one. “Ready to fire, sir!”

  “Lost our fucking remote director input again. Can’t raise commo—Right and left pointers and trainers, standby local fire. Give me last input.”

  “Yes, SIR!”

  A gunner’s mate behind Tommy leans into the eyepieces of the range finder. On the reticule appears the last available readout of the range, bearing and elevation as determined by gun director radar and computed by battery plot.

  Which is fine if the Rock were stationary, but she’s not only moving, but she’s also pitching up and down and rolling slightly from side to side, which means the range and elevation information is useless without constant updating.

  “Turret two’s offline,” Baker shouts. “I say again, OFFLINE!”

  The “talker” wearing a dome-shaped, Darth Vader-like MK-2 helmet dutifully repeats the information—less dramatically—into a sound-powered microphone draped around his neck like a life preserver.

  It’s then that Tommy spots what’s wrong.

  He’s still wet behind the ears, trying to swim the rapids of being a junior gunnery officer on a battleship. But he’s no idiot. Who knows how it happened, but the switch on the bottom of the gun ready display unit is facing to the left not the right.

  Somehow, someway, Baker—or somebody else—must have accidentally turned it off, thus disabling input from the Gun Director and Battery Plot, thus shifting training and elevation inputs to local control. Thus creating the FUBAR (Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition) situation currently taking no prisoners inside the crowded turret.

  One of the talkers repeats what he hears in his headphones, “Plot officer to booth two. Say your difficulty.”

  “Shit!”

  Baker rudely shoves the talker out of the way as he heads for the computer operator’s station. The young sailor bounces off a console, loses his balance and falls. His helmet keeps him from being knocked out cold.

  Tommy helps him stagger to his feet.

  “You okay?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The look on that kid’s face; shock, fear, and utter powerlessness...it’s in that precise moment that Ensign Thomas Aloysius Riley’s calling in life is born. He doesn’t quite know it yet. But he will, when his five-year active-duty service obligation is over, and he takes the LSAT (Law School Admission Test) and knocks the ball out of the park.

  But that’s then.

  This is now.

  He sends the kid back to his duty station. Then he escapes from the volcanic, shouting Baker long enough to grab a clipboard and pretend he’s checking the powder-bag count. While doing so, he surreptitiously reaches beneath the gun ready panel and slides the local/remote switch back to the online position.

  The effect is instantaneous. All three gun-ready lights stop flashing and glow steadily. Bells ding, analog computers hum, crewmen sit up straight.

  Baker swings around. “What the fuck’s going on?”

  “Sir, we have re-acquired input,” Tommy says innocently.

  Baker’s face shifts from fear to relief, then back to anger.

  “What’d you do?”

  Tommy’s smooth, round face is the picture of “who, me?” innocence. It’s a skill that will serve him well in years to come, both in the courtroom and the board room. “Nothing, sir. Must have been a glitch of some sort. I mean, when you think about it, the Rock’s been around since the second world war, right?”

  Tommy makes room for the already approaching Baker, who stabs the gun-ready switch, the firing buzzer buzzes... and seconds later, the Rock sends another serving of whoop-ass to the Vietcong.

  Tommy happens to notice a petty officer staring at him. The young man holds eye contact long enough to silently say, “I saw what you did, sir.”

  Then he winks.

  Tommy winks back.

  USS New Hampshire (BB-70)

  USS Savo Island (CG-57)

  Operation Desert Storm

  February 25, 1991

  T he Ticonderoga-class, AEGIS-equipped guided missile cruiser USS Savo Island has no trouble keeping station with the battleship USS New Hampshire.

  The sleek, missile-bristling, modern-looking vessel paces a quarter mile off the port beam of the venerable—but still damned dangerous—Montana-class battleship, providing air defense for the Rock and the assorted frigates and minesweepers that make up the small task force.

  As the flotilla completes a sweeping, coordinated turn to starboard, the pre-dawn darkness momentarily shifts to noonday brightness as the Rock’s 16-inch main battery opens fire with a teeth-rattling salvo aimed at the Iraqi Coastal Defense Force’s central facility at Umm Qasr in occupied Kuwait.

  The facility supplies mobile missile launchers currently deployed all along the Kuwaiti coastline. Each of the twenty-foot-long, “Seersucker” anti-ship missiles the launcher carry is capable of raising holy hell with US Navy vessels.

  An export copy of the Chinese “Silkworm,” the Iraqi version packs a 500-pound warhead that can punch a nasty hole in the side of a ship. Used to lethal effect during Iran-Iraq’s “Tanker Wars” in the 1980s, they must be neutralized before the Coalition can take back Kuwait from the greedy hands of Saddam Hussein.

  The concussive BOOM of Rock’s salvo penetrates the Savo Island’s steel bulkheads and myriad passageways, clear down to the crowded confines of the CIC (Combat Information Center), located one deck below and aft of the wheelhouse.

  The officers and ops specialists e
xchange raised eyebrows and goofy grins, including Electronics Mate 2C Jack Riley who smiles broadly, shakes his head and whispers to himself.

  “The Rock’s at it again, Pop.”

  “Pop” is Jack’s father, Tommy Riley, the young ROTC ensign who saved Turret Officer Lieutenant Baker’s bacon back in Vietnam twenty-two years ago. Tommy’s long gone from the navy and has become a skilled defense attorney who heads up highly successful elder law practice back in Concord, New Hampshire.

  His son Jack hasn’t followed his father’s footsteps as a commissioned officer, though. Mostly because even as a boy, he preferred hopscotching through life from one scientific interest to another, instead of following established, beaten-down-flat paths.

  From electronics to hydrodynamics, metallurgy to migraine headache causes, Jack’s nimble, insatiably curious mind has never stopped wondering why, where, and how.

  As far as higher education goes, Jack survived exactly one semester at the uber-elite RPI (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute). Gifted to the point of genius, he won a full academic scholarship including room and board plus a monthly stipend.

  Despite that academic blessing from above, he dropped out of school in favor of a motorcycle road trip out west astride a 500cc metallic green Triumph Bonneville.

  As you might imagine, this did not sit well with Tommy.

  Not that Jack gave a damn what his father thought. He was too busy thinking about other things instead.

  For example:

  One night, while rolled up in his sleeping bag somewhere in the middle of the New Mexico desert, Jack proceeded to stare up at the infinity of stars.

  Minutes later, he started thinking of how dry and lifeless land can be without water.

  Moses struck a rock with a staff and water gushed out...