How Did You Spend Your Summer

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One of the Holy Cross NROTC requirements was to spend a summer aboard a ship.  Think eight week internship.  I opted for a small minesweeper based in Long Beach, California, the MSO (minesweeper ocean) Guide.   California was where it was happening.  

Aboard the MSO Guide not much was happening, as I discovered when I got there.  Active duty US ships aren't really prepared to train aspiring Navy officers.  The Guide like many of the Long Beach ships was taking a rest between deployments to Vietnam where she patrolled coastal waters looking for Viet Cong sneaking around by sea. 

Between visits to Vietnam, the Guide never ventured far from port at Long Beach.  It was a little minesweeper, just 700 tons and 170 feet long.  Big destroyers like the USS John Paul Jones weighed in at 4600 tons, were 400 feet long, packed guided missiles and 5-inch artillery that could lob explosive shells at targets 12 miles away.   During the Battle for the Dong Ha Bridge, a 70-lb round from the Jones disintegrated an NVA tank during a firefight at about 1000 yards.  The Guide had a tiny 40mm gun, which wasn't a defense against much of anything in the era of jets, guided missiles and tanks.  It's steering didn't even operate like a big destroyer's.  It had special propellers that could change their angle for better maneuverability.  Guide  was half the size of the USS Constitution, "Old Ironsides", the famous 200-year-old three-masted sailing ship that my parents took me to visit in the Charlestown Navy Yard in Boston when I was a little boy.  Consider that the 200-year-old sailing ship outgunned the Guide by a factor of 50 to 1.



The ignominy of it all.   Our first day trip out onto the calm waters on a sunny California day just south of Long Beach and I got seasick.  I couldn't even find privacy and refuge from the shame of it.  I raced inside to the Guide's closest head (restroom) and let loose into the toilet only to discover at the last moment that one of my supervising officers was sitting on it.  Unlucky and messy for him.  ignominy for me. 

Sunny California didn't turn out to be a refuge from the grim reality of the military in a time of war.   I was looking forward to a weekend at the beach one Friday afternoon when all shore leave got cancelled.   The Guide and all remaining hands were to sail immediately for San Diego and help search for a helicopter that had crashed at sea during a training exercise.   Hopefully, the minesweeper's sonar would be able locate the sunken helicopter, and divers would be able to recover the bodies of its crew.

The Guide's sonar was high tech and secret.   There was actually a hole in the bottom of the ship (actually an internal well) that the an/sqq-14 sonar was lowered through.  The sonar rendered a television view of the bottom of the ocean.   When we arrived near where they thought the helicopter had crashed, we lowered the sonar and searched and searched ... and found nothing.  Then the sonar died.  We hauled it up to fix the thing.   This was where my most useful talent came in handy.  Not something I learned at Holy Cross.  The previous summer on an Oregon ranch, I had learned to use wrenches to take things apart.    To the surprise of everyone, especially the ship's captain, I rolled up my sleaves and started helping the chief petty officer take the cover off the sonar internals.  We couldn't fix the sonar, so we bolted the thing back together and went home.  That was the most interesting thing I did all summer, but not really useful.   They never did find the bodies of the helicopter crew. 

I discovered too late that the Navy base at Long Beach wasn't much closer to the beach and California girls than an Oregon ranch.