Picture Source: www.defenselink.mil
The picture above was taken during operations in the well deck. The ship has ballast tanks that allow it to sink into the water. This floods the well deck and allows the ship to offload or onload landing craft or other amphibious vehicles. The ship carries about 800 Navy crew members and 2000 Marines. It is used for carrying various small craft, helicopters and Harrier VTOL aircraft. It also has a large medical triage area intended to be used for treating casualties that may occur in the area it's operating in.
It was a great ship (not too pretty though, it looks like a giant floating bathtub).
I started my Navy days at San Diego for boot camp, was sent to Corry Field in Pensacola for training as a cryptologic technician (CT), then to the Great Lakes for more training and back to San Diego for deployment. I started my Navy stint as a CT, working with signal intelligence and various other highly classified systems and data.
Pensacola is a great place. I was in school with men and women from the Air Force, Marine and Army, which was interesting. I did well in training and was offered a chance to go to the Rand Corporation "Think Tank" in Washington D.C. on a special assignment / change of career.
As so often happens, other events superseded that offer and I ended up going to various electrical/electronic schools in the Navy and spent the majority of my time maintaining and troubleshooting various shipboard systems.
One of my first jobs was working in the battery shop (holy clothes), then the engine room (interesting), the motor shop, and finally the hydraulic shop. We got to work on a lot of different types of control systems. It was fun and very educational.
One thing about the Navy is they allow you to pretty much do what you are capable of and you get a chance to work on a lot of things that you would never get to in civilian life. I got to work on everything from water and sewage treatment plants, elevators (large and small), small boats, lighting, generators, constant tension winches, movie projectors, conveyer systems and a lot of cool stuff all over the ship from the very bottom to the top (it's about 14 stories...seven below the main deck and seven above.)
One job I helped with was setting up sensors for early trials of the Harrier takeoffs (they can takeoff and land vertically but they don't always do that). It was really cool to get to hang around on the deck while they were doing that.
I had two especially memorable experiences -
One night we were conducting operations at sea with various aircraft in the air and small craft in the water. I was the maintenance electrician on duty and got a call to go to the bridge. When I got there the Captain told me they were having intermittent electrical dropouts on the bridge. This was a big deal considering the orchestration necessary to keep track of the helicopters, boats etc. They needed radar, radio, and lighting to keep the show going.
I traced the power problem to a loose fuse holder in a distribution panel. The challenge was I couldn't turn off ships power to that panel without jeapordizing the operations. The other challenge was that if I stuck a screwdriver in there and slipped I'd electrocute myself and maybe worse short out the panel and bring down the power system. It was a matter of tightening up a screw or two, so I put on some rubber gloves, while the Captain held a flashlight and got the job done. No sweat...hardly.
Another time we were scheduled to depart for operations out of San Diego. The plan was to move offshore, flood the well deck and take on a full contingent of small craft (we didn't keep the well deck full of small craft in port). The cool thing about the Navy is things are "real". There were real small boats waiting for us to come and get them. Real people...real. Not like a desk job sometimes.
We were having problems with the door on the rear of the ship that had to be opened to allow the small craft to come in (it wouldn't open). That door weighed something around 200 tons and had a complex contol system that included motors, relays, safety locks and, limit switches (some of which would be submersed in salt water when we flooded the well deck, which was one of the reasons it was hard to maintain).
This is a picture of the rear of the ship with the door closed. You can see it's made of two pieces and can imagine the weight by considering the width and height of the ship.
One of our sister ships of the same class, had a similar problem of not being able to open the well deck door. The sailors working on the door had got it partially open, possibly by jury-rigging/bypassing safety locks, and then something happened causing the door to fall back closed...which literally bent the back end of the ship, sending it to dry dock for some expensive repairs.
My crew was responsible for getting the door open so we could deploy. I was a petty officer by this time and had a couple of other sailors working with me. We went through the schematics, working through the night, and figured out a way to get the door to open with the bad limit switches and all. It was very interesting. The control systems then were primarily large banks of relays that formed logic gates (AND or OR gates). We had an amazing amount of "spaghetti" (jumper wires) in those relay banks to get the dang thing open. It was EXCITING because of the size of the door and the fact we knew a lot of people were depending on us...we got the job done.
I was given the Stoker Award on that ship for exceptional performance and got my name on a plaque that stayed with the ship, which was quite an honor for me. I'm proud of that work.
I like to joke about my time in the Navy too.
I was the laundry petty officer in boot camp. That meant I got to sit on big bags of laundry and smoke cigarettes while waiting for the laundry truck. I missed small arms training because I was performing my laundry P.O. duties. I never got to touch a gun in the Navy, although after I got onboard ship, I was issued a knife license (we carried big pocket knives in sheathes that we used to cut the tape when disconnecting shore power...as sort of a badge of honor).
I attribute my time in the Navy to my ability to (a) occasionaly fix a household appliance and (b) fold clothes very neatly (not that I do anymore...but that was a big part of boot camp).
I had some great times in the Navy, met some great people and have some stories...what more could you ask for?
For me being in the Navy was sort of like what they say about buying a boat...the two best days are the day you buy it and the day you sell it. My two best days were when I got onboard that ship and when I left, with a lot of good ones in between.
I'll miss the USS Belleau Wood.
