From My Memoires:
Christmas Eve,
1977. I stood on the quarterdeck of USS Pharris (FF-1094), in port Mina Sulman,
Bahrain. Bahrain was a small island nation about a third of the way up the west
coast of the Persian Gulf. Four weeks ago we had sailed down the Suez Canal, stopping
in Great Bitter Lake. We sat in the lake, anchored with the rest of our south
bound convoy, while the north bound canal convoy steamed past. Suez is a one
way canal. Great Bitter Lake, about two thirds of the way down the canal, is a
place where you view scenes that time forgot. If Jesus were to walk on this
water, his eyes would feel comfortable with the sights. The vessels haven’t
changed in two thousand years. There were small rowed canoes and scows,
obviously fashioned from hand hewn timbers, and sailing craft with hand
stitched lateen sails rigged to ancient spars fashioned from tree limbs that
had seen little preparation prior to their having been put to use aboard ship.
The people aboard those boats could have come out of another millennium as well.
Throughout the
canal transit we caught good views of the debris that still littered the Sinai
from the Yom Kippur war, strewn about the desert right to the canal edge. They
were a testimony to war’s waste. There were remnants of the Soviet mobile bridging
equipment that the Egyptians had used to rapidly ford the canal and take the
heavily fortified Israeli Bar Lev Line in the early hours of the war. They sat
there as informal war memorials.
A groomed dirt
road follows the west bank, carrying everything from cars and trucks to ancient
donkey carts and ZSU-23 anti aircraft guns.
As we passed
through Port Suez at the southern terminus we saw a city still in ruins from
the war. A burnt out Egyptian tank still occupied a traffic circle near the
water’s edge, its gun fully depressed in permanent surrender, one of its tracks
blown off.
Every ship must
carry a Suez Canal Company pilot. After discharging ours, we steamed down the
Red Sea, dodging gas and oil rigs that flared off excess gas, lighting up the
night with wasteful flames as we sailed past the Western Sinai mountains that
made shadows in the night sky. There was a quick, unmemorable stop in Jeddah,
then, a day later, at first light, we exited the Gate of Tears at the south end
of the Red Sea, skirted the hostile Yemeni coast, and cruised west through the
North Arabian Sea. We were preparing to endure one of the Navy’s least
interesting deployments in the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean littoral.
Now, for what it
was worth, Christmas had come. For most of the crew, it was the first time
spending the holiday in a non Christian country. Things weren’t quite like
Saudi Arabia; chaplains could wear their shoulder boards and insignia ashore
with the religious symbols on them. But signs of non Muslim religions in this
country were scarce. The most Christmas like thing was the weather. It was
barely in the forties, with twenty knots of wind. Though I was out there
standing watch with my heavy bridge coat and scarf, I was freezing. Anyone who
thought the Gulf was a tropical area hadn’t been there in winter.
I had been
commissioned less than two years ago. Back when I’d been buying my initial kit
of uniforms, the bridge coat was listed as “optional, may be prescribed.” I had
bought one because it looked cool. If you bought the Navy issue coat at
government small stores instead of one off the rack at a commercial uniform
shop, you got a coat of genuine Melton wool that weighed nearly fifteen pounds,
would shed moisture all day, and stop a thirty knot breeze. Thankfully, that’s
what I was wearing today. I was experiencing all those hazards.
Over the stern
the shipyard stretched for a mile or more in each direction, filled with
Mercedes sedans and construction materials, lined up in perfect rows. It was
the bounty of Bahrain’s oil wealth that was pouring in faster than it could be
taken away. Some of it would no doubt be driven across the causeway into
eastern Saudi Arabia, since there was only so much this little island could
absorb. Each day the bounty in the shipyard grew. The pallets of cement bags
grew. The pallets of lumber grew. No trucks ever seemed to come to cart them
away. No drivers came to drive the Mercedes away. So it seemed to me. “So,” I
thought, “this is what petrodollars do.”
On our way into
Mina Sulman we had passed countless ships anchored in the roadstead on the
approaches to the harbor. They were all awaiting a berth to unload. Bahrain had
ordered so much stuff with its new found wealth that the ships delivering it
were piled up at its doorstep; Bahrain was paying for them to sit there and
await their turn at anchor.
As the sunlight
faded, I could see the lights come on in Muharraq, the religious center of the
country. Sailors preferred the capital, Manama. You could get liquor with your
meal there.
We were in port
for the Christmas holiday, enjoying a respite from our mission of showing the
flag in the Middle East Force backwater. Unlike neighboring Saudi Arabia,
Bahrain was home to numerous churches, but few sailors sought them out at
Christmas. They were more likely to look for a bowl of the excellent curry and
a bottle of beer.
USS Pharris was
not going anywhere fast. She was, in the terms of Navy sarcasm, welded to the
pier. Anyone brave and foolish enough to dive into the cold and mildly polluted
waters of Mina Sulman would see that the ship’s single nineteen foot propeller
had had its blades bent back round against each other like pretzels. This
crude, crippling piece of bronze art had a sad story.
Pharris, named
for Chief Warrant Officer Jackson Charles Pharris, who had been awarded the
Medal of Honor for his heroism during the attack on Pearl Harbor, had sailed
for Bahrain in company with USS Dupont. Dupont’s commanding officer was
considerably senior to Pharris’ Captain, and so he commanded the little two
ship group, destined to become part of the three ship United States Middle East
Force.
When the two
ships arrived at the outer harbor of Mina Sulman they fueled at a large pier
before taking on a pilot to finally moor in the inner harbor. The catch was
that Mina Sulman had only one pilot, who didn’t take ships in after dark, and
it was getting late. The senior ship, Dupont, would go in first. Pharris would
have to anchor out in the roadstead for the night and go pier side in the
morning.
As the fuel
hoses were being disconnected, Dupont’s commanding officer, not a man
accustomed to being told no, arrived aboard Pharris. When he left fifteen
minutes later, our Captain assembled his officers in the wardroom for a quick
briefing. We would not be going to anchorage. As Dupont entered the inner
harbor, guided by the pilot, Pharris would follow in her wake.
As a young
ensign, I was surprised. The more experienced officers were appalled. Then we
were dismissed to make all preparations for getting underway. Stopping by my
stateroom to grab my pipe, I bumped into my room mate, Chip Boyd, the OPS
Officer, going over the underway checklist. He looked up at me with a sad,
angry face, and shook his head, then went back to work.
It was my turn
to stand watch in the engineering spaces to complete my qualifications, so I
didn’t witness the events that followed on the bridge. The engine room had a
mirror over the main reduction gear so that those in main control could see the
main shaft. Suddenly, as we were steaming into port, the ship began vibrating
heavily, and the main shaft started to jump. Without being ordered by the
bridge, the Chief Engineer on his own ordered the main throttle valve closed,
then cracked it slightly to prevent bowing the main engine rotor.
Our phone talker
in main control told us that there was confusion on the bridge. The order came
down from the bridge for five knots ahead. At five knots the ship went ahead
like a hobby horse, bouncing up and down. We stopped the engine. Our phone
talker said there were tugs on the way. We tried to steam ahead again. The ship
began to hobby horse again. We stopped, and dropped the anchor. Shortly, we
took two tugs along side, weighed anchor, and the tugs brought us to an
anchorage.
We were in the
midst of oil country. The next morning, a British underwater salvage diver came
out to dive on us. He surfaced, his graying beard plastered to his ruddy face,
dried off his wet suit, and sat down on the after capstan with a pencil and
paper. The Captain, the XO, and the Chief Engineer clustered ‘round him as he
sketched the state of our single propeller. “Yer prop’s all bent over like a
pretz’l,” he said, pointing to the rough drawing on his lap. “It’s ruint. It’s
gotta go,” he insisted in an accent that placed him somewhere outside of the
British public school education system. “Yer gonna need ta have a new one sent
over fer sure,” he continued, raising his eyebrows as he looked the captain
straight in the eye. The expression on the Captains face cannot be adequately
described. Horror, disappointment, and something else. He was a man who had
just ruined the thing that he had worked for all his adult life.
In the morning
two tugs dragged us in to the pier, since we could not power ourselves in. I
was too young and inexperienced to be involved in the repair planning, but the
job of an underwater propeller repair was a fascinating evolution to watch.
Before it could begin, a new prop and a repair team had to be flown in from the
States with special equipment.
It would take
the largest transport aircraft in the U.S. inventory, a C-5A, to fly the
necessary gear out to fix us - a new prop, a balance beam, some special tools,
and a few pros from Dover to supervise the whole operation. Those lucky pros
would spend their New Years in beautiful Bahrain.
My first clue
that the C-5A with the new prop had landed was the appearance of a tug warping
a barge with the new prop alongside the pier by our stern. There was plenty of
work to be done. Not only would the prop need to be changed. The sonar dome had
scraped the bottom. The no foul coating had been damaged, leaving a “beard”
that would make a ton of noise on the sonar. It would need to be trimmed. More
work for that diver with “the sharpest knife we could find.” “That coating is
some tough,” he said, as he emerged from the chilly pier side waters after
another dive. This one had been on the bow, where the sonar dome juts out like
a big, bulbous chin. “I could try a linoleum knife to start. The coating is all
ripped off like a beard. I can just imagine what it’ll sound like at speed.” He
was referring to the flapping that the ripped coating would make on our
sensitive sonar equipment as we steamed through the water. I noticed the OPS
officer roll his eyes. The weapons officer owned the sonar, but I had already
figured out that he was the least sharp of the department heads. The Operations
Officer, my room mate, was by far the smartest, and the most skilled. He didn’t
say a word, or make a gesture, but I could see the expression on his face. The
moment he had heard the diver’s report, he might as well have rolled his eyes
back in his head.
The Captain, XO,
and three line department heads stood in a circle on the fantail, talking with
the diver, seemingly lost. The ball was in the Captain’s court, but he had done
the damage, and I could see him from across the fantail, looking for a blinding
stroke of genius from his department heads, or maybe his XO. No one spoke. Then
my room mate, Chip Boyd, spoke up. I couldn’t hear what he was saying, but he
was talking with his hands. They walked off to the interior of the ship.
The quarterdeck
was a quiet place at this time of day. I wandered to the port quarter to get a
look down at the barge. The giant prop’s edges were carefully protected by
specially fitted wrapping. Though it was huge, it was a high precision
instrument. At it’s center was a hole milled to within a few thousands of an
inch to fit our shaft’s keyway. Along its edge were tiny holes. When underway
air compressors blew air through those holes to prevent cavitation. That
reduced our noise signature when hunting
submarines; as a rule we were always doing that when at sea. Next to the new prop was a steel beam about fifty
feet long. It would be used to remove the old prop and install the new one
while the ship was in the water. There was also a bunch of chain. In the
distance I saw the tug returning to the pier with a second barge, this one
containing a crane. The pros from Dover were wasting no time.
In less than a
week Pharris had a new prop and was ready to go. There remained only the
punishment of the guilty, and this being the Navy, a few innocent as well.
No comments:
Post a Comment