Thursday, March 15, 2018

Christmas 1977


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.

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