About two weeks shy of 1.5 years, actually. A standard enlistment was four years. I went in under the RM ATF (Radioman Advanced Technical Field) program - signed for six years vice four, and volunteered for sub duty, in return for which I was guaranteed all those schools, was paid as an E3 starting the first day of boot camp, and was advanced to E4 immediately upon completion of ‘A’ school.
As a submariner, I got to spend quite a few hours waxing decks (not to mention cleaning bilges) even as a First Class. Different divisions were assigned different areas of the boat to clean. We RMs cleaned Radio, of course, but we were also responsible for cleaning the lower-level passageway and 21-man berthing. (all my time on subs was spent on 688-class boats.) On my first boat, Radio also owned the port side of Main Condensate Bay (part of the Engine Room).
Surface fleet barbers are Ship’s Servicemen; they also run the ship’s store and the laundry. According to this, SH ‘A’ School is 26 days. (Submarine barbers are volunteers from the crew - I’ve seen torpedomen, A-gangers, nucs and others doing the job. My first boat actually sent a torpedoman to a civilian barber school in Honolulu, but he was the only one I knew who actually received formal training like that.)
Well, sure, but still, it must be nice just to be out on the golf course.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/divots?s=t
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/davits?s=t
Anchor management issues…
San Diego RTC, March-May 1980.
As the company Yeoman I was spared the requirement to participate in Service Week. I still had plenty to occupy me during the days.
I did just barely miss out on being given a marching party when I failed to get one of the guys to a dental appointment on time.
Two of the guys in my company showed up for training without knowing how to swim.
In the UK, naval recruits undergo an exercise called HAVOC, a 3 story sinking ship simulation. Apparently it is pretty stressful, along with wet and cold. Of course, less stressful than actually being on a sinking warship, but that is the point.
Si
Because of the volume of recruits passing through boot camp in 1967, our company was delayed by a week. So we had two weeks of service “week”. One week is bad enough, but the second week was pure hell, as the lack of sleep was turning us into zombies. One guy lost it on the chow line, where he had been dispensing butter pats the entire time. Someone refused butter and he started shouting “take the fucking butter! TAKE THE FUCKING BUTTER!!” and throwing the pats at people. He was taken off the line, and that night he lost it in the middle of the night, crying and shouting. He ended up being discharged. I remember falling asleep standing up at my station (salad dressing? salad dressing? salad dressing?) and the galley Chief coming up and screaming at me to WAKE THE FUCK UP, MAGGOT!! Good times.
Ah, the damage control simulator - basicly a large subdivided matel box kitted out internally like a ship. It has a number of inlets connected to water mains and these look like shell holes etc.
They can turn on the water at these inlets during the course of the exercise, in addition the lights always go out, so you have to run emergency lighting, you also have run emergency electrical supplies to get various extractor pumps working - all the time being blasted with high pressure water from the broken firemain.
Just to make it more interesting they also bash the outside of the metal box with hammers and stuff, it also tilts over whilst you are working to simlutatea listing ship.
In practice is it surprisngly real, we smashed into the arse end of USS Dale, and this was the result,
http://www.ambuscade.org.uk/Amb_Collision01-1.htm
We were on our tea break at the time, around 10:10 am, up came the emergency announcement ‘Stand by for collision forward!Safegaur, safeguard, Stand by for collision forward!’
‘Safegaurd’ is a term to mean ‘This is not an exercise this is for real’
We were a bit suprised due to us being miles away shore or port, surely there was nothing to hit - but we’d underestimated the skill of our navigation crew in finding an obstacle.
Seconds later the ship suddenly tilted massively - it is amazing just how quickly you can get up on deck when you think you life depends on it - genuinely thought we were going to capsize but we soon rolled back again.
How was Goa?
Ah yes,
Some of the crew took a few days off and went there, but we had to take it in turns. I was due to leave the ship anyway, but that had been scheduled to happen when we arrived in Australia, however we never made it due to the collision (or at least I had left by then)
Trying to leave India through immigration without a passport stamp for arrival casued a certain amount of consternation to their burearocracy - application of excess unwanted currency seemed to help out though.
When we got into the dockyard that was also something of a disaster. We were put into a dry dock that was absolutely enormous - probably intended for aircraft carriers ore somesuch, certainly not a little frigate. The result was that there was real concern we could topple over sideways since the supportin props from the dock wall were right out as far as they could go. We had a diver go down to ensure we came upon the keel blocks correctly whikst the water was pumped out. We came down right on his air lines, so that finished him.
The dock was so large it had been divided in two, with a coffer dam half way up the length of it. At the furthest end of the dry dock a crane decided it would give way, having been stood for perhaps 70 years. It landed on a bunch of Indian labourers and killed around 20 or so of them.
That one was a real Jonah trip, we also lost two helicopters in the Gulf too, one ditched and the other landed in Barhain on a mail run and couldn’t get up again. Thing is, we had borrowed the second one from another ship, they still want it back, which they can have if they get their fishing rods out!
The site says:
“The US Navy finished off what Ambuscade attempted to do on April 6, 2000, when USS DALE became the victim of a SINKEX in the Atlantic.”
What’s a SINKEX?
The Ambuscade looks remarkably like an attacking shark’s jaws from the back. Good idea for morale, like the Flying Tigers.
SINKEX - Using a ship as a target and blasting away at it until it sinks. The finest end a Naval ship can hope for!
Not just near. It was actually in Orlando - about a mile east of downtown. Most of it is now a tony housing development called Baldwin Park.
The local joke when the DoD decided to close the base was that it took the Navy thirty years to figure out that Orlando is an hour and a half from the sea.
I don’t know, I kind of think the museum route is best. Like the New Jersey, Midway or Intrepid or much to my surprise when I first heard it, my old ship, the USS Ranger CV-61. Sadly as of October, the Ranger is again scheduled for scrapping. Still hoping some break comes in that.
How does one ship crash into another in the deep and wide ocean?
Flotillas, or even sub-sub shadowing, I can see.
I mean, was one ship coming over for a mail toss or a battery jump?
ETA: is “Jonah trip” Brit navy slang?
According to the USS Dale Wikipedia page, the US and British fleet were conducting joint training exercises when the collision happened. Maybe someone got a bit too zealous.
I had a friend who was on the USS Evans when it was cut in half by the HMAS Melbourne in 1969. He survived, but the guy who traded watch with him didn’t. He claims he had dreams about the collision for weeks before it happened. After it was all done with, he changed his rating from Boiler Tech (a seagoing rating) to Utilitiesman (a Seabee rating) so he would never have to go aboard ship again.
mrAru said that the DC Sim was looked upon as one of the funnest parts of training - he was very disappointed that the proposed stint at teaching at SubSchool fell through, that was one of the things he was to be doing. He always heard that the instructors had as much fun planning and running the simulator as the students inside. I was hoping to get a ‘family day’ in the simulator. I always liked family cruises, I tended to hide in Machinery with him instead of going around the sub and learning about things.
I believe the 1890s US Navy Officers manual says something about the enlisteds along the lines of 'They have a certain animal cunning but are not really intelligent and are not to be trusted" 
At least you saved the beer!
I used to tour the foreign ships hitting Norfolk NAS occasionally, and I will admit that other than the Germans, the British sailors were amazingly friendly, I like the habit of a Ships Pub. Though the time the Soviet Fleet showed up it was fascinating to a Cold War baby to actually tour a Soviet destroyer, [the Olitchny.](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/destroyer Otlichny)
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That thought occurred to me when I saw the picture. That was some serious damage.
Could be worse, there is a Navy Base [or was] outside Las Vegas.
I don’t know, at least a museum ship gets maintained. About 5 years ago we toured an old [URL=“http://www.ussalbacore.org/”]pig boat](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/destroyer Otlichny) up in Portsmouth NH, I pretty much cry when I see pictures of the Red Banner Fleet rusting at the pier. That is not a good death for a naval vessel, enemy or not.
Very carefully?
I can understand a sub coming up under something, that is just plain sloppy but not unknown. I would guess that more than a few officers and senior enlisteds got into hot water
‘Jonah’ is a term for someone who has loads of bad luck, everything screws up around them, hence a Jonah trip is a deployment where everything goes wrong. Something to do with biblical events I believe.
How do you collide with something in the middle of deep water in bright sunlight and a flat calm sea?
We were doing ‘Officer of the Watch’ ship handling exercises - OOW steering.
We were meeting the Armilla patrol at the time, and steaming in a formation straight inline ahead. The last ship in the line makes it’s way to the front by zig-zagging up the line. This is a common enough training exercise to train junior officers, I’ve heard that trying to control the direction of a ship is similar to trying to steer a planet through space, any changes in speed and course take a long time to take effect.
I guess we zagged instead of zigging, I don’t recall a steering gear failure though that is possible. Such a failure is classed as an emergency condition and would have been announced over the tannoy - steering gear is extremely reliable and when doing exercises, such as this, you close up the steering gear compartment with the emergency steering crew, just in case of a hydraulics failure - it can be operated manually but it is very slow indeed.
I reckon that collision took away around 40 foot of our bows, straight into the beer store, fortunately the collision bulkhead held. Its a good job it was tea break time, as there would probably have been more folk around in the collion area.
Once we’d stopped and were idle in the water, with beer cans floating around us, USS Dale sent her chopper over to see if anyone needed to be pulled out of the water, it hovered over our flight deck. Now our own helicopter was very much smaller so we were not familiar with the power of the downdraught of theirs. This downdraught clean lifted our Flight Deck Controller right off our helo pad, over the guardrails and right into the drink - he was wearing a set of my noise cancelling headphones which I had to repair.
We were asked by the skipper of Dale if we needed any more assistance, they might have been a bit offended when they were told, 'No, we think you’ve just about done enough f***ing damage for one day!"