Received from the author. Besides getting your personalized autographed copy, the book is the foundation of a documentary for next fall!

All,

It’s my pleasure to invite you to a discussion of my book, “No Higher Honor: Saving the USS Samuel B. Roberts in the Persian Gulf” (Naval Institute Press, 2006, http://www.nohigherhonor.com) at 7 p.m. this Friday, Jan. 19, at the Borders Books in Springfield, Va (6701 Frontier Drive, Springfield, Va). The store is located near the Springfield Mall, just south of I-495.)

The book (now in its second printing) tells the story of the USS Samuel B. Roberts, a small U.S. warship dispatched to the Persian Gulf in 1988. Well-led and well-trained, its crew shepherded oil tankers through the chaos of the Iran-Iraq War — until disaster struck. On 14 April, an Iranian mine ripped open the Roberts’ engineroom, ignited fires on four decks, and plunged the ship into darkness. With seawater rising around their boots, the crew fought fire and flooding into the night. Four days later, the U.S. retaliated, sinking a half-dozen Iranian warships and boats in the biggest surface battle since World War II.

The book has received good reviews; it has also inspired a History Channel documentary that is slated to air this fall.

Hope to see you on Friday!

Brad Peniston

My book report is here.

Oh, yes, and Brad chipped in two copies for the Valour-IT Fund Raiser this past November. Just in case you wanted to support him, too.

If I’m not there, the PVR is running…

Aviation buff? Curious about what air combat maneuvering (ACM) has been like over the ages? Do you love tactics, espcially ones conducted at high speed and in three dimensions? Do you get “speed is life” or want to?

So, at 10PM each Friday night, you should be tuned to the “History Channel for “Dogfights.”

Using computer gaming simulations software, detailed graphical representations and interviews with some of the actual “players” in many historical air battles, it will give you a dose of detail to round out your comprehension of the “process” of dogfighting….

For the Naval Historians out there, the episode aired 12/22/06, titled “Death of the Japanese Navy” was a well done detailed description of the Battle Off Samar in Oct, 1944. While the show is about air combat, they used the same techniques to tell the story of the clash between Adm Kurita’s Central Force and Taffy 3 in the early hours of 10/25/1944 off of Leyte Gulf. Featured for much of the commentary was James Hornfisher, author of “Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors”. The valiant aviators, who, in many cases with no more ordnance, continued to make passes at the overwhleming force is intermingled with the surface combat between destroyer escorts, destroyers (on the US side) and the battle force lead by IJN Yamato, other battleships, cruisers and destroyers of the Japanese fleet.

So…see about the Flying Tigers, aerial combat between “The Last Gunfighters” F-8 Crusaders and MiGs over Hanoi, Spads (not A-1s!) over the trenches, or the trials of the “Cactus Air Force.”

Post your stuff here!

Chief “Mac,” my “Sea Daddy” said (while the stub of his cigar never left being clenched between his teeth) these things about pistol usage:

• “You have to put 50 rounds down range a day” (to stay proficient – he believed a 1911 .45 should feel just like another part of your body)
• “You always shoot twice. Once to get him, the second to make sure. Any fewer rounds is stupid, any more is a waste.”

Wisdom…it comes in many forms.

A wee bit late for the sun passing over the yardarm, but here nonetheless….post your good stuff!

My sea story? In a word….Seabats. I know, you think I’m pulling your legs, but…RADM Bernsen has seen ’em….and so has this guy. Today is your day to tell me how you can connect the dots.

And when you have that assignment completed, tell me about your seabat experiences….

The last few days have led to some introspection on the nature of my blogging. Sure, I have opinions, and thoughts, but what I know best, and no longer being plugged into current operations, I know the history of the Navy I served in. In addition, the Navy’s role, while important for the global support capabilities, in, until the rise of the Chinese Navy, rather secondary, necessarily so, to the front line Marines and Grunts who are the only ones who can take it directly to the enemy in the way all wars are eventually won. The support of the Navy to those ends, such as close air support, and the manpower to let the trained trigger pullers stay in the field certainly is of more importance right now.

Anyhow, I think for a while, I’ll spend some time catching up history. I went to the Wikipedia entires for three ships, two that I served on, and edited some history that I personally was around for.

So, for today, for all of you who have served, take a few minutes and see what isn’t told in a forum where you can directly add to the storage of actual events, and add some of what you know…..

Maybe one day when my professional background fits the current events better, I’ll add more to the multitude of commentaries.

It’s Wednesday again! Hope everyone had a great holiday season. Post your trackbacks, maybe someone will discover you here.

“Sea Story” of the day:

I had a “paper brain” that lived in my hands, being perused for the many items to be done and their status, or safely in my right seat pocket, with my wallet, which will further convey it’s relative importance. If was a 5″x8″ Day Timer with a leather cover and, believe me, it was well used in my XO days.

One day, somehow, I became “separated” from my separate memory. I believe it was after the end of a Planning Board for Training (PB4T) (held at 1300 on Thursdays weekly) while at sea on deployment. The anxiety level rose, but it was a busy day, and, after all, it couldn’t be over 453′ from me, unless it went for a swim…

It didn’t take long before an envelope was delivered to me by a watch messenger. It certainly didn’t appear that the wandering was enclosed, but, upon opening the message, I found two Polaroid pictures of said Day Timer. Both showed my almost sole source of recollection secured to a chair with the small nylon line used for the underway replenishment shot lines, and in one picture, a black gloved hand held a 1911A1 .45 caliber pistol, pointed at the Day Timer. Enclosed was a note, with some demand, beginning with “If you want to see your Day Timer alive again…”, yet, I had the Mater-at-Arms force on my side, so I chose to disregard any show of weakness.

Short moments later, the MA1 had dusted the pictures for fingerprints and, lo and behold, the miscreants had been careless, leaving their positive identification in my hands. The guilty parties were summoned to my stateroom and confronted, at which time, the leader of the pack handed over the missing collection of all tickler items to me. Chaos was fought back and the World restored to a right order.

You know, it gets boring at sea and the practical jokes sometimes get quite entertaining…..Somewhere, in a box in the attic is a set of Polaroid pictures, secured, after being used as evidence, for historical purposes.

Pat Conroy, a gifted writer, son of a Marine pilot, anti-Vietnam War protester has come out with a clear eyed letter on his decisions made in his youth, and how he views such actions now.

It takes some serious guts for a man to look back, his understanding of life tempered by years of experience, and grant that he made a bad decision. Most would prefer to ignore such choices to be forgotten, or try to rationalize them away, but Pat steps up tot he plate and admits he wasn’t so wise when he was young, and what that decision means to him today.

I applaud him for his courage to say this in a web based and media forum. Titled harshly by himself, “An Honest Confession by an American Coward” is worth taking about 5 minutes to read and reflect on his words, and how his college teammate, never questioned his views, yet in telling his story of captivity during the Vietnam War, and as a result of this relationship, cause Pat to look inside himself. Some would see this as the process of “iron sharpening iron.”

When I visited my old teammate Al Kroboth’s house in New Jersey, I spent the first hours quizzing him about his memories of games and practices and the screams of coaches that had echoed in field houses more than 30 years before. Al had been a splendid forward-center for the Citadel; at 6 feet 5 inches and carrying 220 pounds, he played with indefatigable energy and enthusiasm. For most of his senior year, he led the nation in field-goal percentage, with UCLA center Lew Alcindor hot on his trail. Al was a battler and a brawler and a scrapper from the day he first stepped in as a Green Weenie as a sophomore to the day he graduated. After we talked basketball, we came to a subject I dreaded to bring up with Al, but which lay between us and would not lie still.

“Al, you know I was a draft dodger and antiwar demonstrator.”

“That’s what I heard, Conroy,” Al said. “I have nothing against what you did, but I did what I thought was right.”

“Tell me about Vietnam, big Al. Tell me what happened to you,” I said.
[…]
It was that same long night, after listening to Al’s story, that I began to make judgments about how I had conducted myself during the Vietnam War.

In the darkness of the sleeping Kroboth household, lying in the third-floor guest bedroom, I began to assess my role as a citizen in the ’60s, when my country called my name and I shot her the bird. Unlike the stupid boys who wrapped themselves in Viet Cong flags and burned the American one, I knew how to demonstrate against the war without flirting with treason or astonishingly bad taste. I had come directly from the warrior culture of this country and I knew how to act.

But in the 25 years that have passed since South Vietnam fell, I have immersed myself in the study of totalitarianism during the unspeakable century we just left behind. I have questioned survivors of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, talked to Italians who told me tales of the Nazi occupation, French partisans who had counted German tanks in the forests of Normandy, and officers who survived the Bataan Death March. I quiz journalists returning from wars in Bosnia, the Sudan, the Congo, Angola, Indonesia, Guatemala, San Salvador, Chile, Northern Ireland, Algeria.

As I lay sleepless, I realized I’d done all this research to better understand my country. I now revere words like democracy, freedom, the right to vote, and the grandeur of the extraordinary vision of the founding fathers. Do I see America’s flaws? Of course. But I now can honor her basic, incorruptible virtues, the ones that let me walk the streets screaming my ass off that my country had no idea what it was doing in South Vietnam. My country let me scream to my heart’s content – the same country that produced both Al Kroboth and me.

It is in our relationships and getting to know each other’s life and stories, not in shouting down of one another, that we all grow. Many could take a lesson from the hard won wisdom of Pat Conroy.

H/T: Chapomatic

So, there I was, flat on my back at 20,000 feet…no kiddin’…oops…wrong story and me without the obligatory huge watch (to compensate, ya know), but…it’s open season on trackbacks, so link ’em up!

Last week, I left me “on station” at the gunfire support range at San Celmente, Island, by way of discussion the continualy noise that surrounds you while abaord a ship.

So as it was training, within minutes of checking in on the radio net after maneuvering into the assigned gunnery “box,” of course the observer ahsore had targets for us…”Fire Mission! Troops in the Open! Grid: ….” and so the formatted message went, telling us what, where and some other important details. The plotters surrounding me went to work locating the spot he was adressing, marking our position on the chart and “ded reckoning” (simple time/speed/distance calculation) to show our predicted path of the ship. Once we had the target location plotted, we’d measure the azimuth to the target from the ship’s track and compare that to where the gunfire control system (GFCS) had figured (with its own computer) where the target was. We had to be within a degree of difference, or we’d have to replot and check, which burned valuable time ashore and specifically in the target’s area.

On top of the comparison to the GFCS plot, we also checked with the Ship’s Navigator to make sure his plot tracked with ours. It’s all about accuracy and speed within that. The Gunnery Officer would order the guns loaded and I would announce “plot set!’ if all the navigation data (three separate plots) were within the allowed tolerances. Our readiness would be reported to the spotter, who would give us final clearance to shoot. Usually he would have us fire a single round to see where it landed, then he would pass directions to “adjust the spot, by his best reckoing, to make the next round land on target. Back then the “Mk 1 Mod 0” eyeball and the operator’s calibration were the means of doing this. Today we have fancy laser stuff to tell the observer the distances, accurate to very small distances.

So…when the radio told us to shoot, it was my responsibility to send a standard order to the Gunnery Officer, who would relay it to the gun crew and the gun control console (GCC) operator, who would step on a foot pedal to fire the gun.

In this sequence, I would come to learn the timing from the moment I gave the order to shoot to the time the round was on it’s way. The thumping of the electrohydraulic ammo hoists and the operation of the loader tray and ram, followed by the slamming shut of the large steel breech block became familiar to me, so when we got to exercises requiring rounds to arrive on a target at a specific time, I was able to time my order so the computed time of flight for the rounds was essentially what was measured from the actual shot leaving the barrel. The “latency” was all

As I meantioned last week, the operation of the guns, whether they be the forward or after gun mount, was detectable where I stood in CIC, in the darkened space with dungaree clad sailors and khaki clad chief petty officers and officers, while I learned a deadly trade.

Maybe more specifics next week…but…that’s the short form and worthy of not interfering too much with essential afternoon shopping runs for those of us late present determiners….

Lots of chatter about the net, so I left this alone, as I have posted my thoughts in comment sections.

However..to add some unbearable lightness to the insane naming situation, Rich Casebolt needs to be credited with these brilliant one liners, found in the comments section at Milblogs, on a post by Bublehead:

I can already hear the commentary about having Ford-class carriers in the fleet …

“You can have it any color, as long as it’s gray …”

“Fix Or Repair Daily …”

“Found On Rocks, Damaged …”

“Have you sailed on a Ford, lately?”

“Ford … a Better Idea?”

Would enlisted men on these carriers, who move up to become officers, now be known as Ford Mustangs?

Would the ships of the Battle Groups formed around these carriers now be referred to as Ford Escorts?

Would the Lefties criticize the building of these carriers by referring to them as Ford LTD’s — Long Term Debts?

And finally, I now see the truck ads, featuring these carriers behind the truck (or launched off its catapults) to show that the trucks are “built Ford tough.”

If you need more “gouge” on the USS FORD, Lex’s post, replete with raging commentary is here, and Bubblehead has the “long form” version here,

Weekly Open Trackbacks. A “safe harbor” to “suggest” to readers they should take a chance on you(r writings). Go for it.

From last week’s Sea Stories, I discussed the ship at sea always being a place of noise, and I indicated I’d tell more of that this week. Here it is.

On my second ship, one of my collateral duties was that of Gunnery Liasion Officer (GLO), which entailed being the person who managed the trageting of the ship’s guns against shore targets, via a spotter, on the ground or in the air, who would identify and fix target positions.

As part of our “shakedown” training (it was a newly commissioned ship), we had to train in this mission area, and we took a trip from San Diego harbor (homeport) to the west to the firing range off San Celmente Island and I proceeded to practice a skill I first learned in the school rooms of the Fleet Training Center.

I stood at the Dead Reckoning Tracer (DRT), which, for the purposes of this work, was converted to a plain old chart table. The operation specialists had laid out the grid reference charts for the area, and set up the radio circuits and sound powered telephone headsets. Status boards (large hanging, edge lit plexiglass sheets) were redrawn with the format for the fire missions we would be tasked with and positioned so I could easily read them from where I stood. My tools, up to three stopwatches, a sharpened No. 2 pencil, dividers and the “Commanche Board,” also were out for use.

So, “perched” several decks above, and away from the fore and aft 5″54cal MK 45 gun mounts, I would still be able to hear the gun laoding mechanisms doing their work. Two decks below the guns, the magazine crews would pick the type ammuntion and powder charges from their storage and place them in the hoists. Hydraulics and mechanical systems would rapidly raise the 76 lb projectiles and the powder cases up to the gun mount, where they were automatically loaded into a tray before the ram then shoved them into the waiting breech, to have the breech block slam into place behind them, awaiting patiently for the electrical charge that will begin the “explosives train” on it’s path to sending the sleek bullet hurtling towards it’s assigned target.

I felt the operation as much as I heard it. I felt the forward gun, Mount 51, and heard it fairly clearly, but I mostly felt Mount 52, probably 350 feet aft of me in straight distance measurement, insulating itself from me thru multiple bulkheads and 4 decks of aluminum and steel. The firing of either mount, was clearly unmistakable, as I became practiced on sending high explosives many miles away on the word of a disembodied voice on the radio.

“On Station, Ready for Call for Fire” begins the sequence, alerting the forward observer you are available to pummel the enemy who dares to enter his field of view…..

More later…