A Day in the Life of a US Navy Plane Captain

3/3/2023 | Me

[airdalechief]

Very Good

Very damn good

[freepersup]

How about those apples? Awesome opossum!

Great piece of recollection and writing. I really appreciate it when freepers put in the work and compose the subject matter themselves.

I’m going to follow up and get more identification from the aircraft that I posted about, that’s from a Clansmen squadron.

Thank you for doing the grunt work out on the deep blue waters in a dangerous place (dynamic carrier deck) even in peacetime.

[rlmorel]

My favorite port (After Mallorca, of course) was Barcelona...it was beautiful, and there were lots of bars and restaurants there.  My favorite restaurant was “Los Caracoles”...when you walked up to it, there were chickens on spits roasting in a recess in the stone wall just to the side of the door.  It was the first place I ever had calamari, before most people in this country who were not Italian had it!

I went there with the same group described below, and one of the first thing they brought out was two big platters heaped with golden yellow fried rings. They were perfect (I am sure one of the guys had the dish before and ordered it for us) and when offered to me, I refused. I thought they were onion rings, and I have a lifelong aversion to onions. When I told him, he said "No, no...not onion rings, this is calamari!" So I took one and nibbled it and I was hooked. After I got out of the Navy, and before you saw them routinely in restaurants, I tried over and over again, but...just could not get it right!  

However, this night described below did not happen at Los Caracoles. But it was in Barcelona.

I usually did not go ashore every single night...I wasn’t a “Liberty Hound”.  So, one night as we were anchored off Barcelona, I was just sitting in the shop late, writing letters, and the door opens.  In comes Naperski and his best friend, Bob Fairbanks.  They are drunker than skunks, and Ski is rattling on, nearly incoherently, about drinking out of urinals and wiping his face with toilet paper.  I had no idea what he was talking about, and Fairbanks kept saying “Don’t listen to him.  He’s crazy.  He has no idea what he is talking about...”  

Well, I could believe that.  They left and went to bed.  The next morning, they came down to the shop and convinced a group of us to go back with them to this restaurant.  They just had to go there again, they said nobody would believe them if we didn’t.  So that night, eight of us got on a liberty launch and went into town.  Myself, Heath, Toothless Ingram, Dan Grote, Steve Naperski, Bob Fairbanks, John Outcelt and Tom Hammond.  

Once ashore, Fairbanks and Naperski admitted they were so inebriated the night before, they had no idea where this place was, or what it was called.  We couldn’t believe it!  But they insisted that it would be easy to recognize, so we hopped into two taxis, and had the guys drive us around Barcelona.  Up and down the streets we went, peering out the windows.  We drove for 45 minutes, and finally, the cab driver pulled over, turned around and basically said “What the hell are you boys doing?”  None of us spoke Spanish, and he spoke no English, so....we tried everything to get the point across to him.  Making motions with our hands to mouth to eat, and Ski made a motion like smashing something with a hammer while saying “BOOM BOOM”, and the guys face just lights up.  He says “AAAAAhhhhhhhhhh...” and turned around and drove us right to this place and stopped in front of it.  

We walk inside, and to the left is a bar, and further ahead, a bunch of tables.  There is paper, trash, food and broken glass on the floor.  I take this all in, and say to myself “This ain’t right...”  and suddenly,

there is a deafening “BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM”!  I cringe and look to my left, behind the bar, and this guy (dressed in what appears to my untrained eye to be Lederhosen,  shorts, suspenders, etc. ) has a HUGE wooden mallet with a short handle on it.

The head of the mallet appeared to be at least a solid foot diameter on the face, and was a least two feet long.  Basically, it looked like a piece cut out of a tree trunk!  He had the mallet with both hands, and was pounding it on the bar with all of his might.  The whole bar and wall behind it shook...crockery, glasses and cups fell off the shelves onto the floor and shattered.  

There were rolls of toilet paper being dispensed from hangers installed up near the ceiling.  When customers wanted a napkin, they just reached over and grabbed some toilet paper.  After using it, they would simply throw it on the floor.  Nobody said anything to us and pointedly ignored us, so we found a table and sat down.  We sat there for about 15 minutes, wondering what we needed to do to get something to eat and drink, and this old withered, bald guy, wearing the Lederhosen, just walks up to us and looks at us with his hands behind his back, rocking back and forth on his toes.  

We looked at him then at each other, then back at him.  He looked at us.  We all shrugged our shoulders and one of us said “Cerveza?”  at which he turned on his heels and walked away without a word.  This was very strange.  Another guy walks over with his arms full of beer mugs, and throws them on the table!  We scrambled to catch them, but several slid off the table and broke on the floor.  

We grabbed our mugs, thinking “Okay, what now” when the old guy comes back over with an enameled chamber pot, and puts it down on the table.  It is full of beer, and we dumbly stare at the guy.  He reaches over, grabs a mug, and dips it in the chamber pot of beer, scooping out a mug full.  At that, we all burst into laughter, then scoop our mugs in and begin drinking.

 

And so it starts.  We drank and drank chamber pot after chamber pot of beer.  Then, the old guy came back over to the table and just stood there looking at us.  We looked at him then at each other, then back at him.  He looked at us.  We all shrugged our shoulders in bewilderment.  The guy had one hand behind his back, and pulled it out, and there was half of an onion.  Food?  Yes, we would like food...could we get some bread as well...”Pan?”  The little withered bald guy in Lederhosen turned on his heels and walked away.  

Suddenly,  a wheel of bread, thrown from the other side of the restaurant, came winging at our table like some huge, oversized golden-brown frisbee!  We missed it, and just as we looked at each other to say “What the...”  another wheel came winging to our table!  We caught that one, and the next one that arrived a second or two later.  I have no memory of eating anything.  Things got a little fuzzy after that.

  Then, one of the guys who worked there came to our table and began shouting in Spanish, while he gesticulated with this...er...device in his other hand.  It looked suspiciously like a douche (as if I had any idea what the hell that was at the time...but Toothless Ingram (who had to have all of his teeth pulled on the cruise for some reason) stated his certainty of that identification. In the picture below, you can see one of these crazy people who worked there drinking from this contraption!

 

We’re gonna drink out of a douche?  Is that safe?  

Well, we were drunk enough at that point that drinking out of the toilet itself might have seemed like a good idea.  The guy holding the “device” looked at us, and with the patience of a teacher educating slow students, stuck the tube in his mouth and took a big swallow as if to say “See?  Nothing to it!”  Well, he used that to dispense beer to us as if  he were using a fire extinguisher.

 Pretty soon, there were two or three of these things being passed around...my recollection after that time frame is a bit fuzzy.  I remember eating chicken and throwing the bones over my shoulder.  I also remember a fire starting on the floor at the table next to us, all that crumpled up toilet paper on the floor must have been ripe for a spark, but one of the Lederhosen wearing guys simple walked over and dumped a chamber pot of beer on it to extinguish it.  

Throughout it all, there seemed to be and incessant BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM as one or another of the staff would take a turn with the huge mallet.  

There were occasional wheels of bread that flew through our midst, I think, but I cannot be sure.  At one point, a young lady at another table wearing a denim top surrendered it to the staff, who modeled it for us.  

I have no recollection of seeing that woman without it.  I remember the woman was there with two guys, and I think it was their table that had the fire.  

Soon, all three of the guys who ran the place were drinking  with us.  I do not believe there was much service going on other than these guys hauling the beer dispenser devices to any patrons who happened to be there, which at that time was doubtful.  I believe we were the only ones there.

 

The next thing I remember is standing outside the place in a line, facing the entrance.  As the guys lowered the protective grating on the entrance and crouched underneath it to exit, we all turned around and mooned them.  They began shouting in Spanish, and whizzing in the gutter!  This whole thing was like a hallucination.   At that point, a cab showed up, and Ski jumped up and stood on the hood of the cab, while the driver yelled out the window at him.  

That was the last thing I remembered that night.  As long as I live, I will never forget that night.  The name of the establishment is lost to me, if anyone reading this knows of it, I would appreciate the information.  Someone told me later it was very popular with the college crowd.  

  So, I am grateful for the time I spent in the Navy.  I couldn’t have purchased a better education about life. And that night sure was an education!

[rlmorel]

It was fun...thanks!

[rlmorel]

Thanks! I’ll bet those guys could. Funny how that stuff stays in there, hidden all these years. Heck, I have thought about it and talked about it a bunch, but usually all the other odds and ends of the life, not the “professiona”l part of it nearly as much.

[rlmorel]

I'm with you brother.

Interesting time of our lives.

I loved being up on the flight deck when there were no flight ops going on. You could look up in the sky and see the milky way, clear as day with no light pollution at all.

The wind rushing by, always rushing by, and the background sound of the ship, the hull hissing through the ocean, and in the ship, the thrumming constant low vibration and sound of ventilation, machinery, and propulsion.

I was always careful on the flight deck. We had all seen the training movies of the crashes and guys being hit by broken arrester cables, or planes plowing into a group of spotted planes.

It was no stretch of the imagination, even for young, invincible guys, to easily visualize just how dangerous it could be up there. It was bad enough for unexpected things you never saw coming, never mind having your head up your ass and doing it to yourself or someone else.

Did they still show TRAINING FILM VIDEO: The Man From LOX" when you went through training? It is so absolutely corny and wonderfully sexist, but extremely effective, especially for irreverent 18 year old boys! Heh, "The Safety Officer is going to HAVE MY ASS!"

[rlmorel]

LOL, it could be! I knew it couldn’t be the speed brake, because we could not test the speed brake on our plane. it was a big long thing on the underside of the plane that would have smashed into the ground if it had been activated.

I think for different planes, it was different. For example, the A-6’s had speed brakes that deployed out the sides of the plane just aft of the wings, and IIRC, the plane captains for them had them tested by putting their hands together straight out in front of them, and made the same “V” to the sides instead of up and down.

But I will admit, I could easily have that wrong. I had to think a long time on that, and wasn’t sure. The others, I am pretty sure, but that one was fuzzy to me!

[rlmorel]

We had VAQ-133 on our ship. Those guys were out of Whidby Island, right?

Actually, all of you guys were?

[rlmorel]

I am glad you liked it.

I am a historian at heart, but I find WWII history fascinating and just horrible. But history hinged on that war like no other.

I think of all those men who were small town guys, all ending up in the same place on the other side of the world handling jobs with huge responsibilities at very young ages.

My favorite movie of all time is, hands down, “The Best Years of Our Lives” which won Best Picture in 1946, back when the Oscars meant something.

I grew up around those men, ordinary men who had to to extraordinary and sometimes terrible thing, but they did them because they had to.

I came to revere those men, and I still feel that way today.

[rlmorel]

You are welcome. It is a world most don’t know about, and how could they?

There are so many things like that I have no idea about, and one of the things I love about FR is the broad spectrum of experience I get exposed to. Everything from Geologists to Missionaries, you can find it here.

[doorgunner69]

When your planes weren't flying, you had to wash the planes. Since there is little water available at sea, you don't get to wash planes like you would a car.

Got to hand it to you guys with airplane cleanliness. I worked ordnance on the Marine F4-B at RVN airbases for the first 2/3 of my tour. Now and then a navy F4 would divert to Da Nang or Chu Lai.

Usually a much more new bird, like a J model or something, but pristine. We would all ooh and aah at the things, next to our grungy jets. Never knew you guys washed them. Was all we could do to keep them loaded with ordnance. And they were always flying.

[rlmorel]

I usually have a lot to say on this forum whenever the topic comes up. I don't have a connection to it by having been there, but my Commanding Officer in my training squadron (McCain) was one of the pilots who was smack dab in the middle of the conflagration, playing a key part.

Then, my Fleet Squadron I went to (VA-46) was flying the A-4 Skyhawks that ended up being the fuel that ignited the explosions that followed the Zuni missile streaking across the deck.

Remember, the Forrestal fire took place in 1967, and I was in that squadron less than nine years later. Be the equivalent today of a 2014 event to our present day. So there was still a lot of institutional memory of that fire in my squadron, and the lessons from it taught to the fleet were still being taught.

Glad to help.

It was complicated for me for many years on this forum.

As I said, I was in McCain's old squadron (VA-46) some years after he served in it, and when I entered the USN, McCain was my commanding officer for several months. I served as a plane captain trainee and was his plane captain as a trainee on several occasions. I grew up in a military family, and I held the torch for all of our POWs, including McCain, and gave him default respect for years due to all the factors above. I wore POW wrist bracelets (I had one for Denton that eventually corroded and fell off my wrist) and was at Andrews AFB to welcome them home when the first flight of them ended up there, so I have early roots in the POW awareness as a kid. When I joined the USN and was a trainee in his training squadron (VA-174 Hellrazors) some of the other guys didn't know much about him, but I sure did...and about his father and grandfather.

I refused to criticize him for years, and am grateful to a Freeper who gently discussed it with me via Freepmail (not in a thread) and helped me see that McCain was not worthy of any kind of respect or support from me as a conservative. He could have flamed me to pieces in many threads about this, but not only did he not do so...he was reasonable and persuasive without being caustic and abusive. v I cannot tell you how much I appreciate that. I am stubborn about tradition, respect, chain of command, etc., and if that person had fired a few broadsides into me as others had, I would never have seen the light of day.

I still will not criticize his performance as a POW (even though I have reviewed and believe the evidence from other POW's that confirms some of those negative accounts) because...I just wasn't there. I don't know what it was to go through that. We all know everyone (nearly everyone) talks under torture as Admiral Stockdale said (one of my signature heroes in life) I have an extremely negative view of McCain as a politician and husband.

I am fine with the most vitriolic characterizations of his actions in those aspects, but condemn in the strongest terms attempts to pin the USS Forrestal disaster on him. It makes us look foolish, and waters down the things he should have been condemned for. And it disrespects the men who were injured and died that day in 1967 because it sacrifices the truth in an attempt to use the event as a political pawn to bring him down. I really dislike that. v The truth is, McCain did not start that fire no matter what anyone says, even if I myself would like to pin it on him. People say he was clowning around and doing intentional "hot starts" which caused the fire. Simply not true, not even close.

Here is the truth.

---

Planes were spotted for a launch back near the ramp. This is a common setup. You can see from the image below the relative positions of the planes, I highlighted where McCain's was, the Phantom that fired the Zuni, and the path across the flight deck.

As the planes were getting ready to launch, stray electricity on the MER/TER rack holding Zuni rockets on the wing pylon of an F-4 Phantom caused one to ignite.

It streaked across the flight deck, severed the arm at the shoulder of a sailor who was in its way, and it plowed into the drop tank of the A-4 next to McCain's A-4, passing through it and continued on into the ocean without exploding.

Fuel poured out of the punctured tank onto the flight deck and was ignited by flaming pieces of solid rocket propellant from the Zuni that had fragmented on impact, and the place became an instant conflagration. The

rest is history. The root of the problem was those safety pins I talked about in my account that were removed from the TER/MER racks before we launched. Those safety pins physically broke a circuit, so no electricity at all could be conducted to the ordinance mounted on them. But due to the high tempo of flight operations supporting shore combat in Vietnam, they found that they could decrease the time by removing those pins early on, before the plane started up. This shortcut seemed reasonable and safe, and was approved by leadership on the Forrestal.

NOTE: THIS REMINDS ME OF SOMETHING I FORGOT OR GOT WRONG IN MY ACCOUNT: we had to hook external electrical power up to the plane, and that was what we pulled out of the wells in the flight deck to plug into the side of the plane. That was hooked up before the pilot arrived. Once the plane was started, I believe one of the first things the pilot would do is flip a switch in the cockpit to switch from shipboard power to the plane's own electrical power system. It is part of this root cause.

The F-4 Phantom across the flight deck had the power cable in the plane and its TER/MER safety pin out of the rack.

When the Phantom started up and the pilot flipped the switch to transfer power to the plane, and there was a stray electrical current surge when he flipped that switch that entered the firing system of the TER/MER, and since the electrical switch had been opened by the removal of the safety pin, the current flowed right in and set off the missile, which ignited and fired.

The other root cause of this was the defective ordinance they had loaded on the planes. The Forrestal had been on station conducting heavy flight operations and was running low on ordinance. When an ammunition ship performed and underway replenishment to give them more bombs, the only ones they had left were old Korean War era iron bombs. They were aged and due to that age had more unstable explosives that became that even more unstable with age. Worse, the coating on the bombs, (even thinner coating than the modern bombs at the time) designed to insulate them if they were caught in a fire, had decayed as well, and its performance as an insulator was drastically impaired. The bombs were cracked, had material leaking out of them, and were covered with rust and dirt. The ordinance crews were afraid to even handle them and were concerned that a the shock of launching the plane might set one off. The Captain of the Forrestal was aware of this and attempted to send them back to the ammunition ship (USS Diamond Head), but was told there were no replacements, and it was those old bombs or nothing. So, wanting to fulfill his mission, he reluctantly agreed to accept them.

These old, uninsulated, thin skinned, cracked, leaking, rusting, and chemically unstable bombs were mounted under the wings of the A-4 Skyhawks. When the fire started, it is said that one or two of those bombs came off the racks (possibly inadvertently ejected by McCain) and they rolled around in the flames until they prematurely cooked off and killed dozens of men.

That is it in a nutshell.

[rlmorel]

Ahhh! When were you in? VAQ-133 was on the JFK when I was in!

[rlmorel]

I will tell you-I got completely lost in it for a period of time. As I dug mental images out of the cobwebs, more pieces fit into place. It was a fun journey to remember just how much was still swimming around in there!

[rlmorel]

Bring back any memories, Chief???

Hahaha...I'll bet if you were in around the same time as I was, you wouldn't have to struggle to remember what a "MAF" was!

You Chiefs. I had some great Chiefs. Chief Waters, who handed out all the nicknames to our guys himself became "Chief Muddy Waters" due to his constant cheek bulging with Red Man and styrofoam cup of brown spit.

Chief Moore. Best. Chief. Ever. I have a great story about him.

He was one of the most taciturn people I had ever met. But not taciturn in the way someone might be sullen or unfriendly, but...just didn't say much.

The chief was a very pleasant guy. He never, ever lost his cool. He was rational, thoughtful, and a GREAT mechanic.

That is him with the blue baseball cap and his hand on Naperski's head (we were at the volcano park outside of Naples for a squadron BBQ. Perfect picture, captured him faithfully. We all thought he was a great guy and someone we all could find something to emulate in. But man, was he a quiet guy.

He was quiet, and calm. Great qualities. I remember once, up on the flight deck, someone dressed in khaki came running up to him with steam coming out of his ears. He was waving his arms, yelling and was squarely facing the chief about two feet away. I don't remember what he was pissed about, some maintenance thing.

While he yelled, Chief Moore just stood there impassively, styrofoam cup in one hand, cheek bulged out to one side of his black mustache, not moving. His blue eyes (they were kind of an Electra-Shave blue) just looked right back at the angry guy without showing any emotion.

Gotta remember one thing about Chief Moore. He was from down south, and always had a big chaw of Red Man in one cheek, a lot of them did like the Famous Chief Muddy Waters. Not a little dainty one, either. There were times when little strands of black, wet chewing tobacco could be seen sneaking out of the corner of his mouth. I recall seeing him pull the bag out, incline his head to the side while he conveyed a big blob of tobacco from the bag to his mouth as he tried to minimize the droppage.

So as this guy lost his mind yelling at him, Chief Moore stood like a wooden indian holding the ever present styrofoam cup. Just as the guy was reaching his peak of agitation, Chief Moore inclined his head a fraction, brought the styrofoam cup up a little higher, and a dark brown jet of tobacco spit exited from under his black mustache and expertly landed in the cup without so much as a drop hitting the sides.

The guy yelling at him literally stopped in mid-sentence with his arms halfway up in the air. It appeared he had completely forgotten what he was saying. His mouth opened and closed once or twice like he was a landed fish, then he turned on his heels and walked away.

Over the years, I have often thought of that, and am convinced he DID play that guy like a fish, and waited to spit at just the right time.

[rlmorel]

LOL, thank you for your service, FRiend, and Welcome Home!

Gaah. Of all the tasks disliked by anyone I knew, washing planes was the suckiest. Well, maybe not as sucky as removing a throttle cable on an A-7, but pretty bad.

Ashore, it was easier because you had water. But trying to clean the accumulated grime and dirt mixed with corrosion, dried hydraulic fluid and oil from around all those dozens of bent tubes was nearly nauseatingly impossible. I liken it to scraping and painting the old, complicated wooden trim you find under the roof lines of some old house. The most unrewarding job ever.

Of course, we would go to the fuel petcocks in the wheel well, and dump a bunch of JP-4 into the tin buckets.

We would walk over and toss the buckets of fuel into the wing roots and wheel wells, where we would let it percolate for a few minutes. It did get them clean, but...all that jet fuel, running into the drains.

That does make me an environment criminal. But I was a young guy. Didn’t care.

Then, I would go back to the barracks in those olive green coveralls, and when I stripped them off, all around my neck, collarbone, waist where the tool belt was, and my crotch were all beet red, raw from the jet fuel you just ended up bathing in.

I know. We were stupid. But there you are.

[Allegra]

…(we were at the volcano park outside of Naples for a squadron BBQ.

Carney Park? Ah, memories. My friends and I practically lived there on weekends once summer beach season was over.

I love reading your stories. Chief sounds like a great guy.

My dad was in VP-4 squadron out of Oak Harbor, WA. My mom died young, when I was in my 20s, so I was my dad’s “date” to a couple of the squadron reunions they had every three years. I loved hearing all of their stories, like them listing all of the bars in Okinawa they were banned from. Hahaha…

[rlmorel]

Yes! Oh man, I could not have dredged that name up, ever! Carney Park!

So...you were a brat???

[Allegra]

So...you were a brat???

Yep. My entire childhood, from birth until I went off to college. My parents met in Pensacola. My siblings and I (I was the first one) grew up all over the place.

I would not trade that experience for anything. :)

Thank you for your service and Go Navy!

[rlmorel]

I too was a brat! You might appreciate this:

LINK: The Odyssey of a Navy Family