[Bob]

One day, about half way through the port call, the Americans began their 0830 routine of running equipment checks. Someone in the missile house selected the wrong cells and loaded the launcher rails with two Warshots instead of the usual Pretty Birds. The on-deck safety observer immediately informed the missile house of the error and the Wardhots were quickly pulled back into the missile house, but not before there were a lot of binoculars staring at the loaded launcher from the Russian ship.

I had a similar situation happen to me running DSOT on a DDG in port at San Diego. The safety observer didn't catch that live birds, rather than TSAMs, were under the launcher arms. As they were coming up, he SCREAMED to stop the loading. There we sat, with two live birds halfway in the magazine and halfway onto the launcher. The only way to cycle them back down was to bring them fully up on the rails. I think it may have taken an act of Congress (or perhaps divine intervention) to get the permission needed to do that. Definitely the most interesting DSOT I ever ran. (And yes, I did catch hell for letting it happen.)

[MasterGunner01]

In the late 1960s or early 1970s, one of the GMG1 gunner's mates on a Forrest Sherman-class DD discovered he had a cheating spouse. [Forrest Sherman DDs had auto-loading Mk 42 5-inch guns.] As it turned out, he could see the bedroom window of his apartment from the one man control (OMC) station of the Mk 42 gun mount from the pier at 32nd street in San Diego. He decided to give his cheating spouse and her boyfriend a Sunday morning wake up call.

He figured that she'd call her boyfriend over for some “horizontal mambo” while he stood duty over the weekend. He had the gun loaded to the transfer tray with a BL&P projectile (blind loaded and plugged practice ammo). Fortunately, the weekend duty section people stopped him before he could put his plan into reality. Wife and boyfriend were very fortunate the wake up call wasn't a 70 pound projectile at 2,900 feet per second flying through the bedroom. Now that IS coitus interruptus!