It is exercising high speed turns. When I was on the JFK, after it came out of the yards from repairs following the Belknap collision, they did one of those maneuvers. You get time to prepare for it, they don’t just spring it on you.
Well, I was doing mess duty in the Chief’s Mess (a good place to do it if ya gotta do it!) and they commenced one of the turns.
We fouled up, and didn’t properly secure one of those metal cabinets on wheels that has all the plates in it on some kind of spring mechanism the pushes a new plate to the top when one is taken off. When the ship took that heel, that thing went flying across the empty Chief’s mess and slammed into a bulkhead...there were broken plate fragments everywhere.
It was incredible. Nobody got chewed out for it, amazingly enough, but...that thing would have killed someone if it had hit them.
The other thing that stuck out for me was when they did the “Circle William” drills where they seal off all the compartments and cut off the ventilation (which you would do in the case of an NBC attack, Nuclear, Biological, Chemical) I remember it was off for a long time, it got pretty hot, sticky, and stuffy, and when they turned everything back on, it definitely was an honest to goodness breath of fresh air!
Thanks for the stories.
Both experiences sound insane.
Especially having ZERO airflow.
The POD will tell the guys what events are going to be happening- who reads that though? I was hole snipe on a guided missile can (DDG-7) so we were well aware when high speed runs were planned and it usually involved turns so make sure the tool boxes are tied down tight or you might get hurt!
I hadn’t mess duty in the Chief’s mess on the Dubuque in 1994—as an embarked Marine. Not easy, but much better than the slave labor on the mess decks