Posted on 07/25/2011 12:22:34 PM PDT by La Enchiladita
Also MCAS El Toro, MCAS (H) Tustin, Mare Island Navy Yard and more. I miss all those places. Spent quite a bit of time in and around them! When the services had to close bases after the cold war, you KNOW it wasn’t going to be where they HAD political support!
Hey Shipmate. I served aboard USS PIEDMONT (AD-17) 64-67. We were homeported in San Diego. I remember being tied up to the pier across from DIXIE and PRAIRIE at various times.
My first WESTPAC cruise in 64 we relieved the PRAIRIE in Okinawa. No liberty that day. Just anchored out in the stream and when PRAIRIE arrived, we exchanged movies, some paper shuffling and we were off to Yokosuka and PRAIRIE went home to San Diego.
SFP2 (DV)
USS PIEDMONT (AD-17)
64-67
I did a sea tour and a shore tour at Long Beach in the ‘80s. I thought it was far superior to being stationed in San Diego.
I left the Navy as an IC2 - the Main Gyro was my shop and we took care of all the sound-powered phones, telephones, etc. They also started putting small studios onboard with satellite and closed-circuit systems for the crew. We actually got to watch Red Dawn about the time it was coming out in the theaters. One West Pac and Over-theLine Ceremony for me, an Honorable Shellback if I say so myself!
That was Long Beach, wasn’t it? My bro-in-law was on the USS Alfred A. Cunningham (DD-752) when it was ported there in the late 60s, early 70s.
I went there, touring, in 1993, visited the Queen Mary in between visits to the Getty Museum and touring the coast road (Highway 1) up to San Francisco and Redwoods National Park.
Later I saw a photo published in Soldier of Fortune, when they were writing stories about the Clinton scandals, of Slick Willie making a speech on the quay in Long Beach, pitching the city fathers of Long Beach on his plan to sell off the Long Beach Navy activity to a PLA-controlled Chicom company -- and with a sensitive USMC commsta right across the fence, and CMC raising hell behind closed doors! I was so pissed at people for voting for that traitorous swine .... he was such a pig, on so many, many levels.
But I vividly remembered the forest of masts and haze grey hulls from my visit, when I counted what I remember as maybe 15-18 auxiliaries and landing ships of different descriptions. It seemed to me that Long Beach belonged to the Big & Slow TYCOMs.
Not to be nit picky and all, but the oldest ship in the fleet is 200+ years old and berthed in Boston.
There was around 40 ships homeported at Long Beach when I was there. An interesting mix of shooters, gators and auxiliaries. No CGs, DDGs, or subs but the two west coast BBs, DDs, FFs, and FFGs. An LHA, LKA, LPD, LSD, and a couple of LSTs for the gators. I remember an AD and two AOEs- could have been more auxiliaries. Then there were the units in the shipyard-IRRC the drydock could take CVNs.
One of those AOE's will have been USS Camden, my cousin's old ship -- he served in her on the Gun Line in '72 and '73 as an SK3. He can tell his grandchildren he saw Olongapo when it was full of drunken American sailors ..... before the Chinese took it over!
Camden had half an engine set intended for the later Iowa-class and Montana-class BB's that were never built (Kentucky's bow wound up grafted onto USS Wisconsin, I think the story went, after a collision). Camden and her sisters bumped up the ante on unreps; they'd do over 20 knots. "One-stop shopping" was the cry; now the "theory" has gone back the other way, no telling why.
Camden was one of the last ships in the Fleet to burn Bunker "C" fuel for that reason, btw .... that was supposeddly part of the rationale for retiring her (that, and Big Dick Cheney clapping her out like the "unwanted" CV's and CVA's, running her with no yard periods or SLEP work) -- so Mr. Bush could get all those icky expensive ships off the books and he could give his old-boy Yale classmates on Park Avenue a nice, big "peace dividend" tax cut.
Then there were the units in the shipyard-IRRC the drydock could take CVNs.
Won't that be a kick in the head when the PLA-N schedules the Shi Lang for a yard period there, in the shipyard Slick Willie got for them, cheap.
Bet they make us do the work with Chinese subcontractors.
Actually your naming of Camden makes me see I was mistaken. It wasn’t AOEs, it was AORs at Long Beach. The West Coast AOEs were up in Bremerton.
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