I remember during my time in the navy (1980s), when we had an Indian Ocean tour and we found ourselves shadowed by Soviet Krivak class destroyers every day. They lit us up regularly with their weapons systems, disrupted our underway replenishment maneuvers, and created general havoc on our day-to-day deployment activities.
One day, we had a USO group come to our ship for the day. They setup on the fantail and gave us a concert. One of the Soviet vessels edged up alongside and dropped anchor. We weren’t only but a few hundred yards from each other. Their crew came out and sat on the decks, listening to our concert. We waved back and forth and took pictures of each other across the water. When the concert was over, they weighed anchor and pulled away. Not too long after that, they lit us up again with their weapons systems.
It reminded me of that World War I story of the opposing soldiers in the trenches during Christmas.
It’s really a shame that we consider each other enemies. Back in the 1800s, Russia and the U.S. were the closest of friends.
In 1968 I was aboard USS Independence for a long Med Cruise...we left Norfolk on Jan 5,'68 ,did work-ups in the Carribean and proceeded to the Med and did not return to NORVA until Jan 27,'69.
During that deployment the Russians did their usual stuff to interfere with us whenever they could...but they met their match with our CO,CAPT Mathews,(sorry his first name escapes me since we traveled in different social circles.),who had enough of their shenanigans.
The Russians were getting in the habit of lining up for replenishment with our destroyers and stuff like that which was worth a chuckle,but they went too far when they statred cutting across our bow when we were starting to launch aircraft.
CAPT Mathews began collision drills saying he wanted us to clear everything forward of Frame 109 whenever the collision alarm sounded.The Captain was quoted as saying,"The next time that sonovabitch cuts my bow I'm gonna run him over!"
Sure enough a few days later one their Petya(?)class frigates cut across our bow...I was on the roof at the angle at the time and found myself looking down at the fantail of that little f****r and the gaping faces of the guys on deck.
They never,never tried that trick again or any other one either for the rest of that deployment!