23 Navy 3 – HS-11

Navy3 HS-11

After reporting to my fleet squadron HS-11 “The Dragonslayers” I was assigned to my home in the Bachelor Officers’ Quarters (BOQ); it was next to the clinic and the base chapel, and a short way from our hangar.  I had two adjoining rooms in a suite, with my own bathroom.  Below was the officers’ dining room (mess), which always had milk, coffee, cocoa and juice available from an always-on machine, and bread with which a hungry snacker could make toast or sandwiches.  Every morning I ordered oatmeal, eggs and bacon; the meals prepared by Filipino stewards were delicious, but one could thrive on the mess’ around-the-clock provisions!

The squadron officers’ main job was to be a pilot, but each was assigned to one of the squadron’s departments, with a secondary assignment which kept the squadron functioning smoothly; I first worked in the Operations department as the Classified Material Control Officer (CMCO).  As such I was responsible for distributing, security and finally disposing of the squadron’s classified message traffic; I was given access to the station’s security office, and distributed each incoming message (Confidential, Secret or Top Secret), coaching the recipient in its proper handling, and finally reclaimed each and made periodic trips to the base’s incinerator, an always burning furnace where I burned the documents.  I also supplied each squadron aircraft with pertinent maps, which were housed in the plane’s document pouch.

My next collateral duty (which I had for the rest of my time, probably because nobody wanted it) was “Drive Safe Officer”.  Mostly my lessons consisted of gory movies involving traffic accidents; I showed these films, which I checked out from an office on the base, to classes of squadron personnel, and kept records.

Our flights were nominally four hours, which allowed time to work with a submarine or train, depending on our mission, and transit. Typically the plane commander (pilot) sat in the left seat; his copilot sat on the right; the enlisted crewman sat in back at the sonar console, where he could operate the hoist, if that was called for.

Our squadron belonged to an “air group” consisting of a helicopter squadron of 16 aircraft and two squadrons of fixed-wing S-2s Grumman “Trackers”; these were equipped with sonobuoys and had a boom on their tail, housing a Magnetic Anomaly Detection (MAD) device, to find submarines; our air group 52 (at Quonset there were two; our counterpart was HS-5) took turns when our carrier USS Wasp (CVS-18) sailed; the off times we operated from our hangar at Quonset, but all the time was counted as sea duty. During my three years with HS-11 our cruises aboard Wasp were to northern Europe, the Caribbean, and the Mediterranean; I didn’t have a camera, but brought back many illustrative brochures. Wasp’s “Public Affairs Office” (PAO), besides serving as “bank” for exchange of local currencies, arranged guided tours of the historic sites of some ports; in the north our ports were these:

• Portsmouth, England – Here I threw in with the “Seamen’s Institute”, kind of an English version of the Servicemen’s Christian Centers of the states, which I knew.  We took a tour of a few old castles, including Edinburgh and Holyrood (the monarch’s home, where the crown jewels are kept); the Scottish highlands, including legendary Loch Ness (no, we didn’t see the “monster”).

• Hamburg, Germany – I had a fine edition of Martin Luther’s Bible, and was very smug about that.  Here I went to the (German) service of the “Freie Evangelische Gemeinde” (Evangelical Free Church, a denomination); I was befriended by a German lady who first translated the church service for me, then invited me to her flat for dinner, where I met her husband and their little boy.  She became my guide during my stay in Hamburg, and took me to famous “Tierpark Hagenbeck”, a revolutionary concept in zoos, with animals kept by moats rather than barred cages, to simulate their natural environment.  In those days the infamous “Berlin Wall” was still up, and was a cause of much resentful propaganda by west Germans); we were flown over the wall into Berlin, saw up close the bombed-out buildings, and given a tour of a holocaust museum/concentration camp.  En route to and from the Munich airport our bus went through several towns, among them Hamelin of Pied Piper fame.

I visited the US embassy in Hamburg, obtained a passport and visa to visit Israel while Wasp was ported in Naples.

• Lisbon, Portugal – Here a local cobbler replaced by hand the worn-out leather soles of my loafers.  I found it depressing how the Roman Catholic Church so dominates society in Europe; it’s no coincidence that the nations are socialistic.

On our two cruises in the Caribbean we went to Eleuthera in the Bahamas, and Guantanamo, Cuba, where the US maintains a Naval base popularly known as “Gitmo”; this base is surrounded by hostile communist Cuba, and is always in peril.  To both places our helicopter squadron sent, for 1-2 weeks, detachments, of which I was part – it was hot!  We flew along the shore of Jamaica; I remember watching flying fish and dolphins beneath our helicopter, seeing a circular rainbow from aloft, and making the full moon rise and set as we took our bird up and down.

On our Mediterranean cruise the ship made two stops that I was there for:

• Barcelona, Spain – we took a bus tour to the monastery of Montserrat (saw-tooth mountain), where we saw a celebrated “Black Madonna”, a wooden statue darkened by centuries of smoke from candles.

• Naples, Italy – from here, where Wasp was in port (anchored in the harbor) two weeks, I went on leave to Israel, which I had before arranged in Hamburg.  While there she must have picked up an A-5 “Vigilante”, a large jet which rode back in the hangar deck for repair in the states; we already had two A-4 “Skyhawks”, small jets, aboard (routine for Med operations).

On a return trip the ship stayed a week at Bermuda, where a few of my fellow pilots and I amused ourselves by flying “bounces” (practice landings) in formation at the airfield.  On the week-end, on a walk in the hot sun, I found a local church whose pastor invited me to their service next day; my shipmate, a fellow believer from MI, was disgusted when the (black) congregation celebrated the Lord’s table with a shared loaf and cup.  After that, we had dinner in the home of a dear sainted lady whom I had also met on my walk.  That evening another pilot and I attended a Bermudan church service in which a musical group sang a spirited song on the Lord’s return with the theme “Be ready” (I have never heard it again); after the service we had a gospel sing-along before returning to our ship.

In the Navy I had 30 days’ leave (paid vacation) every year, which I usually took to return to my mother’s home in Chattanooga; on those occasions I attended a Baptist church in Hixson, where I became friends with the pastor; once in a sermon he referred to “Bill flying around in a helicopter singing Amazing Grace”.

While ported in Hamburg I applied at the US embassy there and was issued a passport to visit Israel during the two weeks Wasp would be ported in Naples (I planned ahead then).  When the ship was at anchor in the harbor, I waited in the air station for a “space available” hop to Rome, and eventually went there on a train.  I flew to Athens and changed planes there; before landing at Tel Aviv, my new passport was stamped with a visa to visit Israel.  Then I rode a bus to Jerusalem, and after spending the first night at a “youth hostel” outside the city, I took a room at the YMCA (the locals called it “the imka”).  The next day I found a Christian book store (per my practice) that was managed by an American missionary whose husband had died in Haifa after they  had come to live there as teachers; the store was downtown near the King David hotel, at street level in a large house with a church that met upstairs.  I bought several books in that store, which I use now, and she became my guide and host during my stay of about a week in Israel.  In addition to English she also spoke Hebrew and Arabic; one day she took me to the home of an Arab family, and we drove south to the “Herodion” fortress, ruins on a hill, where I bought an inexpensive Roman coin. One night she took me to a mid-week prayer meeting in another home, Pentecostal.  She took me to meet another friend of hers, distributing his just-published booklet “Fire over the Holy Land” (In those days the “six day war” was fresh in everybody’s mind).  After my return to the US, discharge from the Navy, and settled in our home, I corresponded with this lady; she seemed to enjoy my “much mores” from Romans chapter 5.  I was so impressed with her that I named our youngest daughter (now living in Israel with her own family) Irene after this lady.  Many years later, in 2006, we re-met for lunch near her home in Jerusalem; remarried (first two husbands died), she is widely known and active in Christian circles; in her apartment our Irene’s husband Anthony helped her with a computer e-mail problem.

Other milestones during my time with the squadron were annual “Presidential Fitness Training” PFTs); these benchmarked the physical condition of all personnel, consisting principally of a two mile run; those more senior or less fit typically showed anxiety and did poorly on these.  On one occasion, while exercising with a submarine an hour south, I stayed on station longer than wise, and flew back on reserve fuel; for this I earned the unflattering sobriquet “Cool Hand Bill” (after the then-popular movie).

Lest my reader think it was all light and fun, during my stint at HS-11 we lost the crew and a helicopter in a night dipping accident, and a ship’s crewman washed overboard while refueling the carrier in a savage winter storm in the north Atlantic.  One such storm we had waves crashing over the flight deck (65’ up); I saw some splash on the admiral’s bridge (150’ up).  Though our aircraft were chained to the deck, yet some were damaged or lost in the storm.  Sometimes things could be perilous, with our lives in danger.

As one of my last official acts in the squadron, I flew our executive officer down to Norfolk; while in the Navy exchange store (which sells inexpensively priced goods, untaxed) I bought a pair of wedding rings and a four-place setting of Pfaltzgraff “Yorktowne” tableware.  We still love this pattern, and have expanded our original set to twelve places and updated it through the years (the manufacturer has gone through several changes) with acquisitions from the local Salvation Army store, the factory outlet and other sources.

When it was clear that I would marry and leave the Navy before our upcoming Med cruise, the officers of HS-11 gave us a large platter with silver decoration; we dropped and broke this exquisite gift on the back step of our new (to us) house.