Posted on 01/28/2004 8:29:07 AM PST by Rebelbase
I take it that this was a 637/Sturgeon-class boat. Sorry if the name's not familiar, but then I was always in the East Coast Navy.
Judging from the boats on your page, you were PACFLT all the way and a near contemporary. I was in the Atlantic and we never saw Skate, but occasionally Nautilus and Sea Dragon, together with a few Permit-class boats (mostly Tinosa and Dace) and a shoal of 637's. So saying, I'm dating myself as well.
Nice picture of Swordfish. Liked your pointers for nostalgic ex-bubbles and passed that around.
I was a NAVFAC OWO (oceanographic watch officer) and then an EWO (evaluation watch officer) at OCEANSYSLANT's Norfolk command center in the CINCLANT OPCON Building, where we were neighbors with The Man himself, with his subordinate CINCLANTFLT's Indications Center (INDIC), with our direct report's (ASWFORLANT's) operations center, with SUBLANT, and with CINCLANT J-34, an outfit behind heavy, vaulted doors from whose cynosure CINCLANT spake unto his boomers. When they ran an exercise, Marines from the Third Division literally ran from Camp Elmore, a mile or more away, wearing shower flipflops, exercise shorts and undershirts, Class A's, parts of uniform dress, or whatever they had one when the sirens sounded, and carrying anything from M-16's to riot shotguns, to post up around the OPCON Building, and big vault doors began to slam shut tighter than a tick all through the building -- I once saw a WAVE CWO2 hauling @ss at a dead run down a P-way to make it back to her command before the vault door closed, while alarms rang and sirens howled as I was myself hurrying to leave the building (at the end of my watch) before I was locked in by the Marines.
There were also some other intelligence commands, the kind that required people to wear ID badges with little letter codes on them: the more letters you had, the more spook gazoot inured to the wearer. I never wore one of those badges, since my clearance work hadn't been completed when Congressman F. Edward Hebert, Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, took Admiral Zumwalt to the woodshed for certain statements to the Congress that Representative Hebert felt had been lacking in a certain spirit of informativeness, by ordering Zumwalt to take a RIF of 30,000 staff officers servicewide in the summer of 1972. This occasioned any number of commands a certain amount of climbing up their own bungholes to accommodate the Congressman's disciplinary measure, and OCEANSYSLANT was one of them as it was forced to RIF half a dozen Command Duty Officer (CDO) candidates, me included. As Vietnam wound down, that was the theme of the times -- the Marines had taken a big officer RIF about nine months earlier -- that, and general relaxation of military and naval uniform and discipline, as the services gradually declined into the Ford and Carter years. That was also when they introduced, temporarily, those abysmal French-looking working blues for the white hats, and officers and chiefs were allowed to wear boots with buckles on the sides as items of uniform with working and service-dress khakis.
http://www.saratogamuseum.org/pressreleases/080702pr.html
http://www.donshelton.net/djs-srp1.htm
http://www.juliett484.org/juliett/index.html
http://www.chinfo.navy.mil/navpalib/news/news_stories/sub-centen01.html
I got to meet the first guy to get periscope photos of a Juliett-class boat, back in the 60's. He was skipper of USS Blackfin, I believe it was. I met him in 1971, when he was the TAR officer at a Naval Reserve center in Lake Charles, Louisiana. He told me about meeting the Juliett in the Kattegat during her transit from the Baltic to the North Sea and being amazed at her high freeboard (they didn't know what that was for, yet)......he mentioned sniffer ops later on, gathering some of the Juliett's exhaust emissions for forwarding to the technospooks.
TLA = Three Letter Acronym
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