Aircraft Carrier info

[Guest alfakilo]

Back when I was at Ubon during the war, we had a informal exchange thing with the USN...we would send 3 or four F-4 crews to the carrier and they would send an equal number in return. The idea was that we could exchange operational tactics, etc...

The COD dropped off the Navy guys and they beat feet for downtown, never to been again or something!! We jumped on the COD (the old S2F IIRC) and set out to the boat.

The landing was sporty and we were introduced to our hosts...I think VF-154, a USN F-4 squadron. We went below to where we were going to sleep...once there, I opened my B-4 bag and asked the guy if it was OK to bring these on board. 'These' were a couple of bottles of Jack Black...

He then opened up a drawer and in it were a number of dead soldiers...later one night, he took me out to show how these were dealt with. He had stuck them into a laundry bag...he went over to the edge of the ship and threw them out...and remarked that the Soviet trawlers that picked up the ship garbage probably got a laugh out of that.

I got two rides in the back seat...one day and one night. The cat shots and traps were everything I had imagined...very cool.

The guy I flew with bought it a few years later at Yuma when he hit the ground doing a low pass..too bad, he was a bunch of grins to fly with. On the day flight. he ran in on the boat on the deck...below the flight deck...and then pulled up into a loop. Somewhere I have a photo I took at the top of that loop looking down on the ship. I was amazed that this kind of flying was not only apparently permitted, it was encouraged. The night flight was uneventful until the approach. I had seen some dark nights, but a dark night over the ocean has to be seen to be believed!!

Best part of the week?

Midrats!! Iceberg lettuce and real American greasy sliders!

It was a grand experience!!

[Guest Scribe]

Enlisted quarters were 84-man rooms with racks stacked 3 deep with a 4-5 inch drawer under the mattress and a small standing locker for storage; smelled like a locker room. That would suck being there for any amount of time. Their chow hall was a move through, grab your food, stand and eat it, get back to work affair.

They are stacked like cordword in as many as 90 man berthing. There is a TAD rotation where junior enlisted from squadrons have to support ship's company so a 19 year old kid might have to mess cook or work supply with no contact with his or her squadron. My hat's off to them.

'Dirty shirt' wardroom was where bag wearers and the like ate. Very laid back. Never went to the other wardroom. Didn't have any uniform but a flight suit which were not allowed.

and we like it that way. Ship's company has old Navy feel with a "sitting" and folks waiting on tables whereas Dirty Shirt has a chow line and you can some choice over your meal. A favorite place for mid rats (fourth meal of the day).

Kitty Hawk, now decommissioned I believe?, had not been refitted to accomodate women. There were only two aboard, a JAG and a supply type, not easy on the eyes......

Not quite yet. JFK just got towed out of her berth cold iron, but Kitty Hawk is still in Japan due to be replaced by GW.

[pcola]

I was enlisted in the Navy from 93-97. Served 4 years aboard the USS Eisenhower (the Mighty Dike, as we called her.) I was a green shirt flight deck type, V-2, Waist Catapult operator.

Did we do 36-hour shifts? Yes and No. We worked when the jets were flying. Period. We were undermanned and didn't have enough for two shifts. We'd show up to work a couple hours before the first launch of the day to pre-op the cat. We'd work all day during the launch/recovery cycle, cleaning our spaces or catching 30 minute catnaps on the floors in between launches. Then we'd spend another couple of hours after the final trap of the day doing our post-op mx plus any other required scheduled mx. 20 hour workdays were common. A typical day would be a 5:00 AM muster to pre-op the cat. We would then launch jets all day, and would be required to do work (mostly cleaning our assigned spaces) in our down time until 16:00 or so. After 16:00, we still had to launch jets, but we would be allowed to watch TV or nap in our downtime, until the final recovery usually around 22:00. We would then spend a few hours doing more mx, with final release around midnight, plus or minus a couple hours depending on what kind of mx had to be done. We would then get 3-6 hours to shower/hit the rack in the night. By the time we finally got to get back to the berthing compartment to shower, all the hot water was gone, so we more often than not ended up with a cold shower. Add to that the additional duties assigned to folks while General Quarters (GQ) drills were going on, duties like firefighting, or damage control, etc, and many times getting woken up in the middle of the night (during our precious few hours in the racks) for man-overboard drills or false alarms, life was not good.

Of course, this was all only when we were underway. In port, life was decent for a flight deck guy. We usually only had to do our preventative mx (PMS) and keep our spaces clean. Typical work day in-port was 7:00 AM show and be at the beach by noon. The only thing that sucked was still having to live on the boat.

Enlisted quarters were 84-man rooms with racks stacked 3 deep with a 4-5 inch drawer under the mattress and a small standing locker for storage; smelled like a locker room. That would suck being there for any amount of time. Their chow hall was a move through, grab your food, stand and eat it, get back to work affair.

They are stacked like cordword in as many as 90 man berthing. There is a TAD rotation where junior enlisted from squadrons have to support ship's company so a 19 year old kid might have to mess cook or work supply with no contact with his or her squadron. My hat's off to them.

Yep, that pretty much sums up the quality of life and quarters onboard. I was ships company (assigned to the ship vs one of the flying squadrons) so I lived on the ship even in port. The boat was my home, 24/7/365, and the conditions described plus the trunk of my car was the only space I had to call mine in the world. I would've killed for a dorm room.

Yeah, had to do the TAD rotation, too. Supposed to be a 90 day rot to the mess decks. Funny thing was that I had 12 hour shifts working on the mess decks and I did the last 30 days or so of my rotation out to sea, so I didn't want to go back to my real job working 20 hour days on the flight deck. You know its a shitty life when you'd rather wash dishes in the "scullery" just so that you can be guaranteed to get some sleep.

I'm not saying that being in the Navy were the worst conditions a person could ever live in. I have nothing to complain about compared to you old-heads that served during Vietnam. However, life now as an Air Force Officer is completely Gucci compared to my days as a junior E in the Navy. I laugh at some of the shit I hear people in my Sq complain about. "What do you mean you won't give me a Non-A slip. I can't stay in billeting on base. I'm flight crew..." The sad fact is, I've caught myself complaining about the same shit. I guess its all a matter of what you get used to.

Kitty Hawk, now decommissioned I believe?, had not been refitted to accomodate women. There were only two aboard, a JAG and a supply type, not easy on the eyes......

My ship, the Ike, was the first USN warship to have women onboard. IIRC, they were onboard for our Med/Persian Gulf cruise in Oct94-Mar95. Very few were easy on the eyes, even after 6 months at sea. It actually made life worse, because having women on board brought alot of the PC type issues to the Navy. Before then, nobody gave a shit if you had porn hanging on the walls or what kind of jokes you told or what kind of hazing you did, and things were still more forgiving if you got in a fistfight with somebody, or if you got too plastered and got into trouble in port, etc...