A little hint of what it is like when deployed on US Navy Tin Can. Its not all fun and games. Its not spending a lot of time ashore in a foreign country. For example, my ship deployed to the Mediterranean on November 12, 1969 for a six month deployment... 183 days. On November 14, my son Timothy was born... 56 hours after we shifted colors and got underway. During that 183 days, we may have spent about 15% of our time in foreign countries. That is a total of about 28 days. If you were single, you had your full pay to spend while deployed on a Med cruise. For myself, all of my pay and allowances, save the Family Separation Allowance of $30 per month, went to my family. We normally were on Port and Stbd watch duty which means that half of the crew is allowed to go ashore and half remains on board. So that 28 days averages out to 14 days for the 297 souls on board... less than 1 in 10. ?Why? you may be asking. Because a ship never goes cold iron while deployed. Cold iron is when the engineering plant is secured. That does not happen because the ship is normally at anchor and everything requires steam and electricity supplied by that plant. It is very rare that a Tin Can gets to be moored to a pier or dock when deployed. And to get ashore, the 148 people who had liberty had to go by boat. That would be the ships motor whale boat. A USN Motor whale boat was 26 long and had a 9 beam. It was powered by a 25 hp diesel inboard. It wasnt very fast, especially fully loaded. It had a crew of three and a capacity of 22. So that means that a maximum of only 19 people could get ashore at one time. A deployment is a lot of long hours of hard work and nearly daily training to ensure that the crew is ready for anything 27/7. The crew, on average, spends about 169 days of 183 on board that ship. Between watches, cleaning ship spaces and drills, there is some time for catching a few winks, reading, shooting the bull, listening to music, and thinking about home. One last thing for those who dont seem to uderstand what life is like for those who serve. The thing that is most constant in your thoughts is the end of that deployment and the return home to see those you love standing on that pier waiting for you. ?Why? you may ask do we do it? For myself, I was single when I chose to re-enlist and stay in the Navy. I liked what I was doing. I felt pride in doing something for my country. When it came time to re-enlist a second time, I had ten years of service behind me, a family of five (my wife, three kids and my wifes mother) to think about... and my wife was also pregnant with my youngest, Timothy J. Bembenek at the time. It was a tough decision! I was very good at what I did and the work was rewarding. It was not just a job to me! So I chose the security that the Navy provided for my family, and to continue to do something that had become personally very satisfying. If I had been at that point in early 1972 after experiencing humiliation and degradation from degenerate Nam War protestors, I may have chosen to get out.
Posted on: Fri, 21 Mar 2014 10:35:55 +0000