Navy DD-711 Part VI

The blind joy associated with all that paint chipping and repainting couldn't go on forever. Sure enough, an end date began looming. But then something happened which distracted me a bit. The scores from all those tests I took during boot camp came back like the ghost of Christmas Past. After six months, one of the officers on board had gotten around to looking at my file and coincidentally had just seen a memo reminding staff that the Naval Academy at Annapolis routinely accepts a few dozen cadets from the enlisted ranks.

He thought it would be prestigious for the Greene (and his own career) to contribute a candidate. He asked me if I was interested. You know, to get a free college education and a commission. Oh, all right, but I was looking forward to chipping some more paint! 

So, more tests. But there were also some much more involved physicals including an evaluation of how I would look in uniform. Geez, picky. Then the psychologists! OMG! They desperately wanted to see if I would crack under pressure. I remember one of them examining my fingernails under a magnifying glass and I wanted to know what in the world he was looking for.

"I need to make sure you're not biting your nails." This was apparently a sign of deep, untreatable naval psychosis. So, I said, "Oh, no, I can't bite my nails." 

"What?", he said, looking up at me sharply. "What do you mean by that?" "I can't, they're too hard" and slammed my fingers down - nails first - onto the table a few times. The way he stared, it was clear that in his world what I had just done was impossible. But after a prolonged silence, he just made an impressed face and wrote out a critical-looking note. I'd love to know what he had written! Perhaps 'Hard as nails!'. 

So someone somewhere bundled all these findings up, put a bow on them and off they went into the ether. They would 'get back to me'.

On a Destroyer, everyone has half a dozen jobs. For example, you may have regular daily duties, but a different job to perform during Search and Rescue, another if there is an active fire and another for General Quarters otherwise known as Battle Stations. For your listening pleasure, this is what you hear for General Quarters:

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0B8iIYjO4U

Try ignoring that, huh! Since there were quite a few departures from the Greene after the cruise to Vietnam, there were some job functions open. As a result, a flurry of us were sent off to gunnery school in Virginia Beach. We were going to be a team that operated a 5-Inch 38-Caliber cannon.

Cool!

You've seen this gun before on the deck of the Greene, but this is a closeup image, although it's not my particular gun. Technically the weapon is named the Mark 12 5-Inch 38-Caliber Dual Purpose Mount Naval Deck Gun. We wouldn't be breaking in anything new, these guns had been in active use since 1934 and had seen plenty of action in World War II, Korea, Vietnam and elsewhere.

The '5 Inch' part of the name meant the projectiles it fired were 5 inches wide and the '38 Caliber' part meant the barrel was 38 times longer than the width of the projectile or 190 inches. The 'Dual Purpose' part meant it could be used against surface targets and aircraft.

What can be seen above deck is only part of the greater system which is three levels deep. It took a lot of men to operate this thing efficiently. A well coordinated team could fire each barrel 14 times per minute. When fired, each of those 55 pound projectiles could go as far as ten miles. So they had to train us and get us some real life experience or we would kill everything around us including ourselves.

To get us trained, they scooped the team up and sent us around the corner to Virginia Beach on the Atlantic where we actually got some beach time and I managed to learn a valuable lesson.