Navy DD-711 Part VII

In case there is anyone left out there who hasn't learned the following fact, allow me to provide insight and tutelage:

Keep your mouth shut.

This is good advice. It will help you all your life and extricate you from many dangerous situations. However, it's always been a tough lesson for me personally and what happened next was another instance. We had arrived for our first class about our new gun and the Gunner's Mate was giving us the rundown on the weapon and the operation thereof.

Of course, I'm sitting there yammering to one of my friends and paying no attention and the Gunner's Mate crooks his finger at me and says, "C'mere, you're going to show us how the projectile-man does his job."

Well, the 5-In 38 is a pretty big gun and it fires pretty big shells. The bullets you may be familiar with have the projectile and powder all combined into one cartridge. In this case all that together would be about five feet long and weigh too much for one person to handle, so the projectile is separate from the powder. As a result, loading the breech is a two man job. 

The powder-man pulls his powder from the powder hoist, slams the powder into place and with perfect timing, the projectile-man pulls the projectile out of his elevator, slams the projectile into place, steadies it and reaches up to pull the rammer control lever to load the newly formed combination into the barrel. Then he signals the gun captain and off we go.

The projectile weighs 55 pounds, is smooth as glass and has no handholds. Oh, and it explodes. The man who handles this delight is the projectile-man.

The manual for the gun has this helpful hint:

Precautions: 1. Never drop a projectile ... because the fuses are 'quite delicate and, when struck, may fail to operate entirely - or may even explode prematurely.'

To review: Projectiles weigh 55 pounds, they're smooth as glass, you pick one up and load it every four seconds for possibly hours on end and if you drop one, you may kill everyone you know. Bottom line - No pressure on the projectile-man!

Part of what was going to happen during training was that we would be assigned a job within the gun team on one of the three levels of the gun. This wasn't a fast-food joint, so we weren't going to rotate around to different jobs. You kept one job because you had to become expert at it. Your movements had to be smooth, you had to have flawless timing and you couldn't make a mistake. You were big boys now.

These assignments wouldn't be made for quite a while, so it's easy to figure out what the Gunner's Mate was doing when he beckoned me to the front of the class. He had been annoyed by my talking and was intending to embarrass me by having me fumble the projectile-man job like an idiot and drop the dummy shells so he could talk about the danger of explosions. What he didn't realize was that I had been going to the gym excessively over the past six months. Consequently, after I had done 20 or 30 loads in a row effortlessly, suddenly I was the projectile-man. Karma.

To close out the class, we did some live firing and I must say it's an adrenaline rush to hear that cannon fire and see the hot casing come flying out the back of the breech where the hot-casing-man used his huge asbestos glove to bat the casing down into the casing drain. There's only room enough inside the gun for us to stand and it would be no fun at all to have a red-hot brass casing rolling around by your feet. 

When we got back to Portsmouth, someone took this photo of me in front of my gun. That's my barrel there behind me on the left. Look how happy I am. Those are the bridge windows up there above the gun. That's where Captain Kirk sits as he's firing on the Klingons.

In this closeup, you get the full, brutal impact of this imagery. This is really something to write home about, isn't it, folks? If you look very closely, you can actually read my name stenciled on my shirt. Because I wouldn't want anyone to steal that shirt! No way!

It turned out that the training we had just received was 'just-in-time' training. The Greene was about to head to the Caribbean for her 'shake-down' cruise following the refit. This was done not only to ensure the upgrades all worked properly but to get the crew working together as a team. 

Of course, we were also going to blast one small island practically out of existence.