Navy Guantanamo Bay Part II

Most people learn to drive some time or other. Except my mother, she never drove and to the best of my knowledge, she never even tried. 

But even if you're pretty good at driving, you can still have accidents. Just two months earlier, I had been home on leave to attend Bob Deeter's wedding to the lovely Judy Powel and on the way home had driven through one of Miami's infamous 'puddles'.

Water doesn't drain well when it has nowhere to go (like in Miami) and in those days, if you got your brakes wet, sometimes they would just... disappear. 

And that's exactly what happened causing me to run into a Cadillac on Biscayne Boulevard. Had to be a Cadillac! I was in uniform and thought maybe I would catch a break, but no! No breaks! No breaks for you! Here I am showing off my ticket for posterity.

But remember what was probably the hardest part of learning to drive? That's right, parallel parking! And that's essentially what the Executive Officer of the Greene was attempting as we pulled alongside the pier that Wednesday, August 30, 1967.

The problem was that we didn't 'pull alongside' as much as 'run into'. Normally, we would have to fling our lines to the pier but because we came in a little hot and on rather too sharp an angle, we could reach the pier just by dropping the lines over the side. So they moored the lines on the pier and we tied our end off on the ships bollards in a figure eight pattern just like you see them in this photo and held on for our lives.

In this actual photo from the Greene, you can see the bollards are merely just stools that only have lines on them when the ship is docked.

So as we scraped along the pier, those of us who did painting were all cringing at the thought of how much work was clocking up for us as the grinding continued. Meanwhile, the stern was much too far to reach with lines so we held the bow and ran the engines to pull the stern in closer.

We were going to have a bow line that day, but it was going to be metal, we had already laid it out, so the line my two shipmates and I were holding that day was called the bow spring, the next line up from the bow. 

The line ran from the dock, in a multiple figure eight pattern around the bollards on the ship and the three of us held the end. Essentially, we were trying to hold a Destroyer under power with a 2-inch nylon line. 

In retrospect, we should have foreseen that something untoward was in the offing.

And so it was.