Never Made it to the
Family Gram
By Ray Harvey
On a U. S. Navy ship, a reported fire sends everybody to their General Quarters "battle stations." At battle stations, in addition to all the guns, operations and engineering areas being fully manned, the ship is set in a watertight condition with all doors and hatches closed and the fire and rescue parties and the medical parties are all at their highest degree of readiness. This is the way we organize to fight any fire, large or small.
When the GQ alarm went off, it was about 1700, we were about 2 miles off the RVN coast, headed out to sea and the crew was relaxing after shooting an afternoon-long fire support mission. The weather was warm, although the deck was wet from a rain shower earlier. The sky was clear and the sun was getting low in the sky.
I was standing the bridge watch as the Junior Officer of the Deck at the time and the OPS officer had the OOD. We were relaxing, too. The OOD was reading radio messages and I had the "Conn" and was watching out for fishing boats ahead of us. We passed the word for "shower hours" and a line began to form on the main deck. We only had shower hours once every week or less often, so shower day was a big deal.
On this day, the Captain had declared that there would be shower hours for the crew and there were about 60 guys in line on the main deck waiting to get showers in the forward crew head -- clad in nothing but towels and shower shoes and carrying their soap dishes.
What ENC Baker, the master at arms, would do is line the crew up on the main deck with the head of the line up at the bow where there was a ladder down to the crew's head. They would use one shower and Chief Baker would stand there with his watch and give each guy one minute to wet down, soap up and rinse off. Then the guys would walk aft to the berthing compartments and dry off and dress.
Into this idyllic scene stepped Mr. Murphy. Somebody popped out of a hatch on the main deck and shouted up to the bridge "FIRE IN THE SHIPFITTER'S SHOP." The OOD looked at me and said "Hit the GQ alarm." Either I or the Boatswain's Mate of the watch in the pilot house hit the switch and everything got really loud and busy.
We were accustomed to going to GQ, but to special stations called "Condition 1 Rocket" where most of the crew manned the rocket launchers. We went to "real" GQ very seldom, so there was a little confusion because this was different from usual. [It has always reminded me of that scene in Mr. Roberts, where they set GQ on the ship and two guys bump into each other running for their stations: "Is this my GQ station?" "I don't know, it was up here last year."] Of course, the fire fighting parties were the same for both, so LTJG Berlin had his people on station pretty quickly, it turned out.
Well, when the General Quarter's alarm sounded for the "fire," about half the guys in line looked up to the bridge to see if it was a drill or what and you could read their eyes: "I can't decide whether to go to my GQ station and lose my place in the shower line or not."
We got very busy on the bridge, getting into battle gear, taking "manned and ready" reports and setting things up. While we were doing this, I was still supposed to be driving the ship and so I would look out over the bow every few seconds.
Photo credit: Unknown; Mount 41 during a fire mission.
You can imagine that many of the towels didn't make it to the GQ stations at the same time as their owners did. I will never forget looking forward to the bow where Mount 41, one of the ship's 40 MM gun mounts, was located and seeing a sailor [who shall remain nameless] vaulting buck-nekkid over the splinter shield and into the gun tub. At least the rest of the guys there had life jackets on already.
They soon found out it was a false alarm called in by someone who had been walking by the Shipfitter's Shop and seen smoke billowing out into the passageway.
Serious then, funny now. Nobody was hurt except for a few scraped knees and elbows. No "Battle Dress" that day. Whew!
When the Captain got to the bridge and found out it was a false alarm, he said something like this to the JOOD: "Nice time for a fire drill!" I think he might have been in the shower himself.
That little incident DID NOT make it into the FamilyGram.
-- Ray Harvey, Family Gram Editor, USS Clarion River (LSMR-409) 1970
(c) 2005 Ray Harvey, used by permission in the River Currents and on the MRFA website.