Washington – Three recent memoir posts have recounted naval training in the early 1960s, in preparation for U.S. Navy active duty service. This post recalls my first tour of active duty, aboard USS Rainier (AE-5), home-ported in Concord, California.
In 1966, I was to become the ship's communications officer and division officer for Rainier's radiomen, signalmen, and electronics technicians.
I reported aboard ship in the fall of 1966, in San Diego, after several weeks of training at the naval base in Newport, Rhode Island, where I learned cryptographic methods and how to operate crypto equipment. From San Diego, Rainier sailed to San Francisco and then departed from Mare Island in February of 1967 for the Philippines and attachment to the U.S. Seventh Fleet.
For the next several months, Rainier's mission was to replenish other Navy ships in the South China Sea, the Tonkin Gulf, and along the South Vietnamese coast. Mostly we operated out of Subic Bay in the Philippines, but also put in at other ports: Manila; Hong Kong; Kaohsiung, Taiwan; and Sattahip, Thailand.
Rainier was an old ship, built in 1940 as a C-2 cargo hull with two massive Nordberg diesels for propulsion. Despite antiquated equipment, we won a coveted "E" award for efficiency. Late in 1967 Rainier returned to its homeport via Yokosuka, Japan, and Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.
This was the height of the Vietnam War. See an earlier, longer post reflecting on it. My hope in 1967 was that both North and South regimes could be replaced. I bought the books of war analyst and critic Bernard Fall in Kaohsiung and read them aboard ship. Bernard Fall was killed in Vietnam that year. In 1968, first with the Tet Offensive and then with Richard Nixon's sabotage of the peace talks, any such hopes were dashed.
For me personally, the Rainier experience was good. Navy officers get the benefit of being thrust at an early age into responsibility. There's nothing like being the officer-of-the-deck in tight situations at sea. I learned much from my first captain, Vincent P. O'Rourke, the very model of a wise sea captain, and from my second, John C. "Jack" Smith, the very opposite, who wrecked the ship's car in the Philippines while driving drunk, and once plowed Rainier into a pier.
With few officers, our wardroom was close-knit; I recall them fondly: Howard Murphy, chief engineer; Bob Lee, first lieutenant; Tom Stuart, operations officer; Dave Johnson, navigator; George Raines, damage control assistant; Chris Henderson, assistant engineer; pork-chops Pat Ryan and Jim Graber; and Charlie Alderman, gunnery officer and diver. Murphy and Lee were mustangs, as was the XO.
The crew was a proud and tough cohort of many different races and backgrounds. Some ships had racial conflicts. Not so much on Rainier. In port, we often sought out a gym for a basketball game, which I organized. Captain O'Rourke joined us once, which impressed the crew as they enjoyed playing with the captain.
The photos below show the work of our deck division sailors, who risked their lives daily to fulfill the ship's mission; my view through binoculars at two approaching ships in the South China Sea; Rainier signalmen at a day's end; in-port at Yokosuka, Japan, late 1967.
