The picture is of JJ Zerr equipped to start a new day in CIVPAC. New Connie ball cap to keep the sun out of his eyes after it comes up. Mug of mud in a Connie coffee cup to toast the greatest warship in the universe.
Heard from a lot of you over the last couple of days, and appreciate the comments. Mostly. Some of you reminded me of how stingy God was when he invested me with altitude. That’s okay. Everything I needed to know, I learned in kindergarten. That’s when I stopped growing too.
A couple of sailors, from what I’ll call the clean fingernails ratings, mentioned getting called to serve on fire parties and experiencing getting a bath in JP-5, which is pretty caustic stuff. And scary when you think of how much of the JP was on fire through a good bit of the ship. We burned fifty-five thousand gallons of jet fuel outside of jet engines and boilers, the only places we were supposed to burn it. There are a number of stories like the bath in JP and they all say it was a close-run thing, that fire, but they also say, that when help was needed, whoever could, gave it. And that’s why we made it back into port the next day.
Some of you mentioned things like the A-gang working port and starboard during the recovery period getting her ready to go back out to sea. At sea, everybody worked hard. What else were we going to do? But no ship ever worked harder in port than we did the rest of August and into September. That is truth as I saw it.
Have a great CIVPAC day, shipmates.
Heard from a lot of you over the last couple of days, and appreciate the comments. Mostly. Some of you reminded me of how stingy God was when he invested me with altitude. That’s okay. Everything I needed to know, I learned in kindergarten. That’s when I stopped growing too.
A couple of sailors, from what I’ll call the clean fingernails ratings, mentioned getting called to serve on fire parties and experiencing getting a bath in JP-5, which is pretty caustic stuff. And scary when you think of how much of the JP was on fire through a good bit of the ship. We burned fifty-five thousand gallons of jet fuel outside of jet engines and boilers, the only places we were supposed to burn it. There are a number of stories like the bath in JP and they all say it was a close-run thing, that fire, but they also say, that when help was needed, whoever could, gave it. And that’s why we made it back into port the next day.
Some of you mentioned things like the A-gang working port and starboard during the recovery period getting her ready to go back out to sea. At sea, everybody worked hard. What else were we going to do? But no ship ever worked harder in port than we did the rest of August and into September. That is truth as I saw it.
Have a great CIVPAC day, shipmates.