Retrospective

Part 1 – The “Deployments”

Fourteen years, six “deployments.” I put “deployments” in quotes because, in spite of–actually, because of–my extensive time overseas (six years in all), I somehow managed to accumulate six awards of the Sea Service Deployment Ribbon (SSDR), and yet never once (okay, maybe once, if you tilt your head to the side and squint) went on a traditional shipboard deployment.

Lots of pictures to follow, but first some clarification.

Traditional Deployment

What I mean by a “traditional” deployment, from a surface Navy perspective, is something like getting underway from a pier in a US-controlled port (not necessarily a port in the US), being gone for about six months, give or take (leading more towards longer underways lately), and returning to the same port at the end of that time away. The deployment as a single, discreet (however lengthy) period of departure from and return to a so-called “home port,” be it San Diego, Norfolk, Yokosuka, or any one of a number of places where the US maintains ships and sailors together as a permanent duty station.

So if I (arguably) never did one of these “traditional” deployments, what did I do to earn six awards of the Sea Service Deployment Ribbon (SSDR) in my abbreviated career?

“Deployment” #1

We’ll call this WestPac 1A. Not two months after graduating from college, I reported to my first ship and truly began my career as a naval officer. I got my number one choice of designator (1160 – Officer in training for Surface Warfare Officer qualification), my number one choice of platform (an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer), and my number one choice of duty station (Yokosuka, Japan). I was what I wanted to be, doing what I wanted to do, where I wanted to be doing it, and it would be the worst year of my life (2020 is nothing by comparison). This particular “deployment” (as defined by SSDR eligibility) started July 2, 2005 and, like most of my subsequent “deployments,” would end after 12 months in the so-called Forward Deployed Naval Forces (FDNF), rather than at the end of a period of 90 days or more away from homeport as is “traditional” (see above).

The underways for that year consisted of the usual (at the time) round of unit-level training and certifications for an FDNF-Japan ship (I vaguely recall doing events within whatever we called a training cycle back then, culminating in a Final Evaluated Problem or “FEP”) along with and in between the usual round of exercises, such as ANNUALEX with the Japanese and FOAL EAGLE with the South Koreans, among others. As the short name for this deployment (WestPac 1A) would imply, we spent the bulk of our time at sea in and around the western Pacific ocean. Although we did make a brief foray west, into the Malacca Strait.

The picture above is most likely something I took as we were coming together with other ships for a group picture (a “photoex”) as part of ANNUALEX 2005. The two ships shown in full in the foreground and middle-distance are of the Japanese Maritime Self Defense Force. Beyond that, left of center is a frigate (probably USS Gary or USS Vandegrift), and at right on the horizon is a cruiser (probably USS Chancellorsville or USS Cowpens), both still maneuvering into station. The aircraft carrier with its bow visible at left is USS Kitty Hawk.

During the year (mid-2005 to mid-2006), we made the following port visits:

1. Pyeongtaek, South Korea (October 2005). We anchored out, it was a working port (normal workday routine, as opposed to a liberty port with maximum time off), and apart from taking the bus to Osan Air Base, there wasn’t much to do. My first port visit ever as a naval officer, and I apparently didn’t even see fit to take a picture. The picture below, from within the port itself, is actually from a later visit to the same port, and may illustrate why I didn’t consider it picture-worthy the first time around:

2. Hakodate, Japan (November 2005). What I remember most about this port visit was being so exhausted from the preceding days at sea that I slept for seventeen hours straight before I even considered going ashore. When I finally woke up on the second day of the port visit, I actually felt dizzy, possibly from being dehydrated (seventeen straight hours of sleep, seventeen straight hours without fluids). Though I did eventually go ashore, I didn’t do much, and I didn’t take any pictures (strike two). Nothing against the people of Hakodate (or, while I’m making apologies, Pyeongtaek and all the other places I would go on to be underwhelmed by), but these early port visits were not exactly to the sort of places known as tourist destinations. Most people visiting that part of Japan (it’s on the northern island of Hokkaido) would tend to visit Sapporo, where I’m told they have a magnificent snow festival each year (not that I’ve ever been myself). So in lieu of a photograph of Hakodate, from Hakodate, here’s one I took of the southern shore of Hokkaido while transiting the Tsugaru Strait during a later “deployment”:

Technically, that may actually *be* a picture of Hakodate. Looking at google maps, the peak that appears most prominent at right of center is probably Mount E on the Kameda peninsula, which is within the boundaries of Hakodate itself. So… hurray! We have a photograph.

3. Okinawa, Japan (November 2005). I mean, wow, it looks like I struck out with these early port visits. I distinctly recall having liberty in Okinawa on four separate occasions, the first being for Thanksgiving of 2005, which included lunch or dinner in the Officer’s Club at Kadena Air Base. But here, too, for some reason, I didn’t get a picture. For what it’s worth, I actually really liked Okinawa and wouldn’t mind going back a fifth time. So below is a picture from a brief stop we made the month prior, anchoring out to transfer personnel ashore via small boat. In addition to the proper port visits where liberty was allowed, I made more of these briefs stops for stores, personnel, or fuel than I can remember, either anchoring out in Buckner Bay (as pictured below) or mooring to the pier at White Beach. If we were pierside, they would sometimes let us go ashore for an hour or so to the small exchange on the naval station.

During exercises in the area, it wasn’t unusual for most or all of Destroyer Squadron 15 (at the time composed of four or five destroyers and two frigates) to pull in to Okinawa all together.

4. Singapore (December 2005). We certainly got around in November/December. It was what we called fall cruise, typical of the schedule for FDNF Japan ships at the time, and maybe even still. There was also a summer cruise, but the truth is that such notions (of a reasonably consistent, seasonal underway schedule) were mostly for the aircraft carrier, as the escorts (destroyers, cruisers, and, once upon a time, frigates) tended to have more fluid schedules. And of course the enemy gets a vote (whoever that is). Nature, too. Anyway, here’s a street picture from my first visit Singapore. I really wasn’t on my A-game yet as a photographer:

5. Langkawi, Malaysia (December 2005). We capped off the fall cruise with a port visit to Langkawai, Malaysia. Very scenic, but (yet again) not much of a tourist spot. In theory we were supposed to be there as part of an arms show, with ships from many Navies present (and there were), but given all the circumstances of the visit, I’ve come to wonder if we weren’t there as part of what would later be known as the Fat Leonard scandal. There weren’t many (good) reasons to be in that port, much less for a full week as originally planned (a length of stay–mostly at anchor and in a port without substantial services, no less–that I have never encountered before or since), and there was at least one big reason not to be there (force protection concerns, threats, etc). Anyway, when the force protection conditions were ramped up (eventually precipitating our early departure), there were materials and services provided, almost as if they were expecting it, from Glenn Defense Marine (the same one featured in the aforementioned scandal). Since I only got one day of liberty out of the entire days-long port visit (I had duty on the first day, liberty on the second, and liberty was secured for the duration before I could go out on the third), most of my pictures were from anchorage. Here’s one:

Most of the other navies present for the “parade of ships” sent glorified patrol boats, or maybe a corvette. The Australians, at least, sent a proper frigate, and had us aboard for drinks (alcohol–they can do that). We sent a ten thousand ton destroyer that positively dwarfed everything else, and it really made me wonder what on Earth we were doing there, particularly given the force protection concerns going in. Great opportunity for graft, though. No doubt.

Anyway, the port visit to Langkawi was the last major event we had before heading home, with Christmas “standown” (it wasn’t really) due to start just as soon as we returned at our most economical speed (now the fleet planners are worried about keeping costs down?). Of course, the weather gets a vote, and in our case we were confronted with the possibility of a weather divert. The choice presented to our Captain was to either slow down and pass through the Luzon Strait behind the weather (and miss Christmas), or speed up and try to beat the weather through the same. The Captain elected for the latter, much to the crew’s pleasure.

However, even with the increase in speed, the weather reached the strait ahead of us and we had to endure some pretty rough seas the whole way back. Still being somewhat new to the Navy (just seven months out of college), I threw up so often during that dash for home that I ended up dangerously dehydrated. Generally, the way it would go was, I’d drink just before “hitting the rack,” sleep the usual three to five hours that an Ensign gets, wake up, head straight to the… “head” to throw up whatever was left in my stomach, and go up to the bridge for my four to six hours of watch. Once there, I’d throw up again about an hour into watch, then again thirty minutes after that, and then dry heaves every fifteen minutes or so after that, for the remainder of the watch. It was so bad that when they picked me for urinalysis just before returning to home port, it took me three hours of drinking water from a fountain (at intervals, limited by how long I could physically stand and keep my balance for) to finally be able to force out just enough dark brown urine to meet the bare minimum (about fifty milliliters) for urinalysis. TMI? Too bad, because there’s a lesson for anyone heading to sea for the first time: whatever you do, keep your fluids down. If you can’t do that, you probably shouldn’t be standing watch. If you have someone in your section who seems to be in that situation and can’t seem to remove themselves from the watchbill, see to it that they are removed. Not only was I not of much use in such a condition (to the point of being unsafe), it turns out that the last couple days of me being “seasick” were actually just me being weak and dizzy from dehydration after being unable to keep anything down for the preceding days, kind of like a vicious cycle. In retrospect, I probably should have reported to medical, perhaps even gotten an IV for the fluids before it got to that point. Anyway, we made it home (to Yokosuka, I mean) for Christmas.

6. Donghae, South Korea (March 2006). What better proof can there be of a schedule beyond summer and fall cruises than a port visit to South Korea at the end of winter? This was another working port visit to “not exactly a tourist destination” for some exercise, possibly an official Foal Eagle, but maybe also just one of the many unnamed CSOFEX’s (counter special operations forces exercises) we participated in. I took a couple pictures while out on liberty, but the most “picturesque” is probably one I took of the port from the ship as it was pierside:

I like the dolphins painted on the silos, and how the paint scheme blends with the blue of the sky and the haze against the backdrop of hills in the distance. Nice touch. If that sounds like faint praise (calling that the most “picturesque” picture I have of the place, after a short port visit), please consider that probably most mid-sized industrial cities in the developed world would be unlikely to attract much lustrous praise from someone visiting on business. The reality is, most of the world is not a tourist destination, nor should it be judged as one. By way of demonstration, here’s a picture I took of the downtown area:

Nothing wrong in that picture. It’s just a mid-sized city in the developed world. Nothing more, nothing less. If it weren’t for the signs, it could almost be Abilene. And just look at how the world of psychology has besmirched poor Abilene, applying its name to a paradox for describing how people end up in undesirable places through a failure to manage agreement within a group. Poor, undesirable Abilene (where I lived for a time after leaving the Navy). My faint/absent praise of Donghae and other underwhelming port visits is nothing by comparison.

All that aside, the only significant event I can recall from the Donghae port visit was what may well have been the the quintessential “SWO” moment of my career. I found myself as one of two ensigns getting bitched out by the Captain in full hearing of the deck division over the placement of some rat guards (sheet-metal contraptions placed over the mooring lines to literally guard against rats crawling up onto the ship from the pier) and the completion (or rather non-completion) of some inventory checklist. Set against each other in a metaphorical knife fight for dominance, the prize (or the punishment?) was the position of First Lieutenant (to be in charge of said deck division). The Captain stormed off, and I literally threw the checklist into the face of my fellow ensign, thus becoming the First Lieutenant (okay, there wasn’t exactly a causal link, but the sequence is right). I’m still not sure if that means I won or lost, but I’m fairly certain the sailors lost. The other divo became the Combat Information Center Officer, if you’re curious.

On return to homeport a week or so later, standing on the forecastle as we were about to moor, a newly appointed (for the third time) Seaman Recruit of my division (he’d also been in my bridge watch section, so I knew him well enough already) cheerfully confided in me that he was glad he wouldn’t have to “put up with this shit anymore.” And though I’m sure on some level he was just saying that to save face ahead of being put out on his ass with an other-than-honorable discharge for a pattern of misconduct, he was convincing enough to me at the time that I couldn’t help but quietly envy him, going home (for real home, not just Yokosuka). Really got inside my head. Fucker…

7. Okinawa, Japan–again (April 2006). This was my second port visit to Okinawa and the final port visit of WestPac 1A (SSDR #1). Once again, in spite of my general appreciation for the place, I took no pictures. Good thing I visited twice more on the way to SSDR #2. I suppose it’s worth mentioning that here is where I left my first Captain, as the ship held a scheduled change of command pierside during the visit. I might have hoped he would be the worst Captain I would ever have to serve under, but I would be wrong. To be clear, lest I besmirch anyone’s good name, the worst would not be his immediate successor (my second Captain), but another. Stay tuned: that’ll get covered as part of “Deployment” #4 (if I can find it in me to write about it).

“Deployment” #2

WestPac 1B. Still homeported in Yokosuka, Japan, one year into my first dvision officer tour and still not even qualified Officer of the Deck (underway), much less Surface Warfare Officer. Technically, this “deployment” began on July 2, 2006 (precisely one year to the day after I reported aboard), but as a narrative it works best if we pretend it began a few days earlier, with USS John S. McCain among the ships participating in Valiant Shield 2006 around Guam. As with ANNUALEX the year before, I took some pictures during the photoex (one of them is below), but the real event for that summer began with us getting the order, at the end of June, to transit north at speed in response to the pending 2006 North Korean missile test. The strike group had a lot of really cool port visits planned for that summer, but to those of us aboard the good ship McCain, that summer would become known as JapanPac ’06.

As we arrived on station and started doing drift ops to save fuel in anticipation of the North Korean missile test, there was some concern that Kim Jong-Il’s shenanigans might keep us out to sea indefinitely. So we all breathed a sigh of relief when the test concluded inside of a week, no part of the wreckage fell on Japan (never even made it halfway over the Sea of Japan, much less to Japan, Hawaii, or the west coast of America), and no war broke out. So the summer cruise was back on! Except one ship had to stay on a tether in the vicinity of the Korea and Japan in case things took an unexpected turn for the worse. Which means that instead of the planned port visits to Australia, Thailand, and Singapore that the rest of the strike group got, we got…

1. Sakaiminato (and Hiroshima), Japan (July 2006). If you’ve never heard of Sakaiminato before, then you’re in good company because neither had I. And for what it’s worth, I haven’t heard it come up since, except in rare conversations with fellow McCain veterans about that summer, but even then there’s not much to talk about. I only remember two things about the port myself. First, I recall that, as sometimes happens in Japan (or at least did as recently as 2006), we came upon a bar that refused to serve us as foreigners. The bar tender was very polite in his refusal and even went so far as to lead us to a bar down the street that would serve us, where we all had a good time, but… yeah. While the US certainly has problems with race, xenophobia, and general bigotry, I can at least expect that if such a thing happened in the US, it wouldn’t be seen as “quaint,” as it was when we were warned that such things might happen as part of mandatory cultural indoctrination training for all US military personnel serving in Japan. But, we weren’t in Japan to change their culture, and unlike people facing day-in/day-out discrimination in the US (or in Japan, for that matter–they do have their own immigrant and minority populations, after all), we didn’t have to live the rest of our lives there. So, moving on… the other thing I remember about this port visit was the day trip to Hiroshima. It was both a nice, scenic bus ride through the hitherto elusive Japanese countryside, and there was more to see in Hiroshima.

As a side note, the traditional castle visible in the background of the picture above was built post-war as a replica to restore some sense of the city’s history after the atomic bombing leveled the city center, to include the original castle. If you’re in Japan and have the time, I highly recommend visiting Hiroshima and its peace memorial museum.

2. Aomori, Japan (August 2006). Aomori is known for its apples and its Nebuta festival. The festival is held during the first week of August, and coincided with the second port visit of SSDR #2/WestPac 1B/JapanPac ’06 (take your pick). Lots of floats, flutes, and dancing, with the floats modeled on fearsome samurai. It’s located across the Tsugaru Strait from an earlier port visit (Hakodate), and my relatively more positive experience with Aomori (evidenced by actually taking pictures of the place) probably had as much to do with the time of year (August as opposed to November) as the coinciding festival. I also started “getting out more.” By which I mean looking for opportunities, still within the allowed liberty radius, to explore the surrounding area rather than just the downtown areas they tended to drop us off at.

3. Himeji (and Kyoto), Japan (August 2006). I suppose the good thing about being relegated to independent patrol duty off Japan for the summer was that we hit port visits in quick succession. The third came only days after the second, with the time required to transit around from the northern tip of Honshu down to Himeji via the inland sea being the limiting factor. Himeji is a tourist destination in its own right, well known outside Japan for its castle (a common backdrop for films set in Japan), but it was also a short ride to Kyoto via the Shinkansen (we really, really, really need high speed rail like this in the US–just sayin’).

4. Saipan, Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas Islands, ‘Murica (September 2006). So, someone did the math and decided that we could dip down to Saipan and still be close enough to where we needed to be, to do whatever we needed to do, within the time they needed us to be able to do it in, relative to the Korean Peninsula and Japan. This was the first port I stayed out overnight in, learning a valuable lesson for future port visits: the more nights you can spend away from the ship, the less being on a ship sucks. It also helped that a certain PNCS (Senior Chief Personnelman, a now defunct rating merged into… Personnel Specialists? I think?) had departed the ship, and so was no longer abusing his position as watchbill coordinator to ensure that his duty section always got either the first or last day of duty (often a day in which no liberty was even authorized, let alone overnight), thereby screwing over every other duty section. Anyway, I was so excited to be in America again, like “home” in a way, that I took some pictures of the street signs during the ride to the hotel. Nice views from Mount Tapochau, too.

Before going on, as a footnote between port visits, I’ll mention that there was an incident involving a Chinese submarine popping up near the strike group. I remember a lot of chest-thumping and “hoo-yah”ing as we proceeded to aggressively search for and (hopefully) track the submarine, but the overall impression I came away with was… “meh.” I mean, what were we going to do if we got a good track, shoot them? (Answer: no. Let’s just be very clear on that). Although I was and have since been assured that such things are cool and “very SWO” (hunting submarines to no end), to me it was and is just more cold war nonsense in the middle of two hot wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. I mean, I might have been impressed by our presence at “the tip of the spear,” doing the nation’s business, if there hadn’t been two very real wars going on at the time, but I couldn’t help but wonder, “Who the fuck cares?” I get that China was a threat as a potential adversary, I was and am (at this moment) appalled by their aggressive tendencies in the South China Sea and elsewhere, and I am satisfied that the US Navy has an important role in pushing back to ensure the maintenance of international norms, but I didn’t join the Navy in 2005 to fight a Cold War that was supposed to have ended circa 1990, you know? Needless to say, as I was toiling away my early twenties aboard the McCain, cutting circles through the ocean with our wake, I was underwhelmed. As underwhelmed as I might have been on yet another a port visit to Okinawa. Which brings us to…

5. Okinawa, Japan–again–again (November 2006). This underway started out great. I finally qualified as OOD, the ship was free of its tether to the waters around Japan, and we were a mere 12 hours away from pulling into Hong Kong (yes, I am aware Hong Kong is not Okinawa–not even a part of Okinawa). I just so happened to have the deck the night before we were due to moor, and it was just after sunset when we got word from the weather guessers that the path of the tropical cyclone they had “anticipated” (guessed) would continue happily west and pass well clear of Hong Kong was, according to their latest guess, expected to swing north and drive right into Hong Kong. So I got to call the Captain and explain to him that we were going to get a weather divert and the port visit to Hong Kong was effectively cancelled. He took it well enough, and after a few hours of tooling around somewhere off the Luzon Strait, we set a course east: back through the strait and ultimately on to Okinawa. And wouldn’t you know it? Before we even tied up to the pier, the weather guessers had changed their minds again and the cyclone was projected to pass well clear of Hong Kong and its approaches. But too late for us…

There’s not much else I can say about this port visit, other than that I finally got a picture from Okinawa (of the pier, from the naval station at White Beach).

6. Pyeongtaek, South Korea–again (March 2007). At some point between this port visit and the last one, I both qualified SWO and survived the first threat of having it revoked (footnote for another post, perhaps). While I at least got pictures this time, I must again stress that none of my port visits to Korea were calculated to do the country justice. They were not tourist spots, nor were they during the best/most picturesque times of the year. These port visits were something akin to visiting a mid-sized industrial city in, I don’t know, pick a coastal state… New Jersey.

With that out of the way, here’s what I got:

I’d have loved to visit Seoul during one of my port visits to South Korea (Pyeongtaek is inside of fifty miles as the crow flies), but… something about a liberty radius and a Commander, US Forces Korea whose first general order was drawn from the dean in Animal House.

7. Okinawa, Japan–again–again–again (April 2007). My fourth and final visit to Okinawa was the best port visit ever. Why? Because I detached from there. Took a short walk off a long pier into a waiting van for a ride to the airport, homeward bound via Tokyo-Narita and Washington Dulles. We had the hail and farewell for me and another ensign going to nuke school (hence the 21-month tour) in the officer’s club at Kadena Air Base. Or was it Camp Foster? Anyway, somewhere on one of the surprising number of US military installations on Okinawa. Apparently, the occupation of Japan ended in the 1950s for everywhere but Okinawa Prefecture (Okinawa and surrounding islands), which remained under US administration until the Okinawa Reversion Agreement of 1971. And even today the US military maintains control of large swathes of Okinawa as military installations, including White Beach Naval Base, Kadena Air Base, and Camp Foster. Suffice to say, a substantial portion of the lingering US troop presence in Japan and the associated burden, with clash of cultures and loss of real estate, is borne by the population of this one small island (relative to the home islands) and the locals aren’t necessarily happy about that all the time. Anyway, below is a picture I took of a frequent liberty spot called American Village. Because if they can’t be rid of us, they might as well have our money. No judgement from me on that account.

Intermission

For the sake of keeping these posts down to a reasonable length, I’ll break it off here. Technically, my departure in April of 2007 did not close out my second SSDR (I needed three more months to round it out), but it’s a convenient stopping point and works better for “narrative purposes.” As you may have gathered from the intro, there are four more “deployments” to cover, tentatively identified as WestPac 2A, WestPac 2B, MidEast, and South America. Expect to see two more posts on them (two “deployments” per post), with plenty of pictures for the “your writing is bad and you should feel bad” crowd.

If you found this interesting or know someone who might get a kick out of reminiscing about the FDNF, consider sharing the link over social media. Once I’m done with the “deployments,” there will be at least a couple more posts covering things related more to life in the home ports, with a rant or two about liberty restrictions in Yokosuka circa 2006-10 to be included.