"Thorsson was here," a Sea Story

Many moons ago I was a young lieutenant junior grade wrapping up my first sea tour aboard the USS CUSHING (DD-985).  CUSHING was an old Spruance-class destroyer that was over thirty years old and I'd been on board for nearly two years.  It was not a happy time for me.  I'd gotten on the captain's bad side and it seemed like everything I did just dug that hole deeper.  So when I finally got orders transferring me to my next sea tour, things started looking up. 

For my last weeks on board I had fewer and fewer responsibilities and that suited me just fine.  Since I was about to leave, most of my tasking was relegated to weird little short-term projects that I could wrap up before I was due to leave.  So I spent most of my time working alone, toiling away on administrivia and counting down the days until I could put the whole unpleasant thing behind me.

On my last full day I was walking down the passageway when my former leading petty officer, OS2 Roy Frederick stopped me.

"Sir, I just found out you're leaving tomorrow," says he.

"Sure am," says I, "and it's not soon enough."

"Damn, I wish I'd have known," says he, "I could have at least bought you a drink or something."

The officers had had a hail and farewell to mark my departure and welcome the newly reporting division officers, but I realized that I never did get a chance to really thank any of the guys who had been working for me.  In truth, I'd been working without any subordinates for so long I really didn't think anybody would care that their former boss was going to stop haunting the ship.

"I'll tell you what, Fred," I told him, "After work I'll head over to Morrigan's for a while if anybody wants to catch up for a bit.  Hopefully you can stop by.  Pass the word."

The Morrigan's was an Irish Pub situated just across the street from the main gate at Naval Station Yokosuka, Japan.  According to most of the Cushing's crew, it was our official bar.  But then again I suppose most of the ships crews in 7th fleet would say that since it happened to be the closest bar in town.  It closed down about nine years ago, but it used to look like so: 

Inside it was a pretty cramped little space that was staffed entirely by Japanese folks who did a solid job of approximating the look and feel of an Irish pub.  Many's the weekend I found myself there on a Friday night only to find myself passed out in the back of my car on Sunday morning.  That was back in my more serious drinking days.  

But I digress.

Drinking in Japan was expensive.  So before going off base where the liquor was costly, I would usually stop on base for a couple of drinks on the cheap side so I didn't have to break the bank to enjoy some inebriation.  On this occasion I also stopped at the Navy Exchange where I bought this goofy little Polaroid camera that made these tiny little postage stamp-sized photos with an adhesive backing.  Since I'm a sucker for a gimmick, I had to have it.  I also figured at the time that the film cartridges for it would probably be hard to come by, so I stocked up.  I don't know exactly how much film I bought for it, but it was likely enough to snap at least two or three hundred stupid little sticky photos.

So, two drinks into my evening, I stuffed this little camera and a few hundred frames worth of film into my cargo pockets and set out into town to see if anyone showed up at the pub.

I can't say anyone showed up.  Instead, it was more like everyone showed up.  

That's not exactly true, but probably two thirds of the off-duty enlisted guys from the shop popped in to see me off.  Apparently Fred passed the word and it turns out I was going to be missed.  The place was packed.  Within seconds, someone asked me what I was drinking, ordered me a double, and the evening was off to a rollicking good start.

While laughing and joking with one of the guys, I got a funny notion.  I snapped a slightly buzzed selfie with my stupid little Polaroid camera.  On the little tab below the image I wrote "Thorsson was here," and handed it to him.

"Do me a favor," I told him, "after I'm gone, wait a week or two and stick this on the ship somewhere."

"Sure thing, sir," says he.

"Here's the trick," says I, "Don't put it somewhere obvious.  Stick it on top of a light fixture or on the bottom of a desk drawer or something.  Some place where it'll take a while before anybody will ever notice it."

Then I did the same thing with someone else.  Buzzed selfie.  Handed to a shipmate.  Hide this on the ship.

Over the course of the evening I have no idea how much I drank.  I do know that I continued to snap increasingly intoxicated selfies, scrawling "Thorsson was here" across the bottom of them, and handing them off for later attachment to the ship.  To me, this kept getting funnier and funnier.  I imagined a point in the not too distant future where the ship was being cut up for scrap and the shipbreakers would still be finding stupid little drunken photos of me and wonder who was this Thorsson guy.  That dude was everywhere.  The Kilroy of USS CUSHING.

I have no idea how many photos I took, but out of the two or three hundred photos worth of film I bought, I woke up the next morning with exactly none left.  I do remember being drunk enough to vomit in the bushes out in front of the pub not once, but twice.  I also remember being pretty proud of myself each time for managing to take selfies mid-yak.  

Thorsson was here.

The next day was my last day reporting aboard the USS CUSHING.  I shuffled my way up the gangway looking every bit the professional naval officer but absolutely reeking of alcohol.  I'm sure it was still leeching out of every pore, but the only thing I had to do that day was sign my final FITREP,* pick up my official orders, and get gone.  

Several of the enlisted guys stopped me around the ship and told me about various things I'd said or done the night before and I was able to slowly piece together a narrative of what sounds like a pretty benign drunken evening carrying on with a really great group of guys drinking, joking, and commemorating the end of a thoroughly storied couple of years followed by a couple of the guys mostly carrying me back to the lobby of my girlfriend's apartment building.  They said they couldn't be sure I made it up to her apartment, but they watched me stumble into an elevator that at least went upstairs and apparently I made it to work the next day, so everything must have worked out.  

While I was hoping to depart with a minimum of drama or ceremony, they still had the rest of the officers line up on the quarterdeck and see me off.  I was gone before noon and didn't for a moment look back.

Fast forward two years and I was a full lieutenant assigned as an instructor for the Division Officers Course at Surface Warfare Officers School in Newport, Rhode Island. SWOS, as it was known, was a sort of Mecca for Surface Warfare Officers.  It was where you went before your first sea tour and then you'd make pilgrimages back to the school there before becoming a department head, executive officer, commanding officer, and so forth.  So being there as an instructor for a couple of years meant regularly crossing paths with almost every officer you'd ever met in the surface navy.

At some point I was strolling down the hall in between classes and ran into the former Chief Engineer who I'd served with aboard CUSHING.  He was on his way to be the Executive Officer on some newer ship and so he was in Newport for the XO course.  

"Hey sir," I chirped, "how's it going?"

"You!" he exclaimed, which I wasn't quite expecting, "you have no idea how close you came to a court martial."  Which I was definitely not expecting.

"Um, what?" I ask.  I knew the captain on that ship didn't like me.  But there's a big difference between 'we don't get along,' and 'I belong in prison.'

To understand the thing he told me you need to know something about the USS CUSHING.  She was a gas turbine ship.  This means that the main propulsion was provided by four General Electric LM2500 gas turbines.  These were essentially two pairs of big-ass jet engines coupled to two propeller shafts which provided something like 80,000 horsepower.  

The thing about gas turbine engines is that they're made of thousands of tiny, expensive, delicate moving parts that have very tight tolerances and can be readily damaged by introducing any foreign objects into their intakes.  To keep this from happening, each of the four main engines is contained in a sealed gas turbine enclosure.  The air that goes into the enclosure runs through a series of heavy-duty filters before it hits the turbine intakes.

The gas turbine enclosures are kept locked at all times to prevent contamination.  There is only one door into the enclosure and it has a tiny window to allow for visual inspection of the engine.  The only keys are held by the ship's captain and the chief engineer.  Access is tightly controlled and whenever any inspections, maintenance, or repairs are done, the person entering the enclosure has to put on clean coveralls, turn out their pockets, and a every tool, part, or speck of dust going into the enclosure is written on a list before going into the enclosure.  When the job is done, each item that went into the enclosure must be accounted for.  Then the enclosure is locked up again to prevent contamination.  

So it turns out, about six months after I'd left the ship there was some sort of engineering inspection.  I forget the details, but inspectors came aboard and among other things, had to enter each of the four gas turbine enclosures.  Three of them were entered without incident.  But when they opened the fourth one, on the inside of the door, just below the little window, was a sloppy drunk photo of me, grinning the stupidest grin I could muster.

Thorsson was here.

I have no idea who put it there, but apparently the captain went through the roof.  I was calling for my head on a pike and thankfully a few of the other officers were able to talk him down pointing out that I never had access to the enclosure and there had been more than a few inspections since I'd left the ship where there was definitely no photos of me on the inside of the enclosure.  

I realize it's problematic, but I still think it's hilarious.

Not too long after I left in 2001, the USS CUSHING became the last ship of her class still in commission.  She was decommissioned in 2005 and was offered to the Pakistan navy who didn't take her.  Ultimately, she was used for target practice as part of the RIMPAC exercises off of the Hawaiian Islands in 2009.  The ship took quite a beating before sinking to the sea floor, 2,550 feet below.

You can see the SINKEX here: 

Just know that somewhere in the Pacific Ocean, half a mile beneath the waves, there are probably dozens of photos of yours truly.  Drunk as can be and grinning ear to ear.

Thorsson was here.

*FITREP is short for "fitness report" and it's essentially a report card that an officer gets from their commanding officer every six months and at the end of every assignment.  Needless to say, this one wasn't great.

Follow-Up: Operation Tomodachi

If you've been reading my blog for any length of time, you may remember that I spent a month and a half on active duty last year.  I was aboard the USS BLUE RIDGE (LCC-19) assigned to the staff of the Commander of Seventh Fleet during Operation Tomodachi, the joint US military relief effort in the wake of the March 11th earthquake and resultant tsunami.

When I was stationed aboard a ship homeported in Japan from 1999 to 2001, it was common to pull into Japanese ports and be met by protesters holding signs telling us to go home.  They were usually fairly small groups and they were always very polite, but the sentiment was always there.

Well the other day USS BLUE RIDGE pulled into port in Tomakomai, Japan and they were met with this scene:

BLUE RIDGE was in Tomakomai for a goodwill port visit that coincided with the nearby Annual Sapporo Snow and Ice Festival. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Mel Orr)

It's nice knowing we made a difference.

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End of Operation Tomodachi. For me anyway...

In the beginning, Operation Tomodachi was huge.  But once the search and rescue missions were called off and there was no need for helicopters to deliver relief supplies to isolated islands and coastal communities, the US Navy's role in Operation Tomodachi had come to an end.

Returning to port, the Navy set the record for the largest number of US ships inport in Japan since the end of WWII or thereabouts.  I have my doubts about that, but the harbor was pretty packed all the same:


I volunteered to stay behind for a few days to help sort out the lessons that were learned in the course of the operation as well as handing off the few remaining chores to the active duty guys on the full-time staff.  This meant shifting to something more like normal office hours and actually getting a couple more days off in Japan.

Wandering around after hours, I snapped a few random Yokosuka Images.  Here's a Japanese Hell's Angel:


Here's a bank of vending machines in a local toy shop:


Many of them don't make much sense to me:



I also took advantage of the opportunity to hang out with my friend Rich and his family.  Rich is still on active duty with the Navy and has been stationed in Japan for a few years now.

At some point they took me to a secondhand store called "Off House."  Apparently it started out at "Book Off," a used bookstore, and then expanded to include much more than just books:

I'm not 100% sure what a "Hard-Off" is, but it sounds like the opposite of Viagra.

Inside the Book-Off there were all sorts of interesting things.  Even in the "Junk" section:


I didn't find anything I needed, but I did find this:



A few days later we headed up to Tokyo's Ginza district:


The plan was to hit up a particular restaurant, but we were pretty early for dinner.  While we waited, we decided to wander around the neighborhood and found a toy store.  Japanese toy stores are a mixed bag of really cool and really lame stuff all under the same roof. 

This is where I spotted LEGO ninjas:


LEGO NINJAS!!!


Maybe I've just been out of the LEGO loop for a while, but it seems like there's a lot more cool stuff available now than there was when I was a kid.  For example, check out some of this year's lineup of Star Wars minifigs:

There's a LEGO Wampa.  A WAMPA for Christ's sake!  My childhood suddenly seems pale by comparison.

I also made the mistake of noticing some very high-end collectible HALO: Reach action figures: 
I contemplated buying one or all of them for costuming references. I'm proud to say that I was able to restrain myself.



After a couple of hours of browsing, we headed over to our goal for the evening, the One Piece Restaurant:


I'm not an anime fan, but apparently "One Piece" is a fairly popular animated series in Japan about a group of pirates who have a flying pirate ship and seem to be predominately dressed in business attire.  I'm sure it makes sense if you speak the language.

Rich's wife and daughter are huge fans, so we made the trek, got tickets, and had a themed dinner based on all sorts of oddities that we didn't understand.  I'd imagine we felt the same way a Martian might feel if his first visit to Earth was a trip to Disneyland.  Here we are looking confused about the whole thing:


We were apparently underdressed too:


Still, Barbara and Jesenia had a good time:


The food was fun:



The souvenir shop was entertaining too:



By the time we'd finished with dinner, it was well past Ricky's bedtime:



A few days later, my role in Operation Tomodachi was completed and it was time to leave.
To underscore the end of my mission with obvious symbolism, here's a sunset in Tokyo:



Once I had my orders in hand and said my goodbyes, it was only a bus trip, a couple of plane trips, and an hour on the road before I was back on board the S/V Heart of Gold. Then I stopped being "LCDR Thorsson" and became "just some dude" again.

Next...


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Visiting Yokosuka and it's Business as Usual

So at long last I've finally had a chance to roll ashore and visit lovely downtown Yokosuka, Japan.

Here's a view of the port from a nearby Starbucks:

Walking around downtown, the locals don't look especially concerned about radiation exposure or fallout:

These girls are absolutely not worried about exposure:

Since I had a bit of time off, I ended up hanging out with my friend Rich and his family:

As long as I was wandering around, I had to check out the latest and greatest high tech toilet seats:

Rich's son Ricky checked them out too:

There was also a Spring sale going on in the pet store section of "Homes" which is something like a Japanese WalMart:

Excuse me, it was a "Spling Sall."

This is why the pets were all so inexpensive. Like this puppy:

The current exchange rate is 85 yen to one US dollar, so this dog costs $1882.32.  He's cute, but damn!

Here's a kitten for $1760 US dollars:

To think there's people in the states who give these things away for free!

Finally,. here's a $5500 bulldog:

Given the ridiculous high prices for cats and dogs, I had to check out the smaller, cuddly animal section:

On the left were pet chipmunks or the like:

In the cage on the right was a pet bat for sale.  He was preening himself:

I wasn't quite sure he was male until he paused long enough to look at me:

The longer he looked the longer he got, so I left before he tried to molest me in some way:

At some point while we were out, I also snapped this picture of a plurple heffalump escaping from a nearby building:

So yeah. It's pretty much business as usual here in Yokosuka.

Stay tuned. I've got ten more days here and with the daily aftershocks you never know what's next...

Operation Tomodachi Update: Group Photo of 7th Fleet Staff Augmentees

Here's a winning photo of most of the extra folks who came out to help out the COMSEVENTHFLT staff for the operation:

Vice Admiral Van Buskirk, Commander of Seventh Fleet, is the exceptionally tall man front and center in the flight suit.  I'm one of the guys in snazzy blue digital Smurfy-flage on his right.

Operation Tomodachi Update: More Personalized Pics

The journey of a thousand miles may begin with a single step, but the journey of 5,000 miles begins with a car, a couple of airplanes, and a bus. 

Flying into Tokyo's Narita airport was pretty simple.  In fact, the usually bustling Tokyo airport was eerily empty when I got there for my layover before connecting to Okinawa.  Judging by all the short-haired foreigners waiting around in the terminal, the flight was almost entirely filled with US military personnel. 

This made sorting out luggage at the airport a bit of a chore before we all got on the bus to the first base:



They put us up in transient quarters at Kadena Air Base for the night while we waited for the ship to arrive.  The next morning we all piled back into the bus and headed to White Beach Naval Station which still looked pretty much the same way it did the last time I was there (somewhere around the year 2000):


It's a small base, so in no time at all we got our first glimpse of the ship:


When I was a midshipman, I actually spent a month on board the USS BLUE RIDGE (LCC-19) and now, almost fifteen years later, I'm amazed at how clean the ship is.  I could show you all sorts of things to demonstrate the showroom quality of the ship, but here's a random passageway, complete with polished brass sounding plates in the deck:


After I'd received my stateroom assignment, key cards, passwords, and electrical safety checks for my personal electronics, I dropped my bags on my rack and headed out to walk around for a bit.  I haven't taken any pictures of my stateroom because there's no good angle from which you can photograph a space the size of a small walk-in closet when it's designed to sleep six adults and store their gear.

Up on the main deck, I took a few minutes to check out one of the helicopters.  Suffice it to say, the admiral rides in style:


Then I took it upon myself to leave the ship and walk around ashore for a bit.  It was there on the pier that I finally found LCDR Servance, my closest classmate from the SUNY Maritime College, looking ever the professional naval officer:

We went out and had dinner and spent a few hours catching up.  Then it was time to head back to the ship and crash out.  The next morning we were underway bright and early and I started standing watch in the Fleet Command Center, tucked away in the deep, dark recesses of the ship. 

So deep and so dark in fact that I never ended up getting any pictures (that, and pretty much everything in the room is classified to some level*).  In fact, it wasn't until I'd been on board for a week that I finally found my way topside when there was still some sunlight outside.  A bit anyway:

Somewhere along the way things began to stabilize ashore and our operational tempo began to trail off.  We were headed to Yokosuka, Japan and someone decided it would be a good idea for all of the folks like me who were augmenting the staff temporarily to pose for a big group photo with Vice Admiral Van Buskirk, the three-star admiral in command of Seventh Fleet.


I'll post that picture whenever I actually see a copy of it.


Meanwhile, I managed to get a picture with some of the guys I've been standing my watches with:

I'm the guy on the right not wearing a flight suit.

The next morning I got my first view of Japan's big island from the sea (for this year):

If you squint really close in the picture you can see a little dark sliver on the horizon.  That's the land of the rising sun.

As we got closer, I was again amazed at how uncharacteristically quiet it was.  Tokyo Bay is usually bustling with ships and boats going every which way.  This day it was almost serene:



As the ship made it's turn toward Naval Station Yokosuka, the crew began manning the rails:



Since I was off watch, all I had to do was stay out of the way while the ship moored.  Then everyone was dismissed and I got to hang out on deck while the shore gang rigged the gangways:



While I was waiting, I noticed a couple of things I hadn't seen before in my previous visits to Yokosuka.  The first was these tiny little tugboats:

I can't imagine what they're good for, but they're adorable.

The second new thing I noticed was a handful of guys on deck taking their Geiger counters for a walk:

From what I've heard, they didn't count very many Geigers.


Once the gangway was set up, Rich Servance and I wandered around the base for a bit and headed out into town for dinner.  Japan still looks much like I remember it looking.  As a bonus, the cherry blossoms are in season:


Now that we're in Yokosuka and things are slowly returning to normal for the fleet, the bulk of the augmentees are being sent home.  But not me.

Being one of the few people staying behind for a bit means there's finally enough room in the "Flag Mess" where the admiral and his staff eat to fit me as well:
Unfortunately, I've been standing watches at night and they don't serve mid-rats** in port.  Jerks.

I'll be getting a bit of time to actually go out and about before I'm done here in Japan, so stay tuned for more pictures and whatnot...

*Which might sound cool, but I still don't get to know if there are aliens.

**"Mid-rats" is short for "midnight rations" a fourth meal served aboard ship to accomodate the folks who are getting off work or about to start in the middle of the night.


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