HOM: Hi, School!

Three of the Gunboats were already in Vietnam; the Asheville, the Gallup & the Crockett. The 12 month tour of combat duty was drawing to a close for most of their crews and replacements were being readied and sent over. For most of the replacements, the duty would be pretty straight forward, working on the same stuff they always had. This wasn't true for the Engineers. These gunboats had a very complex & unique propulsion system. This PG school was to train the Engineering division in operating and repairing all the various integrated systems. Bigger ships with bigger crews had specialists assigned to each different system. A PG had a six or seven man engineering department to maintain and repair everything from the A/C units to the jet engine. (Six men was about the minimum - it allowed three watches of two men each when underway. The two on duty kept a constant check on all the systems.) The Navy selected a core of four or five enginemen and two or three electricians/IC-men for each PG and then threw them into a brutally condensed training program so the lucky six could learn each other's trades plus all the other trades needed. Classes in hydraulics, pneumatics, gas turbines (the jet engine), diesel engines, electrical systems & troubleshooting were on our menu. The school had most of the actual operating components of a PG in the classrooms for hands-on work, skipped all but the essential theory, and gave us the greasy-knuckled skills to keep the boat running. Later classes were under less of a time squeeze, but we didn't have that luxury. Nonessential stuff like survival & weapons training was eliminated. I'd guess there were a dozen or so of us in this first class. Five of us - ENC Wright, EN1 Holder, EN3 Bongard, EM1 Sweeney, and me - would head for the Crockett together. (Correction: not Bongard.) The OIC of the school was a Mustanger (Former enlisted man who becomes an officer) by the Name of Otis Griggs. (Correction: Paul Hanvey) One of the instructors was a red haired oddity called "Mac". I don't remember the other staff. Only a couple of the other students stick in my mind besides Buddy Jones. One was an EN2 that could pick up a fifty gallon barrel of oil and load it in a truck by himself. Another was the EN that built a custom motorcycle around a Porsche engine. There was an EN1 named Yeats that we all felt bad for. He was career Navy, and when he got orders to a PG his wife gave him the choice of divorce or desertion. If he went overseas, she was done with him. He was in the middle of his enlistment and couldn't face the idea of deserting and spending the rest of his life on the run, so he took his case up through the chain of command asking for new orders. No Joy. Everyone felt bad for him, but the undertone of most of their private comments was "Good riddance!" A wife worth keeping would not put someone she loved in the spot he was in. He went overseas and she divorced him, but he was still hoping to win her back when he got home again. Marriage and military are a bad mix. So is the mixing of men & women in combat units, but that is another story. Anyway, Hi Ho, Hi Ho, off to school we did go! TBC (Me) (Home)