End of Enlistment Options

The Rotation

Operations Specialists (OS) aren't really meant for onshore work, so our rotation was 5 years at sea and 2 years onshore, and I was just finishing my 5 years at sea when OS Senior Chief Connell showed up—he was now the detailer who decides where all E-1 through E-6 OSs go for their next orders—and he threw the entire book of orders open in front of me and told me I could have any order in it I qualify for...

You have to understand that getting new orders normally works like this: you call your detailer, plead your case based on your evals and accomplishments, beg if you must, and then you get whatever the detailer gives you. If he's pressed to fill a billet, you're likely going there. This is not a long conversation. So to have the book thrown open before you was an extreme privilege!

A billet for the Pentagon war room was in there. I asked Connell what I'd be doing, and he didn't know anything, but we could both agree that Captains probably serve coffee to Admirals in there, so who knows. Only one thing was certain: it would look pretty impressive on a resume!

Same as NORAD, there was an opening for an OS under the Cheyenne Mountains. Again, I had no idea what I'd be doing, but it would look impressive on a resume.

About a decade later, one of the big TV networks ran a special where their cameras were the first ever allowed into NORAD. It revealed 2 OSs sitting at 2 Naval Tactical Data Systems tracking "space debris," among many other unspoken things, I'm sure.

While I thought about it, Connell penciled me in for NORAD.

Or, as it turns out, your detailer can waive the 5/2 rule, and I could have gone right back to sea for another 4 years on board the newest Aegis Cruiser, also gaining AIC and ATACO training. AICs are Air Intercept Controllers who controlled fighter and bomber aircraft like F-14s and F-18s back then. ATACO stands for Air Tactical Action Controller Officer, and they control helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft hunting subs, dropping sonar buoys, and so on.

I want to stress something I've pointed out before: If Top Gun were real, an AIC would have been constantly directing every one of those Navy pilots. That would have ruined the movie and prevented much of the out-of-the-chain-of-command flying that happened.

Other positions included flying around the country as Navy Security, bringing back AWOL sailors, like in the early Jack Nicholson movie; I forget the title. Whatever I took, the re-enlistment bonus for an OS was $20,000 in 1988 dollars (approximately $56,162 today).

If I weren't gay, I would have probably gone back to sea. (A First Class opted for the NORAD position because he was within 1 rank of their E-5 request.) But I'd just survived 5 years of my youth tightly in the closet. I decided I'd best hit college and live OUT. I'd proved I could  "man up" with the best of them; I'd earned my freedom to be me in October of 1988.

I was discharged Honorable with a preferred re-enlistment code of RER-1.

After 9/11, I was contacted to be convinced to re-enlist as an Intelligence Specialist. By then, the Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy created gay witch hunts. I'd survived my 5 years with gay porn in my locker, and there wasn't one locker inspection the entire time. I just couldn't imagine that freedom under the new policy, from everything I'd heard.

Hell, in plenty of foreign ports and even in downtown Norfolk, our home port, I went to plenty of gay bars but remained celibate. I never really understood how Naval Investigative Services didn't know about me. Other gay guys I knew on the Tico had been busted and drummed out of the Navy with an Other Than Honorable discharge for being gay. But frankly, it seemed to me that the more senior you were, or the more integral you were to the ship's operations, the less likely you were to be outed.

There were other guys on Tico who knew I was gay, mostly because they were gay, and we all trusted each other and could appreciate that we were not alone. Of course, my best friends knew: Kunz from my division, Quartermaster Nardone, and Alyea down in Engineering. Alyea begged me not to tell Everett. Ev was a short, thick-necked, gentleman redneck from Richmond, Virginia, just minus all the prejudice. And I judged him right, but for a moment there...

After I told Ev, he immediately turned away, and I thought he was winding up a haymaker. But he turned back with a very gentlemanly statement of fact: "Eric, my daddy raised me to value that a friend is a friend no matter what." And that was the end of it. Not all rednecks are complete hicks. Ev went on to become a successful painter, especially in portraits.

After I got home, a couple of Aegis contracting companies contacted me and offered very good money to come work for them. Several of my fellow OSs, like Botinelli, already were. In fact, one of them would get a bonus if they hired me.

Looking back, it often feels like I should have re-enlisted. My fellow OSs thought I was a lifer (I role-played one convincingly?), but I would've never made it 20 years as a gay male back then.

In the end, I am so utterly glad I chose to get out and move to Tucson to be around my mother because she died 3 years later of a sudden aneurysm. I value those 3 years so dearly! Oh, and I was there for my grandmother's last two years, too.

Oh, and on my way out of the Navy, we were getting a new division officer, who said, "I hear you're great at your job, so how about you write your last eval?" Of course I took him up on it. I even gave myself one negative comment, to be fair.

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A note on Bill Kunz: Bill was from Oshkosh, WI, where my father lived, and Bill's father worked in the art department at Kimberly-Clark, a major paper mill, while my stepmother worked in accounting, and they knew each other. I've been DMing Bill on Mondays recently. Bill got the Ticonderoga by being top of his class, so it was a coincidence rather than a geographic recruiting factor. It's a very small world.

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I'd like to point out that my life has found me in both wonderful places and dreadful places while I was undiagnosed with bipolar disorder. Now we can look back and understand the highs and lows. But no, not everything was always so stellar.

I Was Almost Busted

 During the last months of my five years, I was nearly busted down in rank.

Marty Larson was a First Class Petty Officer (E-6), while I was an E-5. I wouldn't normally disparage a shipmate, but he later dishonored himself by getting caught stealing from other guys' lockers in berthing, and the Navy canned him. But at the time, he wanted to qualify as an Identification Supervisor, and as both the Division Training Petty Officer and the TIC he worked under, I determined he was a train wreck, so I refused to qualify him. An example of professional rank overbearing military rank.

A few days later, I was busy laying a new track on the chart table specifically for the Captain. Larson stepped up to me and told me to go clean the passageway. I hadn't cleaned anything outside of all hands "evolutions," as they called big hauling, refueling, and replenishing jobs and such, in two years, so I went over to the Seaman lounging at the end of the surface alley to assign them the work and went back to laying this track. After a while, Larson came back over and forcefully told me, "No! I told YOU to go clean the passageway." (I hadn't cleaned anything in around 2 years).

The Mistake

Unfortunately, I responded, "Fuck off, Larson." Annnnnd unfortunately, my entire chain of command was having an impromptu pow-wow right behind us, within earshot. My Leading Petty Officer, Senior Chief, CICO (CIC officer), Department Head (Lt. Commander), XO, and CO were there. From the XO down, each dropped a disciplinary chit on me, including Larson.

Now, you can only go to the Executive Officer's Inquiry (XOI), which precedes Captain's Mast, for one disciplinary problem on one chit. There cannot be duplicate chits. Still, I had to work to get each of them to drop their chit, except for Larson, who claimed he couldn't drop his in the face of those witnesses and still be taken seriously as a First Class Petty Officer. I stepped closer to him and whispered, "It's OK, Marty, nobody takes you seriously now."

The command has 90 days from the chit date to bring it to XOI. On day 90, they announced XOI, and Larson finally took pleasure in telling me, "Strike below, get into your dress blues and report to XOI."

I was done for. I'd spent nearly five years trying to walk a perfect line, and I'd gotten too full of myself.

But I had a secret weapon.

And here's where I need to be a little vague: a few months earlier, a senior Radioman distributed the ship's drug-test results message to all the ship's department heads, which was wrong. First, the XO must sign off on the message; only then is it distributed. So they retrieved the distributed message, got the XO's authorization, and redistributed it. My close friend Radioman Everett (RIP—who I'd served with on mess duty) noticed something fishy: the first message implicated a senior member of the ship's personnel, but his name was missing from the second. Then Ev promptly copied the first message to his closest friends. I felt I had nothing to lose, so I prepared to request a closed XOI (all must leave except the XO and the ship's Master-at-Arms), slide that evidence across the table to the XO, and point out that nobody's perfect.

Our Master-at-Arms was Master Chief Radioman McCormick. A quirk of our new watch rotation schedule was that the Captain assigned a Radioman to sit in Combat Information Center (CIC) to communicate with the guys in Radio and change any frequencies we might need to "kick" for being too "dirty." This was normally the job of the Leading Petty Officer of the Watch in CIC (an E-6).

Not only was the Radioman unnecessary, but MCRM McCormick didn't have enough Radiomen to cover this new watch position. Fortunately, the Master Chief covered the position during my watch rotation. He saw how I operated in CIC, and during dull watches, a bunch of us would chat and tell stories over an internal circuit we invited him to; he rewarded us by sharing his salty stories. That's how I knew that after 29 years of service, the Master Chief was getting out instead of taking his full 30. As he put it, "I always told my wife I'd get out when it stopped being fun."

Everett had also been telling McCormick Shook and Everett stories for a couple of years because Mark and I had amazing adventures both onboard the ship and on liberty. That probably helped me here, too.

So, on my way to strike below and get into my dress blues as commanded by Larson, Master Chief McCormick was rolling up the passageway to XOI, and he stopped me:

"Shook, I was told to gather the paperwork for your XOI, but I gotta tell ya, I can't find it."
With my rank on the line, I was completely confused, so I asked, still in my stupor, "What does that mean?"

"It means no XOI for you," he said, winking, and continued his casual saunter up the passageway like a man well in control of his world.

I was still stunned, standing in that passageway with my adrenaline slowly evaporating for quite some time before it finally sank in...

I returned to CIC, where Larson basically bull-rushed me, bellowing, "I told you to strike below —"

"No, Larson," I interrupted, "there's no XOI for me today," giving him no other information and leaving him mystified as I walked away with an even louder yet unspoken, "Fuck you, Larson."

I was untouchable.

Oh, and once again, your real shipmates will protect you when they know how real you are. My best advice to anyone on a ship: know your network and treat your shipmates straightforwardly, and as if you already owe them a favor.

Shipmate is a sacred word in Navy terms.

Force Track Supervisor/Tactical Information Coordinator

 It wasn't long before I became a Force Track Supervisor (FTS)/Tactical Information Coordinator (TIC). My trainers, Loren Miller and Peter Bottinelli, were both senior TICs, and all I had to do was emulate them to succeed. No sensible person ever stands alone while trying to be their best.

The TIC oversaw what we called the Big Picture: the quality and accuracy of all the ship's gathered information about the surrounding world. An FTS is likewise responsible for the entire force's Big Picture, overseeing all the TICs on other ships and similar positions flying in AWACS or E-2Cs.

Anytime we operated with other units, we became the FTS because we were the senior/most experienced Aegis cruiser.

You earn the FTC/TIC position because your analysis when advising officers is always on point, and you can command guys who are among the smartest on their ships. You also supervise all the Operations Specialists in your Combat Information Center (CIC) who contribute to the picture from the IDS down to the surface tracker, including some officers. So you can see why the TIC position earned the nickname "The Octopus." It requires an insane level of multitasking to control the entire picture and all its data sources.

It probably helps to know that you have military rank on your arm, but you also have professional rank, which reflects how much subject-matter authority you carry in the eyes of the crew, and for my last 2 years I was the senior TIC on the Tico, and therefore technically the senior FTC in the Navy.

I eventually wrote a TIC/FTC training manual that circulated in the wardroom (among officers). Then the Captain entered the document into the Navy's archives.

Professional Rank in Action

To give an example of the professional rank a senior TIC carries, I was just coming on watch one evening when the TAO was getting ready to go to general quarters to shoot down two unidentified aircraft coming out of Iraq and following the west coast of the Persian Gulf (we were there to convoy oil tankers through the Straits of Hormuz in '88). I immediately recognized their flight profile because 7-8 hours before, on the previous watch, two French Mirages flew into Iraq on that same flight path but transmitted, "squawked," the proper encrypted ID codes all NATO units identify with. On a TIC's word alone, we potentially avoided an international incident.

A counterexample of what can happen when officers do not listen to advice started when one of our top officers misspoke one word; while I can't tell you what happened, the resulting incident sent us back to the States and caused our sister ship, the USS Vincennes (CG-48), to replace us on station in the Straits of Hormuz. Subsequently, they mistakenly shot down an Iranian Airbus, killing 260-some people.

I Get Pointed Out by Connell

When Senior Chief Connell left the Tico, he became the Detailer who decides where all E-1 through E-6 Operations Specialists go for their next orders. Our 3rd Captain asked Connell who he should come to in CIC now, and Connell unfortunately told him, "Shook," me. At that point, I should have been honored, so I followed Connell's direction even though I didn't appreciate that Captain*. I did, however, respect the rank and the privilege to advise him more closely. 

So the Captain came to me with the classified version of the Vincennes investigation report to ask for my analysis of it, and while a version of the report was made public, I cannot actually break everything down and explain whose fault it actually was because the conclusion of the public report was that nobody did anything wrong. And I seriously disagree. I just can't explain it without referring to classified information.

This was, in fact, part of the curse we OSs lived with on the ship: standing in the chow line, knowing everything about the operation we were on but unable to utter a word about it outside CIC. Or even now, when classified information has been made public. Chiming in would confirm the information and break my oath under my security clearance.

Some stories, however revealing, simply cannot be told.


* As for why I did not respect our 3rd Captain, in his change of command ceremony, he said that "from now on USS Ticonderoga was going to have to earn her reputation rather than having it handed to her on a silver platter" (paraphrased). For years, our crew had to be operationally top-notch, always on operations, and remain polished in appearance so we could be in a combat zone one week and in a port giving tours the next. Every crew member resented this man from day one.

Force Identification Supervisor & Libya '86

 Background

Libya's leader, Qaddafi, an ally of the USSR during the still-unresolved Cold War, aggressively claimed Libyan domain over all of the Gulf of Sidra, violating international law, which set every nation's territorial waters at 12 nautical miles. He also bombed a Berlin disco, killing several U.S. service members. Reagan sent a 3-carrier battle group to the Gulf in response.

Force Identification Supervisor

It didn't take long for me to become the general quarters GQ Identification Supervisor (IDS), so I was the Force Identification Supervisor during combat operations in Libya, the Gulf of Sidra, in the spring of '86 for a 3-carrier battle group. The Admiral ran the show from about 20' away from me. Meanwhile, those 3 carriers and their defending ships sat at the northwest corner of the Gulf, while we were about 2/3rds down into the Gulf, roughly North of Sirte. During this time, I also served as the Positive Identification and Radar Advisory Zone (PIRAZ) Operator, further asserting control over all contacts, including commercial aircraft. (We let commercial aircraft fly during the many weeks we sat on watch in the Gulf.)

The desert's hot, sand-laden air filled the atmosphere above the Gulf, stretching all the way up into Italy. This created a duct where radar and radio signals could bounce off this dense, low ceiling and extend over long distances, bending over the horizon. This made sensors effective over much longer distances, creating a more dangerous combat zone.

The ducting also created mystical holy days when my radiotelephone frequency picked up harmonic bleedthrough* and one could hear both the Catholic church bells of the Vatican and the Islamic call to prayer of Libya intermingling in the background of our military transmissions. The contrast was emphatic.

We Saved an F-14 Pilot

One watch, Qaddafi launched two missiles in our direction. I picked them up immediately, and ID'd them as hostile. They kept climbing in altitude, so they couldn't be surface-to-surface missiles. Nope. They were aiming for the F-14 flying around his Combat Air Patrol station north of us. We called the ship controlling that F-14, but they weren't!

Our two Air Intercept Controllers (AIC)—the guys you would have constantly heard in the ear of every Top Gun fighter pilot if it hadn't been a Hollywood movie—got on AIC radio channels 1 and 20 and worked their way inward, finally finding him on channel 11 to give him the one-word command: "SCRAM!" Meaning: drop out of the sky immediately, which he did. This forced the missiles to burn their remaining fuel, altering their trajectory so steeply that they fell harmlessly into the ocean.

A couple of seconds late on that missile ID could have been catastrophic for that pilot.

F-18s and Corvettes

A few days later, their corvette (very small but fast) boats loaded with surface-to-surface cruise missiles were hunting for us. Our Air Intercept Controllers worked with a couple of F-18 Marine pilots and took them out.

One of the F-18 pilots said he was taking small-arms fire from survivors in the water and requested release of weaponry several times, but the Admiral denied it each time. So, yes, the adrenaline-charged, dogged service member stereotype exists, but so do very rational Admirals asserting rules of engagement that comply with international conventions. Now, if they were shooting, shooting back would have been a legal defense. But as the Admiral could see, they were at our mercy now in the balance of power. He wouldn't expend more weaponry than necessary to neutralize the primary threat.

Bombing Libya

Then, on 15 April, 1986, we coordinated the bombing of the entire Libyan coastline. Libya reported 34 casualties after we had taken out every coastal missile station and every radar, fire control, and electronic warfare site. 34 was probably the smallest believable number Libya dared come up with. But they're the only source of casualty reporting, naturally. Not that I don't like the idea of keeping the number as small as possible. I just know this number insults their uncounted service members who died for their country.

Other Events

We lost an FB-111 Air Force bomber. We all listened to the pilot's cool, calm voice over the radio: "Sorry, guys, just can't make it." They went down "feet wet", lost at sea.

Our sister ship, USS Yorktown (CG-48), took out a Corvette up by the carriers with a cruise missile, which made headlines stateside, but which I'm highly skeptical of and cannot explain without using classified information.

I always express it as, "Technically, I'm a combat vet."

For our combat operations, we were awarded the Armed Forces Expeditionary and Navy Expeditionary combat medals, which would also qualify us for membership in the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) and the American Legion—not that I ever have registered with either group. I enlisted, yes, but I'm not normally much of a group joiner. And the men of our "War on Terror," namely Iraq and Iran—now, they've seen combat, or guys serving on ships involved in Hormuz or the Red Sea this last year (2026)— they've shot how many missiles and drones down?

The truth of the matter is that I've never been in a bloody trench fighting with bayonets and bullets, yet one misstep by an IDS and you could get 360 of your shipmates killed, or 268 civilians in an Airbus misidentified and killed, as happened with our sister ship, USS Vincennes (CG-50). [Disclaimer: Had they listened to their IDS, Petty Officer Anderson, whom I'd previously served with on the Tico, the incident never would have happened.]

Also, I'm a little jealous of today's Operations Specialists because they get to control drones, not just plan missions for them.

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* "Harmonic bleedthrough occurs when a radio transmitter unintentionally radiates radio frequency (RF) energy at harmonics—integer multiples—of its intended operating frequency (the fundamental)."

3rd Class Petty Officer to 2nd Class Petty Officer

When I returned to the Combat Information Center (CIC) from mess duty, I noticed that whenever the phone rang in CIC, everyone veered away, so I started answering every call and resolving each one to the caller's satisfaction. It didn't take long for me to become one of the go-to guys in CIC if you wanted to get things done. I also caught the attention of freshly minted Chief (E-7) Connell. He took me under his wing and trained me in everything not in the books.

First Class (E-6) Connell had become the man the ship sent out to coordinate with every unit possible on their interface with the Aegis System, effectively showboating the Ticonderoga's new technology. For instance, we offered NASA downrange telemetry on the space shuttle that they didn't have at the time. So while Connell had only just become a Chief, he held immense professional rank (unspoken rank in contrast to military rank) among the ship's highest officers, so much so that when the CO needed CIC's advice, he went to Connell, even though our 36-man division had a Senior Chief and Master Chief above him in military rank.

In short, Connell was a brilliant mentor to have and learn from. I consider that, in part, I was his brainchild. He seemed gruff but always relaxed, and his speech patterns were shaped by his time as an Air Intercept Controller (AIC), controlling aircraft. My patterns shifted similarly; as OSs, we'd been taught to speak a specific way over our military radio frequencies. But I patterned mine off of his because he had it right; using a deeper, crisp, metered voice asserted control more firmly. So I even changed my tone to mimic his effect.

My first accolade: I was picked for General Quarters (GQ) Surface Tracker. That's when you know you're considered the best among your peers at a CIC station. Then I moved over to the air side as an air tracker and, after a period, was assigned GQ there as well.

After a year, I made Petty Officer Second Class on time with another near-perfect score and was promoted to Identification Supervisor (IDS) on the air side. My chief responsibility there was identifying any baddies. (More on this next post.)

The division rapidly began losing the plankowners—OSs who had been with the ship in the drydock before it was even launched or had gone through its sea trials—and with them, their expertise. But this knowledge remained resident in me. Also as a result, I gradually picked up five collateral duties: Chart Petty Officer (PO); Naval Warfare Publications Library Custodian; Training PO; Supply PO; and CIC Cryptology Custodian, and I also managed our PC and peripherals. Honestly, I effectively lived in CIC even in port. Guys jokingly called it my living room.

I took over as Supply PO while still a 3rd Class PO (E-4), and I think they assigned it as a kind of poison pill, or I was just lucky as fuck! Because of a shortage of Storekeepers in the Navy, Supply POs from each division filled in for a 3-month stint running the front counter in the supply department, and I was up first.

During those 3 months, I served every division on the ship, sourcing items in short supply, expediting orders, and more. Even after my stint, I stayed in the shipwide supply network, and we traded information as much as goods. Plus I now had someone to vouch for me in every division, and I'd earned a great deal of favor.

You see, "snipes" worked below the waterline — engineers and electricians like my buddy Keith, with whom I did mess duty — and they weren't afraid to get dirty because they were men, serious men; whereas those of us working in the superstructure, above the waterline, were "twidgets", soft geeks, basically, who play with dials and knobs. But I had so many positive interactions with our snipes that they respected me more than they normally would a twidget.

This was especially true after the day they came up to CIC with the engineering report for the TAO and stood around waiting for his attention when one of them ran out of coffee in his huge, enclosed mug. One of our guys offered him our coffee, but he turned it down as almost certainly too weak, so they told them to use Shook's (my) strong pot on the top burner. The engineer sputtered upon drinking it! You see, I had five 5 5lb cans of espresso from Naples and would make a pot with a filter almost entirely filled with espresso. (I love bitter tastes). That got me further street cred.

Mind you, I only needed 5 hours of sleep back then, but watch rotation was 6 hours on, 6 hours off, endlessly while haze grey and underway, plus all my collateral duties. So, yes, I drank true mud!

Also, when we were in home port, all of CIC's equipment was down, and classified-everything was locked up tight, so shipmates asked us to give tours of CIC so their visiting loved ones would know why they were so proud and fortunate to be on board the Tico. Over time, I became the tour guide everyone wanted, including my co-workers, who nearly all hated giving tours. I had a pretty colorful routine down, and I knew all the answers to everyone's questions because I had elicited them 95% of the time through how I delivered.

I was also assigned a new in-port duty as ship's roving patrol. They liked to give OSs this duty because we were already cleared for high levels of classification, so we could enter any compartment, and the added background checks made us very trustworthy hands in which to put the ship's security. So every third day in port I'd strap on a .45 and tour the entire ship. Again, this got me around to all the other departments.

All I can say is it felt great to be tight with the whole crew, and it benefitted our division in complicated ways and made me into a bit of a "fixer."

I was known for fixing anything I took ownership of, and I took on everything I could; I became an ardent multitasker.

Early Service on Board the Tico, Fire, Crime, and Well-placed Knives

First Days

The day I first entered Combat Information Center (CIC), the ship had just returned from its first Mediterranean cruise, during which it provided Naval Gunfire Support, shelling Beirut, Lebanon, and during which all the division's Seamen were made 3rd Class Petty Officers. They were all dog-tired of cleaning duties and exhausted from the 6-month cruise, so a lot was coming my way. They also tried to haze me with the traditional foolery, like, "Go to engineering and get me a bucket of steam," or, "Get me 50' of gig line." The gig line runs from your shirt's button panel through the edge of your belt buckle and continues to line up with the edge of your fly...

I didn't get tripped up on the haze. It was gentle. And unfortunately for any of the guys who might've thought they were really giving me the shaft by assigning me the nastiest cleaning duties, I'm an only child, so I grew up entertaining myself. I'm very good at turning any job I'm given into an art form, even cleaning shitters. In the process, my mind enters an enjoyable trance state. So no job was too dirty for me.

Mess Decks Duty: Kitchen & Fire

After a couple of months, I was sent to the 3 months of kitchen duty every seaman does on board. I started on the night shift in the kitchen.

On September 8th, 1984, at sea, in the early AM hours, the call to General Quarters (GQ) went over the ship's 1MC (loudspeaker to every space on the ship). I kept my face looking down at the kitchen deck so my profuse tears wouldn't drip onto the 30 pounds of onions I was cutting. I looked up when GQ was called to suddenly see smoke roiling across the kitchen ceiling. Had I not been cutting onions, I would've been the first to notice it. However, we were quite lucky: Boatswain's Mate Kaiser stepped out onto the starboard bridge wing for a smoke and noticed an orange glow on the ocean beside the ship!

Also key to our survival, our other Petty Officer Kaiser from Engineering took charge of the firefight and, given the emergency, chose to hit the glowing metal wall in the helo bay with a solid hose of water, which you're never supposed to do because the metal could slag everywhere. But if he hadn't, the fire had already spread from the uptake (smokestack) it started in to within feet of our fuel lines on one side and within feet of an ammo bay on the other...

Meanwhile, a bunch of us Operations Specialists (OS) were gathered around our chart table, coming up with puns such as "First and Formidable," our ship's motto, became "USS Ticonderoga, First and Flammable," and then there was "First Aegis Cruiser? No. "First ashes cruiser." Later, we were used to clear fire-adjacent compartments that were outgassing from the overheated gear they contained. We did it holding our breath.

For the record, you spend most of Navy boot camp with a Company Commander yelling in your ears about how a misplaced eyelet on a shoestring can get all our shipmates killed, and eventually you become a believer. Well, that fire that almost killed us all? Some guy forgot a couple of cleaning rags in that uptake because he wasn't paying attention to detail!

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Mess Decks Duty: Scullery

Next, I served in the scullery washing pots, pans, and cooking utensils. The other guy in the scullery was a bully who had recently been knocked down to E-1 after he won a fight with a shipmate in a single blow.

This was a typical early duty. Much of the crew pegged me as some kind of affluent city slicker, out of place on the street, soft, and perhaps spoiled. So they took joy in giving me challenging tasks, like pairing me in a 5' space with a bastard who was notoriously touchy.

Working with this guy was like walking on eggshells, and he threatened me enough times to really piss me off. But I have a lifelong policy of never hitting first, so I did not skillet him, even while knowing with certainty that everyone would believe it was self-defense.

Instead, he'd been slowly reading an Agatha Christie mystery novel for more than 3 weeks, but was nearing the end. These are relatively short novels. So he was a terribly slow reader but liked mysteries, so I gave him one. He kept the book in the scullery, so I scanned the last pages to find out who did it, then ripped them out. A couple of days later he was furious, but never suspected me.

Our next port call was Portsmouth, England, where he broke into the base commander's private residence and raped his wife. Our nation was more than happy to leave him there to be dealt with under English law. Afterward, my fellow mess deck buddies spread the Agatha frustration story around the ship, and you can be sure many of the guys believed I had provided the last straw that pushed him over the edge.

We'll never know, but nonetheless, this gave me considerable street cred.

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Mess Decks Duty: The Mess

Three of us were assigned to our last month of duty in the mess, where everyone from E-1 to E-6 eats. My two compatriots, Mark Everett (RIP) and Keith Alyea, became two of my best friends on the ship and close lifelong friends. I still talk to Keith every month and have often visited him in Indianapolis.

The problem with working the mess was that OS1 Conway was our supervisor and fashioned himself a dogged stickler. He never liked to pass us on his first cleaning inspection after each meal. For example, we lost break time re-cleaning the entire drink line for a single minor defect. So I came up with the idea of giving Conway a glaring but easily fixable error every time. For example, our first try was leaving a knife under the drink line; he found it, berated all of us, and that was it. We removed the knife. Done. We kept repeating the formula, and he never caught on.

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I returned to duty in Combat Information Center with solid connections to and street cred with shipmates outside my division.

The Aegis System

Combat Information Center

I'll give you a short tour of the first Aegis System Combat Information Center and some of our capabilities at the time. Not only do all our combat ships now have Aegis, but so do many of our allies, like Japan. In fact, Aegis was recently incorporated into our anti-ballistic missile continental defense.

At the heart of Aegis is the Spy-1A radar. It revolutionized anti-air warfare. Previously, ships could track as many air contacts as a couple of guys could track by manually correlating symbols in the tactical data system overlay with blips on the air radar beneath it. Then the Naval Tactical Data Systems (NTDS) on one ship would link that picture (of symbols) to other ships, aircraft, subs, and land units. So a task force's air picture could easily grow to 50-100 contacts. But any one unit would track maybe a couple of handfuls at once. Furthermore, to target one of those air contacts, a combat ship would have 2-4 illuminators. These are radar dishes that stay focused on one target the entire time your missile is on its way. So, prior to the Ticonderoga, a ship could have four missiles in the air at once.

We also had a conventional air radar, the SPS-49. It rotated a lobe of energy 360 degrees, as you've seen in all the old movies. The Spy-1A, by contrast, was composed of four octagons (arrays), each covering slightly more than 90 degrees (1/4 of the horizon) and containing 1028 individual radar antennae, for a total of 4,096 beams of energy the computer could control. And since the Spy radar illuminates and automatically tracks targets, we could technically have all our missiles in the air at once.

With beam assignment, we could do all kinds of neat things I can't actually talk about for obvious reasons. But I can say we could track many hundreds of contacts simultaneously. We could make our radar signature extremely hard for enemies to detect (for electronic warfare purposes). It's also very hard to jam (overwhelm its sensitivity with energy). And every one of those octagons could assign all its beams to an area 15' away and roast an entire cow in less than 1 second if it were hanging there.

The hatchway into the Combat Information Center (CIC)is key-coded because the routine handling of classified materials makes the CIC a SCIF (sensitive compartmented information facility). As you enter, you step up onto the false deckplates beneath which all the electronics cabling runs. If underway, the compartment is dark but lit by a thousand indicators and screens. The compartment consists of an air "ally" and a surface "ally," connected at the front of the house by 4 large screen displays: 2 for when the Admiral and staff embark, and 2 for the Tactical Action Officer and Commanding Officer (when present).

Here are pics of exterior octagonal arrays, what a lit, modern air ally looks like, and a pic of the front of the house,

 

At the heart of CIC are the Naval Tactical Data System (NTDS) consoles:

The console on the left is an NTDS. All the red lights on the left are on the Identification Friend or Foe (IFF) box. Almost all aircraft transmit ("squawk") identifying codes. US and NATO squawk in an encrypted mode. Commercial aircraft all squawk 1200 in Mode 3. You can see the standard radar scope, which lets you select any of our radars to display, plus the tracking-symbology overlay. The front of the house only sees the symbology. The console has a comms panel and about a couple hundred buttons beyond our level of detail here. At the very least, weapons release happens from an NTDS console.

Just to the lower right of the radar screen is the trackball, which is one reason I was so quick on the console: I used to leave the top scores on Centipede machines before the Navy, which used trackballs.

Typically, an Operations Specialist starts as a surface tracker and works their way to air tracker; then, on the air side, they become the Identification Supervisor (IDS) and, then ideally make it to Tactical Information Coordinator (TIC).  However, on the Ticonderoga, we were always the senior Aegis platform and the most advanced ship wherever we went when there wasn't another Aegis sister ship. Therefore, the TIC on Tico was responsible for every detail of "The Big Picture" (all the data and symbology) for "own ship," and was elevated to Force Track Coordinator (FTC), responsible for the entire operational force's big picture. Likewise, the IDS becomes the Force Identification Supervisor.
So you had to be near-perfect to serve as a TIC or IDS because we were top of the line.

You knew you were considered the best at a position when you were assigned to sit it for general quarters, AKA "battle stations."

But back to the beginning...