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.