by Donald Masselli
As soon as I stepped off the plane at Clark Air Force Base (AFB) in the Philippines in the fall of 1967, I knew it was going to be a tough day. My white Navy uniform was already sticking to me, and the hot, thick air was hard to breathe. If it’s this bad at 10:00 a.m., what’s it going to be like at dinnertime? I wondered. I was jet-lagged and exhausted from the fourteen-hour flight from Travis AFB in California, and I had no idea how long it would take me to reach my final destination at the Naval Ship Repair Facility in Subic Bay.
I moved with the other passengers to the luggage claim area, where I collected my sea bag and a small suitcase before trudging to the bus stop to wait for my ride.
I found some shade, sat on my sea bag and tried to rest. I couldn’t stop thinking about how I ended up in the Philippines. Before this assignment, I was newly married and assigned to a submarine repair ship that stayed tied to the pier most of the year. When the Navy offered me the opportunity to reenlist for six more years to receive college-level electronics training and a big cash bonus, I just couldn’t turn it down. I signed the papers and soon my wife and I moved out of the travel trailer we rented into a real apartment, bought our first television set, and picked up a brand-new Oldsmobile 442. Things had been looking up, until I received orders for a one-year unaccompanied tour in Subic Bay to support the war in Vietnam.
I instantly realized I’d made a mistake, and my sense of trust and loyalty to the Navy was severely damaged. My wife and I only had a couple more months together in California while I trained on the electronics system I would be supporting in the Philippines. Then came the long goodbyes and lots of tears.
The high-pitched squeal of brakes shook me out of my depressing thoughts, and I climbed onboard the dusty blue bus for the three-hour ride to Subic. After I arrived at my new duty station and settled in, I was reunited with the team I had met during training in California. It was nearly a month before our first system arrived, so I had the opportunity to get to know many of them better before the work began. Our mission in Subic was to install, maintain, and operate a new shipboard missile defense system. The electronics were housed in a large gray box we called the “hut” and was to be temporarily installed on a destroyer, mounted amidships between the two smokestacks. We were responsible for nearly a dozen systems during my time in Subic.
When the first destroyer finally arrived in Subic Bay, our team supervised the loading and installation of the hut and its antennas on the ship. Then we tested the system to ensure that everything worked properly before the ship left on its way to the Tonkin Gulf, with a member of our group aboard to maintain and operate the system while patrolling along the coast of Vietnam.
When the destroyer stopped in Subic on its way back to the U.S., we would remove the hut and install it on another ship. Jumping from ship to ship like this meant that most of us were in the combat zone for most of our time overseas.
I was scheduled to go out with our third hut. As I waited for the ship to arrive, I had a great deal of anxiety. It wasn’t actual combat that bothered me—that was something that didn’t seem quite real at the time. What bothered me most was the very real threat of seasickness. In my three years of Navy life, I had yet to be seasick. My only real ocean experience had been on the big sub tender—a large ship that moved calmly through the seas like an ocean liner. This time, though, I was going out on a destroyer. Destroyers were notorious for bobbing and rolling in heavy seas. To make matters worse, I would have to go through my expected seasickness in the company of weathered sailors who would no doubt find endless hours of joy watching me hang over the side of the ship, emptying the contents of my stomach.
Standing outside the hut as the ship left port, I watched the high Philippine mountains shrink away as we headed out to sea. Seasickness, embarrassment, and war—real war with guns and missiles and airplanes—weighed heavily on me. I kept busy that first day, readying the hut for heavy seas and performing preventative maintenance. That evening, I stood outside watching the calm sea as a fat orange sun colored the puffy clouds before dropping below the horizon. How many more sunsets would I see before the action began?
The seas were beginning to get a little choppy that first night when I hopped into my top bunk in the crew compartment under the rear gun mount. I slept soundly, though, and was up before dawn with a healthy appetite. I made my way to the crew’s mess in the forward part of the ship, adjusting to the rhythmic rise and fall of the deck as we plowed through the growing waves. Breakfast was wonderful: eggs to order, potatoes, bacon, and fresh milk (the last we would see for a month). I had seconds on the eggs and potatoes, then filled my coffee cup and headed for the main deck to watch the sunrise.
I held my coffee in one hand and opened the hatch that led to the main deck with the other. It opened easily, helped along by a steep forward lean of the ship. A rush of salt air pushed my hair across my eyes as I leaned back, pulling the hatch closed behind me. With it secured, I stepped forward, gripping the railing with my free hand, trying to see the horizon. All I managed to see was a big wave splashing along the main deck, drenching me head to foot with cold saltwater.
I sheepishly slunk back to my bunk, where I changed into dry clothes, then took my second cup of coffee (this one without salt) to the midships deck. The hut was installed on the port side of the deck, just aft of the Anti-Submarine Rocket (ASROC) launcher. It was positioned with the single door facing the bow of the ship. The destroyer’s forward superstructure, which contained the Combat Information Center (CIC) and the ship’s bridge, shielded me from the salt spray. When I arrived at the hut, I balanced my coffee as I entered the combination for the heavy-duty lock on the door. I spent the rest of the day preparing and testing the hut’s electronics for whatever mission lay ahead. By late afternoon, I had completed all my work, secured the classified test equipment and manuals and locked up the hut and wandered over to CIC.
As the day passed, the weather worsened. Waves were approaching twenty feet, tossing the little ship up and down, side to side. It started to rain heavily, and the gusting wind drove the raindrops nearly horizontal. Traveling outside the ship’s skin was no longer safe. For a couple of hours, it wasn’t too safe to travel inside it, either.
The crew had spent hours preparing for rough weather, but things still got loose. Toolboxes, coffee pots, suitcases, and all manner of books and test equipment went crashing to the deck and rolling down passageways. As soon as we secured one loose item, another projectile would attack us from different angle. After an hour or so of this chaos, everything managed to wedge itself somewhere, and soon it was safe to walk the passageways and resume shipboard duties.
The one good thing I discovered during all this was that, miraculously, I was not bothered by seasickness after all. Not only was I surprised at my immunity, but I was amazed to find out that I was in the minority. At least two-thirds of the ship’s crew became so sick they could barely function. Everywhere I walked, crew members stood by open hatches, their pale faces drinking in the fresh air, munching slowly on the ever-present saltine crackers they hoped would save them from the dreaded “dry heaves.” CIC was the worst place of all. It was very dark, the only light coming from red bulbs near the walls and the dim glow of radar screens. In the windowless darkness, with no frame of reference, all a nauseous sailor had was the unwanted sensation of motion. Up and down, side to side, like closing your eyes on a Ferris wheel that had broken free and wobbled down the road. The radar operators seemed barely alive, staring bleakly at the white line circling their radar screens. Each console had a shiny metal bucket close by in case the operator lost his battle to control his stomach. Not one bucket was empty. I was relieved my fear of seasickness had been in vain, but that opened me up to a greater awareness of my narrowing proximity to combat and what that entailed.
The weather cleared up on our third day out, and we made final preparations for entering the Tonkin Gulf. We received a briefing on our first mission: Operation Sea Dragon. For this operation, we were to cruise along the coast near the DMZ, looking for signs of enemy artillery or mobile anti-aircraft sites. If we detected one, we were to charge directly toward the shore, firing on the target with both five-inch guns from our forward gun mount. After we delivered a good number of rounds, we were to head away from the shore, blasting away with our rear gun mount until we were beyond the range of any enemy counterfire.
Real combat! Targets that shot back! Tension grew throughout the ship, adrenaline crept close to the surface. We were going to war! After that briefing, there was a marked change in the crew’s attitude—and mine too. This was serious. It was real. Here we go, I thought.
Our last safe sunset passed in front of us as we bedded down for a quiet night’s sleep. The slow rocking of the ship and the constant lapping of waves acted like a natural tranquilizer. Everyone not on watch was in a gentle, deep sleep.
Suddenly, sounds tore throughout the ship: Bong! Bong! Bong! Bong!
“General Quarters, General Quarters, all hands man your battle stations!” Everyone jumped from their bunks at once, pulling on uniforms and grasping for life jackets. I flew from my bunk, bruising my shoulder on the poor sailor’s head that slept below me. I was dressed in seconds and ran upstairs toward my battle station inside the hut.
“Jesus!” I thought, “We’re under attack!”
I had two minutes to get from my bunk to the hut. I made it in less than a minute, my heart racing like a locomotive as my eyes tried to adjust to the darkness before the enemy started shooting. It was pitch black; a layer of thick clouds obscured the moon and stars. I didn’t care about the clouds or the sky—I just wanted to get inside the hut where I had some protection from the shrapnel that might soon arrive. I was terrified.
That’s when I realized I had forgotten my flashlight. Well, I hadn’t forgotten it—the thought never entered my head. I had never gone into the hut in the dark before. But here I was, in the middle of the night, with gunboats or airplanes or God knows what headed my way, and I could barely see the side of the hut, never mind entering in the combination. I stood there for several minutes, sweat stinging my eyes, thinking of the Purple Heart and sorrowful funeral mass my wife would soon attend. I strained my eyes an inch away from the lock, trying to discern the numbers by the faint phosphorescence of nearby waves. No luck at all. I finally decided to head below, and when I turned to do so, I bumped up against the hut and heard a muffled “clunk” from my pocket. “My lighter!” I gasped silently.
A glimmer of hope found its way into my desperate brain. I pulled out the trusty Zippo, striking it close to the lock, struggling to keep it lit in the breezy night air. I turned clockwise to 14 and counterclockwise past 14 to 8.
Is a Vietnamese gunner drawing a bead on the bright white light right now? I speculated.
Clockwise from 8 to 22. Click—the lock opened. I yanked the door open, dashed inside, and secured it behind me. I powered up the system and threw on my sound-powered phones, which connected me to the ship’s battle control network.
“Bridge, this is Midships ECM calling. Over,” I spoke breathlessly.
“ECM, Bridge. Where have you been? Over.”
“I had a problem with…” I started to respond when I was interrupted by the ship’s P.A. system, blaring with a familiar voice.
“Gentlemen, this is the captain speaking.”
There was a long pause.
“I want everyone to know that we just entered the Tonkin Gulf Combat Zone. You have all earned your first combat pay.”
“Now secure from general quarters.”
It was quiet for several seconds.
“Son of a bitch!” A voice hissed over the sound-powered phones.
I pulled off my headset, wiping sweat from the earphones on my already damp shirt. As I turned off the hut electronics, I sighed deeply, my relief tainted with a hint of disappointment. The clock on the wall said 3 a.m., but there would be no sleep for any of us as we recovered from our first combat experience of the tour.
What a roller coaster of emotion! I went from fear, to panic, to relief, to amusement, in just a few minutes, but the adrenaline rush lasted well into the day. First combat indeed!
Ten months later, I found myself back at Clark AFB, awaiting my plane home. I had taken three trips to the combat zone during my tour in Subic and experienced some of that combat I’d dreaded. Though it wasn’t as bad as I’d imagined—certainly nothing like what the troops went through in the jungles and rivers of Vietnam. We often received shore fire, but were never hit. A couple of the destroyers that carried our huts incurred damage from the enemy, but the only fatalities I knew of were caused by an incident of friendly fire from one of our aircraft.
That first combat experience had a big effect on my attitude toward war. Gone was the childish illusion of bravery and glory I had from watching movies and television shows. I also developed compassion for front-line troops whose first and subsequent combat encounters were not only life-altering but often life-ending.
I stepped aboard the plane, leaving Subic and Vietnam behind, heading back to the life I left behind a year ago, thankful to be alive.
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Donald Masselli, 77, resides in Gladwin, Michigan, and is involved in writing short fiction, non-fiction, and songs. After ten years in the US Navy, he pursued a career in engineering before retiring in 2008.
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