_/so, is my number finally up?\_

Shipboard routines, especially at sea, are, well, routine. The days are spent sweeping, swabbing, PM-ing, painting, watch-standing, eating, sleeping, boring. With nowhere to go, you almost look forward to an UNREP (underway replenishment) or a refueling, especially if the vessel you hook up to is carrying your mail. Think about it: when you are at sea, you don't get to leave work. My world aboard the USS Lynde McCormick DDG-8 was 437' long, populated with 325 other men who were, wait for it, in the same boat as me.

But seriously, most blue-water ships (not river craft) assigned to the 7th Fleet during the Vietnam War didn't engage in combat per se. The most impressive threat we faced was a typhoon, of which we evaded at least two during my time aboard, The chopper crash incident my ship was involved with was probably the most intense situation I experienced, albeit the briefest. My time in the gun mounts, supporting US and ARVN (Army of the Republic of Vietnam) troops, was my most direct involvement with the business of war. We conducted 167 missions over 56 days during two WESTPAC cruises, 1970-72. Some days, there may have been just one mission. During the second cruise, we crammed 33 missions into just 10 intense days, which included refueling, rearming, and replenishing events interspersed.

It's better to be busy. Time goes by faster, and when you do hit your rack, you fall asleep immediately. Standing mount watches, even with plenty of call-to-fire, was just another routine. Boom boom boom, get out of the mount, chuck the empty powder casings overboard, make sure you didn't damage one of the fire hoses laid out nearby. One foot in front of the other, check in with your watchmates, keep each other going. We usually had only one mount manned, three men per watch group, 3 hours on out of 12. I was on the "9"s, 0900 and 2100 (9am, 9pm).

December 14, 1971. We were underway, somewhere off the southwestern coast of Vietnam, condition II (modified) set, awaiting a mission with Mount 51 manned. Reveille at 0600, "Sweepers, Sweepers, man your brooms. Give the ship a clean sweep down both fore and aft! Sweep down all decks, ladders and passageways! Dump all garbage clear of the fantail! Sweepers!", get some chow. And for me, get ready to take over the watch at 0900 in Mount 51.

The day before was very busy, with six missions, firing 220 rounds at bunkers, Viet Cong/North Vietnamese Army positions, and even a sampan. There had been no overnight missions, so everyone aboard got a chance to get a quiet night's sleep. When we took over mount 51 at 0900, the offgoing watch said we were at full condition II, awaiting orders to begin firing. It would be the last mission of the cruise, and the last naval gunfire support mission the McCormick would have for the rest of the war. Not that we could have known it at the time. For us it was just another day on the gunline, another mission.

When I look at the deck log for that day, I see the bare facts, neat and tidy, detached, routine, as documented by the Officer of the Deck from his position on the bridge overlooking the bow and Mount 51:

0908 COMMENCED NAVAL GUNFIRE SUPPORT. 1006 MOUNT 51 CASUALTY HOT GUN. COMMENCED COOLING GUN WITH WATER. COMPLETED NAVAL GUNFIRE SUPPORT. 112 ROUNDS EXPENDED. 1047 CLEARED MOUNT 51.

Here's how it actually went down. At shortly after 1000, round number 113 was rammed into the barrel, the breech closed, and nothing happened. No boom, no shudder, just silence. Our training immediately kicks in. A protocol we had rehearsed but hoped we'd never have to execute was now the only thing of importance in our floating world. Within three minutes of a misfire (the CASUALTY) in a hot gun, the mount crew must make 3 more attempts to fire the round:

1. Have main fire control resend the signal to fire to the gun.
2. Attempt to fire the gun using the local fire control panel within the mount.
3. Finally, apply the "stinger" wand to the breech and crank the handle on the in-mount generator to send an electrical pulse to the powder primer, hopefully igniting the powder and ejecting the round.

By 1006, with no success after step three, it was time to do whatever was necessary to save our ship. A live round in a hot gun, if left long enough, will "cook off", exploding inside the barrel to devastating effect. Here's an example of a round exploding in the barrel: an Australian ship, the HMAS Brisbane, a ship similar to the McCormick, showing the aftermath of a premature firing of the shell's detonator while still in the barrel of Mount 51.

There were no deaths, with one sailor getting a broken wrist inside the mount. Luckily no one was outside the mount at the time. Just the same, you can appreciate the power contained within this weapon.

In our case, we had only one thing left to do. Cool the barrel of the gun for 30 minutes, using the fire hoses already in place and charged up. One hose was tipped with a modified nozzle to stick into the barrel, to cool the shell and barrel from the inside. Another hose had to be directed, by hand, at and around the point where the barrel enters the mount itself, the area of damaged metal shown in the pictures above.

I don't know who was on watch with me that day. I'm certain I was the lowest ranking enlisted man, and as such, I'd already drawn the short straw. Once the water was flowing back out of the barrel, I had the other hose trained on the hot barrel, the salt water turning to steam instantly for several minutes. Where the other guys went, I don't know. All I do know is that my life had shrunk to this island of gray floating on a gray ocean, and I was standing less than twenty feet from the last thing I may ever see.

I know I made a joke of it at the beginning of this post but now I'm deadly serious when I say that we were all in the same boat. Aboard ship, you have everything you need, and you are charged with making sure it stays intact and floating, at any cost. Although this incident was not of the magnitude to threaten the ship's ability to stay afloat, it was still important to avert the situation shown above.

Thirty minutes is a long time to stand and face an opponent who you know can take you down with one punch, if he should decide to throw it. It's a long time to stand there knowing your only choice is to face him with no shield, no protection, should that punch come. I don't know what was going through my mind, and I won't make up something foolish about seeing my life passing before me. I might have thought about a time a year and a half earlier when I had to choose whether to stay on this course or chose another with less certainty and perhaps more risks. I do know that those 30 minutes, and a dozen more to follow were the longest of my short life.

After cooling the barrel and shell per protocol, the rest of the mount crew and I dropped the breech, extracted the faulty powder canister, and threw it over the side. We then inserted a short charge into the barrel, closed the breech, and had the gun trained and elevated to fire the round in a safe direction and clear the gun. Disaster averted, no damage, no injuries, no deaths.

Except for one or two close individuals, I have never told anyone this story, or even hinted at the experience in any conversation about my days aboard ship. In an earlier post, I shared the conclusion to my research paper about PTSD, saying that I didn't think I had it. I still believe that to be the case. My number was not called that day.

© 2019 John Robin Swanson

_/on the Gunline, off the coast of Vietnam, 1970-71\_

Going to the bakery early Sunday morning was something I always looked forward to. As soon as we got in the door, I'd run up to the counter and grab the next number token so we didn't have to wait any longer than necessary. If mom didn't call them on Saturday to order a coffee cake, we'd wait to see what was left when they called our number. I'd watch the board count up, one by one, rechecking my token, waiting for the numbers to match so we could get our prize and hurry home to enjoy it.

Waiting for one's number to be called at the bakery or at the DMV is one thing. Being in a life-threatening situation and wondering if this is it, the day that your number comes up, is another story all together. But now, it's time for a crash course in being on a destroyer in a gun mount during a war.

I was a Navy Gunners Mate, not by choice. During gunline operations, I would man one of the two 5" gun mounts on my ship, the USS Lynde McCormick DDG-8. There was plenty of automation in our guns, such that under normal firing situations, the mount crew of three didn't handle the 2-piece rounds that could be fired at over 30 rounds/minute. Men 2-3 decks below in the magazine would load shells and powder casings into a pair of stacked loader drums. The rounds were "assembled", sent up via a hoists, feeding into carrier arm that would swing up into the mount next to the barrel. At the right moment, the gun captain would pull a spring-return lever that would load the round into the barrel, the breach would close, ready to fire. In another part of the ship, the fire control computer was given coordinates supplied by land- or air-based spotters, and when all was ready, the gun mount would train and elevate to the proper firing attitude. All that was left was for the gun captain press a detent and move the lever to the "Fire" position. That would have been me.

During a firing mission, you might shoot as few as two rounds before stopping, or you might shoot 20, which still took less than a minute to accomplish. When a round was fired, the entire mount shuddered, but there was no concussion, no BOOM inside the mount, even with both hatches open. It was as if Thor was standing outside, whaling away with a huge, plastic, dead-blow hammer at the side of the mount. Inside, the machinery is flying in and around the barrel, and outside, the spent powder casings clang onto the deck at the same interval as the bang of Thor's hammer, just a little behind the beat. It was exhilarating and frightening in the same moment.

I mentioned that the gun crew never handled rounds. Not exactly true. If a spotter called for illumination, we would have to cycle the system to bring up each complete round, hand lift each powder and shell out of the carrier and lay them on the floor of the mount.This would continue until the carriers contained the illumination shells that the magazine crew had swapped for explosive rounds. After such a mission, the magazine crew got to come topside and carry each shell and powder back down to the magazine, 55# powders and 70# shells. Too bad, so sad. 😭

What else can I tell you? I made two WESTPAC cruises (economy class, inside cabin w/3-tiered bunks, no porthole, four meals/day, all the exercise and fresh air you could handle), during which time we conducted 167 firing missions. We fired a total of  5994 rounds. During the first cruise, our missions were restricted mainly to areas at or near the DMZ, and we fired at total of over 4700 rounds in 132 missions. We fired many different types of projectiles; along with standard explosives, we fired high capacity explosives, illumination shells, and WP or white phosphorus. I know this because I found a database with details of every gunfire mission for every ship that participated in the Vietnam War. I requested a spreadsheet for all 167 missions which my ship participated in during my assignment, and received 40 columns of information which I trimmed to 13, fitting it on five landscaped pages.

During the second cruise, our gunline duty was much shorter, but no less intense. We spent our entire time at the southern tip of Vietnam. Venturing around to the southwestern coast of the country, our mission was to support the South Vietnamese Army (ARVN) while they engaged the NVA and/or guerilla fighters. For us in the mounts, we were never told what or who we were firing at. My spreadsheet has a blank column titled CASUALTIES. No data does not equal no casualties.

On this date, December 14, 1971, exactly 48 years ago, I went on watch in the forward gunmount, called Mount 51. My watch would have begun at 0900, to last until 1200, lunchtime. At 0908 we commenced firing on what was called An Xuyen province. In less than an hour, I'd be looking at that board, watching, waiting for my number to come up.

Continued in number up

© 2019 John Robin Swanson

_/PtSD\_

PTSD – posttraumatic stress disorder – has been a diagnosable syndrome since 1980, when it was defined and detailed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 3rd edition (DSM-III). You can read about the most current information for diagnosing and treating PTSD on the VA's PTSD: National Center for PTSD web page. You can select the Read Full Article button for a full description.

In the spring of 2005, as an ed tech at the local high school, I took a college-credit course, Introduction to Psychology. The last assignment was to select a disorder found in the current DSM-IV-TR, to write a research paper about it, and to give a short presentation. I chose PTSD, due to my involvement in a war (Vietnam), and the increase of cases precipitated by the then-current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It's the only research paper I've ever written. I still have it, and I'm glad I saved it, in particular because of my conclusion.

In the conclusion, I drew upon statistics from the National Vietnam Veterans Readjustment Survey (NVVRS) conducted between November 1986 and February 1988. They surveyed men and women; 30.9% of the men had PTSD, as did 26.3% of the women surveyed. Additionally, 22.5% of men and 21.2% of women had had partial PTSD at some point. All told 1,700,000 Vietnam veterans had experienced "clinically serious stress reaction symptoms".

The conclusion ends as follows:

I am not one of those 1.7 million, at least as far as I know. Perhaps I am one of those people who have all of the right coping mechanisms in my genetic and experiential toolbox. From my research, I have learned that a major traumatic event does not produce the same reaction in everyone. I have also learned that little is known about how to predict who may be more susceptible to getting PTSD. Considering the prevalence for experiencing a major traumatic event, it would seem prudent to me that a section about trauma and coping with trauma should be taught in middle and high school health classes. Along with all of the other challenges our young people must face and prepare for, trauma awareness should be one more important parts of their education.

My research and study of PTSD have given me a better understanding of the world we live in, and how we treat each other as human beings. I hope to find more time to spend with veterans who are less fortunate than I am, both the vets of my generation and those coming back from war now and in the future.

Today when I was mailing a package at the post office, I also picked up a couple sheets of the new semi-postal stamp, Healing PTSD. You can click here for more information about the new stamp and how it will be used to help fund VA PTSD programs. Please consider buying a sheet. A day doesn't go by when you will see a news story about a soldier of the current wars who is dealing with PTSD. And don't forget: when these men are lucky enough to have a family life, their loved ones are also dealing with the fallout from PTSD.

© 2019 John Robin Swanson