I ran across the Hull Association webpage while sitting in the VA waiting for a doctor’s appointment.  I enjoyed reading the stories by my shipmates.    A few years back I got nostalgic and started looking for folks I knew from my 2½ years aboard the Hull.  I have some bad news to share.  Lt. Dan Stockhouse died in 2017 I believe it was, of cancer.  And in 2019 BT2 Jerry Falk passed on also from cancer.  Jerry and I had been classmates at Wyoming High School so with our 50^th reunion in 2017 we got back together.  I learned more about the crazy stuff that went on than I’d ever imagined. 

 Anyway, on to the sea stories.  I really enjoyed reading the story of the fire with the Beaufort because I was very closely involved with it.  First, the Beaufort and some tug had apparently been trying to pull a stranded ship off a reef and had collided, denting some plates in the starboard bow of the Beaufort.  I happened to be walking aft down the port side of the Hull and saw the sparks from the welding on the Beaufort, so I stopped and watch them cutting out the plate from the inside.  I noticed the trash and oil between the ships and the sparks falling into it when it flashed on fire.  I ran aft towards the quarterdeck screaming “Fire!” About half way down a sailor was pulling a firehose off a rack.  I grabbed it and told him to turn it on as I ran back to the fire dragging the hose behind me.  I stood on the railing ready to hose the fire and there was no water.  I hollered at the sailor to turn it on and he said it was on.  Damn!  The firewater on the port had been turned off.  Oh shit!  There had been enough screaming fire that the crew was reacting and soon water came down on the fire.  As for me?  I cleared the hell out of there as an empty hose wasn’t much defense against a fire.

 I have to admit that I never went into the firerooms or engine rooms, but I do have one story about engineering.  We were leaving the harbor and as we went by Lindbergh Airport, the good ole Hull belched a black cloud that blew over the airfield.  Later we heard “some strange black cloud” had shut down air ops at the airport for 15 minutes. 

 Speaking of Engineering, I remember a story of when once we were in a nest on the inside, by the pier. One of our MMCs had gone over to the ship on our port side, went down into engineering with a wrench and started removing a pump.  As he worked, that ship’s sounding & security came up on him and thinking he was part of FAWTC (I hope that’s the right name) and asked him what he was doing.  The Chief said he was working on the pump so Sounding & security helped him remove it.  The result, the Hull had a new pump.

 I remember some other incidents in the 1972 cruise.  We were to deploy on our regular deployment in July, as I recall, but when the NVA overran the DMZ San Diego Harbor went to GQ and after about a  week of standby, we headed for Nam in mid-April.  We transited to Pearl in the company of three other destroyers.  I don’t remember which they were.  After 24 hours in Pearl we headed west.  The rush west stopped at Wake Island, when we sent a sick sailor ashore.  He had a bleeding peptic ulcer.  I remember some heavy weather with green water running on the main deck one day, but otherwise, the transit was unexceptional.  When we stopped at Guam there was another incident.  A BT found a warehouse that was open and there were a bunch of brass fittings just laying around.  Soon there was a line of BTs and MMs carrying brass fittings back to the Hull.  But a SP caught them and all that wonderful brass got sent back.  Oh well!  Nice try.

When we arrived off the East coast of the Philippines, we went through Ticao Pass and several other straits where for the first time I heard the order “steer by seaman’s eye.”  Anyway, the seaman had a good eye and we missed all the rocks.

We spent no more than two days in Subic and headed for the Gunline off I Corps.  There was a number of destroyers on the line when we got there.  The sea was calm and beautiful.  I also noticed that there were many long bamboo poles all along the coast, 2-3 miles out to sea, where the Vietnamese fishing boats tied up to fish, but we saw only the poles, no fishing boats. 

The water was full of sea snakes.  If you don’t know anything about them, they’re more deadly than cobras.  One day we saw another destroyer having swim call there. I remember our captain, CDR Quast, commenting on the IQ of that ship’s CO. 

Pretty soon we got into a regular routine and it would be more than month before we got back to Subic.  We’d bore holes in the water, patrolling our little zone until a forward observer (FO) called us with a target.  We’d pop off a round and he’d call in a correction.  Depending how close we were with the first shot, they call several more positions until we walked into the target.  Then they’d give us a call something like this: “One gun 5 rounds, fire for effect.”  We’d blast away and the FO would call back with the report on the damage we’d one.  Sometimes it would be secondary explosions, or trucks, or when we just shot the crap out of the area and didn’t hit anything of note, he’d call back “Excellent area coverage.”  Remember this line, there is another story relating to this.

The best mission ran like this: “Clayborn (our call sign) this is X.  Troops in the open. Coordinates XXXXX.”  We went through the usual walk in process until the FO said we were on target.  Then came, “Clayborn, this is X. Two guns, 5 rounds Fire for Effect!”
Boom, Boom….. “Yah hoo!  There are bodies flying everywhere!  Gimme five more!”  “Roger five more” [we were so cool!].”  Boom, boom, boom.

In one early mission we had tanks coming down Route 1.  We fired a number of rounds in front of them, but hit nothing of note.  Then a B-52 Arc Light Strike came in and “bye-bye” tanks.  We were also the first ship to fire into Quang Tri.  We blew up the town hall as I recall.

Early on we got to see B-52 Arc Light Strikes.  Three B-52s would come over head at 40,000 feet in a V formation.  They’d turn and then on the ground you’d see the dust flying and 2 miles to sea the overpressure from the bombs would pop open the door at the back of the bridge going to CIC.  The attached photo is of the USS Newport News (CA 48) in the fall of 1972.  The dust off its bow is an Arc Light strike.  Sadly, a few weeks later the Newport News had an in-bore explosion that killed 25 men.