Navy Story #14
Damage Control Exercise
Part of our training at Officer Candidate School (OCS) was to learn about what the Navy calls Damage Control. What this boils down to is how to plug holes and strengthen damaged bulkheads
and structural I-beams. It also involves how to put out fires, but that's another story.
In order to give the officer candidates a fairly realistic idea of what damage control involves, the folks at OCS have built an actual floating section of ship in a huge tank of water,
that they can "damage" in various ways and let the officer candidates try to repair to keep it afloat! It's a pretty sophisticated setup. They have a nickname for the ship, of course, but I don't remember
what it is.
The day that my company went over there, as I recall, was pretty cold. (I was at OCS from November through April, and this was in Rhode Island.) The "ship" is in a large
warehouse, but it wasn't heated much. There are two decks on the ship. Some officer candidates got assigned to the top deck, to try to repair something like a damaged hatch and maybe even a damaged radar mast or something
like that. I got assigned to the gang that went below decks, to try to repair holes in the hull, damaged bulkheads, and I think another bent hatch.
They actually re-float this ship after each exercise, and then somehow when the next exercise begins, they open the holes all over again, and water starts to pour in. I mean, it pours
in like it would if a real ship had taken a hit and had huge holes knocked in the hull. My partner and I had a gizmo kinda like those butterfly bolts that you can push through a small hole in your wall, expand the "wings",
and put a bolt in to hold up a picture. In fact, I think it was called a butterfly patch. The idea is to push the butterfly patch through the hole, to the outside of the hull, expand the "wings", and then tighten
it against the outside of the hull – all the while with us inside the ship. My partner and I could barely push the patch through the hole, because the water was flowing in so fast!
We finally got the patch through, and the wings expanded, but by this time there was so much water inside (from our hole and many others that other officer candidates were trying to
plug) that we couldn't reach the tightening bolt without going under water! And the water was very murky, just like seawater would be, so we couldn't see the bolt. We never did locate it. Our ship sank. So sad.
It wasn't all our fault, of course, but we certainly didn't contribute much to keeping her afloat.
Fortunately, the ship can only sink so far in its artificial "sea" before it bottoms out. But ours definitely bottomed out. I think we technically failed the exercise (duh!),
but the chiefs in charge said we gave it a valiant effort. It was a very sobering exercise. When you see movies of men trying to patch a hole or a buckling bulkhead or something like that, remember that it really is extremely
hard to do it when things aren't going right!
I'm not sure why I even wanted to tell you this story. I guess again, because I have great respect for those sailors who have been in actual battle or damage incidents, and who
have survived to tell about it. And also for those who didn't make it, whose ships sank. They made a great sacrifice to keep us free!