Navy Story #18
Meddling in CIC
I have checked with my brother, John, to make sure it's okay to tell this story. He still feels badly about it. I have assured him that it didn't bother me way back when, and
it certainly doesn't bother me now!
Anyway, in September of 1975, my ship's captain arranged for a "dependents" tour on the USS Pensacola. This meant that we picked up relatives of the ship's crew in
North Carolina (we were returning from somewhere, maybe our Mediterranean cruise; I don't remember for sure) and let them ride with us back to our home port of Little Creek, Virginia.
Here are some pictures that I took of the landing craft bringing my dad and John to the ship:
I'll tell you more about the cruise itself in another story. For this time, I want to relate what happened one morning during that brief cruise, in the ship's Combat Information
Center (CIC).
I was not the CIC Officer, meaning that I was not in charge of the crewmen who regularly manned CIC while we were underway. But as one of the officers who was the Junior Officer of
the Deck underway, I was assigned to CIC during our approach to anchorage sometimes, and apparently that was the case on this occasion. One of my jobs during anchor details was to make sure the bridge officers had a good
idea of what our situation was from a radar's point of view. What I mean is, that the CIC had quite a few radar sets in it, and at least one was always manned underway. The sailor manning the radar would be looking for,
and reporting to the bridge, any surface contacts (ships, mostly, but also land if we were close enough).
Apparently, John went with me to CIC and watched our activities during that anchor detail. John was watching the radar operator move his cursor around the screen, taking distance measurements
of a few contacts. Here are John's own words about what happened:
"At the end of the night trip up the coast from the Wilmington area, we were preparing to anchor somewhere near one of the bridge tunnels near Hampton Roads, and you were in CIC
while the navigation was going on to find the anchor spot. Like an idiot, I thought I could see that one of your guys wasn't positioning the cursor on his radar screen quite right, and so I pointed it out to you. Fortunately,
you had the sense to quietly ask your guy about that, and he gave a quite good explanation, which shut my stupid mouth! I felt like a heel, and still do, about meddling."
John is being much too hard on himself. It was a perfectly valid question. And the answer actually gave even me a bit more insight into how the radar worked. Basically, the operator
was using the edge of the blob of light on the screen that is the cursor, and also the edge of the blob that is the contact, instead of the middle of the blobs, to make his measurements. (The radar's signal is such that
the edge of the contact's blob on the screen marks the location of the leading edge of the returning radar pulse. And the radar is tuned so that the edge of the cursor is the best spot to match with the contact, to get
the correct measurement.) I think John had asked why the operator didn't put the middle of the cursor on the middle of the contact.
Anyway, I feel pretty good about John's comments about how I handled the situation. It was always my attitude that those sailors really knew what they were doing, and I always tried
to get information from them in a respectful manner. I do the same thing with folks that I manage on the job (when I am a manager), and also with my students in my classes, even now. They appreciate it, I usually get the
information I need, and everyone feels good about the conversation.