With the Enterprise moving to Hunters Point, the four thousand men in the ship’s crew moved with her. The Enterprise remained in the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard for about six weeks and was in drydock the entire time. The period was used profitably by sending the crew to school and training courses covering damage control, firefighting, and nuclear weapons, as well as sending them to special training courses on the new equipment being installed in the Enterprise. Many of these courses, such as firefighting and damage control, were mandatory for the entire crew. Sailors were sent in groups of fifty to three-day courses at the local training base, and those assigned to firefighting and damage-control parties at general quarters were required to complete a two-week course. This training was, of course, in addition to the specialized training that taught the sailors their jobs in the ship, such as the operation of the aircraft catapults on the flight deck or controlling the search radars in the Combat Information Center. The specially trained reactor technicians had a great deal of work to do with the reactor plant cold. It was the only time the reactor spaces were fully accessible. It was very time-consuming and demanding work, but then these were very capable people.
In September the yard work was completed and the eight reactors were taken critical. Now the Enterprise would return to its special pier at NAS Alameda under its own power. During that forty-five-minute trip across the Bay from San Francisco to Oakland, there were several hundred sailors on board the Enterprise who were underway for the first time on a U.S. Navy man-of-war. The last week in August, the main task in the Enterprise was to get the ship cleaned up after the experience in the shipyard, where, as always, there had been much acetylene cutting and welding. By now all of the crew had returned from postdeployment leave and were busy installing new equipment and refurbishing the old, as well as attending the mandatory training schools.
We knew the ship had to be kept especially clean, well-painted, and completely squared away, because the Enterprise, being the one-of-a-kind nuclear carrier, was host to many visitors, from both the local community and Washington, D.C. Rickover made several visits just to satisfy himself that the engineering and reactor departments were being competently run and that they would be ready for the Atomic Energy Commission inspection, which would be held in October before deployment. Rickover usually invited himself for breakfast or lunch with me. He had apparently learned a lesson about intruding upon the family life of officers of deploying warships. His mood was always upbeat and he was quite cordial when he came aboard ship, although he would raise his voice and shout imprecations when, on his tours of inspection throughout the nuclear spaces, he saw something he didn’t like. That was not often, but it was inconceivable that Rickover could miss anything that was awry, even by the most limited margin. Among the many visitors who came to the ship were the Harlem Globetrotters, the professional basketball troupe. They demonstrated their remarkable ball-handling talent and clowned and performed with an amazing skill on the hangar deck, much to the delight of the crew. They then joined the sailors at their noonday meal.
The State Department regularly sent foreign dignitaries to visit the ship — I think just to get them away from Washington, D.C., and out of their hair. On board the Enterprise they would tour the ship and then be treated to a fine luncheon in the officers’ mess, suitably dining on all-American fare, usually concluding with strawberry shortcake. That seemed to be a favorite of visitors from overseas. Two handsome young ladies, both competing candidates for Miss California of 1966, visited the ship with their entourages and had themselves photographed with sailors and with the distinctive Enterprise island in the background. At the opposite end of the spectrum, more than seventy members of the distinguished Bohemian Club, a historic fixture in the culture of San Francisco, visited the carrier and then were entertained at lunch in the officers’ wardroom, an event that resulted in many of the ship’s people being given a return invitation to dine in the sacrosanct halls of the Bohemian Club in Nob Hill.
In addition to duties on board ship, I had my hands full with the publicity that always attended the Enterprise. My tasks covered everything from receiving the keys to the city from the mayor to making lunchtime speeches at local civic clubs. On one occasion I traveled up to the University of California in Berkeley to present a model of the Enterprise to Mrs. Nimitz, the widow of Admiral Nimitz, the World War II hero, in the Nimitz Library at the NROTC Building on the University of California campus.
BACK TO SEA
In mid-September the Enterprise went to sea for two days of independent steaming exercises (ISE), during which the ship conducted drills in firefighting, damage control, and deck aircraft handling. A single F-4 Phantom II had been flown on board the first morning, and the new sailors assigned to the flight deck spent the next two days pushing the plane around, tying it down, chocking it, and otherwise learning how to maneuver and secure planes on the carrier’s flight deck. It was almost amusing to see the awe with which these new sailors regarded the single Phantom II, not realizing that in a month there would be eighty aircraft onboard.
During two days of ISE, the Enterprise provided a ready deck for three days of refresher landings for a number of pilots from the West Coast airfields as well as qualification landings for our own pilots, newly assigned to F-4 Phantom, A-6 Intruder, and A-4 Skyhawk squadrons. For initial qualification, a pilot needed to make six good daytime landings and then two night landings. These night landings were terrifying at first, and they never got easy, but much of the flying into North Vietnam would be on night missions.
The Enterprise returned to port for a week, and much of that time was used in correcting material deficiencies disclosed in the ISE and shifting people around to different assignments to better accommodate their capabilities. Some individuals were simply accidents waiting to happen on the flight deck and had to be gotten to other duties to save their own lives and not risk the lives of others.
When the Enterprise returned to sea the first week in October for Third Fleet exercises, the crew was beginning to come together and looked like they would be ready to deploy for combat on time. The Third Fleet, based at San Diego, was the training fleet on the West Coast, which provided individual ships the work-up through multiship task force exercises to prepare them for Task Force 77. Almost all of these Third Fleet exercises, even if they were primarily for the benefit of destroyers, cruisers, or even amphibious ready groups, required the participation of a carrier. That was because tactical aviation was such an essential component of all naval combat operations that the surface combatants as well as the amphibious forces had to have experience in working with the carriers and their aircraft.
In mid-October 1966 the Enterprise was at sea again for two days of ISE, running down the coast to San Diego for Third Fleet exercises. The Enterprise had received special clearance from the AEC to anchor in San Diego Bay in a designated spot where the ocean tides would flush out any fission products, should the ship experience an untoward incident. This is defined as the release of fission products to the atmosphere — the surrounding air or sea. Avoiding an incident was an overriding concern for nuclear-powered ships. The future of nuclear power in the Navy would be in jeopardy if there were a nuclear incident of a magnitude approaching the Three Mile Island breakdown. But even the release of a measurable amount of radioactivity could cast doubts upon the safety of the nuclear-powered ship from ecological and public health aspects. Whenever the Enterprise was in port, small power boats flying the green flag of certain antinuclear activists would circle in the vicinity almost twenty-four hours a day, dipping for samples of the water around us, especially where cooling or flushing water was being discharged overboard. Never were any of these activists able to detect even a trace of radioactivity above the background radiation that is always present in our atmosphere.