The U.S. Navy has never had a nuclear incident, even of the minimum degree, which is defined as a detectable measurement above the ambient that is always present in the earth’s atmosphere. That can be attributed to the stringency of the oversight of Admiral Rickover and his people. The following incident illustrates the effectiveness of the radiation control built into the U.S. naval reactors by Rickover’s people. In 1967 the Enterprise was anchored in Hong Kong Harbor, and when the ambient radiation of the local atmosphere was measured — as was part of our routine safeguards practice — the background radiation measured at the flight deck was higher than the readings taken in the actual reactor compartment with the reactors operating. This ambient radiation, it was discovered, was due to the A-bomb tests being conducted in China.
At San Diego the Enterprise was assigned to training duty with the Pacific Fleet Training Group, similar to the organization at Naval Station Guantánamo Bay, which had assisted the Enterprise’s training during shakedown. The purpose of the San Diego group was to measure the ship’s readiness to conduct operations in Southeast Asia. Yankee Station would be the scenario for the Third Fleet exercise.
The air wing had flown on board the Enterprise during the carrier’s transit from Alameda to San Diego. It was still Air Wing 9, but with a somewhat different composition. It consisted of two fighter squadrons of fourteen F-4B Phantom IIs, two light attack squadrons of fourteen A-4C Skyhawks, one nine-plane A-6A Intruder squadron (a new aircraft for the Enterprise), one reconnaissance squadron of five RA-5C Vigilantes, a squadron of four E-2A Hawkeyes for airborne CIC (also a vastly improved capability over the previous cruise), three A-3B Skywarrior tanker planes, and a detachment of UH-2 Seasprite helicopters, totaling about three thousand people and ninety aircraft. The planes had flown in from their bases around the country. The fighters from NAS Miramar in southern California, the A-4s from NAS Lemoore in northern California, the A-6s from NAS Whidbey Island in Washington state, and the RA-5Cs from NAS Orlando, Florida. Some of the planes had landed at the Alameda Naval Air Station and then taxied under their own power to the carrier pier, where the carrier’s cranes loaded them on board. About half of the aircraft remained ashore and flew on board after we had gotten to sea. The three thousand men making up the maintenance and operating crews of the various squadrons were flown into NAS Alameda by Naval Reserve transport squadrons, embarked with their sea bags and bedded down in their assigned berthing compartments and bunk rooms on board the Enterprise.
For three days at sea west of California, the Enterprise was put through an operational readiness evaluation (ORE), a warm-up for the actual inspection, known as the operational readiness inspection, or ORI. The crew would be exercised at general quarters and then at flight quarters to conduct air operations, simulating a schedule that would be flown in Vietnam. The crew was drilled at handling simulated battle damage, such as fires on the hangar deck, underwater torpedo explosions, and various other casualty simulations that would demonstrate our ability to recover from both battle damage and self-imposed accidents.
By Friday morning the ORE had been completed and the Enterprise was heading back into San Diego Bay and its special berth at the carrier pier at North Island. I was informed by the chief inspector, an aviation rear admiral whose primary duties were to command a division of two large-deck carriers, that the ship had done excellent or better in all areas except two, the communications department and the CIC. Both had been graded by the evaluation team as unsatisfactory. The Enterprise would have Friday afternoon, the weekend, and all of Monday to rectify the deficiencies that had been noted by the ORE inspection team before the ORI would begin on Tuesday with three more days of at-sea operations.
One of my personal tenets governing a commanding officer’s approach to leadership was “command attention.” This had been passed on to me by my father, and it meant, among other things, that the commanding officer should be involved in correcting his unit’s problems, first by identifying the problem, then by defining the corrective action, and finally by a hands-on supervision of these corrective actions. My rationale was that the commanding officer is the most experienced officer in his command, and an officer of demonstrated good judgment — or he would not have been ordered to the job. The XO and I had solved the deck-handling impasse of the four A-4 squadrons during the trip across the Indian Ocean on the first cruise, when after nine days of flight operations the deck handling officers of the Air Department, all commanders and lieutenant commanders, could not devise a flight deck-flow pattern that would enable a deck load launch to be turned around in the required forty-five minutes.
I felt I could not accept the Enterprise’s deployment for combat with an unsatisfactory or even a borderline grade in CIC operations. The CIC was the heart of the ship’s command and control system, where the orders of the ship’s commanding officer and flag officers over him were translated into action for the operations of the ship and the control of the air wing.
On Monday morning, as the Enterprise cleared the channel sea buoy outside San Diego Harbor, general quarters was sounded to get the crew to their battle stations. We would conduct damage-control and shiphandling evolutions in preparation for the ORI while proceeding at thirty knots to the operating area to launch the air wing.
With the ship at GQ and the air wing at flight quarters, I turned over the conn of the carrier to the navigator who had gained my confidence on the previous deployment. I believed that at least he would not have a collision or run us aground. I had assigned the XO responsibility to fix the Communications Department and headed him for the communications center, where he found the problem to be an internal one. The administrative handling and routing of messages to the embarked admiral and his staff was the issue. I surmised that the embarked flag officer had felt he was not getting the message traffic delivered to him in hard copy soon enough. If this were the case, that would be easy to rectify, by assigning more and smarter sailors — and perhaps junior officers — to hand carry message traffic to the flag bridge. Meanwhile, I went to the CIC, the other source of the unsatisfactory evaluation. It immediately became apparent what the problems were. Just as it had bothered the inspectors, it made an equally bad impression on me.
CIC was located in air-conditioned spaces so that the electronic equipment would be in a cool, dry environment for proper and efficient operation. Personal comfort was secondary. But it was one of the few air-conditioned spaces on the ship, and it appeared that sailors assigned to CIC were using the center as a living space. All of the available room behind the display boards and operating consoles was filled with the personal gear of the sailors in the CIC, mainly the unmarried men who had no home ashore to store their personal gear when they went to sea. It was also a repository for much of the shopping at the Navy exchanges and bazaars of the oriental ports visited by the Enterprise—electric guitars, amplifiers, tape decks, kimonos, and mechanical toys — all in their original packing. Also because of the air conditioning, the off-duty petty officers used the CIC for a hangout. They gathered around the coffee mess and flaked out and dozed in the many corners and cubby holes between the consoles, display boards, and equipment. It was impossible for me or the CIC evaluators to know who was on duty, responsible for the operation of the radar and the constant updating of the Plexiglas plots. When I queried the CIC officer about the large number of petty officers in CIC going around with a cigarette in their left hand and a mug of coffee in their right, I was informed by him that the policy was for nonrated strikers to actually operate the equipment, the status boards, and communications. The petty officers acted as “supervisory” personnel. If there was a problem, or the nonrated striker couldn’t handle a situation, then the petty officer would step in and take his place. I explained that this was not what I had in mind in assigning petty officer and striker billets to the CIC.