In July, 1964, I was a new Navy Ensign, and the gunnery officer in USS Picking (DD685), one of several WW II-era destroyers on a six-month deployment in the Pacific. Our primary assignment was to patrol the Taiwan Strait, the narrow strip of sea separating Taiwan from the Chinese mainland. It was a period when tempers flared and hostilities seemed imminent, so it wasn’t exactly a pleasure cruise for us. Between those patrols, we’d get a break and head for Subic Bay in the Filipines, to replenish fuel, supplies, and, of course, San Miguel beer.
On one of the days in port, I noticed some civilians prowling around the after part of the ship, guided by our XO (Executive Officer). After they left, I asked my boss, the Weapons Officer, what the visit was about. It seems that we had been selected to carry out a special reconnaissance mission somewhere to the west, but decided that our ship didn’t have enough open deck space for their equipment. So they went shopping for another ship.
A couple days later, my boss told me that the ship had been selected for that recon mission, and that I was to get underway with them immediately for a surface gunnery exercise and grade them on it.
“What ship?”, I asked.
“Maddox, DD731”, he replied
I grabbed my gear and headed for Maddox, moored on the other side of our pier. We were underway about an hour later. We only had to steam about two hours to get to the free-fire zone for the gunnery exercise, involving the ship firing its weapons at a towed target, well astern of the tow ship. The exercise went as well as expected, since Maddox had a reputation for excellence in accuracy. In fact, the rules for calculating that quality, for some reason, allowed the final score to be higher than 100%. And, for Maddox, it was 105%.
I wasn’t looking forward to reporting that score to my CO, Commander Connelly. He, and Maddox’s skipper, Commander Ogier, did not get along, to put it mildly. To put it bluntly, CDR Ogier had a reputation for being an asshole, with a capital A, something I witnessed only once in my short career, but that was enough. I thought my CO took it pretty well, considering his tightly clenched jaw. I avoided him for the next few days.
A few days later, Maddox was underway for the Gulf of Tonkin, and we were on our way back to the Taiwan Strait. On August 2, we were ordered back to the South China Sea at maximum speed. All we knew was that Maddox had engaged elements of the North Vietnamese navy.
And, the rest is history.
Ever since then, I’ve wondered what would happened if it had been our ship, Picking, instead of Maddox, especially since our gunnery scores were nowhere near those of Maddox.
Even then, regardless of how all of us in Picking might have felt about CDR Ogier, one thing was clear: Maddox was the most combat-ready ship in our squadron.
A Near Miss At Fame Or Infamy
Prose, including snippets (mini-memoirs).
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