Quote:
Originally Posted by masraum
Holy carp! 8 hrs! Yeah, I think our flight was ~2hrs. Diego Garcia was one of the places that my dad could have been stationed, but he gave it a miss.
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Ok, one of my salties. That was a hell of a trip in total. It was my first WestPac and they flew me back to Coronado from Pearl for an additional school. After the school finished, it was all about getting back out to the Enterprise which by that time was on station.
San Diego back to Pearl, out the Philippines, then to Diego Garcia. We weren’t allowed to leave the terminal at Clark and it’s not like there’s multiple flights to DG daily. With the aircraft issues, it caused me to essentially live at the terminal for two days eating box meals brought in.
Spent two weeks TAD in DG living in two man hootches. By the way that’s double the time needed to see the island, LOL. I helped build a sand volleyball court that was about 50ft from the beach. You can guess where we got the sand.
Boarded the USS Hector in DG which was a repair ship. Was told at the time that she was the oldest ship in the entire fleet. Believable because she was definitely old school. Spent a week plus TAD in the Comm shop till we sailed within vicinity of the task force. While on the Hector, I was running laps on the upper outdoor deck while a Frigate was coming alongside for repairs. The Collision Alarm sounded and I grabbed the nearest pipe inboard just before the Frigate came into us. Wasn’t too bad but, definitely swapped some paint! If ya gotta hit another ship, a full repair ship is your best choice.
Once we were in the vicinity of the E we took a flat bottom garbage scow from the Hector to the E with a boarding ladder down. It was maybe 1000-1500 yards and pretty calm seas overall but, you know flat bottom and a couple of the guys were puking,, Not me I can say with some pride,,, I loved big seas.
Was never so happy to get back to the ship as that trip,,,