Old Salts, New Navy: USS MULLIGAN, #1

By Frederic W. Burr, Warren Musselman and JAMES GARIFALOS

"Old Salts, New Navy" is a companion piece to Frederic Burr's first novel, "Mutinies." In this story, an older Mitch Payne, along with one of his former shipmates from the USS Scarslund, joins with two retired chief petty officers to go on one of the Navy's 'Tiger Cruises,' in which relatives of crewmembers are invited to 'ride along' during a transit from Rota, Spain to Norfolk, Virginia. The fictional USS Mulligan is one of the Navy's newest destroyers, complete with every advanced weapon system and technology ever developed. However, the ship is short-handed due to drawdowns of experienced officer and enlisted crew for the Navy's Seventh Fleet units. Although everything seems in order as the ship gets underway, problems show up in some of the ship's electronics systems at the outset. On the second day, the Mulligan is shadowed by a Russian submarine. Then, more than 2,000 miles from home, the ship suffers a catastrophic and cascading series of hi-tech failures and personnel casualties as the result of an unpredictable event.

Not only pitching in to assist with make-shift repairs, these aged mariners try to show today's sailors how to communicate with the outside world, and navigate, without the crutch of technology, even while assisting the command team with personnel conduct issues unknown in their days in the surface fleet.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Frederic W. Burr
• Release date: Aug 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223767053

Frederic W. Burr

A native of Cincinnati, Ohio, Fred enlisted in the Navy at the age of seventeen, and retired in the rank of Commander in the surface warfare community. He is a graduate of the University of Louisville and the Albany Law School of Union University. Retiring from the private practice of law in upstate New York, Pennsylvania and Kentucky after thirty-six years, he considers himself a fully recovered attorney. Fred and his wife Donna (who also writes) make their home in Kentucky.

Book preview

One

A few weeks ago, Mitch took a fall, the back of his head slamming onto the concrete garage floor. Doctor Cunningham, his primary care doc, scheduled an MRI. Two days later, he got the call. Apparently, his skull was in fine shape, but he had a tumor the size of a golf ball at the rear of his brain, and he was being referred to a neurosurgeon. Both he and his doctor were amazed that Mitch was asymptomatic, with such a large mass sitting on his brain.

Two weeks later, after two additional scans, a neurosurgeon showed Mitch the images, and told him he had a meningioma.

These tend to be benign, the doctor said, but yours is practically on top of one of the dural sinuses. If this thing grows even one more millimeter, you could suffer a neural deficit, which, he explained, could lead to seizures, even a severe stroke. This has to come out, sooner than later. What are you doing next week?

Mitch said he would think about it, knowing he wouldn’t give it another second’s thought. Don’t take too long, the surgeon warned.

The day before his fall, Mitch, and his old shipmate Jim Alexopoulos, had been invited to sail on a Tiger cruise aboard one of the Navy’s newest guided missile destroyers, the USS Mulligan, from Rota, Spain to the Norfolk Naval Base. Jim was invited as the grandfather of crewmember RM3 Jason Alexopoulos, and Mitch snagged a berth as a guest of Jim’s grandson when additional slots became available at the last minute.

His last time at sea was some forty-two years ago, when personal computers, cell phones, and global positioning systems did not exist. During his tour as Navigator on the USS Scarslund (DD 748), the ship’s budget couldn’t even spare the funds for a newer model sextant with an artificial horizon.

I wonder how today’s navigators handle morning fixes?, he wondered. Guess I’ll find out soon enough. Hell. If I had a GPS receiver with a chart display back then, life would have been a piece of cake! Getting a chance to go to sea on a new ship with all of the Navy’s whiz-bang technology was something he had never expected. That phone call from Jim, out of the blue like that, was probably the most amazing piece of good fortune that had come his way in a long, long time. He had decided, brain tumor or no tumor, he was going on that cruise.

He woke up at five minutes before the alarm went off at six, as he always did when setting it the night before leaving on a trip. He turned off the alarm before sitting up, taking a second to clear his head; otherwise, he might lose his balance. His doctor said he had something called ‘benign positional vertigo,’ a fancy way of saying he would sometimes get dizzy. Something to do with his inner ear, and osteoporosis, the doctor said. Another benefit to getting old, he thought.

If only Helen were still with him, it would be easier to face aging. They had been together some thirty years when she died. The coroner said it was either a closed head injury or an aneurysm. In any case, he said it was sudden, and that she most likely had no premonition of her death. Mitch liked to believe that was true. Even six years after her passing, he would still awaken in the pre-dawn hours with that old longing for her that left an ache in his heart.

After his normal morning routine, he put on his casual outfit for the flight, and as he had every day for thirty years of his marriage, he slipped on his wedding band. Then, before zipping up the folded suit bag in his luggage, he looked over his dress blues just to be certain everything was in order. He was surprised, yet pleased to discover that he was still able to get into them some thirty years since retiring from the Naval Reserve. That’s when he noticed the missing Surface Warfare Officer pin over his ribbon rack.

Damn! Where the hell did I put that pin? He sighed, before muttering to himself, ‘Helen was always a whiz at finding stuff, even in places where I had already looked.’ When she produced the lost article, usually within a few minutes of searching, she would just say, Using your ‘man eyes’ again, dear? And they would laugh together.

He swore softly to himself as he ransacked his old jewelry box, looking for his SWO pin. He had carried that leather box with him through all of his deployments during his years of active service in the Navy, and it looked as if it had been towed behind a few of them. He had thought about tossing it many times, but could never bring himself to consign it to the trash.

In the partitions were scattered bits and pieces of his career in the Navy, and the Naval Reserve. An old collar device from his promotion to lieutenant commander, a third-class petty officer rank badge from his enlisted days, and several smaller brass buttons that went to, well, he couldn’t even remember anymore. He’d retired after twenty-three years of service in 1987. He was a young forty-one years then, and figured he was entitled to a little forgetfulness at the age of seventy-three.

Mitch had enlisted in the Navy after high school, just a few weeks shy of his eighteenth birthday. After boot camp, he was ordered to Hospital Corps Class A school. After three years of different postings, he was selected for a Navy educational program, and sent to Purdue University as an officer candidate. After graduating with a newly minted bachelor’s degree some three years after enrollment, he was commissioned an Ensign in the unrestricted line of the U.S. Navy and given orders to his first ship, a destroyer escort home-ported in Newport, Rhode Island.

The transition from an enlisted rating to commissioned officer in the surface community was hard enough for him as it was, but his first wife, Judith (never ‘Judy’ or ‘Jude,’ just ‘Judith, thank you’), made it even harder for him to carve out a successful career in the Navy. They had married just shy of their twentieth birthdays, for reasons that he could no longer remember.

Although she claimed to accept the fact that he was intending to make the Navy his career, she did everything she possibly could to convince him to leave the Navy, and he reluctantly gave in after only six years of commissioned service. He went on to law school after separation from the Navy, and accepted an appointment in the Naval Reserve.

When it became clear after fifteen years of marriage, the two of them didn’t even much like each other, they separated. The children stayed with Judith, but Mitch maintained a strong relationship with both of them.

He met and married Helen a year and a half after his divorce from Judith, and never looked back. Helen was also an escapee from a failed marriage. In their early years together, the two of them were still so young, it seemed like the future unspooling before them was limitless, with all the doors wide open; they would live forever. But that was then. Had he known he would lose Helen just two years after taking inactive status with the bar, he would have retired from practice years earlier.

He was fast running out of places to look. He had his ribbon rack, as meager as it was, updated and pinned on his dress blues. But no SWO pin. Jim would razz him unmercifully when he showed up without it. It was bad enough that Jim had retired from the Naval Reserve as a Captain. Mitch left the Reserves after making Commander, one rank below Jim. When they served together on Scarslund, their roles were reversed. Jim was a lieutenant (junior grade), while Mitch was a lieutenant.

He had to leave home for his drive to the Cincinnati-Northern Kentucky International Airport within the hour to catch his flight to Dulles. He went into his office to find his iPhone, and there it was. His old surface warfare officer pin was inside the framed shadowbox with his unit patches, rank devices, medals and ribbons, just below his old naval officer cap device, itself liberally scattered with green flecks from past salt water exposure. Without a second’s hesitation, he took the shadowbox down from the wall, tore the paper backing off, removed the display board from the framing and extracted his pin, figuring he would reassemble the display when he got back from the cruise. Now if he could just find the soft epaulets for his dress shirt, . . .

The flight from Dulles to Lisbon, then on to Seville was uneventful. He passed the time in first class reading articles he had downloaded to his iPad about the Navy’s newest guided missile destroyers. Although the technologies projected for next-generation destroyers in the Rochefort class sounded impressive, he wondered if they would be enough to counter seaborne and airborne weapons systems being deployed in near peer navies, especially China, and to a lesser extent Russia. Of even more concern, he wondered, Will they really work?

He read an article in Bloomberg about the USS Zumwalt (DDG 1000), one of the most radically designed destroyers ever built, with stealth capabilities. She was delivered five years behind schedule, at a cost of $7.8 Billion, and not ready for three years beyond that. The ship had to be towed into port when its drive shafts failed during a transit of the Panama Canal. Worse, the Navy had to admit the ship couldn’t fire its new high-tech gun systems because the rounds ($800,000, each!) were too expensive. A high-tech destroyer that cost nearly eight billion dollars to build, over ten years, that couldn’t afford to fire its guns seemed like a poor investment.

However, a recent online article in the U.S. Naval Institute was encouraging. Last summer, the USS Dewey (DDG-105), a Flight III ship of the Arleigh Burke class, fired twenty hyper-velocity projectiles from its five-inch deck gun. The fact that a relatively inexpensive projectile capable of defending against cruise missiles and manned aircraft could be fired from a deck gun, a weapons system that had been deployed across the fleet over forty years, was exciting. The magazine capacities for these guns would allow a ship to get off fifteen rounds per minute. In his opinion, finding new technologies to address developing threats based on existing weapons systems, was preferable to most of these pie-in-the-sky weapons system projections dreamed up by the big defense contractors.

Two

Scott replaced the handset of his landline carefully, not wanting to disturb the moment or diminish his sense of excitement. His twenty-six year old nephew John, now a first class petty officer serving on the USS Arnold F. Mulligan (DDG-135), a guided missile destroyer home-ported in Norfolk, Virginia, had just called him with an amazing bit of good news. At the age of 78, news like this hardly ever came his way. The Mulligan was scheduled to return to its homeport shortly from a seven-month Mediterranean deployment, and would be hosting a Tiger cruise on its return transit across the Atlantic Ocean. ‘Tigers’ referred to relatives of crewmembers. Those invited on the cruise would meet the ship at its last port of call in Rota, Spain, and within a few days, be underway. Five to six days of independent steaming on one of the Navy’s newest ships! He could not wait to tell his wife, Susan.

Tiger cruises were designed to give non-sailors a chance to experience the shipboard lives of their sponsors, and were great public relations for the Navy; teenagers who had an opportunity to go on one frequently wound up joining the Navy. Older family members invited on such cruises invariably became Navy ambassadors and informal recruiting sources. Scott had not been to sea on a Navy ship, or any ship for that matter, since retiring after his twenty years of service, and that was decades ago. He was anxious to see all of the new technology he had read about. With his nephew John being an electronics technician assigned to the ship, he hoped to get an in-depth overview of the systems and equipment sported by the newest ships in the fleet. Even better, he would have some serious one-on-one time with his nephew, who was like a son to him ever since he was born.

The oldest of five siblings, Scott had enlisted in the Navy after graduation from high school. From Sonar Tech Class A school, he went straight to the fleet, and spent most of his twenty years at sea, rising to the rank of Senior Chief Petty Officer, well ahead of his contemporaries. Although he had some serious, and some not so serious, relationships with women during his naval career, none of them developed into anything that might lead to marriage, given all of his time at sea. Sonar Technician was, after all, a sea-going rate, and he loved being at sea. But once he reached the twenty-year mark in his career, he decided it was time to put down roots, and have a family while he was still young enough to raise a child. He retired from the service halfway through President Reagan’s first term.

He met his first wife Janice the following year. After nine months of dating, he proposed, she accepted, and they married a year after their first date. Two years later, with Janice then pregnant, he took a position in sales with an electronics firm near Beltsville, Maryland. They easily settled into a domestic routine. She kept house, worked on setting up a nursery, and joined an exercise class for ladies ‘in the family way,’ while Scott applied himself to his new position.

Life seemed almost picture perfect for the couple. At times, he had to pinch himself, thinking it was almost too good to be true. Tragically, all of that was abruptly torn away from him before their first anniversary. One week before her due date, Janice and their unborn daughter lost their lives to a drunk driver on the D.C. Beltway. Scott would never forget the state trooper at his front door that Saturday afternoon, the ride to Holy Cross Hospital with lights flashing and siren blaring, only to be told the trauma team had done all they could, but, ‘so sorry for your loss.’

The months after passed in a blur. Scott threw himself into his work. As time passed, he found himself mourning his late wife and unborn child more than he thought possible. When it became unbearable, he would spend even more time with work, sometimes sixty-hour weeks. By age fifty, his health began to suffer. If it were not for the arrival of his nephew, Scott would have easily worked his way into an early grave.

His nephew John was the child of his youngest sibling, Sarah, whose husband had abandoned her when she became pregnant. It seemed ironic to Scott that Sarah, having waited until she was nearly 25 before marrying, did her best to make a careful choice in a husband, only to be blindsided so cruelly.

Infant John needed a father, and Scott, even though he didn’t consciously realize it, desperately needed a son. When Sarah brought John home from the hospital, Scott, by now a recluse, agreed to stop by to see the baby, but only reluctantly, almost angry at what he considered an imposition. But the instant baby John wrapped his pudgy little fingers around his uncle’s index finger, Scott was hooked.

He cut back his hours at work, and began to concentrate on his health, realizing he wanted to be a factor in his nephew’s life for the long haul. By the time John was in Little League, Scott was going to every game, and working with his nephew on weekends, teaching him the fundamentals of soccer. He loved his nephew, his nephew loved him back, and reminded him, taught him actually, who he was.

The ensuing years flew by. He remembered hugging John before the young man boarded the plane for Boot Camp at the Great Lakes Naval Station, and making the trip to watch his company graduate some four months later. Now, he was going to have the chance to briefly share in his nephew’s life at sea.

He met his wife Susan, oddly enough, at John’s Boot Camp graduation. Recently widowed, she was there to watch her son graduating in another company of recruits. They struck up a conversation, and after two years of