March or April 1962 While the Theodore E. Chandler is training in preparation for our May 10 departure for westpac, we are scheduled for a shoot at San Clemente Island. After our first four or five salvos the order is given to cease fire. It turned out that we were a little high and five inch shells were going completely over the crest of the island and landing on the other side - where the marines have some kind of a camp or base... I had heard that the two people that you want to have on your side on-board ship were the disbursing clerk and the cook. I don't recall ever chatting up or palling around with the disbursing clerk, but on the Theodore E. Chandler I did get to know the cook. Many times during the mid watch I would go down to the galley and he would give me a hot fresh-out-of-the-oven loaf of bread and a cube of real butter (the navy never had anything but real butter). After inserting the whole cube into the whole loaf I would carefully conceal my "burden" and slip through CIC into Sonar where the sonarmen on watch would have a "repast."

Summer 1964 Immediately after the Gulf of Tonkin incident in which the USS Maddox and the Turner Joy were allegedly attacked by North Vietnamese torpedo boats, the Hull was ordered to get underway with a small remotely-controlled high speed boat on the fantail which was to be used as target practice for our five-inch 54 caliber guns. The scuttlebutt was that the navy wanted to find out why the Turner Joy could not hit anything... Results were null because we could never get the boat to work. One time on the Hull I was helping coil line on the main deck port side as we were refueling port-to a tanker when the main gyro went out. The helmsman was absolutely intent on keeping the heading he was told to and was doing a terrific job. Unfortunately he was not tracking the magnetic compass. He was focused on the gyro repeater and when the main gyro went out is slooowly began to return to a relative bearing mode. The result was that we veered away (good thing it was away) from the tanker breaking all of the lines and pulling the still gushing fuel hoses out of the intakes and leaving general chaos and running yelling people. I found it to be an interesting experience (which is easy when you bear absolutely no portion of the fault!).