Free Vietnam II: A War Novel Episode 2 (V2) by C.R. Ryder

Boatswain’s Mate Ridley Ford
    USS Missouri
     
    In terms of ugliness and raw power, no ship has ever come out of a Navy shipyard that can be compared to a battleship.  The Missouri was no exception and she was a fine and final example of a noble breed.  Armed to the gills, hard as steel and swift in the water: 887 feet overall, beam of 108 feet, draft of 29, of 45,000 tons displacement fully loaded, rated speed of 33 knots, nothing existing in any navy of the world that outgun her conventionally.
    Her true value was measured in the guns on her deck and the Tomahawks in her magazines.
    Commissioned in 1944, the USS Missouri was the final battleship built by the United States.  Nicknamed Mighty Mo or Big Mo, it went into action during height of World War II.
    The USS Missouri was the ship that held the Japanese surrender ceremony in Tokyo Bay.  She was, as of 1990, also one of the last two active US Navy battleships.  She had been due to be decommissioned, but with the rising conflict with Vietnam the Missouri was granted a reprieve, however temporary, from the scrap yard.
    I was assigned to the Missouri directly out of training and my first deployment was to the Indian Ocean.  My second began in early August 1990 when we sailed to Indochina with the rest of the fleet.
    We left Long Beach in May with 1467 men onboard including 60 officers and 50 Marines.  It was supposed to be a six month cruise.  None of us could imagine that it would be a year before we returned home.
    The big guns loomed over me as I made my way to forecastle.  No one thought we would ever see those fired in anger again and they might not.  Instead we had brought another weapon to the fight.  Deep in the ships innards were dozens of Tomahawk missiles.  They were a weapon untested in combat and none of the old heads had much faith in them.
    The Tomahawk was powered by a small air-breathing engine rather than by huge rockets that lifted the big fat ICBMs above the atmosphere.  The Tomahawk was basically a pilotless torpedo-shaped airplane.  It was a fire and forget weapon, preprogrammed to its target, guided by internal computers from the moment it left the launcher until it found its target.  The onboard computer had TERCOM, terrain contour matching, which compared the ground below with a computerized map allowing it to correct course as needed.  Its accuracy was rumored to be so good that they could fly hundreds of miles and hit within inches of its intended target.  The Tomahawk could protect itself as well, it flew low, hugging the earth, giving a radar return one one-thousandth smaller than that of a B-52 bomber, and was equipped now also with electronic countermeasures (ECM) to confuse or jam enemy radars making it almost impossible to detect, track and intercept.
    We sailed through a storm getting here.  Rumor was that it might become a hurricane or a typhoon as they were called in the Pacific.  Despite getting knocked around Task Force fleet was over ninety percent combat ready by the time we reached our destination. 
    We were all just waiting for the word.
    As this was only my second time at sea I didn’t know how to feel.  My first, and what was supposed to be the Missouri’s last, had been cut short when the Vietnam Embargo was announced so most of the guys didn’t count that one.  I was being mentored by old time loader named Bella.  He was a career E-6 and went only by his first name.  Everyone called him Bella. 
    Even the captain.
    “I was raped by a dolphin once.”  He told me when I first met him that spring.  “I can tell you from experience that you just want to go limp.  The more you fight the more he thinks you’re another dolphin.  If you just let it happen he might finish his business and move on.  You fight back and then he’s going to take you under.  That horny dolphin will put you under a rock or stuff you in an underwater cave if he has to keep you still.  Nobody escapes from them raping