Navy Stuff

1986-1987 Mediterranean Deployment USS John F. Kennedy CV-67

Ports o’ Call
Rota, Spain  28 Jul - 03 Aug 86
Benidorm, Spain 02-07 Sept 86
Toulon, France 12-18 Sept 86
Haifa, Israel 16 - 18 Oct 86
Trieste, Italy 27 Oct - 02 Nov 86
Naples, Italy 06 - 08 Nov 86
Cannes, France 25 Nov - 03 Dec 86
Naples, Italy 10 Dec - 19 Dec 86
Palma de Mallorca, Spain, 23 Dec 86 - 01 Jan 87
Cannes, France 06 Jan - 15 Jan 87
Augusta Bay, Sicily 24 Jan - 25 Jan 87 (100 ship show of force/international)
Malaga, Spain 29 Jan - 30 Jan 87 (Early departure due to crisis near Israel/Lebanon)
Haifa, Israel 06 - 11 Feb 87
Rota, Spain 21 Feb 87

1988 - 1989 Mediterranean Deployment USS John F. Kennedy CV67

Ports o’ Call
Naples, Italy  20 Aug - 27 Aug 88
Alexandria, Egypt 30 Aug - 04 Sep 88
Toulon, France 11 Sep - 21 Sep 88
Antalya, Turkey 10 Oct - 17 Oct 88
Tunis, Tunisia 21 Oct - 24 Oct 88
Palma, Spain 28 Oct - 04 Nov 88
Naples, Italy 14 Nov -18 Nov 88
Marseilles, France 23 Nov - 28 Nov 88
Palma, Spain 15 Dec - 20 Dec 88
Cannes, France 23 Dec - 01 Jan 89
Haifa, Israel 06 Jan - 09 Jan 89

1990 - 1991 Desert Storm/Desert Shield  USS John F. Kennedy CV67
Suez Canal x 4

Ports O’ Call
Alexandria, Egypt 10 - 13 Sept 90
Izmir, Turkey 07 - 14 Nov 90
Antalya, Turkey 19 - 28 Nov 90
Jeddah, Saudi Arabia 29 Dec 90 - 02 Jan 91
Hurgada, Egypt 04 - 10 Mar 91

1993 - 1994 Mediterranean / Red Sea / Indian Ocean /Adriatic Sea Deployment
USS America embarked with Attack Squadron Eight Five (VA-86 Black Falcons) A-6E Intruder
Shell Back Initiation 01 Dec 1993 Longitude 046  01.65

SOMALIA / BOSNIA
Ports O’ Call

Yeah right….Haze gray and underway….3 separate beer days.

——————————————————————————-

   

               

 How To Simulate LIFE In The Navy

1. Buy a dumpster, paint it gray and live in it for 6 months straight.

2. Run all of the piping and wires inside your house on the outside of the walls.

3. Pump 10 inches of nasty, cruddy water into your basement, then pump it out, clean up, and paint the basement “deck gray.”

4. Every couple of weeks, dress up in your best clothes and go the scummiest part of town, find the most run down, trashy restaurant you can, pay $30 for a meal, then walk home in the freezing cold.

5. Perform a weekly disassembly and inspection of your lawnmower.

6. On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays turn your water temperature up to 200 degrees, then on Tuesday and Thursday turn it down to 10 degrees. On Saturdays, and Sundays declare to your entire family they used too much water during the week, so all showering is secured.

7. Raise your bed to within 6 inches of the ceiling.

8. Have your next-door neighbor come over each day at 5am, and blow a whistle so loud that Helen Keller could hear it and shout “Reveille, Reveille, all hands heave out and trice up.”

9. Have your mother-in-law write down everything she’s going to do the following day, then have her make you stand in the back yard at 6am and read it to you.

10. Eat the raunchiest Mexican food you can find for three days straight, then lock yourself out of the bathroom for 12 hours, and hang a sign on the door that reads “Secured-contact OA division at X8333.”

11. Submit a request form to your father-in-law, asking if it’s ok for you to leave your house before 3pm.

12. Invite 200 of your not-so-closest friends to come over, then board up all the windows and doors to your house for 6 months. After the 6 months is up, take down the boards, wave at your friends and family through the front window of your home…you can’t leave until the next day…you have duty.

13. Shower with above-mentioned friends.

14. Make your family qualify to operate all the appliances in your home (i.e. Dishwasher operator, blender technician, etc.).

15. Walk around your car for 4 hours checking the tire pressure every 15 minutes.

16. Sit in your car and let it run for 4 hours before going anywhere. This is to ensure your engine is properly “lighted off”.

17. Empty all the garbage bins in your house, and sweep your driveway 3 times a day, whether they need it or not. (Now sweepers, start your brooms, clean sweep down fore and aft, empty all cans over the fantail).

18. Repaint your entire house once a month.

19. Cook all of your food blindfolded, groping for any spice and seasoning you can get your hands on.

20. Use eighteen scoops of budget coffee grounds per pot, and allow each pot to sit 5 hours before drinking.

21. Have your neighbor collect all your mail for a month, read your magazines, and randomly lose every 5th item.

22. Spend $20,000 on a satellite system for your TV, but only watch CNN and the Weather Channel.

23. Avoid watching TV with the exception of movies which are played in the middle of the night. Have the family vote on which movie to watch and then show a different one.

24. Have your 5-year-old cousin give you a haircut with goat shears.

25. Sew back pockets to the front of your pants.

26. Eat every meal in under three minutes or less so that your buddies on the flight deck won’t be stuck with a boxed “nasty” (lunch) consisting of green-ring baloney sandwiches, boiled egg, fudge brick and sour grape juice. That is also depending if the Mess Crank will LET you eat as you have just came off the flight deck and you have flight deck grime on your hands that defy any soap manufactured today. (I don’t like MS’s)

27. Attempt to spend 5 years working at McDonalds, and NOT get promoted.

28. Ensure that any promotions you do get are from stepping on the dead bodies of your co-workers.

29. Needle gun the aluminum siding on your house after your neighbors have gone to bed.

30. When your children are in bed, run into their room with a megaphone, and shout at the top of your lungs that your home is under attack, and order them to man their battle stations. (”General quarters, general quarters, all hands man your battle stations”)

31. Make your family menu a week ahead of time and do so without checking the pantry and refrigerator.

32. Post a menu on the refrigerator door informing your family that you are having steak for dinner. Then make them wait in line for at least an hour, when they finally get to the kitchen, tell them that you are out of steak, but you have dried ham or hot dogs. Repeat daily until they don’t pay attention to the menu any more so they just ask for hot dogs.

33. When baking a cake, prop up one side of the pan while it is in the oven. Spread icing on real thick to level it off.

34. In the middle of January, place a podium at the end of your driveway. Have you family stand watches at the podium, rotating at 4-hour intervals.

35. Lock yourself and your family in your house for 6 weeks. Then tell them that at the end of the 6th week you’re going to take them to Disneyland for “weekend liberty.” When the end of the 6th week rolls around, inform them that Disneyland has been canceled due to the fact that they need to get ready for Engineering-certification, and that it will be another week before they can leave the house.

36. In your grim, gray dumpster (refer to #1), with 200 of your not-so-closest friends (cite para. 12) regardless of gender, suffer through PMS.

37. Sleep on the shelf in your closet. Replace the closet door with a curtain. Have you wife whip open the curtain about 3 hours after you go to sleep. She should then shine a flashlight in your eyes and mumble “Sorry, wrong rack.”

38. Renovate your bathroom. Build a wall across the middle of your bathtub, move the showerhead to chest level. When you take showers, make sure you shut off the water while you soap down.

39. When there is a thunderstorm in your area, find a wobbly rocking chair and rock as hard as you can until you become nauseous. Have a supply of stale crackers in your shirt pocket.

40. Put lube oil in your humidifier and set it on high.

41. For ex-engineering types: leave the lawn mower running in your living room eight hours a day.

42. Have the paperboy give you a haircut.

43.Once a week, blow compressed air up your chimney, making sure the wind carries the soot onto your neighbor’s house. Ignore his complaints.

44. Every other month buy green or red marine primer and put it in a paint sprayer. Spray it over the roof of your house onto your neighbor’s car. Ignore his complaints.

45. Lock wire the lug nuts on your car.

46. Buy a trash compactor, but use it only once a week. Store the garbage on the other side of your bathtub.

47. Get up every night around midnight and have a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on stale bread.

48. Set your alarm clock to go off at random during the night, jump up and get dressed as fast as you can making sure you button up the top button on your shirt, stuff you pants into your socks. Run out into the backyard and uncoil the garden hose.

49. Once a month, take every major appliance apart and put them back together again.

50. Install a fluorescent lamp under the coffee table and then get under it and read books.

51. Raise the thresholds and lower the top sills of your front and back doors so that you either trip or bang your head every time you pass through one of them.

52. Every so often, throw the cat in the pool and shout “Man overboard, starboard side” Then run into the house and sweep all the pots and dishes off the counter. Yell at the wife and kids for not having the kitchen “stowed for sea.”

53. Put on the headphones from your stereo set, but don’t plug them in. Hang a paper cup around your neck with string. Go stand in front of your stove. Say … to no one in particular “Stove manned and ready” Stand there for three or four hours. And say again to no one in particular “stove secured.” Roll up your headphones and paper cup and place them in a box.   

                                              

Sailor Pranks Posted by runningrooster under Military Times

I know it seems like all we did was pull pranks on each other, but we really did work very hard every day. The humor helped mask the drudgery of being away from home and the very long hours we worked to fulfill our mission goals. The fact is we all feasted on the naivity of the “new guy” who always seemed to show up when we all needed to have a laugh the most. The one that I used a few times is the old superglue on the Master Lock turn dial or in the key hole. That one worked wonders to slide someone right of the edge of sanity…especially if they were coming off a particularly hard day of work. They would have to go to the Master-At-Arms shack to request someone with bolt cutters come down to the berthing and remove the offending lock. It was all that we could do to not laugh out loud in our racks (beds) during the whole event. Good times. As you can tell, you probably wouldn’t do it to someone you liked, it was usually performed when that person needed some Karma to come their way.Other really good gags was to wave a plastic bag in the air, tie it up and hand it to the new guy. Everyone (the Salts) knew the joke around the boat and wouldn’t say a word if they saw a junior enlisted walking down the passageway with a clear garbage bag full of air. We all knew he had been set up by his shop to walk aimlessly around the ship to have the air tested in the bag….first to Engineering, then to the Catapults, each successive shop would forward him to the next until he finally got it…that he had been had! Same goes for the poor airman sent around the ship looking for 10 feet of ”Fallopian Tube” or a “Deck Stretcher” and finally, ”Sound Powered” telephone batteries.The grand spectacle of all pranks was the “Mail Buoy Watch.”  This poor guy would be the goat for the entire ship for a very long time if the prank was successful. It is the Grand Master of Navy pranks, one that is not often successful due to the extent of the ruse. The prank involves convincing the airman/seaman that he would have to stand watch on the hangar bay, near the aircraft elevator opening and wait for the ship to travel close to the “Mail Buoy,” where he would have to use his “Shepard’s hook” to catch the bag of mail hanging from the imaginary buoy. That is only a small part of the gag, the rest involves having the pidgeon dress up with full emergency flotation gear, hardhat and sound powered telephone headset for updates sent to him from the bridge. I was stationed on carriers for seven years and I have only seen a handful of successful Mail Buoy watches successfully completed. It is a sight to behold and from their viewpoint, they seem to not know why there is such a large crowd gathered around in the hangar bay….”Why are all of these people looking at me?…Of course….”   (I am sure they thing to convince themselves what they are doing is perfectly normal)….”They want their MAIL!”  Sooner or later (usually an hour or two), someone lets them in on the joke and they are relieved of duty to face the many days of laughter that will follow them until someone has their turn at being the goat.

I am sure there are lots more that I have forgotten about over the years. I wonder if they still do that in today’s Navy? Maybe I should write a handbook and donate it to the next deploying ship? Nah…they will have to learn them on their own…everyone needs to go and find a deck stretcher at least once in their lives.

January 24, 2008

I understand that not everyone has been privileged to work on the flight deck of a United States Navy aircraft carrier in their life. It is certainly a dangerous place to ply your trade and despite it being a place not conducive to horseplay, we had to find a way to break up the pressure and stress that exists in that sort of environment. We proudly engineered some great pranks that you can use in your civilian life, easily adapted to play on your friends, family, co-workers. or even complete strangers.                        
                                             As we were arduously forward deployed for many months at a time, every good sailor has to have some outlet for the frustrations of being “haze gray and underway.” Especially when you are working in one of the most dangerous environments in the world and subject to working 12+ hours a day, every day of the week. You may not know it, but as “red shirts” (Ordnancemen, BB Stackers, Load Toads…whatever else us weapons bubbas were called) we were usually a bit rowdier than most sailors, very quick to tack on a crow, give a pink belly or participate in all of the hazing rituals since banned by Navy regs. (Those were the good ole’ days). We really appreciated a good prank and I would like to share two of them with you.

Our favorite “prank” would involve at least two or three guys all standing together on the flight deck. This prank usually only works outside and normally during daylight hours. We usually pulled this prank when a pilot was in the cockpit, strapped in and performing his preflight routine. As we all stand together in a semi-circle, we all at once look up at the sky as if Superman himself was flying by. It might take a minute or two, but the pilot WILL look up (which in order to do a maneuver like that requires struggling against his restraint harness). At the point where we know we got him, we all point at him and laugh hysterically…there is nothing he can do at this point and will have to fly his mission with being “had” on his mind. Works especially well on the senior officers and Nuggets. The prank can be used for non-flying personnel as well. This variation requires the same “Look! Up in the sky” routine, but is effective on passers by and others in the area. Eventually they will join your little observation circle and without any words, you just walk away leaving them wondering exactly what the heck you were looking at. The other variation is you have a contest to see how many people you can wrangle into your circle. You would be surprised how many people are really curious to know what it is you are looking at. Try it. You will see.

The second favorite prank is one that you can do by yourself and can be performed in or outdoors, day or night. I call it the “Chicken Little” routine and works every time. Especially on a job-site where there is an existing hazard of falling objects although I wouldn’t do it too much so that others are not desensitized against such real life occurrences. You have to have a reasonable acting skill to perform the “Chicken Little” as you must convince the bystanders that something very bad is coming down from above. This prank works great on the flight deck as there is always something going wrong at any given time up there. When I perform the “Chicken Little”, I like to quickly duck my head down and raise my hands over my head like I am protecting it from a pitched baseball. This physical act immediately invokes a flight-or-fight response in anyone around you. Once you see them duck for cover, you can then start laughing your head off at them. They usually don’t respond in the like manner though, so be prepared to actually duck for real.