In early 1972, I was between civilian jobs and that is how I put in for my annual Naval Reserve training early.  The orders came back very quickly (a surprise), and I found myself on the way to Florida.  I elected to drive down (POV - privately owned vehicle) to NAS Jacksonville.  My timing was perfect and I arrived at JAX a couple hours before the flight down to San Juan, Puerto Rico where I was to join my ship (along with a bunch of other reservists).

 

The takeoff of the Navy C-118 transport aircraft (a military version of the venerable Douglas DC-6) was delayed several hours and that rolled our departure time too late in the day.  We arrived in beautiful San Juan long after the sun had gone down.  We all disembarked the aircraft, gathered our luggage, and loaded it and ourselves aboard a haze gray-painted Navy bus.  The bus took us down to the ship.

 

It was an interesting bus trip through the streets of old San Juan.  The windows on the bus were all down and covered with chain link mesh screens.  We were told this was for our safety.  Uh, huh!  As we passed the houses in the neighborhoods we noted that they were all surrounded by a very high wall, topped with embedded broken glass, barbed wire or razor wire.  The entry was a very beefy wooden or steel door.  We were beginning to wonder what we'd gotten ourselves into.  When we got to the ship, things got stranger.

 

The bus stopped on the pier, we got out, grabbed our gear, and set out for the ship.  Our two week cruise was aboard the USS WALDRON (DD-699).  The WALDRON was a short-hulled Allen M. Sumner-class built at the end of World War 2.  WALDRON was named after LCDR John Waldron, the CO of Torpedo Squadron 8 aboard USS HORNET (CV-8) during the battle of Midway.  He led a suicidal attack on the Japanese carriers.  All of his squadron was shot down, but he drew the fighters down from their combat air patrol stations.  The result was all the fighters were down on the water when the dive bombers from USS HORNET, YORKTOWN, and ENTERPRISE arrived over the Japanese carrier force.  In five minutes, three of the four Japanese carriers were fatally damaged (the fourth was sunk the following day) and Midway became the turning point of the Pacific War.

 

We all reported aboard and were gathered on the quarterdeck.  The OOD (officer of the deck) greeted us with: "This isn't as bad as it looks."  Now, THAT really perked up our ears.  We found out what he meant the next day.  It seems that the CO (commanding officer) and XO (executive officer) hated one another and that the crew had chosen up sides.  This is not the way to run a ship.  Other problems soon became apparent: the ship's cook could not cook.  The food was awful.  You know that you are in trouble when they have run out of ketchup.  And so, there were more than a few of us that decided to live on the sodas in the huge 400-can machine that was housed in the former DASH (drone anti-submarine helicopter) hanger aft and the small Dixie cup soda machine forward.  Soda cans were 25 cents and the Dixie cups were 5 cents.  We refilled the 400 can machine at least three times a day for two weeks.  By the second week, the Dixie cup machine had run out of syrup.  [Author's note: To understand how much soda was consumed in the ship's four week cruise, the ship started the cruise with 5,000 cases of soda at 24 cans to the case.  At the end of the cruise in Mayport, Florida, less than 50 cases were left.  I don't know how many boxes of syrup for the Dixie cup soda machine were aboard when the cruise began.]

 

The first week we paved the bottom of the Caribbean with empty soda cans.  On Saturday we pulled into beautiful Kingston, Jamaica (aka the "armpit of the Caribbean").  There was a 1 to 2 knot current in the channel as our captain made his approach on the pier.  A skilled skipper would have nosed in on an angle and let the current gently move him against the pier, but not our skipper.  He decided to make his run parallel to the pier and left a haze gray racing stripe, one-third the length of the ship, on the wooden pier along with a bunch of splintered supports!  He certainly did impress the locals.

 

Kingston, Jamaica was the only liberty port in my naval career that I had doubts about surviving long enough to reach the end of the pier without being mugged.  It was the only port that the general consensus of the ship's company was -- after 30 minutes -- that we should leave.  As we were getting hooked up to pier-side services, we kept seeing some rather disreputable characters looking at us from the shadows of the warehouses on the pier.

 

As it turned out, my watch section had both Saturday and Sunday off and could go on liberty.  Five of us got together to pool our resources to hire a cab.  The cabbie took us to the heights above town to a local bar where the beer was cold and the females were attentive.  The cabbie told us that the section of Kingston we had docked was the roughest and worst section of the port.  He told us that he'd stay with us until we decided to go back to the ship, because he would not -- under any circumstances -- pickup fares from our area of town at night.  (This was not a good recommendation as far as I was concerned.)

 

The next day, our little group met with the same cabbie and we did some touring of the island.  After we were done, he returned us to the ship.  On Monday morning, with the help of tugs, USS WALDRON got underway for local operations.  Once more we began paving the bottom of the Caribbean with empty soda cans.  We were scheduled to make port at Naval Station Mayport, Florida, the following Friday about 1300.

 

Friday morning was a busy day for ship's company.  The first thing was that we had to be paid.  The ship's disbursing office cut us government checks.  Because most of the reservists were broke by this time, the first order of business was to cash them once we arrived in port.  By 1000, WALDRON was steaming up the channel directly for Mayport Naval Station.  Everyone was very excited because things were going right for a change.  We were wrong.

 

The captain maneuvered WALDRON into a space between a missile cruiser (on our port side) and an oiler (on our starboard side).  Mooring went well (without tugs) and we were soon tied up.  There was a Navy Exchange banking facility about a stone's throw away.  The main propulsion was shutdown -- and then we discovered that there were NO shore power facilities and other utilities at all.  While all this was going on, I slipped over to the NEX bank to cash my check.  It was then that I found out that the ship's disbursing office had postdated the check until the next day -- Saturday -- and that they would not cash it.

 

Meanwhile, the ship had now gone "cold iron"; that is, it was not able to move at all without tugs.  The ship broke out its walkie-talkies and contacted the harbor master to send us some tugs to move us over to where the other destroyers were nested.  All this took time.  By 1315 the tugs had towed us across the harbor to nest with the other DD's (destroyers).  As it happened, we tied up to the lead ship of the class -- USS ALLEN M. SUMNER (DD-692).  When we compared the condition of this ship to that of ours, we were embarrassed.

 

By 1330, the ship had released the reservists so we could make our way home.  However, there was one small problem: we were at Naval Station Mayport and our cars were 40 miles away at NAS Jacksonville.  We prevailed on the ship's driver to drive us to the air station.  Fortunately the ship's vehicle was a station wagon.  Six of us and the duty driver piled in (along with our gear) and we were off to Jacksonville. 

 

It took about 75 minutes to get to where our cars were parked.  We unpacked our gear and said goodbye to our driver.  I loaded my stuff in my car and it started without a hitch.  I headed for home.  I had driven only a short distance from the main gate when I came upon a small local civilian bank.  I stopped and went in.  I explained that I was a reservist just off active duty and that the ship had postdated our checks to Saturday.  Wonder of wonders, the bank said they would cash it!  That was the best part of my two week adventure -- to know that I had enough money to get home!