Our two APB's chugged across the vast reaches of Pacific Ocean at a mind-numbing 10 to 11 knots.  We finally arrived in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.  Our first order of business was to turn in our small arms that consisted of .45 pistols, Navy 7.62mm NATO M1 rifle conversions, some M16s we gotten just before our departure from Vietnam, Thompson submachine guns, 12 gauge riot guns, eight Mk 21 7.62mm NATO (converted M1919A4 Browning machine guns) and eight AN/M2HB .50 Browning machine guns.  Our next stop was the Naval Ammunition Depot at West Loch.

 

Seen from the air, Pearl Harbor resembles a hand with three fingers with the "wrist" as the entrance.  Left to right, these "fingers" of water are: West Loch, Middle Loch, and East Loch.  West Loch is a restricted area; it is fairly remote and does not get the kinds of traffic as the other two.  The place is rather spartan.  We pulled alongside a concrete pier to commence our off-load of ammunition.  The small arms ammunition was still in its boxes and quickly loaded onto pallets.  The pallets were then lifted off by a crane and deposited onto the pier for pickup and transport to the magazines cut into the hills surrounding the Loch.

 

The 40mm Bofors ammo was another story.  Our magazines had many cans of ammunition and it was a rather time consuming and labor intensive effort to move all of them.  Each can of ammunition was roughly 12 inches by 12 inches by 36 inches, contained four clips of four rounds of 40mm ammunition, and weighed 116 pounds.  The cans readily lent themselves to neat stacking in our magazines, but our magazines were deep in the bow and stern of the ship and required a block and tackle to lift them on deck.  It took about eight hours of hard work to move all the 40mm cans to pallets for transfer to the pier.  The time was actually made longer because the civilian workers that ran the crane and other services were allowed a "10 minute" smoke break every hour -- and the break did not start until they reached the designated smoking area.  It was a good thing that we had gotten alongside the pier early in the morning, because it took us a good 12 to 13 hours to complete our off-load when the "smoke breaks" were factored in.

 

It was during one of the many breaks that several of us were looking about and spied what looked like a shark's mouth sticking out of the Loch's muddy waters.  We found out later that the strange object was the only part left of six tank landing ships (LST).  The six LST's had been loading ammunition for the invasion of Saipan on 21 May 1944.  LST-353 experienced an explosion.  That explosion resulted in further explosions and fires.  Five other LST's nested with her were consumed in the disaster.  The only thing left was the bow portion of LST-480, minus its bow doors, standing as a mute symbol to the disaster that killed 163 men and injured 396.  The tragedy was kept secret until 1960 before it was made public.  More casualties were probably avoided because the accident happened on a Sunday when most of the crews were on liberty.

 

We completed our off-load of ammuntion and both NUECES and MERCER proceed to East Loch to tie up.  The two APB's nested alongside the pier with MERCER outboard.  Ahead of us was HMAS DERWENT (F-22), a River-class frigate of the Royal Australian Navy.  All three ships tended to stand apart from all their haze gray-painted U.S. Navy counterparts.  NUECES and MERCER were painted a lusterless jungle green as befitted Brownwater Navy ships attached to the Mobile Riverine Force in Vietnam.  HMAS DERWENT was painted a sort of turquoise color.  At the time of her visit to Pearl Harbor, DERWENT had about five years' service since her commissioning and was very "spiffed-up" for the purposes of "showing the flag."  At night, DERWENT was lit up like an amusement park.  She probably had to rent an auxiliary generator to run all the lights about her at night.

 

Just how well our jungle green paint job worked as camouflage hit me as I came back from liberty in Honolulu.  A group of us were walking down the pier and we quickly spied HMAS DERWENT ablaze in lights to ward off the darkness.  Moving past the gaudy light show, we proceed and tried to pick out our two ships.  Even with all the lights coming from DERWENT, the two APB's were merely two black blobs in the darkness, their presence betrayed by the red range lights on their mast heads and the white glow of their quarterdeck lights.  All the port holes and other doors from the main deck up were closed.  The "darken ship" habit was a hold over from our time on the rivers and really didn't go away until the ships got to the ship yards and started to decommission.