Stories about USS Ray contributed by former crew members.

The information presented here is more historical in nature than what is presented on the "Sea Stories" page. Stories are unedited email. I will only make changes when I believe the information is classified.

The Battle For Rosey Roads!

Your "history" page got me thinking... but remember,this was 30 years ago, so don't hold me to details....

During commissioning cruise shakedown, we wound up having to spend a few nights at NAS Roosevelt Roads, Puerto Rico. This is an isolated place on the east end of the island, very dry compared with the rest of the place, and all-in-all a real hole of a place.

But the harbor water was clean and full of fish, so half the crew wound up getting smashed the first night and swimming off the stern, where the duty section was fishing for sharks.

The O-gang went to their club and got all ticked off cause the flyboys treated visiting submariners like slime that came ashore somehow.

The chiefs repaired to the very nice NAS goat locker and more or less stayed out of trouble the first night.

The second night started much like the first. Then the EM club folks decided they had more submariners than they wanted and closed the joint early. The herd of scorned and still-thirsty sailors (about a dozen, mixed bag of nukes and nose-coners) somehow found their way to the Chief's Club and snuck in a note which got the COB (an RMCM(SS) had relieved "old-boats" Holm for a bit) outside. They persuaded the COB to buy several cases of Heinekens best and to accompany them to the boondocks (everywhere is boondocks at RR) to drink it.

They were having a good ol' talk session complete with sea-stories when out of nowhere came two trucks full of SP's, with brassards, billy clubs, accents & all. The leading ding-dong was a second-class Aviation Boatswain's Mate with 25 years service, who stood about 5 foot 2. After some verbal observations such as "this'll get ya'll busted fer shure", the ding-dong grabbed the COB by the arm and said to come with him.

When the AB2 next got his breath, he was 50 feet down the road and somewhat scuffed up. He couldn't recall how or why he got out of his jumper. The SP's en-mob departed. The story was told afterward that this incident caused a full-scale mobilization of all the NAS self-defense forces, including the permanent Shore Patrol, the Marine Corps detachment, the Air Wing plane crews, and the Puerto Rican taxi drivers.

The flying security crew, now led by a chief, descended on the party. After considerable persuasion, our troops got into wagons and went with them to SP HQ. There, they entertained everyone by doing absolutely nothing they were told to do until the SP asked the COB to have them do it; when they were told by the COB, they moved.

After a lengthy name-rank-and-serial-number session, they were returned to the ship to the custody of the duty officer. The officer returning the troops extended an invitation to the CO from the base commander to have coffee with him in the morning. Early in the morning. The Marines then stationed a guard at the head of the pier with instructions to let no-one off the pier except the CO.

When the captain returned from coffee the next morning, he seemed a bit undone. The only words out of his mouth were "Station the maneuvering watch!". When the watch reported in, the diesel was started, the steam-maker came on-line, and we were outa there in short order. The CO muttered things like "never been thrown outa port" and "lousy damn place, anyway" as we headed for St Croix.

The crew, of course, went nuts. It instantaneously became "the Battle for Rosey Roads" with the submariners playing the part of the good-guys. This single night did more for bringing together the crew of the Ray than anything the officers could have done. Both the nukes and the nose- coners had "seen action" and after that it was one ship, one crew.

After shakedown came the real operations, resulting in NUC's and MUC's, Legions of Merit, and so forth. But the commissioning crew won't forget the battle of Rosey Roads.

Regards, Coyote
OD Carlson, STCM(SS), USN(Ret.)
5/5/97

Retired Navy, Retired IBM, have plenty of blue suits....
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ocarlson@mnsinc.com
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Was looking over some of the Sea Stories and found the one from Coyote titled "Battle of Rosey Roads". This brought back many memories because I was one of the "Magnificent Seven" as we were later named.

One point Coyote failed to mention, while we being detained at the SP headquarters, The evidence, (beer) was placed in front of the podium where the shore patrol was seated. Being good submariners and not wanting to leave purchased beer unattended for a length of time, while one of us talked to the SP behind the podium, another would remove some beer, hide it from view and carry it outside where the rest were waiting. We liberated a few beers before being caught and the SP behind the podium shouting "They’re at it again" which brought reinforcements to watch over us until the arrival of the Ray’s duty officer.

Donnie Martin RM2(SS)

Date: Tue, 04 Feb 1997
From: "Dennis Parker" <dparker@kih.net>

Hi, Don.

You said:
>Any chance that you could send me your photo's so I could
>scan and post them?

Certainly! I have access to several good scanners at work.
I'll scan them here and send them to you e-mail. (I will
assume that you want JPEG format unless you write otherwise.)
Please be patient. Our house burned this last December, and
what little we did save (which does include the pictures) would
not be easy to find right now. They are in a storage facility.

This will also be a good incentive to cause me to sit down and
write about some of my experiences on the RAY. It will add to
the history for your page, and also help me get it down for my
own history.

Also, unless it was lost in the fire, I have an official list
of the 100+ crewmembers at one point during my tour. It was
a list that the yeomen printed out periodically. It should
be a good addition to crew list.

I have two other items of interest from the Ray, both of which
should have been left on-board, but were obtained by innocent
mistake. Now that the ship is decommissioned, I'm really glad
that I have them. One is the version of the USS Ray "SNOB"
ball cap. "SNOB" is "Shortest Nuke on Board," and was worn
by whichever nuke was closest to EAOS, and actually planned
to get out. It was really dirty and raggedy (which made it
even more attractive to wear-you know how that it), and was
signed by each wearer. The second is the ship's rubber logo
stamp. We used it to stamp envelopes and other documents sent
by collectors, and this was my job while on board. We might be
able to make this a current service to crewmembers. Some of them
might like to send things themselves to have them stamped by the
'real' ships stamp.

I had to leave the ship in a hurry due to operational circumstances,
and did not realize that I still had the stamp until I
unpacked it several months later. My belongings were packed
by a contracted company, and they had put it away.

My last underway was very memorable. It was an ORSE, and as
we were just getting ready to begin the evaluation after picking
up the team, we had a BIG steam generator chloride accident.
We had to blow steam generators for two days, which put us way
behind schedule. When it was over we zipped into port in the
evening (and I had duty, of course), did an early morning reactor
start-up during which I had to train a new Ensign who had just
come aboard, and then as soon as I announced that the reactor
was at power, I signed out of the log, went up the hatch, and
the boat pulled away from the pier less than 30 minutes later.
The tender, to which I normally would have reported, was on one
of it's rare sorties to sea, so I was more or less just cut loose
to await EAOS in a couple of days.

Here are some quick facts/notes for you:

The common nickname for C. O. S. A. Johnson was "Stevie Ray,"
the 'Ray' referring to the boat's name, of course. You might
want to add this to your CO's list, as you have for a couple
of others.

Another notable fact about the RAY is that we were the first
submarine to be fitted for (and fire) Tomahawk missles through
the torpedo tubes. We were fitted for these during our overhaul
in the mid-80's. Some L.A. class subs had been fitted for ballast
tank launched Tomahawks before us, but this was awkward and too
complex.

The Santa Claus in your pictures of ICEX-86 is TM1(ss)Wetzel (I
can't remember his first name).

The U.S. Army quit giving it's equivalent of the SEALS (some of the
most elite Rangers, I think) submarine operation training sometime back
in the 70's. When they decided that they needed to resume, the RAY was
the first submarine to take them aboard for training. We also did
at least two of these special training operations with the SEALS.

Some other crewmembers (though I may not remember their whole names,
the names that are listed are 'for sure.')

ET1(ss) Mickey Pitt (nuke)
RM2(ss) Richard Cotterell
EM2(??) Bernhard (nuke)
ET3(su) Wyman (nuke)
ET1(ss) Dan Pershbacher (nuke)
MM1(ss) Osborne (nuke ELT)
MM1(ss) Jim Bates (nuke ELT)
EM?(ss) Paul Crilley (nuke)
ST1(ss) Godfrey (*lots* of seas stories with this fella)
ETC(ss) Gil Pipkens (nuke)
ET1(ss) Troy Eubank (nuke)
ET1(ss) Chris Bougiakas (nuke) (pronounced 'byoo-cuss', if you care)
TMCM(ss) Waddell
MS1(ss) David Fish (he had to be one of the best cooks in all the
services!)
ETC(ss) Allen (nuke)

Do you have the snail mail address for Donald C. Meadows (he was a
TM2(ss), by the way-you don't have that in the crew list)? I would like to contact him, if I could. He had an amazing knowledge of submarine history?

Thanks, Don. I look forward to enjoying this page, and to helping
it grow.

-Dennis

Date: Wed, 05 Feb 1997 21:12:52
From: "Dennis Parker" <dparker@kih.net>

Hi, Don.

Now that I'm thinking about this, here are a couple more items.

Crewmembers:
ET1(ss) Mike Heavener (nav)
EM2(ss) Darryl Macatantan (nuke)
MM1(ss) Dan Matthews (A-gang)

This was Heavener's second tour on the RAY, and his claim to fame
was that he was onboard during his first tour when the RAY hit
the undersea mountain (and gained it's navy-wide moniker "Mt. Ray").

Here's another story about the RAY from ICEX-86. After we got under
the ice the CAMS picked up a freon leak. Despite exhaustive search
the source could not be found after several days. Finally, to preserve
the mission the decision was made to surface through the ice and blow
the freon overboard. This resulted in losing our food storage freezers.
To stretch the food in them we packed them with ice chunks from outside
before we submerged. We were able to continue to eat out of them for
another 7 days. The last day was when hamburgers (oh, excuse me...
"sliders") were served and they were, for all practical purposes, green.
The freezers where sealed after that. The RAY went for 44 days under
the ice cap with this great loss of food. All we had were the dry
goods and meats. We had Spam sandwiches, Spam casserole, Spam soup,
baked Spam, breaded Spam, Spam sticks, Spam surprise, and just about
anything else that the cooks could think of to do with Spam. The
Navy realized that this was a golden opportunity to see how a ship and
its crew would continue to operate under these conditions, and so
actually asked us to keep information on it for their study. They wanted
to know what the cooks did to stretch the food, they wanted to know all
about the morale of the crew and how we adjusted, and so on. Since they
wouldn't send a crew out to do something like this, I guess they wanted
to take advantage of the opportunity.

We (the crew) really did get quite worn out with the monotonous diet, but
I don't think our effectiveness was harmed by it. At one point we had
to surface for some kind of checkpoint or activity associated with our
mission. The Navy took the opportunity to send us some fresh food. That
is what the helicopter in one of your pictures was doing. It flew in to
our boat loaded with fresh vegetables and ice cream. It also had a few
other things for us, but was mostly filled with food. To this day, the
salad that I had that afternoon was the best that I've ever tasted! Even
though I'm sure that the actual quality of the vegetables was nothing
special compared to what we usually had, the special situation and the long haul with such a bland diet made all the difference in the world. Later, the C.O. (Johnson) had the cooks go throughout the boat with bowls and spoons to distribute ice cream to crew members on watch. The really special thing here was that he even authorized it in the nuclear engineering spaces!! I was on watch on the RPCP (reactor plant control panel) at the time, and it is the only time in my career that I know of (ship or shore) when food was allowed to be brought into a nuclear plant. By the evening, all the food had been consumed, and we were back to Spam city.

Later, after we returned to Charleston, the New York Times sent two reporters on board to get the story about ICEX and the great food debacle. The article appeared in their paper later. I'm sure that a little research would turn up this piece.

Other stories to tell about ICEX-86:
(1) Five (yes, 5!) fires under the ice.
(2) The great storm in Baffin Bay (worst of my tour) and the resultant
oxygen candle disaster when they broke lose from their straps and fell from the overhead, rolled about the decks, and fell through hatches (lots of them).
(3) A reduction gear bearing was stripped on the transit across the
Atlantic to return to port
(4) Using hairblowers to keep the oxygen overboard line from freezing
up and halting the mission. We got down to the *very* last hairblower!
(5) Getting stuck in the ice during one of our surfaces and not being
able to submerge until we took on so much water in the ballast tanks that
we broke free and plummeted straight down to a deep depth before we caught the boat.
(6) Getting torpedoes shot at us for the tests (we were the target
ship). The RAY was one of only three submarines in the Navy at the time to be designated a torpedo target ship.
(7) Accidentally shredding a *whole day's* worth of test and evaluation
information with the day's radio traffic. It was unrecoverable, of course. Do you think that this was a BIG deal!? Do you think that people were UPSET!? Do you think that heads rolled!? Boy, oh, boy, did Stevie Ray catch it over this one. (Let's not even mention the poor Radio LPO.)
(8) Three (3-count them) A-Gangers, *of all people,* earned the Golden
Flapper by blowing shitters on themselves. One was an MM1, the other the MMC A-Gang LPO! Did A-Gang take some flak? You bet! Did we love it? You bet!

I'll send these as I get the chance, Don. You might want to think about
how these are posted, they would seem to be more like "history," vs. "sea stories." Also, maybe these will jog the memories of some others to send in their perspectives on these stories, as well as some others.

You may have uncorked a monster now that I've discovered this site! I'm
beginning to remember stories and incidents that I haven't thought of in years.

Take care,
Dennis

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ver: 18 Jan 2006