You make me proud. Very proud. Glad you had a great tour.

Perfect comparison of the XO’s position, Book.

I have great memories of a few different encounters with the Navy League and its members. Once even hosting a small group of Navy Leaguers from Fort Lauderdale, who were visiting Monte Carlo at the same time the USS JFK was there. So, don’t forget your affiliation while you’re traveling!

As an aside, may I poke a little fun at the “black shoe” Navy? Naval Aviators wear brown shoes with their Khaki uniforms, while the rest of the Naval Officers wear black shoes with the same uniform. Commonly you’ll hear reference to the Black Shoe Navy or the Brown Shoes. We Brown Shoes like to pay homage to our Black Shoed shipmates by recognizing that they are the hardest working folks in the Navy… They set out on a job and figure out the hardest way to do it… and then commence to working.

One thing it sounds like you didn’t see, Book, is the lockers with copper wire on spools, waiting to be rolled out to physically connect things when the more advanced connections have gone awry, or been successfully interfered with. There are guys on board who can rewire and hard-wire the whole ship in a few hours.

As far as standing watch, the hours are tough, but not tougher than, for example, being an intern in the last lap of med school and on duty for 36 hours straight. You learn to nap efficiently.

“Shoup” is part of “Abraham Lincoln’s” battle group, and lives in Everett, Washington when she’s at home, and it’s interesting to see the carrier when working. The kids (and they are kids – the average age of on-deck personnel in the last “Lincoln” deployment was, if I remember rightly, 19) work to, essentially, no fixed schedule at all. If it’s Tuesday, you’re on duty. They get up early, and spend the morning launching and recovering planes, then at the end of the day is another cycle, then there’s often enough an overnight cycle.

By halfway through the day, what you see is kids flaked out everywhere. In the ready rooms, in vestibules, in passages, under stairways, under tables in crew lounges – sleeping on the floor in every available space. Yellow shirts, green shirts, brown shirts – deck crew – the airplane handlers. Flaked out everywhere – you step over them.

You grab some sleep when it’s there to grab. The deck crew on “Lincoln” probably think the guys on “Shoup” have it easy – they get to an actual rack twice a day!

The Captain drives, and thinks about the mission. The Exec delivers him a going concern, to utilize as needed. Exec is a much more detail oriented and longer-houred job. When the Exec salutes at the beginning of a cruise and reports the ship as ready in all respects, he’s supposed to know that it is, and he means that every inch of it and the people who drive it are indeed ready.

The Exec is responsible for everything – but, as you noted: if ever any of it goes wrong, it’ll be the Captain’s fault.

The “Ayatollah” class boats, of which the lead was “Kidd” – DDG-993 – have all been stricken at this point. They were a spin-off of the “Spruance” class boats, many of which are now gone, but there are still a few in service. Short life – they were overtaken by the “Burke” class very quickly – and by congress deciding the Navy didn’t need to be as large as it was.

Which, like most of what congress does, is turning out to be wrong.

As for the Shoup reminding you so much of USS Kidd (DD-661; there was another USS Kidd built during the late ’70s, originally for the Shah of Iran), that’s probably because the Arleigh Burke class are essentially fruits of only late-’70s and early-’80s technology. They’ve been upgraded over the years, naturally, but even so the design is really only three or four generations of technology more advanced than the WWII-era USS Kidd. The Littoral Combat Ships the Navy is currently constructing would probably stirke you as being closer to Starship Enterprise than to USS Kidd.