Cuban Missile Crisis by HoustonDavid

[Lance]

CMG member David Sherman [HoustonDavid] is experiencing access problems when attempting to reach CMG. He has asked me to publish his article here, which I am happy to do. —Editor

The Cuban Missile Crisis

For the last week, I have been working to prepare this article for publication. Unfortunately, at the last moment Wednesday, my editor Googled the subject and discovered that five years ago, I had "published" it here at CMG, which disqualified it for publication in their Op-Ed pages. It's in a completely new format with tons of new material, but ineligible. The newspaper only uses new material that has never seen the light of day. I thought it would be appropriate to share it again, here, on its original site on this anniversary of the end of the Cuban Missile Crisis.


The Winds of War
By David E. Sherman
Pasadena, Texas

FORTY EIGHT YEARS AGO this week, I woke up in a brothel in Yokosuka, Japan with the worst hangover of my young life. Underneath my throbbing headache, I kept hearing a familiar, high-pitched sound, like birds chirping. The Cuban Missile Crisis was over, but in my mind, I was still glued to my headphones aboard the aircraft carrier Bon Homme Richard, listening to the Soviets’ Morse code as they tracked their planes over eastern Siberia and the North Pacific.

My shipmates brought me slowly back to life with doses of green tea and aspirin, but it took much longer for me to recover from the anxiety of the last 13 days. I was a 24 year old analyst in the Naval Security Group. At that time, every capital ship (aircraft carriers and battle ships) had an N.S.G. contingent. We "protected" our ships by intercepting radio and electronic emissions that might indicate a threat to the ship. We had to make sure we knew where the Soviet and Chinese planes in the area were located — so our ships were never surprised by an attack. I was part of a small detachment aboard the “Bonnie Dick,” as our aircraft carrier was nicknamed. On April 15th the president learned that a U2 spy plane flying over Cuba had discovered ballistic missiles capable of reaching the United States. We were docked in Yokosuka, taking on supplies.

As soon as our commanders got the top secret news of the imminent danger, shore leaves and liberty were canceled and crews were swiftly rounded up, me included, from their usual haunts — bars, brothels, tourist traps, gambling parlors and movie theaters. A carrier traveling at flank speed can outpace any other vessel in the group, so some of our escort vessels took hours to catch up.
If those missiles were launched from Cuba, our carrier group would have attacked the Soviet’s only warm water naval base, at Vladivostok, with nuclear and thermonuclear bombs. World War III would have begun.

And we dozen analysts took up our position too — in a very small radio shack under the carrier’s noisy launch catapults. Two small compartments (rooms) lined with large radios and typewriter platforms, seven in all. There was a desk for our officer-in-charge on the bulkhead (wall) to the right of the entry hatch (door) and a connected tiny room for our Russian-language voice analysts with two radios and equipment for sending and . We had only overhead lamps for light and no access to a porthole for fresh air. We set up a card table in the middle where a perpetual game of pinochle was always underway for off-duty personnel.

The first four days, we worked at a relatively standard pace, copying the Soviet’s Morse code transmissions on manual typewriters with worn ink ribbons, sticking keys and noisy carriage returns — “old clickety-clacks,” we called them. But “standard” was still pretty fast: Nobody got into our military group without high-speed typing skills — the “Sovs” could swing their Morse keys upward of 80 words-per-minute. Our three-ply carbon paper came out of boxes in endless and unbroken folds.

Typing wasn’t the only part of the job. Once we’d recorded the intercepted codes, we had to break them. The Soviets’ codes were quite primitive in those days — made up of three and four letter-number blocks, five blocks per message. But they regularly changed them, and we worried constantly about what we would do if we picked up a new one that we couldn’t break. Fortunately, we knew that no matter what the codes sounded like, they contained the same information as before: direction, speed, altitude, location, and type of aircraft. The Soviets couldn’t plot an aircraft going 350 m.p.h., heading toward Vladivostok at 10,000 feet, and then change the code and have the same aircraft suddenly change its profile. That was still the key to their codes, and it gave us some degree of security. We routinely broke them within a few hours.
But on the 5th day everything sped up. On Monday Oct. 22, (for us, across the International Dateline, it was Tuesday) President John F. Kennedy decided to go public with what the government already knew, and went on national television to explain what was happening. He also announced the creation of an embargo around Cuba, a virtual line in the sea, and raised the United States military readiness level to Defcon 3.

Our admiral - whose name has faded into the fog of time - had a “red” phone installed in our shack linked to the ships phone system to give us instant access to his command post on the flight deck island. We were ordered to make contact right away should the Soviets go to radio silence (our greatest fear, since without their chattering radios telling us where their planes were, our ships were in grave danger) or make significant changes to their codes. The admiral, in turn, had immediate access to the Pentagon and the White House. The Soviets could have made it nearly impossible to "break" their codes by changing to randomly generated numbers/letters in five character groups that could only be generated and deciphered by their own machines. Thankfully, that wasn't practical at the time - too slow and time consuming.

We were also ordered to 50 percent watch, which meant that at least half of us were manning the radios and intercept equipment at all times. That still allowed us time to take meals in the mess hall, which was on the other end of the long hanger deck from the radio shack. But by this point, we were no longer able to relax during these breaks. At night, the deck was lit with red “battle lanterns.” That red light reflecting off the planes and their racks of nuclear weapons, the armed marines guarding them cast in black shadows, is etched in my mind — more frightening than anything I was to see later in Vietnam.

So were we worried? Did we feel like we were on the brink of Armageddon? The truth is, we were barely aware of the missiles in Cuba, and strangely, I don’t remember worrying much about my family and friends back home. What I do remember is, well, not much. I remember a blur of days in the radio shack. I remember becoming addicted to scalding black coffee and cigarettes; a thick gray haze (along with the odor of our over-stressed, cramped and sweating bodies) overwhelmed the inadequate ventilation system. But we barely noticed.

Then, on Oct. 25th, President Kennedy raised the security level to Defcon 2, the highest of the entire Cold War. We crammed every one of our contingent into the radio shack and began 100 percent watch on all radios. It was physically impossible, but every single one of us was supposed to be listening to the radios, deciphering the code or plotting the planes, at all times, something none of us had ever imagined. The winds of war were blowing in a very small place.
We couldn’t leave except to use the bathroom or a nearby drinking fountain. Meals, snacks, drinks, and fresh coffee grounds were brought up from the mess hall. As the hours passed, the monotony of the codes took a toll; heads began to nod. We were jolted back awake every time a plane took off from the deck above us. Canvas cots were reluctantly provided. We were only relieved from our duties for a few precious minutes at a time. Sleep would come almost instantly, but another round of listening and plotting came shortly after.

We joked that the best mid-watch coffee had to be boiled down to a crispy brown and chipped off the bottom of the pot so we could suck the pieces. We began telling the black-humor kind of jokes that only those in harm’s way can understand: “better a quick nuke than a slow bayonet.”

But eventually we stopped joking with one another; there were no more conversations. We began to ignore anything but a direct order from our superiors. We didn’t want to miss a single thing the Soviets did. If one radar station went briefly quiet, we manically sought out another one, instead of relaxing for a few moments as we used to.
The next three days were nothing but cigarettes, coffee, listen, type; coffee, cigarettes, listen, type, and plot the planes; type; light another cigarette, listen, and type; stretch our weary bodies, wolf down a sandwich, wash it down with more coffee. And back to those terrible, squawking radios. The fact that we weren’t thinking of Cuba doesn’t mean we weren’t afraid: We were afraid for the safety of our ship and the others in our group. It was this that our crew —waiting with excruciating and absolute focus for any indication of Soviet intentions — was responsible for.

Time dragged on and — blessedly — nothing happened. What’s more, the Soviet pilots and radar operators showed no signs of anxiety. They behaved, chatted and signaled as if nothing were different. We realized that the Soviet power hierarchy was not sharing information about the crisis with the “grunts” out in the wilds of eastern Siberia. We might have enjoyed some of their calm, but were grateful not to be so uninformed.

Those aching hours finally came to an end when Nikita Khrushchev announced the dismantling of the missiles in Cuba. On that north Pacific Monday (Sunday, Oct. 28 in Washington, D.C.) the captain of the Bon Homme Richard came on the ship’s speaker system and announced that the crisis was over. We could stand down from Vladivostok.

At first, all we could think about were showers and sleep. But after we’d had our fill of both, the admiral sent our detachment ashore in Yokosuka on a well-earned 96 hours of liberty, with enough beer and liquor to soothe our ravaged souls.

History tells us that senior Soviet commanders and government officials were unprepared for the way the conflict escalated. The Cuban missiles had been a huge bluff on their part. Their weapons may have been real and ready, but the Soviet Union was not ready for all-out war with the United States and our NATO allies. On the other hand, we didn’t want that war, but we did have the capacity to wage it.

I was detached from the group just before Christmas, and assigned to more mundane analysis duties on Okinawa. We were ordered to silence about our exploits outside of N.S.G. facilities and personnel. I didn't talk about it publicly for many years. I finally became curious about fellow shipmates and have found about six via a website dedicated to and run by a former N.S.G. Master Chief Petty Officer. We began trading e-mails and phone calls just in the last couple of years. Of course we all remember those hours vividly, and they have reminded me of details I had forgotten.

I was discharged in 1963, almost exactly a year from the Cuban Missile Crisis anniversary. I became a journalist and learned the craft of writing, which I pursued as a technical writer in the nuclear industry, ironically. Nothing ever competed for excitement with those 13 days in October.

Once relieved of her north Pacific responsibilities, , the USS Bon Homme Richard returned home to San Diego, on February 11, 1963. After earning battle stars for action in World War II, Korea, and later Vietnam - more than any aircraft carrier before or since - she was decommissioned in July 1971, and sold for scrapping in 1992. •

David E. Sherman was a corporal in the United States Marine Corps

[Agnes Selby]

Excellent article. Thank you.

[Cosima___J]

Great job David ---- then and in the telling of your experience.

As a friend of yours, you know I am hoping you'll show up at the Pub.

[jbuck919]

I wondered why we haven't heard from you--I hope the problem gets fixed. Thanks for reminding us that you are a writer, and an excellent one.

[Lance]

Indeed, I, too, greatly admired the writing style of our HoustonDavid! A beautiful piece of writing, indeed!

I wondered why we haven't heard from you--I hope the problem gets fixed. Thanks for reminding us that you are a writer, and an excellent one.

[HoustonDavid]

Thanks for the compliments. It was a real disappointment to not get this published
because I asked for some comments here five years ago, for an article for submission
to Wikipedia. Newspapers (at least some of the prestigious ones) consider that
publication, so be forewarned if you wish to publish something elsewhere. Who knew
(maybe Agnes Selby, as a published author). I will indeed pursue getting published in
Wikipedia, which will require a quite different format, and much shorter length.
Unfortunately, it will lose the personal flavor from somebody who was there and
managed to stay alive long enough to tell the tale.

David Sherman

[Werner]

Let me add my compliments, David, for an impressive story well told.

What strikes me in it is the way historical events play in the lives of people - members of the military, civilians, professionals - whatever - whose lives will continue to embody the memory of them - however directly or indirectly they may have been involved.

Good luck with publication!

[Chalkperson]

David already knows how highly I think of this work, as he sent it to me a while ago, i'm glad it has finally been published...Henry Slofstra has some Wikipedia Contacts I think...

[rwetmore]

David,

Very nice read.

Where have you been these last few months?

[HoustonDavid]

Randall:

Glad to see you missed me (and also liked my article). I apologized to a couple of
people in PM's for my absenteeism, telling them I had taken on a major project to
digitize a couple of thousand family pictures, many of which date back to the 19th
century and were in sad shape. I have accomplished the scanning process and am
working to repair damages in PhotoShop, so I'll have them in near original condition.

That also led me into Ancestry.com, which was another undertaking that took me
back to the 12th and 13th centuries, believe it or not. I've considered doing a forum
piece on what I've learned about genealogy as a result. It's been an interesting trip
which I am not yet finished with, but can spend a little more time here rather than
just lurking. Don't know if there's any interest here but it might be fun to find out.

[living_stradivarius]

Thank you, David, for sharing


Now I'd like to read the prequel to this story.

FORTY EIGHT YEARS AGO this week, I woke up in a brothel in Yokosuka, Japan with the worst hangover of my young life.

[Barry]

Great piece, David. Sorry you're having trouble getting it published.