Sea Stories

Cold Steel and Warm Camaraderie

By Al Bell

An odd coincidence occurred in the summer of 1992 when I was working as a consultant on government contracts in San Pedro for Southwest Marine, Inc. (SWM). USS Morton (DD – 948) was towed into that shipyard along with four other ships for "recycling."  Morton was a Forrest Sherman Class destroyer that I had commanded ten years earlier. 
       I was working at SWM writing claims against the government almost the entire time Morton was being dismantled and cut up.  It wasn't a pretty sight.  She had been "demilled," or demilitarized, by having her gun barrels and other armament cut off before she arrived.  Each day I saw more of her cut off and stowed in an enclosure in the shipyard. Most who know me understand that my two years in command of that ship were the high point of my life, so you can imagine how I felt.  Every piece cut off of her was a piece off of me.  I went on board often, but not having a flashlight with me, did not go below decks.  Walking around her when she was in this condition was a very depressing experience.  Our crew had worked so hard to keep her shipshape and beautiful all those years ago.  They had also prepared her to sleep well in the mothballed fleet, ready to answer the call to battle, if again sounded. 

When she was placed in a floating dry-dock, I went on board the dock to examine the hull.  I wanted to see the sonar dome. The ship had been gently grounded one night in February 1982 on a sandbar outside Pearl Harbor by my best and brightest Officer of the Deck (OOD - the officer in charge of the ship when the captain is not present on the bridge). However, we did not know of the incident until we had a routine hull inspection in Guam during our deployment much later.  (Reports of a scraping sound had been reported to the OOD by a sailor in a berthing compartment, but that information was never relayed to me). The damage was not sufficient to require repairs (only paint was smudged off), but it was more than sufficient to end my chances of promotion.  A grounding is a grounding, however slight.  As Commanding Officer, you are fully, inescapably responsible whether you are on the bridge or not, at fault or not, so you graciously accept your fate.  At least they were kind enough to allow me to keep my command with a mere admonition -- a real rarity in such situations.
            Anyway, I wanted to see the "damage," so I was standing on the dry-dock looking up at the dome (no damage was visible), when the owner of the recycling company came up and asked me why I was so interested.  I told him that I had been her last skipper.  He asked me to help him with a problem he had.  The ship had been turned over to him without any paper on board.  They were having trouble selling equipment not knowing the manufacturer, capacity, power requirements, output, function, etc.  I gave them a Propulsion Plant Operating Guide containing all of that data.  In return, they gave me the bronze light from the top of the mast.

The work continued until there was nothing left of the ship.  In a bit of irony, the last that was seen of the ship was her appearance as backdrop in a“B” movie, Cyborg II, with Jack Palance and Angelina Jolie.  Palance played the part of a crazed Navy captain, who roamed the bridge of one of the rusting ships, trying to control the world.  SWM sometimes made more money renting their waterfront to movie studios than by repairing ships.  (The Usual Suspects was one of the more famous of these films.)  It was a sad end for a ship which had distinguished herself in intensive naval gunfire support operations during the Vietnam War.  She won the Gold Gunnery “E” battle efficiency award more often than any other destroyer in our squadron.

During my career I had always been irritated by the Marines saying that the Navy mans equipment, while the Marine Corps equips men.  Nevertheless, there is a certain truth to their expression.  That expression, however, is not fully explanatory of a certain phenomenon recognized during every commissioning ceremony.  The sailors bring life to the ship.  That belief is behind the part of a commissioning ceremony where the crew marches swiftly on board the vessel.  Ships are a complex interplay of man and machine.  When you serve on a ship, you are an integral part of what seemsto be a living organism.  The men with their various skills and the ship with its various capabilities form a cohesive entity pulsating with life.  When I walked the decks of Morton as she was being scrapped, that life was totally gone.  She was just cold, rusting steel.  However, when I am with the crew members of Morton at reunions, I feel that life again, even without the ship.  There is a camaraderie that spans the years and brings back all of the good feelings without any of the pain of the hardships that we all endured.

What I most like about those reunions though is the chance to not only renew friendships, but to make new ones with people whose experiences may have been in a different timeframe, but which were similar enough that we have a common language and background.  Our time together with such comrades is very important.

Finally, those of whatever generation of Morton who steamed far perhaps to train or to fight in foreign lands share a common feeling.  We know that our greatest comfort was to have our friends close at hand.  Though we consider ourselves patriots, in the heat of operations at sea, or battle, it ceases to be an idea for which we fight, or even a flag.  Rather, we fight for the man on our right, and we fight for the man on our left.  When navies have rusted and been cut up for scrap and crews have been scattered to the four winds, when empires fall away; all that remains is the memory of the precious moments we spent side by side.  

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