Jay Pryor's interview for the Veterans History Project at Atlanta History Center, part 1 of 2

on camera today is may 9th 2016 and my name is tony hilliard i'm a volunteer at the atlanta history center and with me is peggy hilliard another volunteer and sue verhoff the senior archivist here at the history center we're here today to record the oral history of mr jay pryor who served in the u.s navy during the vietnam war mr pryor's oral history is being recorded for the library of congress veterans history project we're honored to have you with us today mr pryor and thanks for participating in the progress thank you in in the project would you begin by telling us your full name and where you live full name is john gatewood prior junior but i go by jay and live in dunwoody georgia just outside of atlanta can you tell us a little bit about your early years i grew up in albany georgia my mother was an eighth grade english teacher and my dad worked for gulf oil and during the war dad dad was a little old for world war ii so he worked at turner field and the air force base down in albany and he told me uh seeing prisoners there at turner field sometimes the prisoners have a yellow pee on their back but anyway in 50 1959 we moved to atlanta moved to sandy springs and mother resumed her teaching dad continued working for gulf wall until he retired and so i went to sandy springs high school which is now kroger okay so when you where did you where did you where did you go to school after high school uh after high school went i i went to georgia tech for four quarters and then transferred to reinhardt college got an associate in arts degree from reinhardt college and then went to the university of georgia which was my dad's alma mater and also my sister had also gone to georgia i graduated from georgia in 1967 and this was when the vietnam war was building up the the largest number of troops during the war was in 1968 i knew when i graduated that i was going to be going to vietnam one way or another and i preferred to go on my own terms and went down to athens to the recruiting office for the navy uh took the test for ocs and was fortunate enough to to be able to do well enough to to go to ocs when i graduated from from georgia i like the traditions of the navy um i had spent a lot of time my family had a cabin on lake lanier and spent a lot of time out on lake lanier back in all vinnie and when i was in elementary school they would put us in a school bus and take us from the elementary school to the ymca and that's where i learned how to swim so i always feel like i'm pretty decent swimmer back in the days we learned to swim without swimming trunks which is something that's totally unheard of these days i mean goodness knows the lawsuits that would ensue but anyways that's a truth um but i i feel comfortable on the water and so anyway went into the navy and went to ocs where was ocs ocs is a the only ocs was newport rhode island so you know i i hadn't gotten out of georgia all that much other than going to oklahoma to visit my my aunt and uncle with with mom and dad so it's kind of a big deal to to take off and drive in my buick skylark up to newport rhode island first first night i got as far as charlotte north carolina which you know is like a four-hour drive and i'm wondering why didn't i go farther than that i was pretty poor but anyway went from own up to uh to newport uh i remember parking the car in the parking lot and i didn't know how when i would see the car again and um people yelling at you orders in your left hand gear in your right expedite expedite and you're running all over the place they were issued clothing there you all your your uniforms for for ocs and we were told i clearly remember this some of you will lose weight and some of you will gain plan accordingly i mean that was kind of an introduction to the to the military the navy particularly so um what time of year was it went into i got there on august the 19th uh received my commission december the 15th so i was i was really a pretty good time of year it got cold in newport but it wasn't horrific um i kind of caught kept up with the georgia football games from as best i could um and we uh ocs was uh you know it was uh it wasn't a lot of fun but we we got through it together our each company kind of bonded fairly well so there were some guys one of the things you had to do was jump off a 30-foot tower into the water into the swimming pool and some guys did just flat out did not know how to swim which was pretty interesting and you know when you get in the water you take your trousers off and make a kind of a makeshift life preserver from the trousers and i had at georgia tech i had gone through the swimming program with freddie laneu who was a kind of an icon at georgia tech back in the day and back then he would you know you'd get in the water with your hands and feet with your tied together tied and you just learn how to bob and survive but anyway so um the detailer came around toward the latter part the detailer is the guy is very important person in the life of military at least in the navy i may be the same name in other branches i don't know but that's the person who gives you your assignment so the detailer came and questioned each person about what they wanted what their first choice of duty station would be and when i was 14 years old i got my first ham radio license i still have a ham radio license k4 ogg so i requested i figured if i were going to be in the navy i might as well bad golly be in the real navy so i requested small combative west coast and communications and lo and behold i got exactly what i asked for i was assigned to communications officer school uh in san diego so i reported there i believe it was the 31st of december of 67 and was there for six weeks um this was actually during the first tet so i was i was assigned first to comm school and then to the uss hissam der 400 the hissum was in the western pacific at the time and i i i didn't you know didn't really know where i found out that that she was uh doing taiwan patrol so i first went from san diego to san francisco flew into san francisco because i was going to fly out of travis to get over to the western pacific or westpac and so i land in san francisco and i tell the cab driver that i want you know here i am an instant as green as they come i wanted to stay in a hotel that was not all that expensive well san francisco has a lot of five-star hotels and and this one didn't have a star this one uh i've wondered if he got a kit back but so he takes me to this hotel and um of course they were they were sites in san francisco that that they didn't have in atlanta at the time and i went out and came came in fairly late at night but then like it three in the morning two three in the morning i'm on the 12th floor incidentally i started hearing these sounded like muffled explosions and um so i wake up get up get out of bed open the door to the hall and there is smoke in the in the entire hall and fortunately my room happened to be a room that had a fire escape so i put all my stuff out on the landing of the fire escape and this fire escape was one of these fire escapes that is strictly vertical so it's just a vertical ladder 12 stories with the little hoop you know around it for safety i guess and so i go down the fire escape and to the coffee shop across the street and watch the firemen come in and and what it turned out to be the guy next door had been partying a lot more than i had i guess and had gone to gone to sleep with a lighted cigarette and started a fire in his room it was a room right next to mine and those explosions that i was hearing were the windows popping out of the of the room so so anyway so i get to travis i fly over to um to japan and let me refer to my notes let's see where was it that i landed in japan um tachikawa by way of uh hawaii and uh and catch wake island i had a uh a uh of course i was pretty grubby you know flying all that distance and so i i went to the barber there in the airport and he did the hot towel deal and the the straight razor shave it was so nice that was just really heaven so anyhow so get there and then i fly to to taiwan and land in taipei and learned that the ship was down in kaohsiung now taipei uh or taiwan is a long island uh calcium keelung is in the north part of the island kaohsiung is down at the southern part of the island so i got a military flight to go from i stayed in the king hotel a night i guess i guess it was just one night there in in in taipei so i'm i'm flying from taipei down to kaohsiung and um so i get all my stuff on the plane plane takes off we land i get all my stuff out go out to the where the taxis are in line and nobody wants to drive me to the dock and i i can't figure out what what's the deal i mean why wouldn't they want to do that so finally i get this guy that that agrees that he would take me to the couch young docks and so i get in the car and we start start off and it takes five hours because it seems that this military plane has landed like halfway down the island and the pilot didn't see fit to let me know that we were not at calishung we were somewhere in between the two so you were completely on your own oh yeah oh yeah absolutely yeah with all my all my stuff you know more stuff than i should have had probably and fortunately the the driver was able to speak some english he had learned english uh fighting in the philippines in world war ii which is kind of an interesting thing get down to kaohsiung and of course the ship has left by this time by the time i get there and is heading for taipei back up north so i get on china air transport cat airlines and we fly back up and and i got to the ship in key long harbor key lung is the harbor for taipei so we were in and out of key lung harbor and also kaohsiung doing market time not market time but taiwan patrol and taiwan patrol came about in 1950 when trum with truman put it into place in 49 chairman mao had run the chinese nationalists out of mainland china and they had gone to taiwan and the thought at the time and it was pretty they people thought it was a sure thing that uh chairman mao would follow and attack taiwan and take over taiwan as it turned out he did not do that but the the president wanted to show the strength and to show that we were in support of taiwan and if uh if chairman man wanted to bring his army over and attack taiwan then he'd have to come through us first interestingly enough one of the things i learned there the chairman mao had the fourth army the his communist arm was the fourth army and so the number four in taiwan is much like the number 13 here it's looked at it being an unlucky number and some some some high-rises don't have a fourth floor because of that and so forth but so anyway so i finally get get on board the hissem and um you mentioned earlier that it was a d-e-r yeah explain what that is a a d-e-r is a destroyer escort radar picket ship okay she was originally a destroyer strictly a destroyer escort she was launched in at the end of world war ii actually made eight trips escorting ships across the atlantic uh during world war ii and it was credited with shooting down a a german uh fighter um uh in somewhere around north africa so that's what the d and so then after world war ii um she was reconfigured with uh high highfalutin radar a sophisticated radar system better way of putting it and put up on the dew line so she would be stationed up on the dew line um one thing about the the the der was the fact that we had twin diesel engines which made us capable of uh long long time lengthy in deployment independent deployments so we could go a long time by ourselves steaming independently and did not have to have the the underway replenishment that a lot of the other ships would have to have so that was and so then as vietnam came about she did we did primarily taiwan patrol and market time and gunfire support what was market time market time was a program where we would look for ships that were tracking from the north to the south along the coast of vietnam and because the north vietnamese would take supplies and ammunition and whatever and put them in a trawler and take them down now i don't think they did it all that much because of our patrol i like to think because of our patrol um realistically well the idea was that we would look for a vessel that was tracking from the north to the south we would stop them and board them and search them and we would have a a south vietnamese navy officer with us as an interpreter realistically if they were bad guys they would run from you but if they stopped usually i i don't know if any i hadn't heard of any experience where that was anything bad when they would stop but the we never we never had to shoot one but a ship that we relieved actually a coast guard cutter the androscoggin had actually had one run from them and they they followed and sunk it so um that's uh that was market time we would simply be on patrol in a given area off uh we were spent a lot of time off of i-corps and up in the north and but we did get down to some of the others and i would occasionally have to go into the beach uh went into vangtal a few times and into the dying a few times because i was the rps custodian rps being the registered publication system so i was responsible for all the classified materials on the ship and had to account for every piece and ensure that they were disposed off properly how large was the crew of the hissam hi gosh the crew was like 125 to 50 somewhere in that the hissem was 306 feet long displaced 1700 tons had 12 officers i had 24 men reporting to me and two chiefs which is a little a little daunting for someone as green as i was and fresh out of college and you know and um the only water the biggest body of water was i had seen was lake lanier but nevertheless i had good guys uh working for me and uh and they carried carried the load so yeah we did taiwan patrol and in market time and some gunfire support um my ship the hissum actually is the only der that was critic credited with some ki and some killed in actions um for some the marvin troops were coming uh coming into an area and they they knew that they were bad guys in there and so they asked for gunfire support in which we did and and they came in and uh and verified some of the some of the stuff that we had was that an anomaly or did did you yeah do that yeah that was pretty much it um we did some gunfire support but not not a whole lot i think our our main emphasis by far was was market time um we we had as you asked the question i served under two different commanding officers um the first was james a barber jr and captain barber is a very wise and is a very erudite naval officer went spent time in the war college naval war college after his commands at sea had several commands at sea great guy as i say erudite nice gentleman second commanding officer good guy different blood and guts get me a mission i want to get out there and kill some commies kind of guy but he was morton e tool jim toole interestingly enough it was tool that that ultimately became a rear admiral whereas barber retired as a captain we had another guy on our ship who made rear admiral as well a guy named bob chamberlain bob was our supply officer so part of my duties as communications officer uh was to break break out the encoded messages that came to the ship they would come in the in the form of of five letter groups and each day there would be a a a code for setting that we had a basket this basket was cylindrical it's just a little cylinder thing and it had a number of rotating pieces within the basket and you'd have to set these things properly put it in a typewriter type contraption and type out these letters that came in on the in the encrypted stuff and to type out whatever it was that was being said well the the supply officer does not stand underway watches and so bob would be the one who'd have to be waked up in the middle of the night and have to come into the radio room and and figure out what it what and you don't even know who it's to i mean you can get as far as as the addressee and then you can stop if it's not to you so but anyhow he had that duty but he made he was the number two guy ultimately in the supply corps for the navy which was pretty impressive a great guy boston from boston how long were you and i don't know what to call them your underway periods i mean you started from taipei went to see how long were you at city before you went back it would vary uh you know i would guess that we would typically be underway probably a couple of weeks two or three weeks it would be there was one particular time i had in my notes there was one time we were underway for 31 days but that was unusual typically it would be two to three weeks and you get paid just before you get to port so that didn't bode well for a lot of the sailors trying to save money for one thing or another did you ever have short patrol i did have show i had show christmas eve one time um i forgot i'm not even sure which year that was it was either 68 or 69 well it would have been 68 uh and uh so we were going it was it was one of the one of the ports in taiwan i don't remember which one uh but you know i was going around with the with the real sort of short patrols the guys who knew what they were doing and um we go to this one bar and they're lo and behold there's a booth of my radio the guys and so mr pryor want a coke i mean being from atlanta you know you can't refuse a coke well there wasn't much coke in that thing that he gave me uh now i don't think i drank much of it but uh yeah but i did have short patrol duty occasionally you get to see the sights that's right that's right now now that brings up my first trip to hong kong we also on our der on the hissam we had the enviable task of being sopa admin hong kong and that means we were the soap senior officer present afloat for hong kong we handle all the administrative duties necessary for for men who are on leave the naval personnel who are on leave in hong kong and on rnr the other ships we would assume their communications responsibilities which of course as a com officer was was a big deal and a lot of the some of the guys the wealthier guys would bring their wives over because we were there for three weeks we were three weeks in hong kong harbor is not bad duty um but the first time we got to hong kong we were out there in the in the hong kong harbor and uh it's finally time for me to go ashore for the first time so you know i'm standing there on the quarter deck and in the navy officers get to go in civilian clothes and enlisted men are required to wear the uniform anyway i'm standing in the quarter today ready to go and here comes a motor whale boat and it comes closer and closer and lo and behold there's my leading my first class uh signalman a guy who reports to me with his hands handcuffed behind him and so they bring him up there and turn him over to us and so we go up on the forward part of the ship the fossil and he starts crying and saying that nobody loves him and and and he had gotten into a bar fight and it was like oh my gosh what do i do with this they didn't tell you about this at ocs uh but that was my introduction to hong kong but hong kong was a great town a great city it's still it would be interesting to be there of course this was before before it was communists this was when the british still had control of hong kong but and interestingly enough the the water at hong kong was supply came from mainland china but it was such a source a financial cash cow for the communists that they they didn't mess with that i mean they continued to supply hong kong with water how many ports in the in the asian waters did you visit um well we went because there was hong kong the two in taiwan and then we would occasionally it would be pretty unusual for us to to go into a vietnamese port but we did go into vang tao denying um so that was kind of the cycle yeah we would also go occasionally into subic bay in the philippines uh infamous pacific bay along the po river uh monkey meat being sold at the bridge uh yes we did do that as well um what was the uh you know we hear about typhoons and things like that in the pacific was your ship ever uh my second cruise uh on the hissem i made three trips to westpac um i i did a little over half of the first cruise under captain barber came back to a homeport at pearl harbor went back for a second full cruise under captain barber and after that second cruise i was had a change of duty station and after being the calm officer for the der i was a com officer for destroyer squadron out of long beach california um so but you know we we hit we we stopped at guam um okinawa um those those different places philippines now after after the first cruise as we were coming coming home we we were fortunate enough to be able to have an r port so we went from the vietnam vietnam area i can't remember if we actually left from vietnam or from the philippines but it doesn't make any difference we went down south to to australia and so one of the things that the navy has as a tradition is the transition from a from a polywog to a shell back so we had in fact i have here let's see a photograph of well i thought i did i've you have to can't kiss the belly of king neptune and king neptune's belly of course is uh covered in all kinds of things this is this is the this is the one officer we had on our ship who was an a graduate of annapolis this is lieutenant earl buck and uh earl's a great guy i mean he uh he he took it well earl later we were doing a towing exercise off of hawaii and earl was a mustang he had been an enlisted man before going to annapolis and becoming an officer and he was a hands-on kind of guy i probably still is but he was on the uh on the fan tail as we were doing this toying exercise and the cable that we were towing parted and came up and opened up his head my best friend had been a hospital corpsman and they put a salt compress there and he was in the hospital in hawaii for a long long time but thankfully he has apparently made a full full recovery we would go visit him there but actually i should show some of these things this is um this here this is after officers quarters or aoq and this is a typical bunk for a destroyer escort my rack was up on the top this is actually there's a third one there are three three racks high there um back in the day the uh there was a mustache growing contest i i didn't win but uh yeah that's uh with it with the ensign bar so that was fairly new wearing your cover to rickish angle these uh here we see uh me with uh some of the men in my division that was after an inspection of some sort we had a ringside seat i believe i believe this is an a4 here and he has come on his bombing run he dropped his ordinance here and you can see the explosion and here he is pulling up and out we were offshore uh during during that was that taken with with just a normal lens on the camera um i had a 200 millimeter lens i think one of the great things about hong kong i bought a nikon ftn there and paid something like 230 or something for it this is typical um fishing junks vietnamese fishing jumps and you would you would come up for a night watch on the bridge and you'd think oh my gosh just see these little lights out there and all around you and you didn't want to run into one of them uh although there were i have heard of it happening where they would try to get run into by a u.s navy ship so they could get paid for it this is um me with uh there i am and here is this is bb sam's bibi was our our second weapons officer and uh bb actually is a very successful commercial artist lives just outside of atlanta did numerous illustrations for children's books but we visited a taiwanese ship and that was when that was um typical typical hong kong hong kong harbor back in the day now i think it's all probably filled in with with high-rise buildings this was a resettlement house um the uh the people who had tried to to escape from communist china and made it to hong kong and um it's just an interesting thing now this this is the hissam this is the ussmder400 and this picture i took this picture and you see here there is the cameraman we had george siverstein who was a cbs reporter uh came aboard the hissam and wanted to do a story about market time so he came aboard i went in the motor whale boat with uh cyberstone and his sound man and his cameraman and the ship just did numerous uh pass pass pass buys and uh and they filmed it and there was a a news story that was put on cbs walter cronkite's station at some time after that he was subsequently subsequently killed in cambodia i think with a sound man but cyberstand uh did not make it through the through the through the war this was there was the the the border back in the day this is typical kind of guy you know classic chinese looking person and he charged you a dollar or whatever it was to have his picture made your picture made with him this is uh this is my boss but this is the bridge of the of the hissam and um ken mcgruther roger strait he was the electronic materials officer ken was the operations boss and here we have christmas on the hissam with putting the decorations on the tree and and speaking of christmas here was a as the calm officer i held on to this but greetings from taipei and the best best of uh with 19 what is that 1969 i think it is but anyhow that was a typical calm communications message this is just this is just a cool picture this guy this is when we were going to at one point the the combat information center officer and i um went over to the island of komoy which the chinese called kenmon and interestingly enough the the communists would shell camoy every other day and we were there on the day that they didn't shell but we were told that the day before they had killed a water buffalo and it was just random shelling um i don't know how long that went on and i assume that it's no longer the case um this is uh an underway replenishment this is the the fuel fuel line and um off the coast of vietnam the the unwrapped or underway replenishment ships would just run up and down the coast of vietnam and we would meet up with them if we'd give them our supply list of whatever it was that we needed and we would one of the things that you have to do to to become an officer of the deck is to take the ship alongside for an underway replenishment and the under the unwrapped ship maintains course and speed and it's the duty of the the ship that's getting replenished to come up behind and come up alongside and you're like a hundred feet away which sounds 100 feet pretty good distance but yet when you got two big ships and they're not really all that maneuverable we had one time we did have a junk that went down in between the two ships so uh you're there on the bridge and you're you're taking you're watching carefully what the distances are and making sure that you're not closing closing in and and it when we did before i came on board the the the hissum did graze an unwrapped ship but unfortunately why would something like that take how long would an underwrap take golly well it would depend a certain extent how much you were getting supplies and so forth but i don't think it would take more than 20 maybe 20 minutes something like that 15 20 minutes probably longer than that sometimes as well so that's a nerve-wracking period yeah i mean you got the captain captain's right there and um he is either has the the deck and the con if you have the if you have the deck you are responsible for the overall safety of the ship if you have the con you're driving the ship so the officer of the deck is the higher of the two and uh when you relieve the white she said this this is mr pryor i have the i have the deck and the con or i have the deck or i have the whatever and when you first report on board you you would be a junior officer of the deck and basically you're there to learn and make sure that you learn properly all the different stuff so the unread ships would would just be going up and down the coast of vietnam and you'd come and be replenished and uh and get movies they would the the other ship would always have a blackboard with a list of movies that they have because always on the ship you'd like eight o'clock you'd show a movie in the wardroom and um so yeah so you'd trade movies back and forth and and that was a that was of course a big deal um this first this first uh deployment that i made when we were coming back we went down to australia as i said went did the the ceremony and and everybody on board became a shellback i was a little concerned because i was going to be getting married and one of the things that they would do was cut your hair and i thought oh my gosh the wedding pictures is going to really not not going to be too good because i'm going to have this haircut but fortunately that that was not a not an issue so anyhow we go to australia into brisbane and we were there for four days one of my fellow officers tom wilson met a girl there at a party they have the they have an organization where they welcome uh american sailors or i guess any american military but so he goes to a party and the first thing she says to him he was a year late because he was the engineering officer and he had to take care of some stuff at the ship anyway they ultimately got married they're still married today and live in orlando florida so we leave brisbane we didn't have enough fuel we're steaming independently of course we didn't have enough fuel to get all the way from australia to pearl harbor so we had to go get fuel somewhere so we went to american samoa and pango pango so we get to american samoa and we get there at seven in the morning and we figured we'll be there for four hours to get fuel well the captain been a good-hearted guy we go port and starboard which means with our watches that means half of the ship is his own watch and for two hours and then they get liberty and the the first two that got liberty for the first two hours they come and they assume the watches on the ship well those guys got so drunk in two hours uh you it was it was amazing that we were able to get underway and another thing that happened was um the the pumping apparatus in samoa was about like your average gas station i mean it was really really slow and so the captain took just enough fuel that he thought could get us back to to pearl harbor and and we we took off we got about halfway back and this is after like a seven month deployment for most of the guys now i had joined i only i was only half like four months but here we are about to get home heading for hawaii and one of the crew comes down with appendicitis and our hospital corpsman chief makes all preparations to do an appendectomy there in the wardroom because the wardroom table is the operating table for the ship and he's reading up on what he has to do and so forth well we have to turn around and instead of heading for hawaii we turned back south and we're going back towards samoa and they sent a helicopter out and got the guy took him to samoa he had his appendectomy and he was in hawaii before we were so we were turning but the other part of the story is that um we the captain sent me an email about this and i had not remembered it uh one of the tank one of the fuel tanks that we had was used for ballast and it was full of seawater and the engineers thought that it had fuel in it but no it was sea water so he said that we by the time we got to hawaii we were on fumes it was like you know and we plus the fact that we had had to turn around and then and so forth but but we made it made we made it okay so the ship didn't have to switch to the sea water tank you just didn't stretch them no yeah i don't know how they found out before making the switch and getting a misfire of the engine now another another incident with the hissam i mean we we did a lot of good stuff we had things that happened that were kind of kind of interesting the captain wanted to drive a live depth charge because we had this depth charge rack on the back of the ship and so he had to get permission from way on up the chain of command to drop a live depth charge because you know they have submarines out there that that are still messing around and um so we get permission we go to a designated area and so forth and the captain i wish i could remember the depths but i don't remember the depths he wanted to drop it at some given depth and the leading sonar man says captain you know that's kind of shallow you know we might want to rethink this and drop it so okay so he dropped it 100 we we we set it so that it would go off 100 feet deeper well we dropped it it went off and it blew a hole and blew a hole in our hole so our we were taking on i don't know how many gallons of water a minute but our damage control guys did their thing and uh we were able to you know get it shored up and and ultimately i think i think that was the first cruise that i was on and then the second one we we spent some time in in dry dock and and got it got it fixed properly but uh that was another another little adventure we would sometimes i mentioned that the unwrapped ships we were that was not the only way that we would get under get uh replenish but this was a vert trip vertical replenishment and the the helicopters would come if we were approaching a port they might come out from the port or they might come from a more typically from an aircraft carrier and and come out in in now this is uh there's uh american samoa one of the beautiful young ladies who was there this is uh this is one of the bars of samoa and um this is zeke zucker zeke to this to this day is an ultra marathoner uh he went from the hissum to command of a swift boat in vietnam this is uh let's see well i mentioned the dry dock there is uh there's the hissam in in drydock and that in japan and here we are i guess i think this was the first cruise here we are approaching pearl you can see the arizona memorial over there in the far left side so after let me see after the second cruise of the hissam i i requested i requested a shore duty for one of the communication stations and instead got orders to be the calm officer for destroyer squadron so i was a com officer for dezron destroyer squadron 29 out of long beach and i don't know if i can remember but let's say there were six destroyers they were the albert david and the ramsey those were the two primary flagships of desron 29 the albert david was d e 1050 a destroyer escort pure destroyer escort the ramsey is deg2 which is a a guided missile destroyer escort and the ramsey interestingly enough the the missiles that they carried were nuclear capable so one of my one of my duties as being the staff comb officer was also as being a sealed authentication system officer which meant that in the event of the use of nuclear weapons i was one one of the people who would authenticate the fact that this was a bona fide mission that we were given so that was the ramsay and the albert david we also had the o'brien the o'brien interesting thing about the o'brien that was dd 725 i don't know that particular hull number but she had a a irish setter for a mascot that was made that made the trip made the deployments with them um so there's the o'brien the ever soul the benner and the cunningham were the the six uh destroyers in dezron 29 um let's see here we are this is there is too much going on here for you to really be able to see this on camera but this is the outline of vietnam here with ships positions uh listed here we see desron 29 you can see some of the ships that are we were the we were the gun line commander com des ron 29 he was a full a full captain and um so we were sure no this was this was in this was in i'm not sure if that was the rams well i think this was the albert david yeah i'm sure this was the dezron communications officer you went to see oh yeah oh yeah when you said you were you know headquartered in long beach i thought it was important yeah we were home-ported i wasn't in long beach long but yeah we um the two ships that we rode primarily were either the albert david or the or the ramsey although one time this was one of my deals when we we transferred to the binner and the banner was a pure destroyer and we were riding into subic we got into some heavy weather and they being a regular destroyer didn't have the facilities to accommodate a staff and so i was on this metal cot it's like six inches off the deck and it's got you know it's all metal doesn't have any kind of a rubber feet or anything and we got into heavy seas and the thing goes sliding across the deck and hits the bulkhead and i got a rude awakening literally from that from that this is uh well here's this is the okay that's the albert david uh some some generally somewhat heavy now one time i never had it was never as bad when on a dezron 29 ship as it was in one particular time when i was on the hissem and we were taking 45 degree rolls so 45 degree rolls means it's as easy to walk on the bulkhead as it is to walk on the deck that was some serious stuff this these these are the two primary flagships this is the the ramsey deg2 and the albert david de1050 and this i just go ahead and finish with all the pictures that i have here this is this is one of my best pictures this is an american airlines plane at dawn on the uh on the um runway at da nang and this was when i was getting out of the navy and there was a course it was full of full of army guys and marines and so forth and as soon as we lifted off there was a tremendous cheer as soon as the pilot announced we were leaving vietnamese airspace there was a bigger cheer and that was pretty neat one of the but one of the night one of the interesting things was uh we were in the gulf of tonka and i was on i think the ramsey at the time and went by helicopter was lifted by helicopter to up into the transferred over to the aircraft carrier the hancock i think it was the han the hancock of the ranger and then flew on the mail plane from the carrier over into denying so i got one take off off the deck of a of a carrier which was pretty pretty interesting stuff in the navy at the time i don't know if it's still true uh any passenger faces the rear and so uh unlike uh you know you see the point the the videos of planes taking off and so forth you're you're going this way because your plane's going that way but that was kind of a nice interesting experience too the plane drip i mean the airplane will drop down when you go off the edge of the deck and then takes off and it wasn't a big deal from there on you mentioned and i forget where it was in your uh your discourse here that you were going to get married yes did you get married while you were in the navy or after you were out yes got married after the first cruise after that first cruise like i said i was concerned about having a haircut but anyhow got back to to atlanta came back to atlanta and we married here went on our honeymoon to gatlinburg and went to hawaii to live permanently so that was pretty nice we wound up in an apartment next to our a couple that became our very closest friends john and elaine cross and john was the ship's asw officer and of course i was communications he was an ensign i was an ensign um if if if they came over to visit we were in adjacent apartments and hawaiian horizon in pearl city on oahu so if they wanted to come over and visit they had to bring their own two chairs because we we had two and that was it and vice versa uh it was the other way same same way going the other direction so but they are very very close friends uh and unfortunately john's now passed away but elaine would still still stay in close touch with elaine so how long was she she stayed in hawaii correct while you deployed well you no she came back she worked for georgia power okay yeah yeah she came back to atlanta and uh and worked for georgia power so um she was an advertising copywriter um we were able to make a couple of trips to the other islands we went to oahu went we lived on oahu of course and we went to kauai and maui and just spent some time at those two and as you know didn't didn't have a whole lot of money expendable income back in those days and so that was nice and then i must say when we when we went from hawaii to long beach my wife was literally crying because going from pristine gorgeous hawaii to long beach and it was this was i mean this is california in 69 and it was smoggy and we were driving past all refineries with the flames coming up and the smoke and everything and it was just and we could the the incredible thing is they had such tremendous produce there really good stuff but the good side we saw we had some good times there got to see john geary at the fairmont hotel we went to a taping of the dean martin show and sammy davis jr was one of the guests we we went to chavez ravine saw the braves play the dodgers and lo and behold so help me hank aaron run won the game in extra innings with a home run so that was pretty cool but working under the commodore was nothing like working for the the two commanding officers of the hissam it was just entirely different kind of thing you didn't have the the the hissum group bonded incredibly well in fact just this last september we had a reunion of the hissem wardroom and i can't tell you how many people with about 10 former officers were there i think including both commanding officers both captain barber and captain tool were there captain tool now has his own uh has a bookstore in washington d.c and goes by jim toole he's uh he's an irascible um kind of guy but gave the the most the most touching talk about the hissam crew and everything and you know for these career guys this was just one ship of of several but something we just really did get along well yeah yeah is there some still an active ship the one of the most gut-wrenching photographs i have ever looked at you look up the hissam you can find it if you google the hissum you'll see a photograph of the hissam as it was a target uh in the pacific now it's it's now out there in the pacific somewhere and it was just a uh a bombing target it's a reef now yeah yeah but uh to see the the mass over and it's all rusty looking and uh it was just not not very good i'll pass along something that i i'm thinking in terms of this reunion that i had we went around telling stories about the hissam first a story that captain barber told he said that at one point this would have been on the first cruise he said that uh we were called upon to do some some gay some gunfire support there was an area that some we were coming into and they wanted some gunfire support in particular area but there was a sandbar uh just out from the coast and so it was pretty tricky getting in there we weren't sure really the depths whether the depths had changed from the charts that were indicated so we finally figured well yeah we can probably do it we can probably get in close enough to to do some good so we do just go just inch along going as in as far as we can and um at this point the the captain says exo exo is the chief navigator uh exo um you think we ought to hold it here or can we go on further and he says captain i think we ought to go on further no question about it and so but the captain's really not so sure and he says hey so um if this were your ship what would you do and the exo was quiet for a minute or two it says captain i would have turned around a half mile back so that was uh that was captain barbara and the action the xo this first was ed hart and what a great great guy he was a mustang tremendous executive officer he at one time we had an emergency recall of the ship because we had a sar mission search and rescue and as a matter of fact we as it ultimately came out there were a number of of uh fishermen who were who died and we we found we arrived at their boat and they had already the survivors had already been taken off from elsewhere but the boat was still there at any rate it was like the middle of the night and we had an emergency recall of all the crew and so that basically means that they send guys ashore to round up whoever they can find and get them on the ship and so that we get enough people on board that we can go out and and try to try to help out where was this it was in taiwan and i'm not sure which of the two ports whether it's kaohsiung or key long but we again the the the xo being the navigator the xo uh he he would party pretty good and so he comes back and he and so the the captain says so uh give me uh give me a course to the to the spot where we were whether we think this the tsar incident occurred and uh the exo says captain i i'd go out of the harbor a mile and hang a left which is not not exactly the precision that the the captain would have noticed but let me tell you this other story about ed hart soon after i had reported on board the ship we were underway and this was literally probably the first day or so that i had been at sea on the ship um met the happened to pass the exo on the mess decks slooted in went my way there there are men there drinking coffee whatever well the next morning we had we have officers call every morning on the ship and and that's where the executive law officer gives you the plan of the day tells tells you what's going to be going on for that day what's you know we're doing market time or whatever and and so he we are the officers are lined up as a group and the exo comes we salute him he returns our salute and then he gives us stuff and we disperse well the exo said i want to go over some shipboard procedure with everybody he says you know when you salute me when we're underway and you salute me at officer's call that's it for the day you don't salute me anymore after that and i knew that he was talking to me but he didn't stop me the day before on the mistakes in front of the enlisted men he was getting the i got the message but what what a great example of leadership uh i've never forgot i've told that a hundred times at least but that was i was so impressed by by what he did um he was just a great guy tell us a little bit about your post-navy life well i got out i got back to atlanta in march of 1970 and frankly took a took a month off just after i got here my wife was was working at georgia power and wife barbara and so then i started looking for a job and wound up at wsb television so in may of 1970 i started at wsb tv in the promotion department i had majored in advertising public relations and so started it that channel it was channel two but still is channel two but it was an nbc affiliate and um i was um doing doing promos promoting doing different things to writing news releases uh putting together video promos promoting different shows on the station what a what a great job it was a fun fun job i mean for a young young person it was just spectacular uh but i particularly i do some running now and have for for a good number of years but i particularly remember back in those days wsb tv every year put together the fourth of july parade the salute to america parade and we didn't now they farm it out but back then it was the promotion department did the whole shooting match and so we were i was driving down peachtree uh early morning on the 4th of july and i remember seeing these runners in the far left hand lane i mean no i don't remember if they were police escorts i sure don't remember it but it's a handful of and that was the peachtree road race in 1970 and um so yeah worked at wsb tv worked in a small advertising pr company after that i had a number of pr jobs the significant ones were wsb tv i work for the southern forest institute which was a terrific job looking for a guy named jim montgomery we would go around promoting forest management in the south so i went all over the south talking with editorial boards and doing television interviews and so forth talking about how important it was to manage your force obviously the in the best interest of the forest products industry to have that resource in the pipeline and then i worked for lockheed for about six years or so wrote speeches for three lockheed presidents bob ormsby paul fritsch and ken canestrick and canestra finally went on to be on the board of regents and so i crossed paths with with canestra i i tell people my my best career move that i made was getting laid off at lockheed because i went from lockheed to working for the university of georgia and worked for the university of georgia a little over 20 years that's the good news the bad news is that was 20 years of commuting from dunwiddie to athens five days a week so and actually the in the early stages i was i was my title was special assistant to the president so i was in the president's office writing his speeches and writing his correspondence and i would often have to go there on sunday and make that drive to and so i had the opportunity to to get into the government relations area which i did so i i spent most of my time there in government relations working on a guy named larry weatherford who is just a great great guy i was very fortunate to hook up with larry and he's a dear friend to this day but i retired from the university of georgia in 2010. well tell us about your family um barbara and i are of course married in in 68 and 76 we were blessed to have a daughter named catherine we named her catherine elaine elaine's the the the name of our good friend and who now lives in williamsburg but then catherine has has two sons peter and robert and peter is six and robert's just about to turn three and uh barbara sells residential real estate for harry norman and um a number of years ago she uh she found this house that is a mile away from us we are just off shamley dunwoody road this one this house is on the other side of shanley dunwoody but she like really liked this house she got catherine and her husband brian interested in it and lo and behold they wound up buying the house so they are 1.1 miles away from us i'm proud to say that catherine's husband brian is a first sergeant marine corps and he's in the marine corps reserves he's done i think it's like 18 years has a couple of years more to go but he makes a trip every month to richmond virginia for his reserve duty she is we and unfortunately brian's parents and barbara and i we were closer friends than from back in the day than than catherine and brian were they were they were in grammar school today they were in the fourth grade together catheter brian we have a photograph of the in the fourth grade picture and so jim and arlene became good friends and uh we've been good friends all along then when when brian was being deployed uh he uh his unit guarded the uss cole which had been bombed and i think in libya if i'm not mistaken any at any rate he did that in active duty then later he spent seven months at al assad guarding the perimeter there so proud of proud of both of them and catherine of course works right here at the atlanta history center her main main duty is the swan house ball but she does promotional things that that benefit the history center if i have that correct basically that's that's what she does and we're we are very blessed well good um good story uh we we like to close out with giving the interviewee an opportunity excuse me to say whatever they want to say comments editorial information you know views whatever um let me i will page through as i say i was a writer and let me see if there's anything here that might might be interesting uh well one thing i neglected to mention at one point i was the boarding officer when we were doing market time and um so i would have a 45 and and we had a sailor with me who had a um had a rifle and the 50 caliber from the ship was trained trained on us and we would get in the motor whale boat we'd get it you actually get in the motor whale boat when it's still up out of the water and you're lowered down into the water and and and go and uh it was generally um uneventful uh one thing that was kind of curious i remember they used to they would store their the fish that they had these all fishing junks they would store the fish that had caught in sawdust for refrigeration they didn't have ice but they had sawdust and that just seemed kind of strange to me the other thing that that i ran across um only time in my life i've encountered this but one of the guys on the ship was a leper and he actually was a card carrying leper and was missing some of his fingers which is you know you don't see that every day and i had and that but that was uh that was one of the things that i encountered as the boarding christ yeah very much sharing the confined space that yeah that you all won't work with me um the uh this is just kind of a interesting side note i guess that my first roommate when i became when i went with uh calm desron 29 was rs hardy and hardy was the executive officer of the uss vance during the the marcus aurelius arndt the aurelius arnheiter affair where arn haider became the commanding officer of the vance and i mean this was like the kane mutiny movie he was um i don't know if you'd say he was certifiably well he had he was disturbed and was relieved of his command after a very short tenure but the my roommate was with the xo there i mean he was the next in command of on the events which was pretty interesting um when we were the gun we were the gun line commander on on the albert david we would we would be anchored in denying harbor uh during the day and at 8 00 8 30 in the evening we would get underway in in fire and this was the thing that was incredible to me one of the things this was this was like 69.70 and to think that how long we had been fighting in vietnam and yet here we were in one of the most secure cities in south vietnam and we were shooting at bad guys from the harbor i mean that just seemed something's not right here and uh and and it wasn't i might mention too that um that i actually did not as a reservist i was in for three three years of active duty and i did not serve three years this was when richard nixon was one of the good things he did so that i was concerned he was he was kind of gearing down with the with the war and the personnel in vietnam and so i got an early out and served a little bit less than than my full three years but i haven't frankly i really have not found anybody else who did three different deployments uh off the coast of vietnam so i i i don't back up to the my dd-214 i uh i'm i'm proud that i was able to do that well good yeah we appreciate you telling your story to us thank you it's really interesting and uh thank you for participating in the project and thank you for your service thank you tony appreciate it thank you

Channel: Atlanta History Center

Views: 1,156

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: Veteran (Profession), Atlanta History Center (Museum), Library of Congress Veterans History Project

Id: 2rofxKzISz4

Length: 74min 16sec (4456 seconds)

Published: Mon May 24 2021