I was breezing through Bill Gertz’s latest “Inside the Ring“, including notes on a possible Bush/Putin fade-away jumper, the latest on the Hesham Islam/Stephen Coughlin kerfuffle, the notes of US Naval Officer in Baghdad and finally this little blast from the past:
The Navy is putting the Persian Gulf War sex scandal involving pregnant sailors to rest — at the bottom of the ocean.
The Navy’s budget for 2009 calls for sinking the Yellowstone class destroyer tender Acadia.
The Acadia was dubbed the “Love Boat” of Operation Desert Storm after 36 crew members, or one-tenth of its female crew, returned to port pregnant after a seven-month deployment for the Gulf War in April 1991.
Which reminds me of a conversation your humble scribe had with a Crusty Old Retiree about the time this bubbled up:
YHS: Didja hear the story about the tender that came back with ten percent of their females in a family way?
COR: Yar, and that’s one of the things that’s different about today’s Navy and the Old Navy.
YHS: What, female sailors aboard ships?
COR: Nar, not so much that. Only in the Old Navy, they’d have all been pregnant.
I hate to disillusion you, but in the OLD Navy they would have all come back with worn out happy socks!
Heh,
Excellent…. Go Navy!
Heh,
Excellent…..
Yar.
Heard that same story before, but it involved a young bull and an old bull. Still like it though.
How big is the crew on a destroyer tender if it had a crew of 360 women back during Desert Storm? Was that a place to put women sailors before they were spread through the fleet as much?
Just wonderin….
I liked that joke, and it rang true… speaking as someone who only knows the Navy second-hand (from tales told here, elsewhere, and by way of SN2, the black sheep of the family) and certainly NOT “the old Navy.”
That said, I was around for both the Old and New Air Force, and I admit I liked the New Co-Ed Air Force (such as it WAS then, not as it IS today). There were MANY more “targets of opportunity,” at least on the E-side. Not so much for the O-types, of course… gentlemen (by Act of Congress) that they were.
Ya know, I had a friend that served on another AD back in the day that related a story to me;
The ship pulls in after a fairly lengthly at-sea period and it appears that there are a bunch of women on the ship that look like they have been beaten up – black and blue marks and all that. The Navy sent investigators to the ship to figg’er out who the heck was beating up on the womenfolk. It ends up that it was other women beating up on their shipmates – not the fellers. In some cases it might have some form of territoriality but in most of the cases it tended to be a more chromosomal form of the same. Alas, no pregnancies were the result of the aforementioned activities. Strange days my friends. Strange days.
Like the old Air Force ditty……
“There are no fighter pilots in the states. They are all on foreign shores making mothers out of….”
You know the rest.
Lex, you bastard!
You’ll get yer reward, when the Kat and the Biscuit start reading this!
Oh, my Mom, born in 1922, used to sing,
“Behind, the door, her father kept a shotgun,
He kept it in the Springtime, and in the month of May
Hey hey!
And if you asked him why the heck he kept it?
He kept it for her fighter pilot far, far, away…”
Depends on how far back you go. Old time sailors wouldn’t allow women on military ships. Many thought having a woman aboard brought bad luck! They believed that it would anger the sea gods and that this would cause bad weather so they would toss them overboard to “appease” the gods. Thanks for the laugh though!
Shortly after the time they came back from that LoveBoat cruise I had command of a shore duty node on the left coast. As such, we were a temporary orders gaining command for (2) poor creatures until they had their babies and could go back to sea duty or separate from service (an option then as I remeber).
Between that unique experience, Tailhook ’91 fallout, the Hultgren affair and Bubba’s administration you may understand why I am a little “hardboiled” about certain things. Discussion of which I try to avoid unless cornered.
BTW, irt Gertz, did you hear that the PRC is hiring a bunch of former Gen/Flag officers as spokesmen to plead their case in the realm of PR (propaganda)….Extremely distastefull at a minimum of course but I read that Bill Gertz and his excellent articles on China are what they have been tasked to refute editorially.
Just more characters for mounting on Salamanders “Wall of Shame”. Why do they think they are so important?
b2
b2,
I’m familiar with the other stuff (tailhook, etc). But, what happened with the Hultgren thing?
Jim C
I looked at one of the websites of that ship. Found a really neat photo album that various past crew submitted and like a lot of similar websites it is interesting how we connect with our past service and old friends from those times.
Yeah well the love boat thing was not the best of events, but I think for the past crew of that ship, the memories of good past service will live on.
Me thinks we might need an LCS tender someday…
B2,
A job in China is a job in China. Where do I sign up? I’m sure one or two of them needs a butt boy…………………..
Skippy,
What about FEDEX, etc. Just in time needs folks with logs experience. Signal willingness to take a post to an area off the beaten path and Im sure you could make it back to a big Asian city quickly.
b2
JimC,
LT Kara Hultgren was a neophyte F-14 pilot who unfortunetly crashed and died on approach turn to a CVN early 90′s..
Much discussed. Internet and elsewhere. Google it up. Local feller Nose has an encyclopediac knowledge of this unfortunate incident. So does Lex.
At my core I have dinosaur reservations re Women & military service but I’ve learned to keep my mouth shut because that’s the status quo and if the folks on AD accept it, so will I.
BTW, pregnancy aboard ship during deployment is still one of the biggest degraders to US Navy readiness but IMO mainly goes unreported (cost of doing bidness?) because the Navy leadership holds onto them statistics doggedly.
b2
USS Eisenhower 1994-1995 cruise. 500 women assigned when the ship first became integrated. 121 pregancies over 18 months-I’m not making that up, I know the numbers by heart.
One other observation that is not PC I’m sure. The majority of pregnancies were not “Suprise! You are pregnant” types. They were in majority married couples who were going to have kids anyway, but were able to make the pregnancy /co-location assignment rules work to their advantage. And miss the cruise in the process.
But I’m a known dinosaur.
Looked at FEDEX-but they hire a lot of locals for their management positions in Asia. Not many expats on staff-at least in Japan………….