During our first stay in Danang harbor/bay we were quite concerned about security. The possibility of a hostile swimmer reaching the ship and planting a bomb on the hull was taken very seriously. One of the measures we took wa to keep two boats out at night circling the anchorage. Each boat crew consisted of an officer in charge and 2 crewmen. One of them drove the boat while the other, armed with rifle, was the lookout. The orders were simple, keep a sharp lookout, prevent approaches to the ship, don’t have both boats on the same side of the ship, and, at the end of your 4 hour patrol don’t come alongside the ship until you are called in.
It was a boring patrol. The main excitement was to watch for the other boat as you crossed the bow or stern. If you saw them moving towards you, you turned around. If you saw them moving away, you traded sides. The patrol was random, the water was usually calm, and the hours seemed to go by very slowly. One night, the time for us to be called in and swap crews had already passed. As we moved around the ship we saw the second boat was tied up alongside the accommodation ladder. It looked like they had been called in for relief. But we hadn’t been called. I kept my crew on station and we made several more full circles around the ship without hearing the order to come in and swap crews. The second boat remained alongside the ship the entire time.
Finally, it was our turn to come in. I asked the officer in charge why we were so late. He told me that his predecessor on the watch had forgotten to wake the relief crews and didn’t realize the oversight until the other boat came alongside to ask. The next day we saw just how important the captain thought that following orders precisely was. The officer in charge of the second boat had come in without being called. The skipper looked on that as if he had abandoned his post. The next thing I knew was that that officer had been relieved of his duties and was being sent back to the US for reassignment. The captain was also dissatisfied with the performance of one of the other officers. That second junior officer was also replaced by a of horse trade. He was swapped for an officer on one of the other amphibious ships by agreement between the captains and with the approval of the Bureau of Personnel.
Lest you think tat this was not a serious offense I should remind you that Communist swimmers actually did plant an explosive device on a ship in Saigon. The ship, USNS CARD, an aircraft transport, sank in shallow water and was later salvaged. The propaganda value of that operation was immense. They claimed, truthfully, to have sunk an American aircraft carrier. The ship in question had been an escort carrier in the Second World War. She had been decommissioned and transferred to her new role of ferrying aircraft. Her crew, by the way, were all civilians.
Wetherhorn 