When I applied for voluntary recall I was assigned as assistant CIC officer in USS Okinawa, a helicopter carrier. The justification was that the CIC officer, a pilot on his first shipboard qualification tour, was expected to be conversant with aircraft procedures, but might need help in matters connected to surface warfare. In this particular case my boss was a CIC school graduate and really didn’t need me to help. I felt like a fifth wheel. The next person up the chain of command was our department head, the operations officer. He recognized the problem and solved it by assigning me as the department administrative assistant, an unofficial position, but one where I would be kept busy and useful.
One of my duties was the handling of all the classified material in the department. We had a five foot high combination locked safe for storing the stuff. Whenever anyone who knew the combination was transferred the combination had to be changed. of course, I was supposed to do that.
The combination lock was based on a set of three rotors, each made of two interlocking rings. There was a notch on the outer rim of the outer ring where a pawl would drop in when the correct combination had been set. This allowed the safe door to be opened.
Resetting the combination meant opening the safe, removing the back plate on the housing for the wheel pack, taking out the three rotors, separating the inner and outer rings of each rotor, replacing the inner rings in a new location, and reassembling the entire mechanism. Just to be clear, the outer rings have notches, which, when they are aligned, allow the pawl to drop and permit the safe to be opened. The inner ring has numbers. The combination is set by connecting the inner and outer rings so the number chosen for the combination are opposite the notch in the outer ring.
Well, I went through all the steps and proceeded to test the combination while the safe door was still open. It didn’t work. At least one of the numbers was not precisely aligned between the rings. I tried again. It wasn’t good. I took apart the rings and went through the process again. This time it worked. I then closed the safe in order to test the combination one more time. But I had neglected to replace the back plate on the housing. The entire assembly moved away from the front dial and the door would not open.
I needed help. There was a petty officer in the shipfitters shop that knew how to handle this. I called him. He then taught me how to break in to the safe. First he drilled a hole in the back, opposite the location of the dial in the front. Then he drilled two more small holes. One was to allow him to see inside, and the other to shine a flashlight through to illuminate the housing.
Unlike the above illustration, we approached from the back. Using a very long thin screwdriver we pushed the mechanism back inside the housing and aligned the rotors to allow the door to be opened, After doing that, the back plate was replaced. I tested the combination again with the door open. It worked. Then I closed the door and did a final test. With the back plate attached, the combination worked, End of story..
Well, not entirely.
Several months later the ship was operating off the coast of Vietnam. One of the pilots from the embarked helicopter squadron was killed in a crash. We had to assemble all his personal effects for shipment home. But,like all the officers, he had a small combination locked safe in his stateroom. No one knew the combination. So I got to use my newly acquired skill as a safecracker to open that safe. I never had to do that again. Needless to say, I never included that knowledge as part of my curriculum vitae when job hunting.
Wetherhorn 