GUEST POST

This is a guest post by a former shipmate of mine, Jay Yurth.
He's an author with at least one published book at this writing so I doubt he minds.
Thanks Jay.
You can find his books at Amazon.com
Search for "Weight of Memories" or for "Jay Yurth".

F.O.D.

While doing our repetitious and mundane jobs of keypunching little holes in the cards from massive stacks of MAFS and SAFS (nomenclature escapes me now) while filling up the Chad bin, we sometimes got a reprieve. My first six months cruise on the Aircraft Carrier was a blur. I was young and stoned on hashish most of the time and we were protected from the weird collateral things all the other rates had to do.
Why? Well, we were Data Processors. We were in computers. We punched up your paychecks. Nuff said. Remember, in 1978 you had to be so stinking smart to even know what a computer was, let alone work with one, that they kinda thought you were a 3G (God, Guru or Geek) and left you alone to do your "Magic".
But this was my second cruise, it was 1979 and we had a new Captain and a new shop Chief, leadership had just had a huge turnover. So every now and then, OK frequently, while out at sea before and after flight ops, the middle-ship minions (us in S-7) were called out of the cold confines of the secret computer room to join the deck hands in a ritual called the FOD walk down.
This Foreign Object Debris walk down was essential in keeping the flight deck clear of stuff that might be sucked up into a jet engine and intake. Anything as small as a lost button, a tip of the plastic that keeps shoe laces from fraying, to a Green shirt (men who worked on the flight deck). Ship's Company usually only went up to watch the goings-on of the flight deck ops from the crow's nest where we would bring our cameras and marvel at the nerve of the Green shirts as they unchecked a jet tire while the engines revved, just prior to giving the "finger point" toward the bow (front) of the ship while standing just out of danger's reach, sending the jet off to infinity and beyond.
But now, we once privileged knombs, were being assimilated. When we heard the voice on the 1-MC (the intercom system) call out, "all available personnel report to the flight deck for a FOD walk down", well, we couldn't pull out our "Nope, we are computer Gods" get-out-of-anything safety cards any longer. So up we would go to the bow of the ship. Along the way, all the different colored shirt guys were pointing and guiding our way with those little smirks on the their faces. We knew they were laughing at us as we squinted from that unusually bright thing in the sky called the sun. We were used to the flickering strobes of the incandescant bulbs that kept our eyes from full dilation. You see we had to wear Foul weather jackets (Eskimo parkas) because it was so cold in the shop. So as our glasses fogged up and our bodies started to itch from the "topside" heat while we got in line, elbow to elbow. Then as if it were a race we could win, we heard the command to "commence FOD walk down". We walked slowly with our heads down and quite frequently we would find a piece of something. We were ordered to put it into our pockets and dispose of it later. Sometimes you would find a small shaving of metal and you would wonder what part of the plane had been sheared off. You wondered which twenty something pilot, flying a multi million dollar jet while smoking a fat one, landed way too hard and caused this shaving. Or maybe you'd go into a daze and ponder about when you would finally get back to port and get to put a big fat wet kiss on your girlfirnd's lips. Whatever. We finally reached the fantail (the back of the ship) and we were relaeased from our side duties. Back to the shop to empty our pockets of any debris we may have found. Inconspicuously we headed behind the tape racks to take a hit from our one hitter hash pipes made from felt-tip markers, then back to our seats in front of the Univac 1710 keypunch machines for another 12 hours. After a while I sort of looked forward to the FOD interrruption, since my second cruise was held over to seven months and one week due to that Iranian hostage situation.
On a side note, I lost a girlfriend during that cruise because of how long the mail took to get back to the states. She thought I had gotten back on the date I had originally told her that I would be returning but that I didn't go to see her. She thought I had met a hairy arm pitted European woman and dumpted her, my lovely little good smelling blonde. Some memories just won't fade away.