Sea Stories by Glenn Mosley

I just recieved my copy of "Sea Stories" by Gary Slaughter. Gary was Communications Officer on the U.S.S. Cony during part of my stay on the ship and also my boss. The book is about his time in the Navy and especially the role of the U.S.S. Cony during the Cuban Missile Crisis. It brings back a lot of memories. It's signed, "to Mose" which in itself takes me back. No one calls me "Mose" much anymore...alot of other names but not "Mose".

During my time on the Cony the first Commanding Officer I served under was Captain (Bill) Morgan. The second one was Commander Thomas Brenner. With the book as a refresher, I
recalled that Capt. Morgan was sort of an odd guy (at least to the enlisted men) and didn't say much. If he wanted a Radioman chewed out, he'd have ENS. Slaughter do it. One of his favorite things when we were at sea, was to shoot at sharks from the bridge with an M16. The bridge is where the ship is controlled by the Capt. (Or Officer of the Deck, or OOD) while underway. His other and MOST favorite thing was to have the OOD sail the ship in wide circles, have someone throw large tin-cans from the lower deck and shoot at the cans with a TOMMY GUN. Some of the guys were afraid of him, thought that he might get mad and shoot one of the crew, but I never was. My Mom was a Morgan and I was raised up around Mom and her family and I never knew of a Morgan shooting someone unless they needed it.

Another memory that had faded in my old age haze was the "burn runs" Gary talks about in the book. The Radio Room recieves messages twenty-four hours, seven days a week. The messages might be in the form of teletype, Morse code and finally encrypted stuff which is highly classified and must be handled in a certain, specified way and then destroyed. We would place EVERYTHING that came through the radio shack in burn bags and every so often would go on a burn run. The burn run required going to the motor pool, requisitioning a truck and hauling the burn bags to the incinerator on the main base. In addition to a couple of the Radiomen, it required an armed officer, usually Gary Slaughter. In other words, great care was taken in handling this material. We all hated this detail.

The incenerator was a concrete building which required carrying the bags up a ramp and into a room which had a concrete floor with a 5x5 foot hole in the center. We had to walk into the space and throw the bags into the hole where there raged a never ending inferno, eating up classified messages by the ton. We used to talk about how the place made us think of how hell must look. Usually for a few days after a burn run we didn't go to the XXX rated movies or the sailor bars on Grandby Street. We'd quit all our sailor ways and only watch movies like "The Sound of Music" and such. But that scary feeling didn't generally last long.

While remembering the old days I got to thinking how much easier it would have been to dispose of all the stuff marked "C" if we'd had cell phones to use. We could have simply placed the phones on a hard surface and beat the hell out of them with hammers.