Tales of the West Pacific, or, Memoirs of a Young Naval Officer

Donald Trump is completely unqualified to be Commander-in-Chief.  This conclusion is not based on talking heads, pundits, the comments of retired generals nor Clinton campaign propaganda.  It is based on personal experience.

You probably missed it because of all the pre-debate hoopla, bombing attempts and street riots, but a few weeks ago in a speech at Pensacola, Florida, Trump said:  "With Iran, when they circle our beautiful destroyers with their little boats and they make gestures at our people that they shouldn't be allowed to make, they will be shot out of the water," Trump said to loud cheers.

This is not just an example of Trumpian bombast, it clearly demonstrates exactly how little he understands about military behavior.  The headlines shouted things like “Trump would blast Iranian ships out of the water for harassing our ships.” 

What Trump does not know is that in times of “peace”—and technically we are not in a state of war with neither Iran, North Korea nor China—military forces “harass” each other on a regular basis.  It is part of the games militaries play.  I know.  Been there, done that.

When I was a destroyer officer operating in the Western Pacific in the early 60s, “harassment” was not only an every day occurrence it was part of our job description.  Every day as we cruised the South China Sea our Task Force (a carrier and four, sometimes eight, destroyers) was “harassed” by Russian Trawlers. These, the Russians claimed, were innocent “unarmed” fishing boats, but they bristled with antennas intended to intercept or sometimes jam our communications and those big funny shapes on deck covered with tarps were most probably 50 caliber guns.

They would trail along with us for days and nights and sometimes intentionally penetrate the destroyer screen requiring one of our destroyers to break the screen, turn, bear down on the trawler and it would scamper away.   Fortunately our Commander-in-Chief at the time—John F. Kennedy who was a Navy Patrol Boat commander--was not a thin-skinned, impetuous, narcissistic real estate developer and we never got orders to “shoot them out of the water.”

Of course, we played the game as well.  You see in those days—over 50 years ago—we did not have GPS, computer algorithms, satellite tracking and all the sophisticated stuff we have today, so in order to learn where the Ruskie submarines were operating we had to go out and find them.  Over the vast expanse of the Pacific Ocean we deployed what were called Anti-Submarine-Warfare (ASW) “Hunter Killer Groups.”  Our ships, with their squadrons of ASW aircraft were trying, 24 hours a day, seven days a week to locate Russian subs.  When we found one, and we often did, we would track them on sonar for days, and to show how tough we were, we would sometimes fire clusters of hand grenades which would explode under water to show them we could hit them if we really wanted to. Of course, we never acknowledged that they had very efficient torpedoes which were quite capable of inflicting calamity on us.  We knew that they knew, and they knew that we knew the game we were playing.

Here’s a true episode that shows how the “harassment” game is nothing new.   At one point my ASW group was tasked to show the Reds that we could operate on their doorstep in the North Pacific in the middle of winter.  If you have never been at sea in the North Pacific in the winter, consider yourself lucky.  It is perhaps the worst experience I had in two years at sea.  The weather was often clear and beautiful, but 24 hours a day, constant, huge ground swells lurched the ship up and down, back and forth sometime 45 degrees port and starboard, fore and aft.  Everything on the ship had to be lashed down.

But we were “harassing” the Russians by operating in their territory and I’m sure they got a big kick out of it.  Every day they would send out a squadron of Badger aircraft that would spend a half hour circling or ships at about 100 feet.  They would actually fly near the bridge of our ship and tip their wings at us as if to say, “You poor bastards, we don’t even send our own ships out with seas like this.”  We would wave back at their pilots. We never fired a shot at the Russian aircraft and they never bombed us.  We understood the “harassment” game rules.

A breach of the “harassment” game would be even more dangerous today than ever.  Once in the South China Sea we were tracking “an unidentified contact” which was code for “we know it is not a U.S. Sub.”  The cat and mouse tracking game had gone on all day and into the night and about two a.m. there was a bang and the entire ship shuddered.  We had hit the conning tower of the Russian sub.  Fifty years ago we did not have satellite cell phones, the Internet nor 24 hour cable news which would have whipped the incident into a frenzy,  and no one ever new of our collision with a Russian sub while we were “harassing” it.  It was intentionally hushed up—by both sides--so as not to cause an international incident which cold have had disastrous consequences.

You see, unlike Donald Trump, even junior destroyer officers of my generation understood that “harassment” is part of the game, and the worst thing to do is to take the first shot and the blame for starting a full scale war.  Harassment is intended to get under your adversary’s skin and provoke a stupid, impulsive reaction something which Trump appears to be prone to.

Take another look at the quote from Trump’s speech:  "With Iran, when they circle our beautiful destroyers with their little boats and they make gestures at our people that they shouldn't be allowed to make, they will be shot out of the water.” 

 

Forget the goofy contrast between our “beautiful” destroyers and their “little boats.” He said that the Iranian sailors evidently made “gestures at our people they shouldn’t be allowed to make” which according to Trump, would be justification for shooting them out of the water.  Presumably Trump means if some Iranian little boats come too close to our war ships and their sailors give us the finger, that justifies sinking their boats and starting another shooting war.