Operations Specialist Class "A" School

In my last post I mentioned Class "A" schools. When I joined, I deliberately chose a job that would give me the best chance at going to sea. I chose Operations Specialist. You can follow the link to learn all about it, but basically I worked with air and surface search radars, tracked and plotted contacts, and engaged in anti-submarine warfare operations (my favorite part of the job).
School was in Dam Neck, Virginia, near Norfolk and Virginia Beach. While we had more freedoms at school than at boot camp, it was still very regimented. We were not allowed civilian clothes, so if we wanted to leave the base, we had to change into dress uniforms. The absolute worst part about school was our proximity to a nearby pig farm. Anybody who has grown up around massive quantities of pigs will know the stench to which I am referring. Imagine waking up every morning to the sweet smell of methane in the air. And I don't mean just a whiff, I mean a stench so overwhelming you could cut it with a knife. But after an hour or so, it faded and we were able to breathe normally once again.
The curriculum was pretty straightforward; we studied maneuvering boards (mo boards) and learned how to calculate the course, speed and CPA (Closest Point of Approach) of radar contacts. I was surprised to learn that if a contact was on a collision course, we were not supposed to call it that; we were taught to refer to it as CBDR (Constant Bearing, Decreasing Range). Should we find ourselves in this situation, we were taught how to calculate a course that would allow us to pass the contact at a specified distance, be it 2000 yards, 3000 yards, whatever the Officer of the Deck requested. We also learned how to calculate True Wind and Relative Wind (important for flight operations) and how to calculate Crash Corpen (in case of an aircraft crash on your flight deck, you want the wind blowing the smoke and flames abaft of the ship, so as to allow your firefighters the best opportunity to approach the wreck).
We learned how to talk on the RT (Radio-Telephone) net; as you can imagine the Navy has very strict protocols for radio traffic. We learned how to plot contacts on the status board, how to relay reports to the bridge, how to plot contacts on the DRT (Dead Reckoning Tracer), how to deal with man overboard situations:
"Officer of the Deck! Starboard lookout reports man overboard, starboard side! Combat recommends all stop, combat recommends hoisting flag Oscar, combat recommends putting a boat in the water..." and several other commands which have eluded my memory. ("Combat" is short for Combat Information Center, where the Operations Specialists worked).
We also studied ASW (anti-submarine warfare) procedures. As I grew into my job aboard the USS California, I came to love this job the most.
As part of our final week of study, we participated in mock combat, being required to track and report multiple targets. I graduated number 2 in my class, and as a result got to pick my assignment. I chose the California because it was homeported in Norfolk, and my uncle, the retired career officer, lived nearby. One of the benefits of joining the Navy was the opportunity for me to grow closer to my aunt and uncle, who welcomed me into their home for many a weekend off, and were kind enough to feed me and let me do my laundry, as well. Thanks G&B, I love you a lot.
Unbeknownst to me, however, the California was not moored at the Naval Operations Base (NOB), but was in the shipyards in Portsmouth, finishing up a year long overhaul. It was a full six months after reporting aboard that I got my first taste of the sea. It was beautiful!
Shortly after leaving the shipyards, we discovered we were to be transferred to the West Coast. It seems that somebody somewhere decided a ship named California should be homeported in the state of California. The then-mayor of San Francisco, Dianne Feinstein (DiFi), had pulled some strings and arranged for us to make our home in Alameda (where they keep the Nuclear Wessels, according to Ensign Chekhov). After some excursions into the Carribbean, with stops at St. John, St. Martin and St. Thomas, as well as Puerto Rico, we made the transit of the Panama Canal and arrived in San Francisco Bay, where I lived until my discharge.