It’s been awhile since I told a story from my military days, so I thought I would remedy that. This story is about the first time I launched missiles from a Navy ship. Yup, I was the guy with my finger on the button. If you’ve been following this blog for any length of time then you could probably predict that things did not go according to plan. Another great tagline I could use for this blog. OK, let’s get to it.

The year was 1990, I was 22 years old and a Second Class Petty Officer on the good ship USS Monterey (CG-61), which was just de-commissioned last month by the way. My watch station was the Missile System Supervisor (MSS) in the Combat Information Center (CIC). The CIC is where the ship coordinates all the combat from. We were at a missile range near Puerto Rico to participate in Combat Systems Ships Qualification Trials (CSSQT). We were a newly commissioned ship and had to pass these trials in order to be qualified to go on deployment and defend the country.

The trials basically consisted of playing war games. For one week we practiced taking out simulated targets using real aircraft but no live ordinance. The second week they replaced those manned aircraft with drones. When I say drones, I don’t mean those little toys you see everyone using today. No, these drones were unmanned mock-ups of full fledge fighter planes. The combat system rates were split into three firing teams and my team was the first one up on the range. The scenario we faced that day was one we had practiced many times. There would be three targets attacking us. One would come in high and clear while the other two would try to sneak in using radar jamming techniques that we were equipped to defeat.

The missiles we would be using that day could be fired in tactical or telemetry mode. Tactical mode is for real warfare. When used this way, the missile would get within a certain distance of the target and the warhead would explode, sending shrapnel in a focused direction to kill the target. It was the most effective technique against enemy aircraft. As you can imagine, the people that owned the drones that we practiced against did not want them constantly destroyed preventing them from using them over and over. The telemetry mode disabled the warheads so they wouldn’t explode. Instead, they sent back telemetric data to receivers back onboard the ship that could tell how close the missile had come to the target. Any missile closer than a certain distance (don’t think that is classified but I am not comfortable sharing it here) would be considered a kill and the drone could live on to fight another day. However, as warfighting sailors we were not satisfied with that. Sometimes, if your radar was working in peak condition you could get what is called a skin to skin kill. This is when the missile actually hit the drone, destroying it without the use of an exploding warhead. Missile range people did not like skin to skin kills; sailors loved them!

This was my first missile shoot ever. It’s what it was all about and I was excited to say the least. I actually listened to the audio of the communications later on and I couldn’t even believe it was my voice. You could hear the excitement and tension in it. Anyway, we were all seated at our consoles. The key players from the top down were the Commanding Officer (Captain) seated at the CO console, the Tactical Action Officer (leader of the firing team) seated at the TAO console, the Anti-Air Warfare Coordinator seated at the AAWC console, the Radar Set Controller seated at the RSC console, and the aforementioned Missile System Supervisor (me) seated at the MSS console.

SHOOT

RSC: Tracking targets 2337, 2424, and 2425 inbound.

TAO: Designate all three targets as hostile.

AAWC: Targets designated hostile.

MSS: Telemetry power enabled aft launcher, module three, cell two. (This disabled the warhead for the first missile we intended to use. When telemetry power is enabled it turns on a five minute battery that powers the data sending circuitry in the missile to transmit all the telemetric data back to the ship. Since the first target was coming in well ahead of the other two targets I didn’t enable telemetry power for the other two missiles yet.

CO: Firing Inhibit Switch disabled.

TAO: Air, take track 2337 with birds.

AAWC: MSS, take track 2337 with birds.

MSS: Taking track 2337 with birds. (At this point I received what is called a RECCOMEND FIRE ALERT on my console. This was the moment I had been training for! I pressed a button labeled FIRE AUTHORIZED. All in two seconds, a hatch on the aft launcher opened and we heard a WOOOOSH as the missile launched upward in a ball of fire.) Birds away! (I watched on my console as the symbol for the missile left our ship and flew toward the target. There was a countdown on the console that told me how many seconds were left until the missile intercepted the target. I monitored this countdown until it reached zero.) Mark India!

CLAP

All during the trials I had been going around telling my fellow sailors that I liked my missile shoots just like I liked my sex – Skin to Skin.

RSC: Lost track 2337. (Normally during a telemetry mode shot the drone target would continue to show up on radar as it flew back to its base. The data would take a couple hours of analyzing before you knew if it was a kill or not. If the drone disappeared from radar at the moment of intercept, it could only mean one thing…) Skin to skin kill!

The first time I shot a missile it was a skin to skin kill, a homerun in the combat world! Everyone in CIC began clapping and hooting and hollering. I allowed myself to get caught up in the celebration for a few seconds before I realized we still had two more targets to defend against. Everyone else on the team realized this too and got back to work.

SHOOT-SHOOT

This combat system had what was called doctrine. Doctrine was a set of rules that could be entered into the computer so that the system would react to threats according to these rules. The first shot had been a manual mode shot. This is when every decision is controlled by a human from the CO down to me at MSS. For the other two targets we had what was called Semi-Auto doctrine enabled. This doctrine allowed the computer to assist us with keeping track of targets in a radar jamming environment. In order to increase the odds of a successful intercept, the computer was given control over which targets to engage and bypassed every operator but me at MSS. The RECOMMEND FIRE ALERT that I had received from AAWC for the first shot would now be sent to my by the computer. I was the last link in the chain to decide if I would fire on those recommended targets.

When we had achieved the skin to skin kill on the first target it had broken up the drone in to pieces. Now these pieces were falling toward the sea but many of them maintained a profile that made them look like to the computer that they were attacking targets. I started to get a flood of RECOMMEND FIRE ALERTS on my console on pieces of the drone that were falling. This is when chaos erupted in the CIC!

MSS: I’m receiving multiple recommend fire alerts!

TAO: Hook tracks 2424 and 2425 and take with birds!

MSS: It doesn’t work that way sir. I have to cycle through all these alerts. I won’t get to the right tracks before it’s too late! (There was a solution to this problem and I knew what it was.) We need to fire ASAP on the two targets. (Fire ASAP was a mode in which a target’s priority could be raised to the top of the list. Once the target had been designated as a Fire ASAP target, it was send over a RECOMMEND FIRE ALERT that would be the next on the list of targets to fire on. However, knowing this and being able to do anything about it were two different things. The MSS console did not have the authority to designate Fire ASAP targets. This responsibility fell to the AAWC operator.

AAWC: On it! Designating targets 2424 and 2425 as Fire ASAP.

On the AAWC console the button for FIRE ASAP is right next to another button labeled FIRE AUTHORIZED BYPASS. If you remember from above, the FIRE AUTHORIZED button is what I used to actually launch a missile. Can you possibly figure out what a button labeled FIRE AUTHORIZED BYPASS might do? Yes! You are right! You are now an honorary fighting sailor. That button bypassed my need as the MSS operator to press a button to fire a missile. In other words, it took all human interaction out of the equation and put the computer in the driver seat. Why do I mention all this? It’ll come into play in just a few minutes.

As I was frantically cycling through all the alerts on my console and waiting on the FIRE ASAP targets to come through I heard a horrifying sound! WOOOOSH followed a second later by another WOOOOSH! Two missiles had seemingly fired by themselves and they weren’t on course to intercept the two remaining drone targets. They were going after pieces of the destroyed drone. Even worse, I hadn’t had time to enable telemetry power on the missiles and they went off as tactical shots with enabled warheads! During all this I tried to maintain my professionalism even when I had no idea how those missiles had launched.

MSS: Birds away track 2535 and 2536. Those tracks are not the targets! Also they are tactical shots!

Everything seemed to slow down at this point as nobody said a word over the communications network. In reality, it wasn’t slow at all. The drones had continued to fly toward the ship during all the chaos and were not very far away. I watched as the first of the errant missiles intercepted a piece of the destroyed drone and as the warhead exploded, reduce it to further smaller pieces. I was expecting to see the same thing from the second errant missile but instead I got a BREAK ENGAGE ALERT on my console.

CO: Broke engagement on track 2536.

The captain himself had broken engagement on the last missile. If you broke engagement on a missile inflight, the system would issue a self-destruct order to the missile and it would blow itself up before striking the target. The captain had been cool headed enough to think about this but he wasn’t fast enough to get the first errant missile. Then it was all over. There was maybe five seconds of silence as every watch stander looked around at each other. I looked back over my shoulder across the row where the AAWC console was located behind me. The Lieutenant Commander who sat that watch had his head down on his console. It was at this point that I figured out what had probably happened. Before I could confirm it the whole CIC exploded in bedlam!

Everyone from watch standers to observers started yelling at once. Most of that yelling was directed at me, wanting to know what happened, wanting to know why I fired missiles at pieces of junk, wanting to tell me what I did wrong. I couldn’t keep up with all the people in my face. The one person I did want to talk to was a civilian observer that had been assigned to the MSS station for training during the trials. We had gotten to know each other and his experience was invaluable to my training.

“Did I press Fire Auth?” I asked him.

“No,” he simply said. “You were cycling through alerts and then the missiles just fired.”

This was exactly what I remembered and now it felt good to have that confirmed by another person. I then heard the captain on the net say, “Everyone on this firing team get reliefs for your watch station and muster in the wardroom in five minutes.” Uh, oh. As one of my fellow shipmates took over my watch, I started to make my way out of CIC. There were still a crowd of people circling around and jabbering at me. When it all got too much I shouted, “Just leave me alone for right now!” Most people backed off but I felt a hand on my shoulder and turned to see the Lt. Cmdr who sat the AAWC console trying to talk to me. He was a cool guy that I had become pretty friendly with during the training for trials. As friendly as any enlisted and officer were allowed to be. He was also an excellent AAWC operator which was ironic because if what I thought had happened was true, he had screwed up. He was trying to say something to me but I didn’t even want to talk to him at the moment. “Please, sir, I can’t even talk to you right now. Let me get down to the wardroom.” He could have ordered me to talk to him but to his credit he backed off and let me go.

I walked slowly down to the wardroom, which is, if you don’t know, the area where the officers eat. It is also the area where we hold briefings and about the only time enlisted sailors are allowed in there. The wardroom has a huge center table where the captain sits surrounded by his senior officers during meal times. Around that table, on the bulkheads of the wardroom, are smaller tables where the junior officers eat their meals. During briefings the officers and higher ranking enlisted sit at the main table while the petty officer enlisted sit at the smaller tables. Because of the delay in warding off all the people that were trying to talk to me, I was the last of the firing team to enter the wardroom. I had intended on finding as seat at one of the smaller tables but I had a surprise. There across from the captain at the main table was an empty chair.

“Petty Officer Lovelace,” the captain said. “Have a seat right here.” This was not a good sign. The Lt. Cmdr, who only arrived just before me, tried to say something to the captain but he cut him off. “WEPS, I’ll be talking first. Just sit down.” WEPS stood for Weapons Officer which this Lt. Cmdr was.

I expected the captain to start yelling at me but he actually just started talking to the whole group in a calm tone. “Everything was going great. We got that skin to skin kill on the first shot then everything went to hell.” He then looked directly across at me. “Petty Officer Lovelace, why did you shoot those next two missiles without orders to do so?”

I calmed myself, took a deep breath and spoke, “Sir, I didn’t shoot those two missiles. The Semi-Auto doctrine we had enabled was sending me a ton of recommend fire alerts on all the pieces of the destroyed drone. I was cycling through those alerts waiting on the fire asap targets when the missiles just launched by themselves.”

“Launched by themselves? You didn’t press fire auth?”

“No, sir…”

At this point WEPS couldn’t contain himself any longer and shouted, “I did it! It was my fault!”

The captain turned to him, “How was it your fault?”

“I accidently pressed fire authorized bypass instead of fire asap,” WEPS said.

“What does that mean?” the captain asked.

“It means,” I said, “That it put the computer in control of firing missiles and it shot at the next two targets that were in the recommend fire que, which happened to be pieces of the destroyed first drone.” It’s exactly what I thought had happened and now it was confirmed.

Nobody said anything for the next few moments and I braced for what I thought would surely be the captain chewing some ass. Instead he calmly said, “OK, lesson learned. Let’s not press that button again.” With that, he dismissed everyone. WEPS came over to apologize to me. Can you believe an officer apologizing to an enlisted guy? I reassured him it was an honest mistake and I thanked him profusely for his honesty. He could have said nothing at all and I would have been put through the ringer for days until data could be analyzed to show I was telling the truth. As it was, I was feeling very relieved that it wasn’t trying to be pinned on me. I only got to enjoy that feeling for a few minutes.

The TAO of our firing team approached me. His normal job is the Chief Engineering Officer which we called CHENG. CHENG said to me, “You know, you could have hooked (a term that meant selecting a target on your console to see all the data on it) the correct targets and fired on them yourself. Your inaction led to this mess.” I didn’t particularly have a fondness for CHENG. I didn’t really know him but in the time our firing team had been training for the trials, I had a feeling he was one of those officers that thought himself high above the enlisted and that we were only minions to do his bidding. With that statement he had just made to me, I confirmed that feeling. He just couldn’t believe that a fellow officer and not a lowly enlisted was to blame for the fuck up. This pissed me off and instead of cowering before his mighty rank (which was a Commander, one below Captain), I defended myself. In the navies of the world of wooden ships and sails, the officers were the educated ones and the enlisted had no formal education at all. Not so in the modern Navy. The enlisted were the ones that were sent to technical schools. The officers, who came into the Navy with their college degrees in anything from liberal arts to proctology, were sent to short courses that taught them just enough about the systems they would be in charge of to make them dangerous. I knew my system in and out and I wasn’t about to let this guy tell me stuff he had no idea about in order to paint me as a lowly enlisted scapegoat.

“That’s not correct, sir.” I responded to him firmly. “Hooking those targets would only have put them in close control to see their data. Pressing fire auth would have still fired at the next target in the recommend fire que which were pieces of the destroyed drone.”

“You are wrong petty officer.”

“I’m not and I can prove it.”

“How can you do that?”

“Let’s go to CIC, put the system in training mode, and get the RSC to build three simulated targets and engage them. At MSS I’ll hook the last target to be engaged and then press fire auth. You’ll see that it fires on the first target and not the one I hooked.”

A look of uncertainty came over CHENG, but by now most of the firing team minus the CO, had gathered around to hear this discussion and he didn’t want to appear to back down to an enlisted guy. He agreed and off we went back to CIC. I won’t drag the rest of this out with all the details because I am sure you figured out the scenario I mentioned in the previous paragraph played out exactly as I said it would. In the end the CHENG just said, “Hmm, still think you could have done something.” As he walked away I realized that I might still be used as a scapegoat. I talked to some of my fellow computer technicians and a few days later when all the data had been analyzed, I got them to print me out a log that showed who pressed what button at what time so I could defend myself against anybody that came at me. I kept that piece of paper locked up in my rack for about six months. Luckily I didn’t need to use it. By the way, I participated in two more missile firings that went without a hitch.

Thirty-two years later they are still citing that missile event when training new sailors for CSQQT. Before my health condition prevented me from going on ships, I became one of those civilians technical representatives onboard for the trials. My group of sailors were always shocked to learn I was the one that was on the MSS console in the scenario that they are taught about in classroom training on how to avoid that situation.

That’s the story. Not a particular funny one, but a story nonetheless.

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