That kind reminds me of a story a buddy told me about his time in 82nd Airborne...His unit got tasked to train with Delta...He’s thinking cool! I get to learn to be a sneaky bad-ass!

Well it wasn't as cool as he thought it would be. They were told to "Hold this building"... Well poor Jeff say before he knows it, He has a cloth laundry bag over his head and his arms and legs duck-taped together. They dragged him and his friends out of the building (none of then faired any better)...They cut the pockets off their uniforms (faster then digging in them to get stuff out) and stacked them like cordwood in a chopper....

Wahoo, that sounds like fun doesn’t it! The only thing that he learned from them was that they are better than him and his friends and that he bruises easy...

That's a SEAL not to be messed with!

Aircraft carriers in the gulf don't stop at night and routinely cruise around at about 15 miles an hour (12 knots) as that keeps enough water moving past the rudders to maintain steerage. So figure that dude had to be rowing about 35 miles an hour to catch the carrier or at least have been the luckiest son-of-a-gun to have picked the spot in the sea that the ship was heading to.

We do stop once every 45 days or so to do a picnic but there would be a couple of thousand sets of eyes looking around the ship. There's not many places to hide on the sea - helo's intercept at 5 miles and beyond tiny fishing row boats. The anchorage point is never the same - figure having to seach the entire east coast of Florida to give you some scale.

The anchor chains don't hang down but are rather retracted inside the hause pipe and sit about 25 feet above the waterline, may be a bit more. The hause pipes are sealed with a bunch of 1 inch diameter bolts holding a steel storm plate down. When the ship is in port they don't drop anchors but rather tie the ship up using large line.

Aux con is located to the starboard (right) side of the bridge 9 flights of stairs above the hangerbay where there are a minimum of 6 people on watch while underway. Everyone (save the Captain and department heads) has to come to atttention and ask permission to enter the bridge while underway to get to aux con. The doors are about 1.5" thick, the glass is about an inch thick - built to withstand bomb blasts.

Secondary con is located in the nuclear reactor plant next to DC central which is manned 7x24 by a handful of watchstanders. No one comes into DCC without permission.

If the ship was giving tours while in port anybody can get though a coke can as the bomb sniffing dogs, hand searches and x-ray machines don't detect soda cans but rather explosives. When I have worked with the UDT or SEAL teams their bombs have been rather real looking with timers, wires and enough explosives (a teaspoon or so) to give the dogs a chance.

When I was in the gulf earlier this year we had enough boats in the water armed with .50's and SEALS that you couldn't get a fly though their screening. We had .30's set up on the brow, armed sentries, only crew members were allowed on or off the ship, all baggage was searched. There were dogs and pat downs. Of course our ship was recognized last year as having one of the finest programs in the fleet.

We did do an exercise with a team who came aboard via helicopter, briefed the mission, then retreated down to my berthing to get dressed in costume. The scenario was that they were rescued off of a sinking fishing boat and that the intel and security departments had to find out who they were and if they posed a treat. Dudes were unshaven, dressed in the white rag getups and even knew enough farsi (whatever!) to speak to the linguists.

15 years ago I played with the SEAL team as they attacked service school command San Diego. Our snipers killed half the team as they cut though the perimeter wire after they faked a car accident on the road that ran along the fence. They got killed again by the same sniper team after they took the commanding officer hostage. She was real bitch but per the ref's the snipers took out every terrorist before they would have had the chance to do anything. They had foolishly all come out into the open rather than posting one or two behind.

There are only two anchor chains. May be they mean mooring line number seven?

From my "other" web site [url]http://home.earthlink.net/~paul1960/[/url] on Navy Surface Warfare:
[img]home.earthlink.net/~paul1960/The_Study_Guide/Common_Core/106_Deck/Deck_Illustrations/Mooring_Lines.jpg[/img]

Mooring line seven is right "downtown" and overlooked but several watchstanders with at least two .30 Brownings, and a couple two or three 12 gauges/.45 toting guards. The whole crew comes and goes via aircraft elevator number two just forward of that line.

I would have thought that they would have approached from the water on the port side (left) and climbed aboard one of the sponsons - about 20-25 feet above the waterline.

Not that the SEAL's aren't some of the finest fighting men around, but a friend of mine in Force Recon in the Marines told me how he took out 5 SEALS hiding in a culvert during an excercise once. Although they were able to kill him also, he took 'em all out of the excersise.

Normally I wouldn't believe this, but there were several of his Marine buddies that backed the story up. He thought it was funny as hell 'cause they were all pissed off that they didn't get to finish the excersise, which had just started.

[img]http://www.ncsg.org/topohat-small.jpg[/img]

The Marines are the finest fighting force in the world. That is my completely unbiased opinion...SEMPER FI[}:D]

A Black Hawk is a huge radar target compared to a sea skimming surface to surface missile. The TAS radar would pick them up at over 30 miles from it's height. I've seen it track cars on the 101 highway along the California coast at a real distance. The SPS-49 and -48E radars can detect things way way out there - the -48E radar has a mode to destroy airborne avionics. Now talk about the SPY-1 radar which is a generation better than the SPS models and you're talking high tech.

Wonder where the look outs were? Underway there are lookouts fore and aft watching for hazards and people falling over the side. A few hundred people work the flight deck and there's always at least one HH-60 helo at the ready. During flight ops there's an SH-60 airborne. We never shut the radars down except for maintenance and then always keep the alternate service radar spinning.

If they use a helo with an IFF transponder of course it would respond too at a really great distance.

We use to take people who fell asleep on watch to Captain's Mast. We had pretty good response with our system, how did your's work?

While aboard USS Midway I ran one of the IC shops. One of the things I would do is run though the sound powered station-to-station intercom system to check for dead circuits or other problems. Late one night I went to the aft lookout circuit and picked up music. So I used the switchboard to cycle though the stations on that circuit until I figured out where the music was coming from - CIC (combat information center).

I had the combo to CIC so I let myself into the darken room lit only with dim red lights and the glow of various radar displays. I knew that we had a couple outlets up there for the circuit so I searched around each until I found a nice looking boom box with a set of sound powered headphones sitting over the speaker. Somebody had used a rubber band to hold the TX button down. I pull the headset off and unplug the cassette player and start walking out with it. Somebody comes up to protest that I'm taking his radio. I said step outside.

I tell the kid that me and him are either going to wake up the XO (executive officer a full Navy captain) and he can explain to him why he was entertaining the lifeguard or it's your choice to destroy the evidence by walking down to the fantail with me and tossing the thing off.

He made the right choice. Back in the day we could throw anything over the side. There was an MAA (master at arms) posted there to check for classified material. The kid walks up and shows the MAA his boom box and then throws it into the sea! The kid then walked over to the aft lookout who was now actually doing his job and they had a brief and heated conversation.

[:)] Justice!