Radio Watch at midnight was, in my opinion, the worst watch of all on the U.S.S. Chicago CG-11. It was important, but boy, it was boring. Radio Watch only happened to me, and to the other members of the ON Division, when we were in port and the people who normally stood Radio Watch were not available, which was usually in the middle of the night.
During a midnight Radio Watch, the assigned person sat in the Combat Information Center, where it was always dark and lonely, and he was deprived of sleep as he listened through the night. He was sitting there, listening and waiting, just in case a brief message came to the Chicago, saying that the United States was in grave danger and the ship had only minutes to get out of port. (Think of the attack on Pearl Harbor.)
Normally, we computer guys would not have to do this, but when we were in port, with a large number of people away from the ship, we would have to stand in for the men who usually did this job, since we worked next to the CIC (Combat Information Center), where the messages from the radio were received. Since we maintained the CIC computers, we were considered to be reliable stand-ins.
The absolutely worst Radio Watch assignment was the midnight to 4 AM shift on a Saturday night / Sunday morning. If you were assigned to it, you knew that you had to get to bed early, but somehow that never happened. Then, about 11:00 PM, someone would come and wake you up. You had to sleepily drag yourself out of bed, get dressed, and get to the CIC before 11:45 PM, where you would relieve the prior person who had been standing the Radio Watch.
The Radio Watch took place at the Navigators’ table, which held the all-important shortwave radio, and also had numerous maps and navigation tools spread over it. The table was designed for people to stand at. There was no surface where you could lay out anything you might want to do. And there were no comfortable chairs to sit on. The only available seats in the room were high stools with no padding. They had stiff backs that were uncomfortable and nonfunctional, and they had no good place to put your legs.
I sometimes dragged a more comfortable chair out from another work space when I had the midnight Radio Watch, but I did not want to be too comfortable, because I might fall asleep. The shortwave radio was on the pillar that was right at the head of the Navigators’ table. I would listen, through the static and the noise, and the garbled, faint conversations of far-away people blundering onto the frequency, for someone official to come on and say a half dozen words that had no meaning, except to a few people who were in the know. I also had to listen for general radio checks and drills. If I missed those half dozen words, or those radio checks and drills, the whole ship, from the captain on down, would be disgraced.
If those half dozen very special words came through, I had to acknowledge that I had received the message. Immediately after that, I had to notify the Officer of the Day and the Captain, or his representative, that the message had come. Those special words meant that the ship and the nation was under attack and in imminent danger. There were only minutes to get out of port. All sailors would be immediately recalled to the ship, and the sailors who did not make it would be left behind.
Luckily, we never received those actual words. The one time that the Navy did send out those words, we were told, was during the Cuban Missile Crisis. That had created chaos, we were told, with ships crowding together and running into each other, and missing key personnel. San Diego Bay was jammed by ships trying to leave, and ship movements slowed to a crawl. The whole situation was so bad that the Navy never actually tried it again, and we only did simulations, or “drills.”
Thus, although the Navy considered midnight Radio Watch to be a very important job, it was extremely dull. You had been awakened after too few hours of sleep. You went down to a large, spooky, dark room, and listened to a noisy radio, just in case some meaningless words were broadcast.
When I was assigned to the midnight Radio Watch on the Chicago, I would try to read a book, but I was generally too tired to comprehend much, and I was afraid that I might miss the half dozen special words if my mind wandered too far. The hands on the clock crept ever so slowly toward 3:45 a.m., when my relief would arrive. And he had better arrive!
