John F Kennedy (CV 67) - Naval Cruise Book

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TRAINING Heat, humidity, and drill, drill, drill. You stood on the flight deck with the merciless Caribbean Sun radi- ating off the non-skid. You sat in a repair locker with sweat the only buffer between you and your helmet. You dragged fifty pounds of patching tools and equipment up passageways, down passageways, and back again. You ran mes- sage sheets, you were a flopper. you administered first aid to a flopper. There were pretend bombs, pretend bugs. pretend nukes. steering casualties, basic engineering casualties, simulated aircraft casualties, mass casualties. And you sweated through it all, while the damage control training teams made those impersonal check marks, and each day the P.O.D. carried the scores for each repair team. Finally, it ended. The training was very soon to become the real thing: extended deployment to the Eastern Mediterranean.

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REFRESHER It ' s a team effort. It has to be. The ship is too large: the job too demanding to be otherwise, and all teams require training. When we left the yards early in 1983 we were a mixture of old hands and new. For some it was the first time in an operational status. For others it was a secon- dary school where they were no longer pupils, but teachers. For everyone this was a new life experience and every day brought challenges. As reflected in the following pages, we visited some ports, and were even involved in some exercises prior to Type Training. They were a bit like the first time your father let you set on his lap and hold the steering wheel. We were driving but we didn ' t have the reflexes, or the control. That is, not yet. We sailed to Gitmo, That ' s Guantanamo Bay, Cuba to the uninitiated. There had been practices before hand but this was the dress rehersal.

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