USS Saratoga

Of Gamecocks and Aircraft Carriers:

The USS Saratoga 20 Years Ago

by Alec Newell

USS Saratoga (CV 60)

 

The Decommissioning Ceremony for the USS Saratoga was held on August 20, 1994.  The following article was written earlier that same year.

This week the USS Saratoga will steam into Mayport from her final deployment and be decommissioned later this year.  It will be the end of a career that has spanned the administrations of nine U. S. Presidents, and five decades of distinguished military service.  It will also mark the end if a long affiliation that I have had with the ship since before moving to Mayport Village in 1976.

My house lies directly west of "B" Pier on the Naval Station, in a direct line with the old St. Johns Lighthouse.  From my yard I can throw a stone and hit the abandoned St. Johns Lighthouse or read the hull numbers on the ships in the basin.  From the signal bridge of the Saratoga, you can look through the stationary binoculars called 'big eyes" and see the chickens in my yard flying up to the roost poles in their fly pens; and every evening at sundown, the chickens can hear taps being played as the ships lower their flags during "colors."
 

 USS Saratoga commemorative decommissioning ball cap

When a carrier comes in after a long deployment, it is very much like the circus coming to town: balloons, banners, and streamers.  Tugboats toot, bands play, wives, children, and sweethearts, all wave and throw kisses to the sailors that line the flight deck in their dress uniforms.  The mooring lines go over, the brows go up, and for the next two hours it seems that every taxi cab and car in Duval County is pouring out of the Navy base, choking the Mayport Road with traffic.



USS Saratoga's Homecoming after Operation Desert Storm in 1991

 

Days before her arrival, the Mayport Road is festooned with billboard messages, more banners, placards, yellow ribbons and hand- made signs welcoming home crew members of the carrier and the ships from her carrier group entourage.  Television cameras are always on hand to record young sailors embracing parents, kissing wives, or holding infants that were born while they were away at sea.  What the narrow focus of the camera cannot convey is the enormous economic bonanza that impacts a community when a floating city of 5,000 people or more, flush with cash and high spirits, is dumped into a middle sized suburban community of bars, motels, restaurants, and movie theaters.  Local merchants and fast food restaurants have been quietly beefing up their product inventories and personnel schedules for days, to accommodate the financial windfall that a carrier homecoming brings.

Within hours local shipyards are busy setting up work compounds in hangar bays of the ship and a frenzied work pace begins, often 24 hours a day, seven days a week, to meet the stringent demands of rigid deployment schedules.  The temporary shipyard compounds  resemble a miniature industrial complex of office trailers, modular shops, tool rooms, time clocks, water coolers, fax machines, phone lines, and electrical networks that are completely independent of the ship's own power and communication systems.



When you spend hundreds, or even thousands of hours working on a ship over the course of years, that ship begins to take on an almost flesh and blood quality of its own.  Some you like better than others.  Often two ships of the same class, like identical twins, can have radically different personalities.  The steel itself seems to magically hold, or give at critical moments on one ship, while you can expect sheared bolts and cracked welds from the twin.  The Saratoga, though stressed with metal fatigue from age, and cluttered with wire-ways for communications and weapon systems that she was not designed to accommodate, she has always had a good work ethic, and has always shown the game heart of a game cock which has always been her mascot.

 



When she limped back into port after Operation Desert Storm, you could feel the exhaustion and the pride.  The non-skid on her flight deck was worn bare for the length of two football fields, and was red with rust.  Only two of her four original catapults were fully operational, and with several of her boilers shot, her propulsion systems had been taxed to the limit.  In an eight month, history making, extended deployment, she had launched 2,626 long distance combat sorties, and had delivered 4.3 million pounds of ordinance in her mission to liberate Kuwait.  The only air to air "kill" of a Mig jet by a U.S. Navy pilot was in a FA-18, launched from the Saratoga.

I am not an overly sentimental person, but I will probably miss the bustle and activity in the hangar bays, with the noise and exhaust from the forklifts and high-reaches, or the aggravation of countless fire and security drills.  I will miss seeing the insigniae of flight squadrons above the divisional doors and the hand painted mural of a gray gamecock that crows defiantly in Hangar Bay One.  I will think about the heavy, chrome plated gamecocks that top the ceremonial rope stanchions on the forward quarterdeck, and I will wonder what has become of them.