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Captain Moloney was flying back to his ship from a
replenishment
CO's conference at the supply airstrip on Masirah, Oman. The
Omani's were using Brit Expat pilots to fly
their fighters against Yemen. Masirah was one of their bases and
we used it as a transfer point to supply the Persian Gulf
battlegroup. The Brits naturally had an officers club, it was
naturally stocked with beer/booze in a Muslim country, they naturally
wanted access to things we had on our ships and we naturally wanted
access to their beer. " Two minutes after I
took that photo, I was
dangling on a wire being dumped back on my ship. Not very
dignified, but I don't stand on dignity." Pat
International relations can be so interesting.
Other guys
attending were from an AOR and an AFS. Pat hitched a ride
on their helo's.
This photo was the return to the Humpin'HASS from one of those logistic
planning sessions. They really were useful meetings. Pat
controlled the civilian tankers and kept all the fuel passers topped
off. Sometimes it seemed that the 'HASS' took fuel in one side
and shot it out
the other.
In
the photo above, Pat was sitting on the deck of an H-46 in a
horsecoller
waiting to get hoisted down to the 145's hover-deck. If you look
at
the bow, you can see the landing
signal officer in yellow jersey on the port side of the deck. Pat
had
asked the pilot of the bird to take a turn around the ship so he could
take some pictures.
This
was the best. Great looking old girl isn't she?
"The SAC...in 81 when I was Cargo Mate on HASS I got
highlined over to
SAC while we were doing a consol and had a root canal done. Got
highlined back and finshed the consol, running the deck operations
under medications.
Probably not the smartest thing I've ever done!" Pat
The
SAC class AOE's were the only navy manned ships that could give MSC
manned ships a run for the money in battlegroup ops. They knew
who the competition was and really turned to. Captain Moloney never
found that to be the case with the AOR's. They had 600 man crews,
the
AO had 125; they could do 27
knots on those battleship engines, the AO could do 20 on a good day;
but if
gas was the only commodity they were looking for, the bird farms always
came to the MSC oiler.
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