Bob Meyer graduated from Marshall High School in 1963 and enlisted in the Navy. After his initial training, he reported aboard the USS John S. McCain in Hawaii in the late summer of 1963. The McCain’s crew then completed qualification training and inspections for a Western Pacific (WestPac) cruise as part of a group headed by the carrier USS Bennington

The McCain steamed west across the Pacific in March 1964 with the Bennington and her escorts on a routine, peacetime cruise. But naval operations are complex even under non-combat conditions. Bob explained their missions on that cruise.

“The McCain’s mission would be patrolling; protecting the aircraft carrier; and practicing launching and recovering aircraft. When you’d operate with a carrier, they’d have one ship be a plane guard. If the aircraft overshot or didn’t catch the wires and went over the side, you were behind the carrier. Then if there was someone in the plane, you stopped and picked them up.”

Bob was fascinated by the underway replenishment process, known as “UnRep.” This is how ships at sea receive food supplies, ammunition, and fuel while underway. The process began with the McCain maneuvering alongside and matching the speed of a large ammunition, oil, and stores ship. A McCain sailor then shot a line to the larger ship. Bob explained the process from there.

“They’d pull over your two fuel stations, fore and aft, and they’d begin pumping fuel in you. It was a serious thing, taking on fuel. The smoking lamp was out. A big, twin-bladed helo would pick up a sling load of stores and drop it on our helo deck. You had to have a 50-man working detail out there to get it down to the storage rooms. You had to have all that stuff all out of the way for them to drop the next load. They also would high-line ammo over.”

High-lining meant the resupply ship would send over ammunition crates along wire cables between the two ships.

The McCain left the Bennington group and was operating alone about 200 miles off the coast of Japan in early August 1964 when Bob had a close brush with eternity. He was varnishing the deck of the Captain’s gig, a small boat used by the ship’s commander.

“I was wiping the deck down with a sponge. I tripped on the step and over I went,” Bob remembered. The 30-foot drop to the ocean’s surface momentarily took his breath away. “I was just kind of stunned,” he recalled, “I came up and hollered as loud as I could, but nobody saw me — a ship is noisy.” The ship was passing Bob when he saw a sailor on the ship’s fantail spot him, but then the ship’s wake pushed him back under water.

When Bob came to the surface again, the McCain was shrinking into the distance. “I remember thinking to myself — ‘Hey, this is it, kid — it’s over — that ship’s gone and you’re out here in the middle of nowhere,'” Bob recalled. Then he heard the ship’s horn and she began turning back. “I’ll never forget the three blasts on the ship’s whistle,” he said with a smile.

The McCain returned and sailors tossed life rings to Bob, who grabbed one to help keep afloat. On a second pass they shot a line over his head, which he grabbed and they used it to haul him aboard. “All these guys were standing around with rifles,” he remembered, “they were watching for sharks.”

The trip overboard earned Bob an interview with the ship’s Captain that evening. Bob remembered the Captain told him, “You are lucky to be alive.” Bob ended the story with, “The next Sunday I was in church!”

The McCain steamed back toward Hawaii. During that return trip the Gulf of Tonkin Incident took place off the Vietnamese coast during which North Vietnamese torpedo boats fired on a US Navy destroyer, which returned fire. This led to a major expansion of the U.S. role in the war in Vietnam.

Bob’s first cruise also led to his reassignment aboard the McCain.

“I decided that I wanted to be a Signalman, so I started hanging around with the Signal crew. They gave me books to read and I talked to the 1st Class. He said that he needed a Striker to come up to the Signal Bridge. So, I got on the Signal gang and they sent me to Signal School right there in Pearl Harbor. I enjoyed it —flashing flag; semaphore, where you talk with your hands; and they had 12-inch searchlights with filters (for blinking ship-to-ship messages) after dark.”

After months of refit the McCain received orders for another WestPac cruise, this time with the new aircraft carrier, USS America. The McCain crew again went through qualifying training and inspections before steaming west in September 1965.

One change in this cruise was that Bob was now a Signalman with a watch station, the Signal Bridge, on one of the highest points on the ship. The other change was that the Navy was sending more ships to support the expanding U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. The McCain was joining the USS America in a combat role in the sea off Vietnam.

The Lyon County Museum is organizing an exhibit about the impact of the Vietnam War on Lyon County. If you would like to share Vietnam experiences or help with the exhibit, please contact me at prairieviewpressllc@gmail.com or call the museum at 537-6580.