I will post 2 short stories today.  One I call "Departing the USS Banner" and the other I call "The 'West Side Story' Story".

DEPARTING THE USS BANNER (1967).  I have another USS Banner story to tell, and it is my favorite one.  As a spy ship, the Banner had a military officer onboard in charge of all intelligence gathering operations.  The Banner also carried a contingent of marines that were ostensibly on board to protect the ship from what happened to the USS Pueblo (boarding and capturing).  The curious thing to me was that these marines were all fluent in Russian and worked in the classified area of the ship; which was off-limits to me.  Therefore, I knew that their primary reason for being on the ship was not to repel boarders.  Even though I had a Top Secret clearance, I had not been briefed into the spy mission program.  However, it was very easy to determine what was going on.  The intelligence officer would speak in Russian when I was in the officer’s wardroom.  And as is usually the case, the enlisted people did not care for their superior officer.  This was especially true for the marines who reported to the intelligence officer. 
During the second 3-week deployment to the operating area off Vladivostok, Russia, the marines and I concocted a plan to play a joke on the intelligence officer when I debarked the ship to go home.  My mission would be over, and it was not likely that I would ever see him again.   We developed a short speech that I would deliver to the intelligence officer in Russian as I left the ship.  The marines coached me on how to say this speech with the proper dialects.  I memorized it, and they kept coaching me to get inflections right, etc.   The speech went something like this.  “Goodbye, my friend.  It was great sailing with you, and I hope our paths will cross again”.
Debarkation day came, and it was time for me to leave.  And as promised, the intelligence officer was on the quarterdeck. With  my suitcase and briefcase in hand, I prepared to debark the Banner.  I noticed that a bunch of the marines were in the area or looking down from a higher deck.  When I reached him, I put my suitcase down and shook his hand.  As I shook his hand I gave my speech.  I then picked up my suitcase and briefcase and walked down the gangplank.  I never looked back, and I never found out what his reaction was to my words.
To me, the interesting part of this whole experience was that he had talked in my presence about things above my “need to know”.  Now I am talking to him in a way that says that I may be fluent in Russian as well, and I probably understood what he had been saying all along.  From what I know about the intelligence community is that they often evaluate performances by using fellow officers to see how they perform their job (read that as, they spy on each other).

THE “WEST SIDE STORY” STORY (1961).  The next story takes us back to my Sigma Nu fraternity days at the University of Rhode Island.  The movie “West Side Story” was in the theaters at that time and was immensely popular.  In fact, lines stretched around the block to get in to see it.  Eddie Anderson and I went to see the movie.  You may remember my friend Eddie from the Fart and Burp story I posted earlier.  West Side Story was, essentially, a remake of Shakespeare’s play “Romeo and Juliet” only held in New York City’s west side which was rife with all kinds of ethnic gangs, notably Puerto Rican ones.  In the famous balcony scene, Tony goes to Maria’s home and climbs up to the balcony to be with her.  While they are holding hands and whispering sweet nothings to one another, Maria’s father calls to her.  She looks inside from the balcony and says to Tony, “I can’t stay.  Go quickly”.  Tony says to her, “I’m not afraid”.  Maria looks at Tony and says, “Oh, but they are strict with me.  Please”.  They lovingly look into each other’s eyes, and holding hands, they begin to sing a version of the movie’s most famous song, “Tonight”.  They sing together, “Goodnight, goodnight.  Sleep tight, and when you dream, dream of me, tonight”.
Remember this balcony scene as I tell you the next important part of this story.  The fraternity rooms at URI did not have beds in them.  They were for studying, not sleeping.  Instead, all the fraternity brothers slept in the attic, which we called the deck.  The deck had many double bunks.  Another rule URI had was that the deck windows had to be open, even in winter.  It was not uncommon for those sleeping near open windows to wake up in the morning covered with snow.  The deck was a sleeping place for tired men, and not too much tomfoolery went on there.  That is until Eddie and I appeared on the scene.
After seeing the “West Side Story” movie, we devised a devilish plan.  We waited until there was a night when most of the guys went to bed at about the same time.  Once in bed, in the darkness,  Eddie said aloud, “Maria” doing his best to imitate Maria’s father calling her.  I then said in Maria’s voice, “I can’t stay.  Go quickly”.  Eddie then imitated Tony and said, “I’m not Afraid”.  Then I said, “Oh, but they are strict with me.  Please”.  Then we both began singing the Goodnight song.  Well, this did not go over too well with the guys trying to go to sleep; especially since neither Eddie nor I had good singing voices.  They boo’d and hiss’d and told us to shut up.  Well we did, until the next night, when we repeated the performance only Eddie and I switched roles.  The reaction from the guys was even more violent than the previous night.  We repeated the scene about a week later.  The fourth time we did this, to our surprise, when we got to the “Goodnight” song, all the brothers began singing along with us.  The deck was full of song that night.
One other point on this story is that almost every night, there was another song going on.  It was a song of 40 or 50 guys passing gas.  You know, farting.  This is probably the reason that the university rulers required that the windows be open; so that the resulting gas could be swept away by the wind.  Oh, by this time, Eddie and I knew how to spell fart (Read the "Fart and Burp Chart Story" posted earlier).

Well, that's enough of my feeble attempts to impress girls.  In today's post, I relate a couple of harrowing experiences I had during my professional career.  They don't fall into the Near Death Experiences I posted earlier, but they were scare nonetheless.  The first story tells of when I was reporting to the spy ship the USS BANNER.  I gave a near death story earlier when I was on the BANNER.  This story is entitled "Reporting to the BANNER".  The second story is about when 3 of us strayed into a highly classified area in Eielson Air Force Base in Fairbanks, Alaska.  It is entitled "Eielson Air Force Base.  Try tp [it yourselves in my shoes as you read these stories.

​REPORTING TO THE USS BANNER (1967).  I gave my near-death experience in Chapter 3 when the Banner was rammed by a Soviet ship.  But I did have a couple of interesting things happen to me during that particular trip.  The first happened when I initially reported to the Banner to begin the mission.
As I said earlier, the Banner, originally a light cargo ship, had been converted to a state-of-the-art surveillance or spy ship.  NAVOCEANO was providing the cover story for its presence as an oceanographic research vessel.  I was reporting on board for its third mission in the Sea of Japan.  Because of its nefarious mission, the ship was berthed at the remotest pier of the US Naval Base in Yokosuka, Japan.  I flew to Tokyo and took a taxi for the fairly long ride to Yokosuka.  Once in Yokosuka, I had to switch taxis to one that was allowed on the naval base. Once on the base, we drove for quite a while to get to the pier where the Banner was berthed. Then the taxi driver stopped his vehicle suddenly and told me that he was not allowed to go any farther.  I saw the Banner at the far end of the pier, and I began the long trek to it with a suitcase and a briefcase in hand.  It was evening, and it was dark.  When I was about a 100 yards from the ship, 3 or 4 marines came out of nowhere, pushed me against a fence, put a gun to my head, and asked me my business.  I told them that I was an oceanographer for the navy and had orders to report onboard.  Despite the rifle they had pointed at me, the marines were very courteous in the way they talked to me.  They asked to see my orders.  When satisfied, they escorted me to the Banner and introduced me to the Quartermaster of the deck.  When the quartermaster acknowledged that they were expecting me, the marines apologized for the “inconvenience” and left.
I always thought that this experience was amusing, but I must say, it was a little disconcerting to have a marine pointing his gun at me.
EIELSON AIRFORCE BASE.  I am not sure when the Eielson Airforce base incident occurred, but it happened a few years after the Banner incident given above.  I was now involved in Arctic Ocean research, probably around 1961 or 1962.  As you will see, what happened is remarkably similar to the Banner story above.  At the time of year that we were at the Eielson base in Fairbanks, AK, it was dark and very cold.  We were experiencing maintenance problems with our aircraft because of the cold weather conditions, and it had been moved to a hanger for repairs.  We, Dick Ketchum, Dr. David Amstutz, and I, were wandering around the base trying to locate the hanger where our aircraft was being housed.  We were lost, and suddenly, we were challenged by several marines.  They pushed us to the ground on our faces and aimed guns to the back of our heads.  We were asked why we were wandering around a restricted area at night.  We explained who we were and told them that we did not know we were in a restricted area.  They let us up and escorted us away.
We never found out why a restricted area was not fenced off and how we could accidentally wander into it.  We did find out why the area was restricted and why we were treated so harshly.  It housed the high-altitude U-2 spy planes that were operating over the Soviet Union.  In 1960, Francis Gary Powers, working for the CIA, was shot down by the Soviet Union a year or two before we were accosted by the marines that night.