Russians

I saw on the cable news last night that a Russian ship “interfered” with two U.S. navy ships in the Mediterranean sea last week. I am not sure what that carefully worded term “interfered” means, but I have an idea.

I remember back in my navy days, whenever we were one day out of Japan the Russian bear bombers would fly over the carrier just to try and screw with us. We always had two F-4 Phantoms sitting on the catapults ready to launch and intercept them and we did. The bigger bears would try to fly right over the flight deck with bomb bays open (and they were big bomb bays) just making a practice run. The F-4s would try to jockey them away from the carrier and us sailors working the flight deck would send the Rooskies a single digit salute. They were low and close enough to see our salutes. In the early days up north in the gulf of Tonkin the Vietnamese would try to surround the carriers with their sampans to try to “interfere” with our aircraft launches. What they did not realize was once a carrier turns into the wind at full speed to launch, there is no changing course because bomb laden jets need all the wind over the deck the ship can muster to help them get airborne. There was a lot of shittin and gettin when they realized we were not going to swerve (nor could we) to get out of their way.

Now if I were the captain of a navy ship in the Mediterranean and those Rooskies tried to “interfere” with my operation, it would be a game of “chicken” when I had the bosun sound general quarters, followed by the collision alarm and then changed course just a few degrees, not enough for the Rooskie captain to notice the course change but close enough so I could see his eyes bug out when all the ship’s guns and missiles were trained on him during a close pass by. Then we would see who went “chicken” first. In my mind one thing we cannot do is lose control of the seas if we want to continue the foreign policy we have had for the last 60 years. Once the Chinese see we can be bluffed they too will soon take us to task in the Pacific. They are already wanting to try us. Two ships potentially colliding during maneuvers is an incident, when an entire task force goes at it; that’s a war. We can deal with an incident; we don’t want them to escalate into a war, which they could if we show any fear at all. I feel that perhaps had that captain done what I said, he might have lost his career, but saved his nation. That’s how I see it; I may be wrong; I have been wrong in the past.