BAHREIN 1968-69

1968 found me stationed in Bahrein, working at the Joint Communications Centre with the Army and Navy communicators at HMS JUFAIR. In those days, despite the fact that my daughter was born a few months before my posting, it was to be a 13-month unaccompanied tour with a break in the UK half way through the tour.
The accommodation was seriously horrible - for the first few months I lived in the Army barracks, which were in so poor and unsafe a condition and with almost useless airconditioning that the verandahs were sealed off, being in danger of collapse. Soon I was moved into the Navy accommodation for while. That was OK, other than the fact that it was right under the junior ranks bar, where brawls and noise were more annoying than dangerous. The brawling usually broke out when the crews of the minesweepers came ashore after being at sea for a long time in fairly primitive conditions - booze as ever being the root of the problem.
Most of the civilian support staffs were Goanese and when they were provided with new and improved accommodation, the RAF took over their old buildings for our use. So I moved into what was once the Goanese kitchen; the airconditioning actually worked but the ceilings were painted reeds or something somilar from which the stink of cooking could not be eradicated.
We took our meals in the Navy mess and more or less got used to basic and sometimes horrible food - the worst being the eggs, all of which came from the Lebanon after being injected with some chemical to preserve them en route. They were truly, truly horrible things which few people ate.
And it came to pass that I struck up a friendship with some of the crew of the USS LUCE, which was on station then in the Gulf area. Now the US Navy eats well and so I joined them whenever I could and spent many an off-shift hour on board. The LUCE was a DLG-7 guided missile destroyer also fitted with, if memory serves, a 5.5" gun turret. Over the months I was shown all over the ship and one of the guys I met was the senior gunner, who asked me if I'd like to see the gun dry-fired. So I got settled in the firing seat and noted that the gun was pointed at the Sheik's palace a mile or so away and very pretty if looked, shining bright white in the sunshine. I was briefed on how the gun worked and the turret was powered up and I was told to push down on the firing pedal. I did so and the turret came alive with huge bits of machinery crashing to and fro. There were no shells or charges involved, of course, but the shell hoist, rammers, breech block etc were all thrashing around with a hell of a lot of noise, which I watched with interest, keeping the firing pedal down all the while.
Suddenly someone screamed "Stop!" "Stop!", so I let up the pedal and wondered what the panic was. It turned out that a safety man monitoring the shell hoist had spotted a live round going up the chain; by the time I stopped the dry-firing sequence it was only three away from being rammed into the breech. Had we not stopped, in the next 15 seconds or so the Sheik's palace would have taken a direct hit and, who knows, it might have altered the whole history of the Middle East? Believe it or believe it not - this really did happen.....