Welcome to Veterans Chronicles. I'm Greg Corumbus. Our guest in this edition is
John K. Hill. He is a US Navy veteran of the Vietnam War.
We spoke with him during a visit to the USS Midway Museum in San
Diego, California, and as we often do, we began the conversation by
focusing on his younger years, starting with where he was born and raised.
I was born in Battle Creek, Michigan, where all the flakes come from
Kelloggs. Yes, and Post which is right across the street from Kelloggs,
the serial capital of the world. So did you have a history of military
service in your family, my dad and my grandfather and where did they serve?
And how well? My grandfather was in the cavalry in World War One?
My dad was army World War Two in the Solomon Islands and all of
MacArthur's Island, hopping throughout the South Pacific. Did that have a strong impression
on your desire to serve? No, So what got you into the service.
Well, if you were a high school senior in nineteen sixty nine,
you had two choices. After you graduated, you were either going to college
or we're going to Vietnam, and I knew there wasn't a college in the
country that would take me, so I would rather enlist and have a little
bit of say so in where I was going and when I was going and
why did you choose the Navy. At the time, my dad talked me
into it, having been in the Army. They had a real good electronics
program, which is what I wanted to get into. But in the beginning
I wanted to be a helicopter pilot in the Army. I was all signed
up and ready to go. Then my dad, who knew an admiral as
a friend, took me out to dinner and they both talked me into not
Army, You're going in the Navy because they wanted to see me again.
I guess they thought your survival chances were better and better. Yeah, you
signed the papers and where did you go? Then? Great Mistakes, Illinois,
Great Lakes is what he means. But what did you do there boot
camp? And what did that consist of? Well, the usual, you
know, lots of marching, calisthetics, pt firefight training and stuff like that,
which was pretty fun. And after we graduated from that, you went
to your various technical school. So for me it was propulsion and engineering still
at Great Lakes. And was that an area you'd already had some interest in
or was that all new to you? No, I was not wanting to
go into that area at all. But the military has this little trick up
their sleeve. They wait until you're in and you're all sworn in, and
then they tell you, oh, you're color blind. You cannot do anything
on this list, which is everything you want to do, And they tell
you, here are the choices you have, and it's one item something you
absolutely do not want to do. So for me it was boilerman. Who
wants to be a boilerman? Nobody, but that's how they fill the billet.
Was it something that came fairly easily to you as you learned it them?
Yeah? I mean I had a mechanical background. We all did in
those days. You know, you souped up your own cars and worked on
machinery as a teenager, so it was all pretty easy. What kind of
a system did they train you on? I would imagine different ships might have
different systems. It was a Babcock and Wilcox boiler plant with a six hundred
PSI operating pressure for steam driven turbans, which is what almost all the ships
in the Navy were running on in those days. And so after you trained,
where did they send you to San Diego? Right here? Okay,
right here? And then what I was into a destroyer here in San Diego?
I check in. I made a huge mistake. When I check in
at the quarter deck, they call for somebody from your division, you know,
the engineering division, who runs up and they're very friendly, and they
rip out their little notebook and they go, hey, when's your birthday?
Dumb things? Should never tell them your birthday? Is that only means when
it comes, you're gonna be hunted down and tortured. Okay, I have
to ask that, what did they do on your birthday? If this is
a family film, I probably shouldn't go into it. Okay, I'll take
your advicement on that one. So was this the Buck? Yes? Okay,
so the USS Buck? And when did you set sail? Well?
When I first got on the Buck, we went out numerous times to the
local island out here, San Clemente for bombing practice, you know, firing
our guns and stuff. We did that a lot to get the gun crews
trained. And up to speed before we took off for Westpac. And then
once he did that, what was your voyage like? Well, I learned
on my first trip to Hawaii that I'm subject to seasickness coming from the Midwest.
Never gave it a thought, didn't even know it existed, but I
found out very quickly it's a bad thing. We stopped in Hawaii for fuel
and supplies, and they gave us They think it was a couple of weeks
of liberty there, which was pretty neat because coming from the Midwest, you
know, that's that's a dream. And for me it was very patriotic because
as we pull in, we're pulling in right across from the Arizona Memorial and
that's where we tied up. And it happened to be on a weekend,
so I remember standing watch on my ship looking across at the Arizona and it
was just very moving and patriotic to be in Hawaii right across from the Arizona
Oriole on a weekend. Just moving. It gets me fired up patriotically.
From Hawaii, next stop was Midway Island to get more fuel, which is
what the BTS are all responsible for, So that means you will not be
leaving the ship and doing any exploring like the rest of the crew. You're
going to be there putting gas in the ship. The one thing that was
interesting on our way from Hawaii to Midway. I'm just nineteen years old.
I'm down in the boiler room and over the one MC we get an announcement
attention all hands, there will be no fishing well tied up to the pier
at Midway Island. And I thought, oh, that's interesting. So once
we got there, I was working down in the boiler room, I thought
I'd climb up and take a peek to see what Midway looked like, at
least from the pier, and there must have been a thousand fishing poles over
the side of the ship. I mean every possible sailor was fishing, and
I couldn't believe it. They made that announcement you're not supposed to be fishing,
and everybody on the ship was fishing. Turns out the reason was apparently
there was some poisonous coral that the fish feed on, which make the fish
poisonous and dangerous to handle. But the whole ship was fishing and nobody seemed
to care. What are you doing on board as this journey continues into the
Pacific, working operating the boiler equipment, you know, making the ship goal.
What does that consist of? It consists of long, boring hours on
watch. You've told every high school dating story there is by the time you
get to Vietnam, and you shared that with everybody down in the boiler room
because there's nothing else to do. You can only stare at gauges so long.
What are you looking out for? What could go wrong that you need
to be there to observe and respond to. They're always changing speeds, it
seems like, and whenever they do, the demand on the boiler changes and
our pressure could drop quickly or rise quickly. So there's different jobs, you
know. So the guy that's actually operating the boiler is called the burner man,
and he's operating the burners in the fuel that's going through them, and
his job is to keep the pressure right on the number it's supposed to be
and not lift safety valves from lack of attention where the pressure would build up
over its safety limit, and then lift a valve that's very loud, and
no matter where you are on the ship, you would know that somebody lifted
safeties. What happens if the pressure is getting too high and you don't respond,
or it's getting too low and you don't If it's getting too high less
fuel less fuel, you know, you throttle the thing down if it's not
high enough to give it more fuel. And our fuel line was one inch
in diameter under three hundred and fifty psi, so we're pushing a lot of
fuel into that nozzle times. However, many burners you have going in the
boiler, which was typically three or four to maintain a cruising speed that they
wanted the rest of us just boring boiler talk. I mean, so,
did you commiserate much with the rest of the crew or was your responsibility to
be down in the guts of the ship most of it? Well, that's
your whole family, that's your life, is the guys you work in the
boiler room with. And there's lots of little initiation things that go on in
engineering to welcome you into the real world of engineering. One of our favorite
tricks was up on the upper level of the boiler room where you're looking through
the sight glass to see where the water level is in the boiler. The
older guys that have been on the ship a long time would take a brand
new quarter and stick it on the sight glass and let it sit there all
watch. The sight glass is about eight hundred and fifty degrees, so after
a couple of hours, that brand new quarter is right around eight hundred and
fifty degrees. So then the trick is they would take a pen and just
flick that quarter off the sight glass. It would fall down between the grating
and make a bunch of noise. It would hit the deck plates at the
bottom where us new guys were, and there isn't a sailor in the world
that won't reach down to pick up that brand new quarter. It's an instantaneous
third degree burn on your two fingers which you can't process fast enough before you
stick it in your pocket. Then it burns through the pocket lighter immediately and
gives you a nice little brand on the thigh. And we could see the
guys in the shower who was in engineering and had just been initiated with their
quarter brand into the side of their thigh. Well, after that story,
I think we ought to trust his judgment in not sharing what they did to
him on his birthday. We'll have much more with US Navy veteran John K.
Hill in just a moment. I'm Greg Corumbas. Please stay with us
on Veterans Chronicles. This is Veterans Chronicles. I'm Greg Corumbas. Our guest
in this edition is John K. Hill, a US Navy veteran of the
Vietnam War. He served as a boilerman on a destroyer, the USS Buck,
and after describing the voyage to the waters off of Vietnam, mister k
Hill described the role the Buck played during his deployment there. Well, if
it wasn't on the gun line, then we spent time behind an aircraft carrier
what they called plane guarding in case somebody or a plane got blown off the
flight deck, we were there to pick him up. Of course, all
the carriers have a helicopter airborne during flight ops, and the idea is you
would think the helicopter would get their way before us. But apparently in one
case it was the plane guard helicopter that got blown off the flight deck,
and so there was no airborne helicopter to pick that crew up. But that's
just driving behind the carrier about a quarter mile behind. So from the perspective
of my job, it was nothing boring, But one of our more interesting
jobs was intercepting supply ships going to Hanois that weren't supposed to be doing that,
I guess, because you know, I'm so far down on the totem
pole of what I need to know. All I got was tenth hand information
a month afterwards. So anyway, we might be sitting at the at the
gun line, you know, in between rounds, just riding in the surf,
and all of a sudden we get a general quarters belt and a flank
bell to take off at this heading as fast as we can go and intercept
this supply ship. And even though we were an old World War two tin
can, we had the twin mounts, you know, and we looked very
menacing if you're if you're not a combat vessel. So we would come alongside
these supply ships with all of our guns aimed at them and our torpedo launchers
aimed at them, and apparently we're telling them on the radio that they are
being escorted to Guam, they need to follow us, and that they need
to cooperate. So here we are taking the supply ship to Guam. They're
all their crew members are on the flight deck. Taking pitch of us on
their main deck, and our whole crew was on our decks taking pictures of
them. And whenever we intercepted one of these ships, we would fly our
ship's flag, which was a jolly roger because we were the buccaneers. I
got my ship's flag right here, and we had a great, big,
huge jolly roger that was oh gigantic, and it just filled the whole back
end of the ship, so that we felt that was cool. Absolutely.
Now you're telling me in the break about the range of the guns and some
of the things you heard from folks well after the war about how effective the
buck had been. Apparently we recalled the fastest gun in the West as in
the West Pack. What was the range of those guns? Well, not
being a gunner's mate, this is what they told us, twenty six thousand
yards. It's a long way, it is. The interesting thing to me
was every time we fired around, you know the shockwave, you don't want
to be anywhere near the barrel. You want to be behind it and as
far away as you can be to get away from the shockwave of that thing
going. Sometimes we would take a break and go up on the deck at
night and you could see the shell heading out over land. But the real
eye opener to me and my shipmates was we were out there when one of
the battleships, I believe it was the New Jersey, was maybe ten or
twenty miles further east of us, and I knew that sound travels, you
know, so fast, so you'd see this thing fired. Of course,
they're firing sixteen inch guns, huge, but I never thought about the heat
traveling at the speed of light. You would see them fire, and as
soon as you saw the flash, you felt the heat on your face instantaneously,
and you go damn, you know, and you'd hear that show going
over us as it's on its way deep into Vietnam. And that's a sixteen
inch round. That's like a Volkswagen Beetle being fired inland. And that's a
long way. That's about fifteen miles. I think they might have gone further
than our twenty six thousand yards. I don't know that for fact. I
mean, I think they had a longer range. No. One of the
other things that happened while we were on this gun line, we would fire
rounds all night long. And one of the things that our ship and the
ships in that era were afraid of was Charlie coming out and planting depth charges
or something on the hull to damage us. So what they would do is
the boats and mats would walk a watch all night long with a pail of
concussion grenades. They would take these concussion grenades and drop them over the side
of the ship. That apparently would kill any living thing within a hundred yards
of where that grenade was dropped. Now we're sleeping right below the waterline all
night long, bang bang, you know they're doing this, But a sailor
can sleep through anything, you're so tired. But all night long, they're
dropping these every fifteen minutes. And I remember getting up one morning and walking
out on the main deck heading to breakfast. I'm looking out and a whole
night's worth the dropping these concussion grenades killed every fish anywhere near the ship.
And there's all these fish belly up near the ship. But what scared us
was look at all the snakes. Dang, you know, and we're going
to go on swim call in this area with all these snakes. I think
that's what scared us more than sharks, you know, man, Because we
were told any snake in the ocean, deadly, poisonous. So the thing
that scared us was all the dead snakes and jellyfish that we saw the next
morning. Did you eat the fish? No, that's the last thing we
wanted. Well, how long were you there in theater? I would say
a typical cruise was we're told we're going to be there nine months. Of
course, after the ninth month, we're told we're going to be here longer.
Of course we knew that was coming. Anyway, I'm sensing a theme
here of what the military says and the truthfulness of it might be a little
bit questionable. What are you most proud of from your service? I never
thought of it that way, surviving doing a good job. I guess well
it was you got him there and you got him home, like you said
before, So you did your job. My last question, as we're aboard
the US Midway Museum here where you are a docent. You are one of
the most pleasant people who we've interviewed, Yet somehow you have the nickname Grumpy.
How did that happen? That was a nickname I got years ago when
I was working at a Christian school up the coast as their campus engineer.
And then I started a video editing and broadcasting class, and the kids realize
that if I didn't have my McDonald's coffee first thing in the morning, I
was not as pleasant as you attuned to. So they're the ones that gave
me the nickname. John K. Hill is a US Navy veteran of the
Vietnam War, serving as a boilerman on the destroyer USS Buck. I'm Greg
Corumbus and this is Veterans Chronicles. Hi, this is Greg Corumbus, and
thanks for listening to Veterans Chronicles, a presentation of the American Veterans Center.
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