After architectural school I joined the Navy. Upon graduation from OCS in May of 1968 I received orders to report to the USS GUAM in Norfolk, VA, a three year old helicopter carrier built to carry 1500 Marines and a couple dozen large helicopters. This class of ship was 600 feet long, weighed 18,000 tons, and was named after the Pacific islands that were taken by amphibious assault in WW2.
Although I had no special training in steam propulsion, the Engineering Officer thought an architect was close to an engineer, so I spent most of the next three years as the Main Propulsion Assistant or MPA. I was in charge of the boilertenders in the Boiler Room and the machinists mates in the Engine Room. The B and M Divsions, as they were known, each had 25 men with a chief petty officer and a commissioned officer only slightly junior to me. I am forever grateful for the chiefs and senior petty officers who really ran the show.
The ship had two boilers making 600-pound steam, feeding two turbines connected to one shaft. My station for entering and leaving port, as well as for general quarters, was the boiler room, a very hot and noisy place well below the waterline. The most difficult part of the job was keeping all of the machinery running, which meant training the operators, seeing that maintenance was done, and having the right parts on hand. While the ship did not see combat, accidents with the machinery such as happened to our sister ship were a possibility.
One Naval tradition is using poetry for the the midwatch log entry on New Year's Eve, and one year my turn came. The log entry must state the location of the ship, what it is doing, its condition of readiness and what watertight compartments are closed, what other ships are around it, and the name of the senior commnder in the area. With that in mind, I wrote my mid-watch entry for 1971.
In 1998 the GUAM reached the end of its useful life and was retired. It was an obsolete ship, not worth an expensive mothballing for future use. It was probably also not economical to cut it up for salvage, as it contained a lot of asbestos insulation that would have to be removed at great cost first. In 2000 the ship was towed to sea and sunk for target practice, as commonly done with old ships.
Photos Taken by Allan Atherton on the USS GUAM (LPH-9)
