by Travis Casey

Created on: March 12, 2008   Last Updated: January 18, 2012

"Underway-Shift Colors". I used to love hearing those words. Those words had never excited me more than when we left Pearl Harbor in 1984 setting out for a six month Western Pacific Deployment. Haze gray and underway!

I was serving on-board the USS Harold E. Holt (FF1074). She was a frigate designed for anti-submarine warfare. An aircraft carrier on a major deployment, as this was, always travels with an escort group. We were one of ten ships in the battle group to escort the carrier, USS Kitty Hawk. Part of our responsibility was to take the bullet.

The aircraft carrier is always the most important ship in the battle group. The rest of us were dispensable if it meant saving the Kitty Hawk. If a torpedo was fired at the carrier, it would be our job to get between the torpedo and the Kitty Hawk and take the hit. Fortunately, we did not have to do that.

The Harold E. Holt was unique in the fact that it was the only American ship in the fleet named after a foreign dignitary. Harold E. Holt was the Prime Minister of Australia from January 1966 to December 1967. He went missing on an Australian beach while he was still Prime Minister, presumed drowned.

We set sail for our first port of call Subic Bay, the Philippines. At the time, this was the largest US Naval base outside of the United States. Our 23 day trip there was pretty uneventful except for the sea stories the "salty dogs" used to tell us "boot camps". They came up with stories about women and boozing that could not have possibly been true.

When we arrived in Subic Bay, and all those sea stories did turn out to be true. Stuck on a booze-less, broad-less ship for the past three weeks and we hit the town. Eight of us went out together hunting like a pack. Once we hit the shore, I don't know which came faster; the women or the beer. I thanked my lucky stars to be twenty and single.

The Philippines turned out to be a sailor's kind of paradise. An adult Disneyland. This was what I joined for. Being a real sailor, at sea and on shore. We had duty every third day, meaning we had to stay on the ship and perform our military duties. Spending a total of eleven days in port, I was glad when my duty day rolled around. Although I had to work, it was considered a day of rest compared to the time spent on shore.

We then sailed to Korea. The rest of the battle group went to Pusan and we were the lone ship to go the small town of Chinho. That didn't bother us as our ship had a crew 300 men, while the full battle group coming

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