http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/conn
Dictionary.com
conn
responsibility for the steering of a ship.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/officer
Dictionary.com
officer
a person who holds a position of rank or authority in the army, navy, air force, or any similar organization, especially one who holds a commission.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/helmsman
Dictionary.com
helmsman
a person who steers a ship.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enlisted_rank
Enlisted rank
An enlisted rank (or more correctly, enlisted grades or rates) in the Military of the United States is any rank below a commissioned officer or warrant officer. The term can also be inclusive of noncommissioned officers. In most cases, enlisted service personnel perform jobs specific to their own occupational specialty, as opposed to the more general command responsibilities of commissioned officers.
http://www.nvr.navy.mil/nvrships/details/FFG50.htm
NVR
Naval Vessel Register
USS TAYLOR (FFG 50)
GUIDED MISSILE FRIGATE
Class: FFG 7
Fleet: Atlantic
Status: Active, in commission
Force: Battle Force
Award Date: 05/22/1981
Keel Date: 05/05/1983
Launch Date: 11/05/1983
Commission Date: 12/01/1984
JOURNAL ARCHIVE: From: Kerry Burgess
To: Kerry Burgess
Sent: Mon, February 27, 2006 12:52:14 PM
Subject: Sleep journal 2/27/06
There was a bunch of stuff in my dreams last night, but I only remember one part. I was also very tired when I woke up, but couldn't go back to sleep. The part of the dream I do remember is where I was walking down some stairs. It seemed to be outside, as in stairs leading down the outside of a building, a factory maybe. I am thinking it was at the end of something, a conclusion of something. I turned around after going down a couple of the stairs and was organizing some stuff, books maybe. I couldn't get them all together or something and I think I was going to have to make a second trip to bring them all down. Within the boxes and books, I pulled out a hat and put it on. It was a U.S. Navy Officer's cover.
Today I am also thinking back to that dream I had in my last days at Microsoft. I told a friend about it. I dreamed that someone had set off two bombs and I was watching the towering clouds from the explosions rising high into the atmosphere. I was baffled at how people were going around their normal business like nothing had happened. There was one person I recognized, a guy that was on the same team as I. I didn't understand why no one was concerned.
[JOURNAL ARCHIVE 27 February 2006 excerpt ends]
JOURNAL ARCHIVE: From: Kerry Burgess
To: Kerry Burgess
Sent: Mon, February 13, 2006 1:18:17 PM
Subject: Re: Sleep journal 2/13/06
Kerry Burgess wrote:
Not sure about this dream from when I finally got back to sleep this morning. I wanted to stay awake to watch the morning news but I was feeling the urge to watch my favorite anchorperson. If I watch her, I am going to talk and who knows how many sociopaths out there are listening to all this. How can this continue??? In this latest dream, there is a recurring theme, lately it always seems to involve sand. Today I was driving a pickup along a road on a sandy hill. I was trying to stop to talk to someone that was walking along. But then I was traveling backwards, down the hill I think. I put on the brakes but I still keep traveling down the hill and away from the person I wanted to talk to. Then I put the transmission in Drive and pressed the accelerator, but all the wheels did was spin and I kept moving fast backwards, I felt frustrated. I eventually stopped and the person I wanted to talk to caught up with me but I don't remember anything after that. There was some other stuff going on, possibly it was dream manipulation to respond to my metaphor about being in an H-bomb experiment. But the recurring theme has something to do with traveling backwards and not being able to stop where I want to. It actually reminds me of controlling a ship, in that it takes time and space to stop one.
[JOURNAL ARCHIVE 13 February 2006 excerpt ends]
[ Bill Gates-Microsoft-Corbis-Nazi the cowardly International Terrorist Organization violently against the United States of America federal government actively instigate insurrection and subversive activity against the United States of America federal government with all Bill Gates-Microsoft-Corbis-Nazi staff partners contributors employees contractors lawyers managers of any capacity as severely treasonous criminal accomplices and that are active unlawful obstructions, combinations, or assemblages, or rebellion against the authority of the United States that actively make it impracticable to enforce the laws of the United States in the United States and in the Severely Treasonous and Criminally Rebellious State of Washington by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings ]
RED STORM RISING
Tom Clancy
PRINTING HISTORY
G.P. Putnam's Sons hardcover edition / August 1986
Berkley mass-market edition / August 1987
Page 252
The leading Kingfish exploded eight hundred yards from Nimitz's port quarter. The thousand kilograms of high explosive rocked the ship. Toland felt it, wondering if the ship had been hit. Around him, the CIC crewmen were concentrating frantically on their jobs. One target track vanished from the screen. Four left.
The next Kingfish approached the carrier's bow and was blasted out of the sky by the forward CIWS, too close aboard. Fragments ripped across the carrier's deck, killing a dozen exposed crewmen.
Number three was decoyed by a chaff cloud and ran straight into the sea half a mile behind the carrier. The warhead caused the carrier to vibrate and raised a column of water a thousand feet into the air.
The fourth and fifth missiles came in from aft, not a hundred yards apart. The after gun mount tracked on both, but couldn't decide which to engage first. It went into Reset mode and petulantly didn't engage any. The missiles hit within a second of one another, one on the after port corner of the flight deck, the other on the number two arrestor wire.
Toland was thrown fifteen feet, and slammed against a radar console. Next he saw a wall of pink flame that washed briefly over him. Then came the noises. First the thunder of the explosion. Then the screams. The after CIC bulkhead was no longer there; instead there was a mass of flame. Men twenty feet away were ablaze, staggering and screaming before his eyes. Toland's only thought was escape. He bolted for the watertight door. It opened miraculously under his hand and he ran to starboard. The ship's fire-suppression systems were already on, showering everything with a curtain of saltwater. His skin burned from it as he emerged, hair and uniform singed, to the flight deck catwalk. A sailor directed a water hose on him, nearly knocking him over the side.
"Fire in the CIC!" Toland gasped.
"What the hell ain't!" the sailor screamed.
Toland fell to his knees and looked outboard. Foch had been to their north, he remembered. Now there was a pillar of smoke. As he watched, the last Kingfish was detonated a hundred feet over Saratoga's flight deck. The carrier seemed undamaged. Three miles away, Ticonderoga's after superstructure was shredded and ablaze from a rocket that had blown up within yards of her. On the horizon a ball of flame announced the destruction of yet another - my God, Toland thought, might that be Saipan? She had two thousand Marines aboard ...
"Get foreward, you dumbass!" a firefighter yelled at him. Another man emerged to the catwalk.
"Toland, you all right?" It was Captain Svenson, his shirt torn away and his chest bleeding from a half-dozen cuts.
"Yes, sir," Bob answered.
"Get to the bridge. Tell 'em to put the wind on the starboard beam. Move!" Svenson jumped onto the flight deck.
Toland did likewise, racing forward. The deck was awash in firefighting foam, slippery as oil. Toland ran recklessly, falling hard on the deck before he reached the carrier's island. He was in the pilothouse in under a minute.
"Captain says put the wind on the starboard beam!" Toland said.
"It is on the fucking beam!" the executive officer snapped back. The bridge was covered in broken glass. "How's the skipper?"
"Alive. He's aft with the fire."
"And who the hell are you?" the XO demanded.
"Toland, group intel. I was in CIC."
"Then you are one lucky bastard. That second bird hit fifty yards from you. Captain got out? Anyone else?
"I don't know. Burning like hell."
"Looks like you caught part of it, Commander."
Bob's face felt as if he'd shaved with a piece of glass. His eyebrows crumpled to his touch. "Flashburns, I guess. I'll be okay. What do you want me to do?"
The XO pointed to Toland's water wings. "Can you conn the ship? Okay, do it. Nothing left to run into anyway. I'm going aft to take charge of the fire. Communications are out, radar's out, but the engines are okay and the hull's in good shape. Mr. Bice has the deck. Mr. Toland has the conn," XO announced as he left.
Toland hadn't conned anything bigger than a Boston Whaler in over ten years, and now he had a damaged carrier. He took a pair of binoculars and looked around to see what ships were nearby. What he saw chilled him.
Saratoga was the only ship that looked intact, but on second glance her radar mast was askew. Foch was lower in the water than she ought to have been, and ablaze from bow to stern.
"Where's Saipan?"
"Blew up like a fucking firework, Commander Bice replied. "Holy Jesus, there were twenty-five hundred men aboard!" Tico took one close aboard. Foch took three hits, looks like she's gone. Two frigates and a destroyer gone, too - just fucking gone, man! Who fucked up? You were in CIC, right? Who fucked up?"
