WENTZEL-RICHARD

The Rest of the Story

     After reading the stories of the Ingersoll (DD-652) and the Adams (DDG-2) I felt I had to tell the rest of the stories of these ships as I knew them. I went to the University of Michigan on an NROTC scholarship and graduated at the end of January, 1960 with a degree in Engineering and a regular commission as a US Navy Ensign.

     I had orders to proceed to San Diego and go to Gunnery School and then report aboard the USS Ingersoll (DD-652). I made two West PAc deployments on the Ingersoll. In the fall of 1960 our squadron left San Diego for West Pac as part of the screen for the USS Bennington. After a pleasant stay in Pearl Harbor we ended up in Subic Bay for Christmas and New Year. Four of us from the Ward Room had heard about Wild Boar hunting on this huge base and had brought shot guns with us to go hunting there. We got a permit to hunt on one of the hunting areas on the base on New Year's Day and went to an Indian village on the base and negotiated with one of the natives to be our guide. We were to pick him up at the road going by the village at 0430 the next morning.

     After dinner that evening we decided we would go into town for just a little while and each have only one beer and then return to the ship and get rested prior to our adventure the next morning. As we were enjoying our beer in town the Shore Patrol came into the pub we were at and said: "All seventh fleet sailors return to your ships immediately!" This we all did but it was a wild bunch of sailors wearing party hats and blowing horns that tried to find their way back and somehow made it!

    The fleet sortied our of Subic Bay at 0200 that morning with about 15% of their crews still missing and a good portion of the rest of those who went ashore not in the best of shape. But somehow every seventh fleet ship made it safely out of the harbor!

     This sudden deployment was a result of President Kennedy putting us into action over Viet Nam and was really the start of the Viet Nam war although credit was not given for being active in Viet Nam until ground troops were sent in three years later. We spent the rest of the deployment plane guarding off the coast of Viet Nam. As an officer with a top secret crypto clearance I would have to go into the crypto shack after my watch on the bridge and spend several more hours decoding messages. The problem with this was that one was never sure if all the Viet Nam words were decoded correctly as the names didn't mean much to us and all looked similar.

     So this was how that first West Pac deployment went. We had one week in Hong Kong and one week in Japan and the rest of the time was off the Viet Nam coast. I think that is why the next West Pac deployment on the Ingersoll, as described well in [the 'Tin Can Sailors' newsletter] 2014 stories, seemed like a pleasure trip. I always thought it was make-up for the 1960/1961 deployment.

     Upon returning to San Diego in July, 1962, I received orders to travel across country and attend Tartar Missile School in Dam Neck, Virginia, and upon completion proceed to Charleston, South Carolina, and report aboard the USS Sellers (DDG-11), as the Missile Officer. The Sellers was a sister ship to the USS Adams that was featured in [the] fall addition of The Tin Can Sailor. However, they were built at different shipyards and I think the Sellers got commissioned earlier. In any case, The Sellers was one of the first ships on the Cuban Missile quarantine line off the coast of the Bahamas and made their way East down the line until Friday morning when they forced a Russian sub to surface. It was told to hold the sub on the surface until relieved by another destroyer and then return to Charleston and replace all 50 of their Tartar warheads from AA warheads, which were expanding rod warheads designed to cut an incoming plane in half behind the wing to explosive warheads. The USS Kennedy replaced us and got all the press on the evening news about the Russian sub and we returned to Charleston where my crew and I worked 24/7 to replace all 50 of our Tartar warheads. We returned to sea on Monday morning now being the only capital warship on either side with a surface to surface missile capability. We made one more swing down the blockade line and then were sent to the coast of Cuba where a flotilla of PT boars had been equipped with surface missile launchers. Our orders were to destroy the PT boats if they tried to come out and attack the blockade fleet and also be ready to destroy the freighters carrying the nuclear warheads if they kept coming. Well the rest is history! The Russians decided we were for real and had the capability to stop their freighters and backed down. Everyone went back to base except the Sellers! We went to the US Navy missile test range off the East coast of Puerto Rico and spent two weeks test firing our missiles against mocked-up PT boats. These tests showed that, if needed, we would have stopped the PT boats. We then returned home to Charleston to a big welcoming home with coverage on much of the local and national press and TV news.

     We spent much of the next four months making trips to our missile test range off the west coast of Florida test firing against drone planes. We had the most Tartar firings; the most hits, the longest hit and the closest hit in the entire Tartar program. In May of 1963 the Sellers made a Med deployment as screen flagship for the nuclear aircraft carrier, USS Enterprise, returning after the third week in November. But that's another story; but an intersting one also!