Neil Brown sent email about his duty at Operation Dominic.
From: "Neil Brown" ndb1@gwtc.net
To: pdxavets@aracnet.com
Subject: Operation Dominic I
Date: Mon, 7 May 2001
I stumbled on to your web site quite by chance and after reading some of the testimony of the sailors and technicians that participated in this operation, the memories started flowing. After serving on the U.S.S Hopewell (DD 681) for two years, I reported aboard the U.S.S. Rowan (DD 782) in 1960, serving on her until mid-1963. At the time, I was an STG2 (second class Sonar Technician) and, at the age of 23, thought myself to be pretty much immortal, as most hard charging blue jackets did in those days.
I can remember leaving San Diego and steaming to Pearl for a change of command ceremony and to welcome aboard our new skipper before heading south. The new skipper was Commander Stansfield Turner, who, in the mid-70s, retired as an admiral and became CIA Director in the Jimmy Carter administration. We just had a couple of days in Pearl to take on stores, top off the tanks, receive our film badges and dosimeters and pull a little liberty before sailing south to Christmas Island. If memory serves me, Christmas Island was a horseshoe shaped atoll. The natural harbor was more like a lagoon as it was fairly shallow. One of our assignments was to patrol the perimeters of an exclusion zone around the island. I believe that it was a rectangle approximately 150 miles by 300 miles. This data was released to the world in a Notice to Mariners.
Of course, the Soviets had the information and their trawlers would crowd the perimeters as close as they legally could. Our job was to shadow them and, if necessary, inform them if they crossed the line and appeared to be out of bounds. On one occasion during a refueling evolution, one of the trawlers pulled alongside our outboard side of from the oiler and simply observed and took movies of the operation. They were interested in our side by side refueling techniques since they were used to trailing behind their oilers while taking on fuel. This particular trawler had a super sized bullhorn mounted atop the bridge and trained it in our direction and played "Midnight in Moscow", a hit tune of the day. I guess they were trying to show their best side by being friendly. On another occasion, we were assigned to shadow what the Soviets advertised as a fish factory ship. Yeah, right. A factory ship (or mother ship for the trawlers) that bristled with radar dishes, radar antennae, close line antennae, whip antennae, not to mention domes that concealed antennae that we couldn't see. They appeared to be well equipped to gather the data they were looking for.
One day were ordered to sail back to Christmas Island and anchor in the lagoon. Several civilian engineers and technicians came aboard to install sensing equipment. The Rowan had a maindeck passageway that ran from the fantail to an area under the bridge. In this passageway, the technicians bored holes in the outside bulkheads, three or four on both the starboard and port sides. They inserted foot long probes through the holes so they would be exposed to the outside atmosphere. The probes were then sealed with good old monkey sh-- so nothing could leak to the inside of the skin of the ship from the outside. The probe leads were then hooked up to Geiger counters and tested.
It was about this time that the crew got the word that a device was going to be detonated some 35-40 miles north of Christmas Island the next morning. Our job was to weigh anchor after the blast and proceed at flank speed to ground zero so the engineers could take atmospheric readings to help them evaluate the results of the test. It was about this time that I began to reexamine my self-evaluated level of immortality. Bright and early the next morning, the engineers had all four boilers on the line with a full head of steam up. GQ was sounded and all hands went to their battle stations. My station was in Sonar Control which was located forward and just below the water line. We had a running commentary from one of the engineers coming over the 1MC so all hands knew what was going on. Those personnel inside the skin of the ship were ordered to sit down and hang on. (At this point, my imagined immortality was reduced to common mortality.) All personnel topside had been issued super dark glasses but were ordered to look the opposite way from which the blast was coming from.
They commenced a countdown to detonation. After the detonation, they commenced a second countdown to the shock wave arrival time. I don't recall exactly how long it was but it was several seconds after detonation that the shock wave hit us. Not knowing for sure what was going to happen, we were all hanging on to something with white knuckles. Was the ship going to heave completely out of the water? Or was it simply going to heel over about 60 degrees and then bounce around for awhile trying to right itself? The shock wave finally hit us and, as it turned out, it was all over in a heart beat. What we felt was a pressure wave and some said it felt like trying to sneeze while holding your nose. To me, it felt like sitting in a new car with the vents closed and slamming the door real hard. Kind of an instantaneous pressure change that made your ears pop. At any rate, the suspense was over and we were all anxious to get topside and view the cloud. Within minutes, GQ was secured and they set the sea detail for getting underway. We all scrambled topside like school kids going to Disneyland for the first time.
As I mentioned, we were 35-40 miles from ground zero, the closest that we would ever come to one of the test blasts. From that distance, the sight of a nuclear cloud is something to behold. In an eerie way, it was one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen. A solid white column of vapor/smoke shot straight up to 30,000 feet or so capped by a fluffy, pure white mushroom cloud. Under the umbrella of the mushroom, it was bright pink, probably from the low morning sun reflecting through the outer perimeter of the cloud. Then, one realized that we were all staring at instant death and somehow the beautiful cloud became an ugly icon of things that we hoped would never come.
We weighed anchor and, after clearing the lagoon, rang up flank bells and headed for ground zero. The Rowan was capable of about 30 knots but by the time we secured from GQ, weighed anchor, cleared the harbor and got up to flank speed, it was still a couple of hours before we got to ground zero. The civilian engineers were buzzing around checking their equipment and making preps to take measurements once we arrived on station. Once we got to ground zero, the engineers were having fits because all of the readings they were getting were indicating that no radiation was present. They checked their equipment several times to make sure that it was functioning as designed. They even sent one engineer to the bridge to ask the captain if the ship was where it was suppose to be. Big mistake!! After questioning the sanity of the inquiring engineer, the captain was scraped off the overhead by the OOD and informed the engineer that we were exactly where we were supposed to be. We made several passes through the area and still found no readings above normal. The engineers scratched their heads all the way back to Christmas Island.
I retired as an STGCS in 1977 and worked for awhile at Gould NavCom Systems in El Monte, California. In 1982, while working at Gould and 20 years after the fact, I received a letter from the DOD with readings of my dosimeter that I wore during the tests. The letter included a rather lengthy list of people that had participated in Operation Dominic. No one on the list had any reading above normal atmospheric conditions.
Operation Dominic was certainly an education in itself. I'm sure that the engineers learned a lot about radiation and its behavior under various atmospheric conditions. After all, who would think that you could be standing at ground zero two hours after a nuclear blast and have normal Geiger counter readings? We on the Rowan witnessed many blasts at various times (some when it was still dark) and at various distances. To think that only a handful of people, relative to the current population of the world, has ever seen a nuclear blast makes the experience unique. I hope these tales will be interesting to other Dominic survivors.
Neil D. Brown
STGCS (Retired)
ndb1@gwtc.net
Keith Whittle
May 9, 2001
[ Operation Dominic ]