Sabotoge

It was a dark and stormy night. The wave were high. The wind was strong.
The rain was horizontal. The ship was in the water half the time and out the other
half. Snoopy and the Red Baron were no where around.

Of course this is precisely the time when something would malfuction and it
did. The syncro motor between the radar and the antenna quit working. The
results of this is you can not get a true bearing of the objects in your way.

The Captain was in the radar room immediately. I told him what was wrong.
He ask if I could fix it. I advised that I could make it work on a relative bearing
basis until we got to port and picked up a new synro motor, but I would have
to climb the mast to the antenna to do it. He said "Will you do it." I said I would,
but he said it was to dangerous. I probably would have ended up hanging upside
down in my climbing safety belt with my head bouncing off the mast if I had tried it.
I told him I could interpet the radar well enough to give the relative bearing every
ten seconds until morning when the storm abated and the lock it in on relative
bearing. That is what we did.

This goes on to a part two of the story. When a new Third Class Petty Officer came
aboard (this guy was my new boss) he put a modification in the radar but got it in
backward. I took it out and put if in right and told him not to touch another item of
equipment on the ship. He didn't. During the next few days after the storm I
noticed someone had taped over the switch that controls the synro motor. I ask
the new Third Class Petty Officer if he did that so someone wouldn't turn it off.
He said yes. I said, good idea. We were on our way home and stopped in Pearl Harbor.
This is where the Petty Officer left the ship and was flown home. I was getting ready
to repair the radar and had to turn the syncro switch off to do it. When I removed
the tape, the switch was off and had been every since the storm. I climbed the mast,
removed the relative bearing lock on, went back down, threw the switch to ON.
There never was a defect in the syncro system. I never did find out what happened
to the Petty Officer. Maybe I should have been suspicious. Earlier in our tour in Korea
the Captain called another Technician and me in for a conference to ask if this Petty
Officer had ever done anything to damage any of the equipment. I could only tell
about the mod kit he put in the radar backwards.