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Underway it's very hectic.
A lot of stress. Sometimes you work 16, 20-hour
days. The main purpose
of EW or electronic warfare is anti-ship missile
defense. What we do is say we pick up a radar
contact. We'll say, okay, this radar is found
on this ship. This ship has these weapons on
it. This is what they're capable of doing to
us. This is what we have to do to combat that.
Anything dealing with electronic countermeasures
to protect the ship, that's what EW is going
to do. We're the ones responsible for that.
[To learn about the radar signals
and what they mean], you have to go into a lot
of publications, study up on certain countries,
what ships they have, what type of ships they
have, and you find out their basic complement.
Once you learn all of that, you find out, okay,
this radar is going to meet these parameters.
These parameters match this weapon. You have
to be able to memorize all of that stuff, so
memory plays a big part of EW. You don't want
to go into a tactical situation and have to
scramble through all of your pubs trying to
see, okay, where is this at? So you just kind
of have to know and study. It's a lot of studying,
a lot of studying.
When I look at a contact (radar
signal on the screen), or when I first started,
it was - it was very hard, very hard at first
because they throw all of this stuff at you
and you're expected to just know it off the
bat like that. So, I mean, it was a lot of extra
studying coming in 6:00, 7:00 at night just
to look up in a book. A couple of months down
the road, doing it day in and day out, you kind
of learn, okay, this guy's coming from here.
This is what I need to do, stuff like that.
It's exciting at times, but then at other times,
it's stressful. A lot of stress can be put on
you.
I've been in two warfare situations.
1997 we did Operation Southern Watch when I
was aboard the USS Santa Barbara. Iran was flying
planes in and out and we had to watch those
guys to make sure that they didn't fire anything
upon us. Just recently in the Kosovo situation
we were involved in Operation Shining Hope where
all of our helicopters or helos, they would
fly out and we had to make sure that their land-based
missile sites weren't locking onto them. So
we had to watch the whole spectrum to make sure
we could only see U.S. contacts. We didn't want
to see anyone else. We just wanted to see U.S.
contacts so when those guys did pop up, we would
notify the appropriate authorities and then
they would take care of that.
[In tight situations,] confidence
is important, I think. You have to be able to
say, look, this is what I have. Pay attention
to me or we're all going to die. That's basically
confidence to be able to speak up and get your
point across clearly. You have to know what
you're doing and if you - if you hesitate, you
know, when you're talking missiles, you're talking
split seconds. You know, mach 10, mach 9 - not
mach 10, mach 1, 1.9. That's fast. So when they
fire that, you got 30 seconds to live unless
you can combat this thing.
The most stressful situation
I've been in is in the Arabian Gulf. Picked
up a submarine that no one knew was there. Didn't
receive any intell [intelligence] on it and
all of a sudden it just popped up, shot a flare
out there, and if they would have been hostile,
we would have been dead because we wouldn't
have known about it. You shoot the engines up
and just drive and drive and drive because you
never know if they're going to fire a torpedo
at you, you know, or a surface-to-air missile.
Your basic maneuvering. Basic maneuvering. That
was the most scary situation I've been in.
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