For Honor We Stand (72 page)

verstehen sie
:  (German)  Do you understand?

von Braun, Werner:  Born, March 23, 1912; died, June 16, 1977.  German-American Rocket engineer best known for leading the development of the German A-4 rocket (commonly known as the V-2), humanity’s first operational ballistic missile and the first man-made object to reach outer space, as well as for leading the team that developed for the United States the Saturn series of space launch vehicles.  This series included the Saturn V which propelled the Apollo spacecraft to the Earth’s moon in a series of memorable missions extending from December 1968 (Apollo 8) to December 1972 (Apollo 17).  He is one of the very few engineers in the history of the United States whose name became a household word because of his engineering achievements.  Von Braun was the first and, arguably, the best Director of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Marshall Space Flight Center near Huntsville, Alabama.  He had the respect of virtually everyone in the program, including that of subordinates who could easily have been contemptuous or intimidated and of officials whose positions made them natural organizational rivals.  Despite having no formal training in the field, von Braun was an administrative and organizational genius and is largely responsible for developing the brilliantly effective managerial system that controlled the development, construction, testing, and operation of the Saturn launch vehicles—a program that is one of the most complete and unmitigated success stories in the history of large project management.  Von Braun’s astonishing achievements as a leader in the United States space program have always been shadowed by his role in developing the V-2, which was essentially a terror weapon for Nazi Germany, as well as by the use by the Germans of slave labor to build the missiles in horrific conditions that caused the death of many of the workers.  This moral ambiguity was perhaps most famously portrayed by the satirical songwriter Tom Lehrer who once wrote:  “‘Once the Rockets are up who cares where they come down.  That’s not my department,’ says Werner von Braun.”  In the final analysis, von Braun was a brilliant leader, an outstanding engineer, as well as a likeable and noble man who is one of the main pillars upon which the success of the Apollo program stood.  It is difficult to imagine the United States getting to the moon when it did without Werner von Braun.  If a man can achieve things later in life that outweigh his earlier participation in a great evil, then von Braun did so.  He was certainly one of the towering figures of the Jurassic space (see) era.

Watch:  The period of time that a member of the crew who is designated as a “watch stander” mans his assigned “watch station.”  Also, the designation of the section of the crew to which the watch stander belongs.  On Union Warships, there are three watches, usually known as Blue, Gold, and White.  They stand watch on the following schedule:

First Watch--2000-0000  (1 Blue)  (2 Gold)  (3 White)

Middle Watch--0000-0400  (1 Gold)  (2 White)  (3 Blue)

Morning Watch--0400-0800  (1 White)  (2 Blue  (3 Gold)

Forenoon Watch--0800-1200  (1 Blue)  (2 Gold)  (3 White)

Afternoon Watch--1200-1600  (1 Gold)  (2 White)  (3 Blue)

First Dog Watch--1600-1800  (1 White)  (2 Blue)  (3 Gold)

Second Dog Watch--1800-2000  (1Blue)  (2 Gold)  (3 White)

The Captain and the XO do not stand a watch.  Rather, all officers other than the CO, XO, and the CMO serve as “Officer of the Deck,” serving as the officer in charge of minute to minute operations in CIC when neither the CO nor the XO is in CIC.  Officers of the Deck stand watch for eight hour shifts on a rotating basis. 

waving the flashlight:  manually directing active sensor scans in a particular direction or directions, either from a fixed orientation or from a programmed scan pattern, usually as a means of obtaining more information to develop a passive sensor contact.  Waving the flashlight is to be avoided in certain circumstances because doing so alerts the source of the passive contact that you are aware of his presence.

WHAG:  Wild Hairy (or Half) Assed Guess.  Just what it sounds like—a guess based on almost pure conjecture with little or no supporting evidence.  A WHAG is derived almost entirely from the intuition of the guesser.  A surprisingly large number of WHAG’s turn out to be correct.

Will Robinson:  the traditional naval nickname given to the youngest and/or the smallest of the squeakers or new junior Midshipmen in service at any given time on board a warship.  The name is taken from the name of a character in the 1960’s television series
Lost in Space
, a program based on the doubly ridiculous premise that small starship crewed by a single family and one pilot journeying from Earth to the Alpha Centauri star system to relieve terrestrial overpopulation as part of a family-by-family colonization program became “lost in space.”  (Doubly ridiculous because of the absurdity that a colonization effort would be mounted by sending each family in its own starship, rather than in large ships containing hundreds or thousands of families, and the impossibility of becoming “lost in space” so long as the vessel retained the rudimentary equipment necessary to identify stars by their spectra and a database of stellar spectra and coordinates.)  In that program, Will Robinson, a child prodigy and the main character in many of the stories, was the youngest member of the family in question.  When the program began, he was a boy of about eight or nine, roughly the same age as the youngest squeakers on a modern naval Warship.  A recurring feature of the program was the announcing of an approaching hazard by the ambulatory robot assigned to the mission (imaginatively named “Robot”) declaring “Danger, Will Robinson.  Danger!  Danger!”  The program, which began as a fairly straightforward, if scientifically illiterate, adventure series, degenerated into a comic melodrama featuring infantile plots involving improbable alien monsters.  The program was roughly contemporary with
Star Trek
(see) and, during their initial network runs was the more popular of the two, but—unlike
Star Trek
—had limited cultural influence and almost no influence on human space forces and exploratory programs. 

Wing Attack Plan R:  A reference to the 1964 Stanley Kubrick film
Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.
  Wing Attack Plan R was a fictitious nuclear war plan that enabled the commander of a bomber wing to order the forces under his command to execute a retaliatory strike against the Soviet Union in the event a Soviet first strike killed the President and other civilian authorities.  In the film, the plan was devised in response to concerns about the United States “deterrent lacking credibility.”  In reality, the United States had an airborne military nuclear command post, code named
Looking Glass,
continuously in the air during this period which was virtually invulnerable to attack and which had the capability of ordering a retaliatory strike.  Accordingly, it is unlikely that there was ever any real plan similar to “Plan R.” 
Doctor Strangelove
is one of the classic films that is part of the Midshipman’s visual literature curriculum, which is why both Captain Robichaux and Lieutenant DeCosta were familiar with it.  While a comedy, the film is a generally accurate portrayal of many aspects of the nuclear weapons policy and strategic deterrence theory of the time.  It is also the source of the iconic cultural image of the B-52 bomber pilot, Major Kong (played by Slim Pickins), riding the thermonuclear weapon like a bronco down to detonation. 

XO:  Executive Officer.  The second in command of any Warship.  On most ships, the XO actually commands the ship through most routine operations and maneuvers, leaving the Captain time to work up battle plans, devise training operations, respond to communications from higher authority, and other high level matters.  If the ship is boarded by an enemy, traditionally, the XO commands the Marines and members of the crew tasked with repelling boarders while the CO “fights the ship.”  One of the primary responsibilities of the CO is to train the XO to be ready to replace him at any time should the CO be incapacitated or promoted to a higher command, or to assume command of another vessel on his own promotion.  Accordingly, in many ways, the XO may be viewed as an “apprentice CO.” 

Yankee search:  active sensor sweep, i.e., a sweep in which the ship broadcasts sensor beams and detects the reflections from objects in the vicinity, as opposed to the normal sensor mode which is passive detection of emissions from contacts.  A Yankee search omni is a sweep in all directions around the ship, as opposed to a Yankee search down a particular bearing or bearings or of a given zone.  The term dates back to Salt Water Navy submarines but is otherwise of obscure origin.  

Z:  (when appended to a time notation) Zulu time.  Standard Union Coordinated Time.  So that all USN Vessels can conduct coordinated operations, they all operate on Zulu Time, which is, for all intents and purposes, the same as Greenwich Mean Time—mean solar time as measured from the Prime Meridian in Greenwich, England, on Earth in the Sol System.  When any other time system is used in any naval communication (such as the Standard time of a planet on which operations are taking place or local time at some place on a planet), that fact is specifically noted.  Clocks on Union warships are linked to the ships’ Velocity Register so that they account correctly for any time dilation caused by travel at relativistic speeds.  Significant correction is rarely needed, however, because—even though many Union warships are capable of velocities in excess of .95 c—they rarely do so because of the tactical disadvantages imposed upon a ship experiencing time dilation in comparison to other vessels that are not. 

Zhou Matrix:  a standard fleet static defensive formation in which ships are arrayed in a plane perpendicular to the threat axis with more powerful ships interspersed with less powerful ones to provide mutual fire support and to avoid giving the enemy a “weak zone” to exploit.  Named for Rear Admiral Zhou Chou Dong who first proposed it in a lecture on hypothetical future space combat tactics in the former People’s Republic of China in 2022.  The Zhou Matrix can also be used offensively as the “anvil” portion of the “Hammer and Anvil” formation invented by Admiral Kathleen “Killer Kate” Phillips” at the Battle of Sirius B on August 22, 2264. 

• Chapter 1
  
• Chapter 2
  
• Chapter 3
  
• Chapter 4
  
• Chapter 5
  
• Chapter 6
  
• Chapter 7
  
• Chapter 8
  
• Chapter 9
  
• Chapter 10
  
• Chapter 11
  
• Chapter 12
  
• Chapter 13
  
• Chapter 14
  
• Chapter 15
  
• Chapter 16
  
• Acknowledgements
  
• Glossary