Military service, part 4

At age 21

The Squadron was composed of the Light Aircraft Carrier Minas Gerais, the A11, a cruiser (again the Barroso, the C11), a frigate, two destroyers (D27 and D28? would the D stand for “destroyer”?), two corvettes and a submarine (that is what I think as I write this draft in 2020).

The group left very excited because, for almost everyone, it was the first trip abroad, practically an illusion (airline tickets were very expensive). In my case, I was assigned to crew the A11 (for laypeople, it was the Aircraft Carrier and that was that), and off we went to play war. My functions (and those of 5 other colleagues, one in each shift) were defined on the first day: sometimes I was on duty in the navigation room, sometimes in command, following the officers in charge, sometimes in the helicopter that glided parallel to the A11 when there were landing and takeoff exercises, filming the landings and takeoffs. I became the official photographer-filmmaker, because I had experience in developing black-and-white photos, acquired in the photographic laboratory of the physics course at FNFi, in the FNFi building, on Presidente Antônio Carlos Avenue, the former Italian embassy-consulate expropriated as spoils of the Second World War.

I began to like it more, I felt responsible and useful, they were important functions and, for a person of my age, a challenge; people trusted me, I was beginning to be somebody. The watches in command were the most relaxing, in truth command was only supervising whether everything was going according to plan. Today we would say it functioned as a “hub”. In fact, information was exchanged there with the machines (the engines), with the navigation room, with the other ships of the squadron. The midshipman had nothing to do, only watch and learn how to do and how not to do. Psychological work.

The navigation room was something else entirely; the naval officer and the EFORM midshipman needed to join hands in order to have a minimum of confidence in what they were doing and to take the ship and the squadron wherever they wanted to go, and within the expected time. There was no GPS. To give an idea, the most modern instrument available was something called a radio direction finder. And in the middle of the ocean one does not see lighthouses, one sees nothing. If you see two lighthouses at the same time you know with reasonable precision where you are, but this only happens in certain places, for a short time. In truth, the navigation room, for whoever wanted to learn something useful and at the same time remain tense all the time, was the right place.

There we also did astronomical navigation and dead reckoning, calculated real and apparent speed, checked with the radars and, when we saw land, the so-called visual navigation. How did the Portuguese and the Spaniards do this back around 1490?

On the way out, the first stop was in Salvador, where the A11 was supposed to dock at the pier. The entrance into the port was unforgettable, because the commander, a sea-and-war officer surnamed Carneiro, certainly wanting to impress the admirals on board, decided to enter and dock the A11 without the help of tugboats. Exceptionally, we had some 2 or 3 admirals aboard the A11 as mere observers and for the ceremonies in Portugal.

In my opinion and in that of the officer on navigation duty that day and at that entrance, he acted brave with the State’s money; after all, it was Brazil’s only aircraft carrier, and the maneuver was extremely risky. Whoever knows the port of Salvador knows that the entrance inside the breakwater is narrow and with a strong tidal current; any small error in navigation (and in the commander’s instinct and skill, in the navigation room and in the helmsman’s hand), or any mechanical failure, certain accident. Since Brazil allocates few resources to the armed forces, the ships almost never sail, so as not to generate additional costs, so commanders and helmsmen do not have a trained “hand”, a “touch”, like driving a car or a new boat or one you rarely use.

When I saw what was going to be done and the possible margins of error, I became very tense; imagine the officer who headed the navigation room, who in truth is the one who conducts the ship and gives instructions to the commander about the maneuvers. The officer, young, almost “had a fit”. He asked me to redo all the calculations without showing me his, all that measuring wind and “pitot” (apparent speed) and visual position and anticipating where we would be 10 seconds later in a boat of that size. Luckily there was almost no wind. When it docked without problems, our adrenaline was sky-high and we even had to sit down, to calm down and celebrate. The stay in Salvador this time was short. I do not remember how the departure was, either I was not on duty, or we left with tugboats, which would have been the most sensible.

Heading to the Cape Verde Islands! Right away, colleague Vincenzi (a tall and thin one) was feeling very sick, as they say “seasick”, to the point that the doctor considered sending him to Salvador by helicopter because we were not very far yet, engaged in training maneuvers. When they told this to Vincenzi, who was on IV fluids in the ship’s infirmary, and said that he would have to report to the Army to do CPOR, Vincenzi got well in two hours and so it went until the end of the trip. From that day on, I began to think that, among the various types of seasickness, one is psychological. The friend and doctor Washington B., with whom, years later, I sailed a few times, especially in a REFENO regatta (Recife-Noronha-Natal) aboard Ilê, an MB45 of Commander Hélio L., corroborates this thesis, since at the helm he does not get seasick, but away from the helm he is a disgrace, a half-baked sailor. That is, nothing to do with the semicircular canals. Or else the anti-seasickness medicines are what have the opposite effect.

Cape Verde is a Portuguese-speaking archipelago, in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean (at the height of Senegal, already north of the Equator, on the parallel of Guatemala). One of those isolated places that sharpen curiosity. A semi-desert landscape. I can say that, apart from the people in our group, I have never met anyone who had set foot there, with the exception of my friend Octavio, from Águas de Portugal, who from 2005 to 2015 lived there, in East Timor and in Mozambique, and invited me to visit him, which I ended up not doing for one reason or another, but I very much wanted to go, both to know the places and for Octávio’s company, his friendliness, his humor and his culture.

On the way to Cape Verde, doing exercises along the way, with intervals for sunbathing and celebrating the crossing of the Equator, I remember two more episodes worthy of note:

The first happened after lunch (it must have been around 1:30 p.m.), after takeoff and landing exercises of the airplanes, good weather, sky with those stratiform clouds, popularly called little sheep, interspersing the sky with white and blue, at an average altitude of about 5 km, in this case more blue than white, that is, good visibility and almost constant sun.

My duty group had just taken up its posts and I was in the command room (where the helmsman goes and from where there is a general view, it is the control tower of the “airport” and where the commander stays). Everyone was still tired from the morning exercises, with that desire to take a “siesta”; not even the commander was in the command room, it was another officer replacing him, everything routine, when a visual lookout triggered the alarm.

It is worth explaining that, although with the advances of radars and other electronic devices, partly by tradition, partly out of distrust of the equipment, aircraft carriers maintained (I do not know how it is today) two visual lookouts 24 hours a day: one horizon lookout, another sky lookout, whose function is to stay alert for the appearance of enemy aircraft.

So, when the alarm sounded, the lookout was questioned over the intercom and informed: Unidentified Flying Objects at position 11 o’clock vertical from course and 02 o’clock vertical from beam (the UFO was above the A11, and the squadron, slightly ahead and slightly to the right).

Remembering Samuel’s story, I thought the lookout was fooling around. Since I was not doing anything anyway, I went out onto the starboard balcony and looked in the indicated direction and, to my surprise: there they were, 3 or 4 bright fluorescent-green lights, identical among themselves, very strong to the point of drawing attention, with the naked eye, as they say, at that time of day, hovering over us above the clouds. What bothered me (made me somewhat afraid) was that they changed places among themselves and their center of gravity also changed place slightly in relation to the A11, that is, they remained more or less in the position defined by the lookout, but oscillating around that point, like wasps hovering in the air and changing position abruptly; they did not seem fixed. Since they were behind the clouds, sometimes one could see all of them, sometimes not. With binoculars one could see them closer, but since they were only lights, it did not improve the observation. Each of those lights seemed about 4 times the size and luminosity of Venus at dusk / dawn and with a characteristic green. They looked like airplane headlights when landing, but in an unknown color.

That lasted more than 30 minutes. Everyone could see it. Even the machinery personnel who stay by the engines took turns going to the deck to see it. Only the incredulous people who were sleeping, in the groups off duty, did not see it. Everyone took pictures. We were all somewhat afraid of that, whatever it was. It lasted so long that there was time to “launch” two airplanes to go above the clouds and snoop around better. But the weather changed a little, the stratified clouds closed, the sky turned white. When the airplanes (propeller-driven, anti-submarine, for low flight) got up high, there was nothing more to see. Whoever saw it, saw it; whoever did not, bad luck... more than half an hour of show, more than 3,000 people from that squadron saw it. Emotion for the rest of one’s life: grandchildren, I saw it, no, we saw a UFO, a Flying Saucer!

When everything calmed down, the commander (Carneiro) called the sailor-lookout who had given the alarm to praise him in his record book, something very important, because they take this very much into account for promotions and it is not common to make such praises in the record book. The reason for the praise was that we were all astonished that the lookout was not sleeping and was attentive.

I understood the importance they gave to praise in the record book when I saw that there was a ritual for this procedure: those who were on duty in command and the two admirals who were also there, curious about the UFO, lined up for the praise, which was more or less dictated by the commander and transcribed by a scribe, someone from the quartermaster corps in charge of the bureaucracy.

When the praise was already halfway through, the Commander stopped dictating and began thinking. He seemed to be choosing his words when, suddenly, he asked the sailor:

_ were you on sky lookout or horizon lookout?

to which, without malice and without thinking, the sailor immediately answered:

_ horizon, Commander.

Carneiro, without changing expression, suspended the praise and ordered both lookouts arrested, the one present because instead of looking at the horizon he was looking at the sky, and the other because he did not see the UFO in the sky. I had to make a great effort not to laugh. Lessons from the Navy and of Navy.

Miguel Fernández y Fernández, engineer, chronicler and columnist, member of the National Academy of Engineering and of the Institute of Engineering # R2026 Jan Ra, 11,021 characters.