Interested in winning a navy scholarship, go see the guidance counselor. I thought that could be me. I went to seize the guidance counselor and i found out about something called the navy rotc. Delusion and fees at 50 a month on top of that tuition and fees and 50 a month on top of that. I got a scholarship and went to ohio state. The rest is history. David you will to ohio state in 1964 you arrived in ohio state in 1964. Senator tom carper how do you know all of this . Have you been talking to my mom . [laughter] david your bio sheet. Can you talk about how it was to be a midshipman in 1964 . The vietnam war is going on in the popularity of the war is declining and the popularity of the war is declining. Can you talk about being a midshipman in all of this . Senator tom carper i will go beyond that, april of 1970. I remember coming back from one of our flights in a restaurant outside of the officers club. They played music, you could have the meal other. Out there. The b52s were coming from a strike in the Late Afternoon or early evening and there was a huge wave of b52s coming in to land after the Bombing Mission over vietnam and they played a big song by crosby, stills nash, and young. It was about the shootings at kent state. I was down from ohio state at the time i was on from ohio state gone from ohio state at the time, but they literally sent everybody home in the spring quarter. That is what it was like in 1970. I left and 68. The mood on campus was not that polarized. There was a strong sentiment against the war felt by a lot of people. In rotc you wear the uniform one day a week. The other six days a week you are just a regular college student. The people that were rabid spoke up against thethere was a strong sentiment against the war felt by a lot of people. War a lot of cases they were friends. It is not like they held it against you personally but if you wore the uniform you stood out and symbolized the military. David do you remember mayday parades i remember mayday parades, demonstrations were the students would put flowers in the barrels of the weapons we did not carry weapons in the mayday parade. There was sort of a friendly dissonance. Those who were not in uniform demonstrating against us, nothing unkind or intimidating but you felt it. The day you wore the uniform you were different. David you talked about your summer cruises. Senator tom carper when i was a midshipman and i went to penn state. State. Midshipman i went to penn state. In my freshman year, we did we headed off to newport island. I was there in the year that bob dylan was booed at the folk festival. We went out into the Atlantic Ocean to do exercises on a destroyer. I remember the most exciting thing was that we got stuck in a hurricane at sea. It was a real test of our stomachs and our will and our manhood. The other thing i remember from that cruz was being signed that cruise was being assigned to the engineering department. They put you in the hardest part of the engine room, steam blows on you. I like to work out every day at the y back in delaware. Sometimes i go into the steam room and that is cool compared to what it was like in the engine room. But it was a good experience. You find out what is is like to be the lowest of below. Of the low. David this was an old world war ii frame. They were modernizing in the early 60s. You are talking about a destroyer at the time that was pushing 25 years old. You rock and roll out there. Senator tom carper writing out the hurricane was an adventure riding out the hurricane was an adventure. Getting bounced around in your bunk trying to eat a meal in your quarters. I remember thinking maybe i do not want to be on a ship. Maybe there is a better life out there for me then navy aviation. David you did mention Civil Air Patrol so obviously you have the error bug air bug at an early age and this did nothing to dissuade you from this. Can you tell me about the decisionmaking process . Senator tom carper the second cruise was at the end of my sophomore year. It was bifurcated into two parts. We went to little creek, virginia, this school. I remember going there a couple of days early with one of my best friends from ohio state gary also a midshipman. We camped out on Virginia Beach and went to a great concert. Earlier in the summer, in newport, i was there the same night that bob dylan was booed. A year later we were on Virginia Beach and we went to a concert by the byrds, the academy of full grown. Academy of full if you told m epitome of folk rock. We learned to fly these tiny plants and had a Pilot Instructor and did all kinds of flying. Some of the guys got sick, i did not. I thought that this was fun. We have a great marine officers out of navy rotc at ohio state. The best officers that i trained under from the time i was a midshipmen were the marines. Some of the enlisted personnel were excellent as well. I was drawn to the marine corps i think because of the mission and thesome of the enlisted personnel were excellent as Great Respect i had for the officer and enlisted men that trained us at osu. My junior year, before my senior year, was long beach california. It was a great duty. We would go out mondaywe would go out monday morning fly around the South Pacific southeastern pacific, and come into court on friday afternoon and have the weekend off. On monday do the same thing again. It was fun. They did not put us down in the engine room. We were treated more like a junior officer and learned a great deal about the operations part standing watches and all. We were taught a course not too far from mexico. We had a growing mexican population in california. Someone on the ship, the skipper or somebody, asked me, i spoke a little spanish, to teach spanish classes. One of the extra things i would do was to teach troops to speak spanish. David i served for a year and a half. Senator tom carper on active duty . David from 84 or 85. David did senator tom carper did anybody on the crew mentioned me . [laughter] david they were a salty crew, it was possible. [laughter] david it is probably razor bladed by now. Good you just address could you just address the affiliation you had at the midshipmen brigade at ohio state . Senator tom carper i cannot remember for sure. I was on the military council at ohio state which was the are the air force, navy, rotc. I was involved in that from the time i was a freshman. I enjoyed that. We had a military ball every year and on my senior year i got to be in charge and put together a big debts. Big dance. We brought in this group from canada that the mamas and the top was had discovered the pappas had discovered. It was the first time we had rock n roll at a military ball. There was also a traditional orchestra. David what did you study at ohio state . Senator tom carper i thought i would major in Political Science but i changed my way halfway through to economics. I never regretted it. Economics a lot more helpful for me as state treasurer. When i was in the house i served on the Banking Committee so it was very helpful or. Helpful they are. Helpful there. It was more helpful than a major in Political Science. A lot of what i do is actually economics. David going on to death senator tom carper when i going on to senator tom carper when i graduated from ohio state i did not want to stay in the navy forever. I wanted to do my time and serve, i liked the movie but i wanted to do my time and be on to other things the navy but i wanted to do my time and be on to other things. I was interested in business and thought what can you do in the navy . I could be a supply officer and that would use my undergraduate training. But i was also interested in aviation. It was his very tough choice and in the end i almost flipped a coin and ended up going to pensacola. I could have been a pilot they taught us to fly my junior year. I did not want to stay for the extended period of time to become a navy aviator. Five years instead of sex. Instead of six. Thought i would try that. David you knew going in, it was the fiveyear instead of the sixyear commitment. Now it is a fiveyear commitment if you are a pilot. Going in, most aviators at the time they want jets. They want to fly jets. Senator tom carper i like the idea of landing on land every night. The idea of sleeping on my bed. Being on a ship and trying to land floating landing strips, that was not what i wanted to do. I wanted east coast. I wanted to be close to ohio state so i could see my girlfriend who i dearly loved. Instead i got p3aw, p3s, west coast. B310 was the Training Squadron at the time. I love the pensacola, beautiful white beaches. I loved spending time with the guys that i flew with and the introductory courses in airman ship. We went from there to Corpus Christi, texas. I really like Corpus Christi. I remember we got to Corpus Christi, one of my buddies from pensacola and i from baltimore we got out to Corpus Christi and we wanted to be able to live in the economy. The deal was if you showed up at the officers quarters and they had room for you that is where you were going to be for the period of time that you are stationed. They got filled up and there were no vacancies. I said, would you step the orders to that effect . The next day we went out and found great accommodations, the guest quarters of a ranch for this millionaire family. Tennis court, pool horses. So that is where we live. It was dirt cheap. Incredibly inexpensive. We were getting paid as ensigns and we were getting flight pay and rooming and quarters. It felt like we had more money than we had in our life. We were probably making 5,000 a year. We would fly, they were teaching navigation how to navigate planes. We flew missions over the gulf of mexico to see what we were doing. It was fun. I loved being in the plane being in Corpus Christi flour bluff, texas. I have met two people in my life that have heard of fkowerbluff. David at that time were they flying beechcraft . Senator tom carper uhhuh. Bamboo bombers down and pensacola. In the pensacola. We had a bigger player in texas but it was fun. Great men plane in texas but it was fun. David then you would be assigned to the Replacement Air Group at the west coast. Was it determined early on you would be going to the p3 community or did they make the determination . Senator tom carper i do not remember. It was around Corpus Christi that we learned we would go to the west coast instead of the east coast. It did not make my day. I wanted to use toast because of personal reasons i mentioned earlier. I love asia, loved asia, lovely people there. David take us through it. The Training Squadron. Senator tom carper we first went to san diego and i live on the island, a beautiful place. Coronado. Twostory frame house, five of us lived in. We started to learn a lot about warfare. That is where they began steeping us and that knowledge. Out of that for the, some people ended up in the three airplanes. P3 airlines. I ended up salt over San Francisco were my patrol squadron was. South of San Francisco where my patrol squadron was. Flight service lasted four or five months. When we got to the squadrons it was april of 1970 and my squadron was about to deploy. I went to the parking lot and went to the hangar of my new squad and they said packed up, we are going. David can i what the specific job was that you were being trained to do . Senator tom carper the p3 other 18 per had an 18 person crew. Three of them were aviators, their jobs were to fly the plane. The two naval flight officers, a navigator and the tactical coordinator who coordinates the group. The crew. During the time i was on active duty a new designation was created called Mission Commander so that whoever was the senior pilot would be the Mission Commander. They had to go through special curriculum. You could be designated as a Mission Commander. My last year in the squadron i earned the designation of Mission Commander. When i went to the reserves in pennsylvania after my active duty the reserves do not have a Mission Commander designation. They did after a year or two. I still flew in the same airplane and the reserves. P3 became designated Mission Commander there as well. David take us through that first deployment. Or i guess the three deployments to southeast asia. Talk about how that goes. Your objective was to attract soviet submarines . Senator tom carper when we were home we flew a lot of missions halfway between california and hawaii. The soviets would go on station with boomers, Ballistic Missile submarines, yankee class. We flew most of our missions against yankees but they had other models. In any event, we were flying missions. Probably a threehour preflight. Studying the oceanography and understanding the target. Do our free flights and charts and then take off. We would fly 10 or 12 hour missions. Three hours and root, on station for six hours, three hours to fly home. Postflight, take all the stuff on magnetic tape and d brief with the same folks that briefed us and sent us out hours earlier. The idea out two hours earlier. The idea was to know where the Nuclear Submarines were so that we would know where to look. We would create these tracks. The soviets would send a sub out, it would be on station for 16 days. We would know the route that they followed and we would have a good idea of when it came back six months later and where it was going to be working. Be lurking. It was a great game of cat and mouse, matching wits against soviet sub skippers. You did not want to split them. Spook them. David the tools you were using sonor buoy patterns. Can you talk about those techniques . Senator tom carper just like you when i have individual fingerprints, submarines and the ships have and ships have acoustic fingerprints. It can be hard to tell the difference but if you actually have the ability to analyze visually the acoustic signature they are quite discrete. During the time i was on active duty we went from not knowing where we were with any great accuracy to knowing with considerable accuracy where we were, where we were putting the sonar, knowing exactly what we were looking for. Sonar vector tell us that only that there was a ship but that there was a submarine over there, the direction. We actually made a lot of progress in the short time i was privileged to be on active duty. David what were the skills that were most important for you to have in that position or for anyone to have in that position . Senator tom carper i have for five principles four or five principles. The first is to do what is right. The second is to do everything well. The third is to treat other people they way we would want to be treated. The fourth is to never give up. The fifth is to surround myself with people smarter than me. What i tried to do was to put officers and enlisted people, the best people in my squadron that i could find. From the moment we took off on the mission to coming off station, we were still monitoring the sonar that we had dropped, looking for submarines and trying to detect them, even as we were on the way home. Just having excellent people on the cruise was important. The other thing was training hard. I would lie in bed and go through the flight in my head. It is like a game, thinking about a game that you are going to play the next day for quarterbacks. I would lay out the flight in my head against the soviet subs. So i think preparation is important. The other thing is not giving up. I kept my crew motivated. David were these principles for by your numeral experience . Senator tom carper the were embedded in part when i grew up but i think the navy certainly they can do, we thought we could do anything. When i got in my slot on active duty after we left, we thought we were the best around. David certainly, the analogy is fishing, you have to have patience. I imagine being a Mission Commander you have to use extreme patience as far as listening and putting it together. Senator tom carper patients on the part of the officers but great patience on the part of the enlisted crew, especially the people who are analyzing the acoustic data, looking for the line on a page to see if maybe that could be the clue youre looking for. The patience they had and the fortitude for staying on the job. I have some guys, jim the chief petty officer, he was so good. David discuss the activeduty when you deployed overseas. You talked about flying out. You made three deployments to southeast asia. Where were you base that . Based at . Senator tom carper the first time we went to the philippines a little label air station across the bay from manila. Just a little petri base. Outside of the door was a Little Community where we would go and get in trouble. You could catch lunch and or cross to the big city, and go across to the big city, manila. Lou would be people Walking Around with machine guns sometimes. I thought they were a very sweet, friendly people. Made us feel welcome. I especially liked that we had our own middle station and there were not too many, very special. When we were not there, you were flying out of the island. They pulled the p3as out of vietnam because they kept getting blown up. Somebody finally said, why do we want to keep them in vietnam were they can get blown up, we can flow that fly them out of taiwan, out of the philippines. Our missions over there were for the most part to fly anywhere from a couple hundred miles to less than that of cost of off the coast of vietnam. Usually fairly lowlevel missions. Fly 5000 feet to do our surface searches and drop down to as low as 200 feet to take a look at vessels. We did a lot of photo reconnaissance, gesturing to keep track of what is pouring in and out of the south. Took a lot of pictures of ships going into vietnam to see what kind of cargo they might be carrying. We look a whole lot for j