| You may not know it, but all students at the various Maritime Academies in the US used to have an option to accept a USNR commission just like any NROTC student. In order to decide if they wanted to exercise the option they could spend a summer cruise on a navy ship. Of course, in order for the cruise to be accepted as merchant marine sea time, it had to be on some kind of ship similar to a merchant vessel. Naturally, oilers qualified as an acceptable ship type. In 1971 The NAN headed for the Caribbean for training and two third-year midshipmen from the Maine Maritime Academy came aboard to see what life was like in the Navy. They were assigned as junior division officers and integrated into the regular routine of the ship. Everything went smoothly until we were left the Caribbean and headed home to Newport. That was when there was a very hush-hush meeting called by the Captain. The participants were the CO ( CAPT Stone), myself (Operations Officer), Tom Dion (Communications Officer) and one of the senior radiomen (I think it was RM1 Williams). The objective: harassing one of our summer midshipmen. I'd made up watch bills for the Mail Buoy Watch, sent new sailors to the Bos'n to get some Shore Line, or to the snipes for a bucket of steam. None of those things came anywhere near what we did on this occasion. Attendance at the Maine Maritime Academy back then was dependent upon the student remaining unmarried until after he graduated. This became one of the key points to the drama as it began to unfold. We took one of the two guests into our confidence and made him a co-conspirator. From him we gathered some personal data about his partner including his Academy student number, and names of some faculty members. The Comm. Officer and his radioman then prepared a fake teletype message made to look like it had been sent via normal fleet broadcast. In the message was a notification for our victim that his wife had been in an auto accident. The message also wanted to know what arrangements should be made for their baby girl who had survived the crash. The message was delivered to the Captain, and he passed it on to the midshipmen in a private audience in his cabin. The ship was still in the Atlantic, with 3-4 days steaming ahead of her before reaching port. None of us who were in on the scam revealed anything about it to any other crew members. As far as anyone else knew this was a real, official, communication. The midshipman, of course, denied everything. He wasn't married, didn't have a daughter, and didn't understand how there could be such a screwed up identity problem. The skipper offered to send a reply from the ship, and asked our midshipmen to draft it. At this point our victim also voiced doubts about the authenticity of the message. The radio room conspirators took him on a tour of radio central. He was allowed to see the teletypes that received messages, and was even allowed to try to type on the keyboard, which did absolutely nothing while the TTY was connected in receive mode to the fleet broadcast radio. There was no way, so we told him, that anyone could manufacture a fake message on this equipment. That seemed to answer his questions about the message being real. After some discussion and consultation the Captain released an outgoing message (which, of course, was never really sent) asking for amplifying information about the reported auto accident. That was when we hit our victim with fake message number two. This time it came from the Maine Maritime Academy, forwarded via Com ServLant. It was listed as coming from the Dean of Students whose name we got from the other midshipman. The Academy wanted answers, too, especially with regard to how to handle the 4 month old baby. It also included a couple of personal items that were not common knowledge on the ship and a veiled threat of expulsion. According to what we heard from his fellow student afterwards, our victim was now really disturbed. He was trying to think of which girls he had been out with 13 months ago. Which one was it? How could he have made her pregnant? How could all this be happening to him? The next morning we were due to arrive in Newport. We had dragged this out for about 3 days. It was time to come clean. The Captain took full responsibility. He called the poor midshipman to his cabin again. There he revealed to him that it was just a way of entertaining ourselves during the long voyage home. I hope he wasn't too upset. I don't think I ever saw the victim again after that.
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