the mighty, mighty blog of darren fix

Cold Warrior

Tue, 16 May 2017 00:00:00 -0600

It all started as a lark

A few years ago, I stumbled upon a link that lead to the Cold War Recognition Certificate Program. It's a pretty meaningless certificate: Basically anyone who served in the military or in federal government service from Sept 2, 1945 to Dec 26, 1991 is entitled to one.

Here's the kicker

A set amount of certificates were created, and once they're gone, they're gone. But until then, there is an office in Fort Knox, KY that is staffed by people whose only job is to issue these certificates.

As a conservative, I felt it was my duty to help fulfill this mission and release these Army personell for a more important job. Of course, with recent events, it seem like this certificate is becoming more relevant.

So, if you'd like to help close this office, and recieve a "suitable for framing" Cold War certificate, you can head over to the HRC site. Due to security concerns, you can no longer order it online - you'll have to print and mail in a form. Of course, their sites display as insecure because they only use DoD certificate authorities (which I won't be installing!)

Here is mine:

Darren Fix, P.I.

Fri, 12 May 2017 00:00:00 -0600

Right after I got out of the Navy, I moved back to Texas and worked for one of the top Private Investigation firms in Houston. Because of my electronics background, I'd usually go along on the jobs where were were checking for bugs and hidden surveillance devices. I was actually surprised by the quality of the gear that we had - it was able to sweep a large range of radio frequenies and silently notify us when it detected a feedback loop. Pretty cool stuff.

We got a call from a client who was sure that his office was bugged. Every time that he submitted a bid, the would get pushback that his margins were too high. He was tired of getting beat on every negotiaion before they even started negotiating. He was a subcontractor for a big oilfield construction company, and he ran his company from a mobile trailer that was parked on his client's site.

We did a full electronic sweep and found nothing (this was back in the early nineties, so we didn't have to worry about burst transmissions, etc.) The first thing that we checked were the phones themselves, but there were no transmitters installed. We did an electronic sweep of the trailer and again, came up with nothing. He insisted on a full physical sweep of the trailer, inside and out. So in the sticky swamp heat that is only found during July in Houston, we crawled under the mobile trailer and searched every inch. Well, maybe every foot. It was frickin hot!

When we finished, I was so sweaty and dirty and miserable that I was tempted to stop at a truck stop on the way back to the office for a quick shower. I'm starting to wonder if we're up against some kind of super-spy or something, capable of hiding surveillance equipment that we were incapable of detecting. As we're getting ready to leave, he looks at us with imploring eyes and says: "Look, I'm not crazy. Pick up the phone, press 9 to get an outside line, and you'll start hearing all sorts of clicky sounds." Ohhhh crap.

Turns our his office phones were routed through the corporate PBX (the corporate telephone system) of his client. They didn't have to bug his office, they could just pick up an extension inside the main building and listen to whatever conversations they wanted. We weren't even sure if it was illegal. We advised him to install a private phone line that he would pay himself if he wanted private conversations.

After mileage, billing a two man team, and the special fees for our special equipment, we ended up billing him almost a grand for that visit. I felt really bad for him, but that kind of thing happened a lot more often that you'd think.

From then on, the first thing I always did was to make a phone call from the suspect phones.

Imputed Righteousness

Tue, 09 May 2017 00:00:00 -0600

The result of another conversation that I had with a friend, this time about a non-Catholic doctrine.

Dear S. ,

A couple of things have been bothering me terribly about the doctrine of imputed righteousness that we were discussing yesterday. The first and perhaps the most distressing is when you insinuated that we have no role in our personal salvation. You even provided three bullet points for the process:

We do nothing for our salvation...it has all been done for us.
God does everything perfectly...because he is God
If we can lose our salvation...that implies God did something imperfectly.

I totally agree with number two. God created us with the perfect knowledge of how imperfect we are. God knew exactly what He was doing when He gave us free will.

However, I think that you left out a crucial step, the one where we ask God for salvation. My understanding is that you were saved when you recognized that Jesus was your personal savior. So in essence, you did have to do something for your salvation - you had to ask for it. I suspect that the biggest difference between our doctrines is that I try to live a life where by I am constantly trying to ask for my salvation - through my words, prayers and obedience to the will of God.

As for number three, I think that it is a mistake to assume that our frailty and ineptitude is in any way demonstrative of an imperfect God. As you said yesterday "Oh yes, as to Adam...He was made perfectly...he did not have a sinful nature...he Chose to sin. We on the other hand are born with our sinful nature because of Adam and need a savior...Jesus Christ." Did Adam not need a savior also? Were the gates of Heaven open to him before the Lord opened them Himself? Just as Adam can choose sin over love and obedience for God, so too are we blessed with free will. Every sunset that God creates is perfect, but this does not mean that they are all the same. While God might love them all the same, I am free to choose my favorites.

On to another subtopic. Last night I decided to try to imagine myself in your shoes. What would it mean to me if I were to believe in the doctrine of Imputed Righteousness (IR)? Almost immediately I was saddened as I realized that many of my most cherished parables would become devoid of value.

Parable of the Lost Sheep: Matthew 18:12-14, Luke 15:3-7.

"What man among you having a hundred sheep and losing one of them would not leave the ninety-nine in the desert and go after the lost one until he finds it? And when he does find it, he sets it on his shoulders with great joy and, upon his arrival home, he calls together his friends and neighbors and says to them, 'Rejoice with me because I have found my lost sheep.' I tell you, in just the same way there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous people who have no need of repentance.

The lost sheep(man) was once a part of the flock (saved) and then went astray (sinned.) The Lord says that there will be joy in heaven when that one sinner returns to the fold. But according to the doctrine of IR, that one sinner couldn't have left the fold to begin with. Not only that, but there would be no reason for heaven to rejoice in his repentance.

If this parable were to be written from the IR perspective, I imagine that it would have gone something like this: "What man among you having a hundred sheep and finding another one he sets it on his shoulders with great joy and, upon his arrival home, he calls together his friends and neighbors and says to them, 'Rejoice with me because I have found another sheep which shall never stray.' I tell you, in just the same way there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who is born again than over one hundred people who have already been born again."

Of course the parable of Lost Money(Luke 15:8-10) is almost identical. How could the woman lose something that was never hers?

How about The Faithful Servant(Luke 12:35-48)? Do you not need to worry about the Master finding you alert?

And the Prodigal Son(Luke 15:11-32)? Could the son have had the free will to chose to leave the farm to begin with? With the IR doctrine, would the father have even noticed the return of the son, much less thrown a party?

The Parable of the Sower (Mark 4:1-20) - does it not matter if your seed is buried in stony ground, amongst thorns or in good ground? I mean, as long as it sprouted once?

And of course, my favorite - the Parable of the Talents (Matthew 25:14-30.) If the Lord gives you the one talent, is that truly enough? Having received at least one does that mean that there is nothing else that needs to be done?

I leave it to you to continue this exercise with other parables. But I will ask what would the Beatitudes have looked like if they were written in accordance with the IR doctrine?

Blessed are those imputed with a clean heart: for they shall see God.

Finally, I'd like to leave you with my understanding of the Catholic doctrine of salvation. I've culled this more several sources and I believe that it born of a consistency with the entire word of God.

Granted purely out of God's love, grace is necessary for salvation. Catholicism says that grace is an undeserved and unmerited free gift from God that wasn't owed to His people. As a gift, however, a person can accept it or reject it. Grace does not constrain man's free will, but it touches his heart and calls him to repentance. If accepted, man must cooperate with grace in his personal salvation from sin. Grace is given so that the will of God may be done. Grace must be put into action by those that receive it. By justification, man is really made just, not merely declared or reputed to be so. Justification and sanctification are only two aspects of the same thing and not ontologically and chronologically distinct realities.

In closing I'd like to reiterate that for Catholics, justification isn't something that we put on to hide our true nature from God so that we may experience salvation. Justification is the result of our souls being infused with grace from the Holy Spirit, that we might live in union with the New and Everlasting Covenant, Jesus Christ.

I hope that I, with the help of the Holy Spirit, have been able to clearly explain some of the thorny issues that I see with the doctrine of Imputed Righteousness. May God bless and keep you.

Your brother in Christ, Darren

When sudo is too dangerous

Thu, 04 May 2017 00:00:00 -0600

On May 4th, Amazon Web Services (AWS) had a major service disruption on the East Coast. It was so bad that Amazon couldn't even notify it's customers about what was happeneing. You can read the post mortem here, but the crux of the story is that a authorized tech mistyped a command. He was supposed to remove a small number of servers from the S3 accounting subsystem, but he accidentially removed a much, much larger set of servers.

These things happen. Heck, I've mistyped several things in this post already! Of course, my typos are usually pretty easy to recover from. But let's be clear: as a developer, I've fat fingered my way into several critical errors, including truncating a table in a production database.

The U.S. military has already solved this problem with the two-man rule. In summary, two people are required to independently authenticate and initiate a nuclear missle launch. We should do the same with mission critical commands in linux by modifying the sudo command.

What I propose is that when a user runs the sudo command, the program will check the config file to see if the command being invoked is in the two-man (or dual-auth) list. If it's in the list, sudo grabs the timeout value from the config (30 second time out as the default.) Sudo then checks the log file to see if the exact same command had been issued by a different user within the timeout period. If it has, sudo runs the command. If not, sudo notifies the user that a second authorized user must execute the same command within the timeout window.

SCADA and the Dead Man switch

Wed, 03 May 2017 00:00:00 -0600

A SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition) system is what allows companies to monitor and control remote equipment. In the world of electrical distribution, it's what allows us to re-route power in case a substation goes down. Power that used to take hours to re-route physically can now be done in seconds.

But this convenience comes at a price. The SCADA system has to be as secure as possible. For many locations, this means that the SCADA network isn't actually connected to the rest of the internet. This is good because it keeps people from accessing the system without physical access to the machine.

But what about vendor patches and antivirus updates? It's really hard to get updates for these things without giving the updates access to the network. Do you trust your vlan to keep it isolated? What if someone hacks the vlan?

The obvious solution is to only plug the machine into the network for the period of time that the operator is going to apply patches. But there is still a danger here - what if the operator forgets to unplug the cable when finished and leaves the SCADA controller tied to the internet?

My solution (idea really), is to build a utility box that connects two ethernet cables with a 60 minute spring loaded wall timer. You might know these as the mighty Jacuzzi timer seen below. The operator turns the dial, they get a maximum of sixty minutes of time to complete their maintenance work. If they need more time, they can wind it back up.

But if there's a fire alarm and the building is evacuated, the circuit will close itself when the time runs out. It's not a perfect solution, but it could add a valuable layer of physical security to the network.

Stewardship Talk

Mon, 01 May 2017 00:00:00 -0600

This is the text for a Stewardship talk that was originally given in 2008.

Hello, I'm Darren Fix. My son and I have been members of the St Matthews parish for about a year and a half now. I was born into a Catholic family, and although I was baptized and received First Communion in the Catholic Church, my family quit going to church right before I was to be confirmed. My parents had a lot of different reasons for pulling us out, but basically it all boiled down to their feeling that the Church was dreary obligation that stifled them and their relationship with God. For a lot of people this would have been the end of the story, but I was blessed. Twenty some odd years later, I found my way back. Last year with the help of the wonderful people of the St Matthews RCIA program, I finally received the sacrament of Confirmation.

Today, I have been asked to share with you what I think about stewardship and how loving God and serving my neighbors has had a profound impact on my life.

A little over a year ago, God answered one of my prayers, and it I wasn't ready for it. It was a Saturday afternoon and my son was at a birthday party, so I decided to take that opportunity to go to confession. When I came into the church there were a few people already in line and so I made my way to the pews to gather myself, say some prayers and see if I had forgotten anything with my examination of consciousness. When I knelt down to pray I noticed a young woman at the front of the church. She wasn't kneeling or doing much of anything that I could tell. She was just sitting up there and I just had this sense that she was going through something difficult and that she was up there looking for some help. After a few minutes, while I was wrapping up my prayers and preparations for confession, I looked up and noticed that she was still up at the front of the church. So I threw out a final prayer: "Lord, please help her find what she's looking for. Please give her what she needs."

With that I crossed myself and joined the line for confession, which by this time only had one other person in it. Almost immediately upon getting in line the confessional door creaked open and the person in front of me went in. A moment later the young lady from the front of the church joined me in line, and when she spoke to me I was a little surprised.

She began to tell me a story about how she had just arrived in town that week and that while she had already found a job she was flat broke until she got paid on Friday. She asked me if I could spare any money to tide her over until payday. (pause) Now, two minutes earlier I had asked God to help her and God had answered my prayer by sending her back to me! I was thunderstruck. To this day I couldn't tell you what she looked like or how tall she was or even the color of her hair. I just couldn't believe that God had answered my prayer so quickly and so directly. I pulled my money out of my pocket and looked at it in front of her. I had a ten and two ones. I gave her the ten and she was grateful for it. I put the other two dollars back in my pocket and I was immediately filled with regret. The Lord had asked me to help her, and I helped her all right. I helped her 10 dollars worth, just not 12 dollars worth.

I mean, are you kidding me? Two dollars? Those two dollars didn't mean anything to me but they could have bought her eight packages of ramen noodles or a few cans of tuna fish. Two dollars is about half of what I usually spend on a drink at Starbucks. It's half of a movie rental. I had my checkbook in my car, credit and ATM cards in my wallet, but I couldn't part with those last two dollars. It's not like God had asked me to sell everything that I had and follow him. He asked me to give what was convenient and at hand, and I couldn't even do that.

God had answered my prayers, and I wasn't ready for it. I had asked Him to help her, and help her He did. By answering my prayer that way, he essentially said to me. "I have decided to grant your prayer. I will help YOUR neighbor by sending her to YOU for help. I was so close to doing it right. So close. But I didn't. I failed by the tiniest amount, and instead of feeling the pride of having served my Lord well, I felt the shame of disappointing him.

But that's OK, because I was born to make mistakes. I've talked to people about this experience and about the remorse that I felt for not giving what I could. Some people told me that "if God wanted me to give her the full twelve dollars then I would have." Others told me that it was prudent of me to hold some money back - after all she might have been trying to scam me. They all wanted to make me feel better about what I perceived as my failure. What they didn't understand, and what I'm not sure that I can explain is that I cherish the regret that I feel when I think about that moment. Because in that regret I feel an incredible sense of hope. Not only do I know that God loves me, but I also know, without a shadow of a doubt, that he wants me to love him and to serve my neighbors. He knew that there was a good chance that I was going to hold back when he asked me to give of myself, but he asked me anyway. And as it turns out, His asking me was one of the greatest gifts that I have ever received.

So, not only has God given each and every one of us gifts - He has given us different gifts and different combinations of gifts and He expects us to use those gifts. When we use those gifts to love Him and serve our neighbors - well, that's called stewardship. Sometimes we can find stewardship opportunities in a Parish ministry or on a school council. Sometimes these opportunities are found out in the community at large - volunteering at Hospice or the Salvation Army or with Feeding the Flathead. Sometimes that opportunity is found in PRAYING for the people involved in those ministries. And sometimes, that opportunity can be found while waiting in line for reconciliation. But always remember, God wouldn't have given these gifts to us if there wasn't a time and a place for us to use them.

If there is one thing that I hope you take away from my talk, it's this: You don't have to be perfect to be a steward. Often times we'll give too little of ourselves. But other times we'll give too much. We'll overextend or put ourselves into a position where we can't sustain our stewardship. We're all going to make some mistakes along the way, but that's OK. Hopefully we've got a lot of time to fine tune our stewardship and find a good balance. The very nature of stewardship allows us to explore it within ourselves, our families and our lives.

Finally, I want to remind you of something that Father Vic has told us: "Stewardship isn't about giving until it hurts. Stewardship is about giving until it feels good." So, I humbly ask you, particularly over the next week, to pray about the gifts that God has given to you that make you unique amongst all of His creation. Please think about these gifts and how you can use them to love God and serve your neighbors.

Thank you.

Cupcakes with Kavi

Sun, 30 Apr 2017 00:00:00 -0600

This letter was originally written in 2008. I had been talking to a friend about God and salvation, and this letter was one of the results.

About a month and a half ago Kavi and I made some cupcakes. Now, if you've ever made cupcakes with a first grader then this story will probably be pretty familiar to you.

Before we even started I made him wash his hands. Then I made him wash his hands again with soap. While he was doing that I measured out the oil and preheated the oven. Kavi returned and climbed up on his kitchen stool and with his clean hands reached for the first egg. He was able to crack all three eggs by himself, dumping the precious contents into the mixing bowl. While I was picking out the eggshells he decided to take a break to do some cartwheels in the den. Of course he didn't understand why he had to wash his hands again, with soap, since we'd vacuumed the floor a couple of days earlier...

We made the batter and he put the liners into the cup cake pans. He even managed to spoon some batter into the liners before it was time to take another break. I had gotten them into the oven and was starting to make the frosting when he returned, just in time to add the powdered sugar into the mixing bowl. After the powdered sugar dust storm subsided he was off to his room for another break.

While I was icing the cupcakes I asked myself why I didn't just buy some cupcakes at the store or wait until he went to bed. Both ways would have been faster, easier and certainly less messy. The next morning at school Kavi was bragging about how he had made cupcakes the night before. He didn't have a clue about how much extra work I had to do in order to make cupcakes with him. Of course, he doesn't understand how much I love to make cupcakes with him either, so it all balances out. Besides, when Kavi took credit for the cupcakes, it didn't take anything away from me. It didn't make the work that I did any less important and it certainly doesn't mean that he could really make cupcakes on his own.

Have you ever heard someone say that Catholics try to buy their salvation through good works? I have, and the next time that it happens to me I'm just gonna say: "Dude, I'm not buying my salvation, I'm just making cupcakes with Jesus." Because God loves us, He gives us the unearned and undeserved gift of grace. As Christians with free will, we can either accept or reject this gift. Our salvation is found when we accept this gift and cooperate with it to do God's will here on Earth. Does this mean that Jesus didn't have to die for our sins or that we can gain heaven by our own merit? Of course not! Does our participation in doing God's will here on Earth in anyway diminish His divinity or ability? Absolutely not.

Jesus died for us, so that our sins could be forgiven. But Jesus also lived for us! He lived for us so that we could see how we should live - an authentic life full of the peace and joy that only an intimate relationship with God can provide. God really is our father and He cherishes each one of us and wants to help us grow and learn. Jesus knows, more than anyone who has ever walked the face of the Earth, that we are incapable of being perfect.

When He invites us to "help" him make cupcakes (feed the hungry, visit the sick, love thy neighbor, etc) He does so because He wants to be involved with every part of our lives. He wants us to abide in Him as He abides in us. He doesn't want us in the living room watching Sports Center while he's in the kitchen making cupcakes by himself. He wants us involved in His life, in our lives and in the lives of everyone that surround us. What do you think he meant when He commanded us to love our neighbors?

God, through the Holy Spirit, has given us all of the gifts that we need to do His will. Use these gifts. Trust in the Lord. When you trust in Him and try to do his will, He will help you to do things that you couldn't possibly do on your own.

Do you remember Matthew 18:3? 'And he said: "I tell you the truth, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven."' Maybe it's time that we take Jesus at his word and start relying more on God as our Father, just as Kavi relies on me as his father.

Your brother in Christ, Darren

Single Page Bio.

Thu, 27 Apr 2017 00:00:00 -0600

You kinda asked for it...

I'm applying for a volunteer position with a local organization and was going through the paperwork. At the end of the short-answer section, they asked for a one page biography. A single page. Two pages are not allowed, but a single page would be grat. Do not go past a single page. But, they also said that I could be creative. Here is the bio that I submitted to them. Now I just have to wait and see if I'll get a callback.

Darren Fix is a professional programmer and expert troubleshooter living in Kalispell, Mt. Although he was born too early to single handedly write the entire code base for the Apollo space mission, he has helped companies such as Microsoft, Eli Lilly, Texaco, Kenworth Trucks, Wells Fargo Bank and Pennzoil to leverage synergies by creating custom ordered packages of digital instructions.
To the great dismay of his enemies, Darren was born in Odessa, Tx. He soon realized that he wanted a better life for his family, so they packed up and moved to Corpus Christi, Tx, where his little brother, Kevin, was born less than a year later. Still not satisfied, Darren would move his family to Omaha before finally settling down in Conroe, Tx, just in time to start first grade. An avid sportsman, he won both the one and three hole tournaments before deciding to abandon competitive golf in search of something that wouldn’t make his legs itch so much.
In high school, Darren finally found a worthy opponent, one that could not easily be vanquished. Enshrined in the Armistice of 1985, Darren formally capitulated and ended the long-standing war with his arch-nemesis, the Humidity of the Gulf Coast region. While the term exile was never formally used, Darren did agree to attend the Verde Valley School in Sedona, Az for his Jr. and Sr. years. While there, he made the most out of some of his time by serving as a RA, peer counsellor, admissions representative, Sr. Class president, thespian, choralist, tennis coach, scullery attendant and member of the fire brigade. Twice, he spent a thirteen day period embedded with a family in rural Sonora, Mexico, with nothing but his sharp wits and rudimentary Spanish to help him thrive. A humanitarian to the core, he was also known for covering the office phones so that the staff could eat lunch amongst their peers.
Too busy to participate in the NCAA signing day of 1987, Darren eventually decided to attend New York University, which in hindsight, might not have been the best choice for a 17 year old from Conroe. Still, he was able to pursue his dream of becoming a sabreur, which definitely would soon come in handy someday, probably.
Never forgetting his secret vow to crush his arch-nemesis, Darren enlisted in the US Navy, choosing to dedicate his time to mastering the electronics necessary to engage his foes with surface to air missiles from very, very far away. During his first deployment as a FC3 to SW Asia, he singled handedly created the PQS for the Mk14 WDS and was awarded a NAM by his CO. It wasn’t until a year later, during his second deployment, that he vanquished his enemy, Humidity, from Southwest Asia.
Little did he know, that upon returning home, he would come face to face with

Hmmm, I wonder what would have happened if I was allowed to write two pages? ;)

Qubes Stickers are here!

Thu, 27 Apr 2017 00:00:00 -0600

All right, all right, allllll right

All right, I've been wanting some Qubes sticker for awhile now, and I've gotten tired of waiting. So, I ordered 100 of them from StickerMule for the low, low price of $66.

Here's my genius plan:

Give 34 stickers to the Qubes-os team for free as a thank you for their work on the project.
Offer the remaining stickers for $1 apiece + shipping.
...
Not profit!

But seriously, I've got some stickers, but I'm not sure how much effort I want to put into selling them. I'll try to come up with some ideas over the next few days.

Montana GOP Senate kills mail in ballot

Tue, 25 Apr 2017 00:00:00 -0600

In a 28 to 20 vote, voters get the shaft.

Yesterday, the Montana Senate killed the last chance we had to choose Sec. Zinke's replacement with a mail in ballot. This means that the polling stations in Fleathead county will have to be fully manned.

I talked to Monica Eisenzimer over at the Flathead County Elections office this morning. The current estimate is that an all mail in ballot election would have saved Flathead County taxpayers between $50,000 and $75,000. We won't know what our final bill will be until after the election is over though.

These are the State Senators from Flathead County that voted against allowing us to vote by mail:

SD 02 - Dee Brown
SD 03 - Keith Reiger
SD 04 - Mark Blasdel
SD 05 - Bob Keenan
SD 06 - Al Olszewski

If you feel strongly about this issue, either way, please reach out to your represenative and let them know how you feel about it and why!

The time line for this bill can be found here.

The results from the final vote can be found here.

FN Daly

Tue, 21 Mar 2017 00:00:00 -0600

The USS Mahan gets a cruise extension

We had just finished our last port of call in Barcelona, Spain. We had just spent about 5 months in the Persian Gulf and were steaming home. The announcement comes over the 1MC that we've been diverted to participate in Operation Teamwork '92. We're heading to the Arctic circle to participate in some NATO wargames - a show of force against a Soviet fleet that couldn't afford to feed it's soldiers in port, much less underway.

The chain of command had decided to not tell us about the change in orders until we had left Barcelona. The scuttlebutt was that they were afraid that some of us would go UA (the Navy version of AWOL) and fly back to the states instead of extending our trip for another 10 days. Ten days were a lot. Some of us had become fathers during that time... others just wanted to get back to wives and girlfriends. I just wanted to get off of the fuckin boat.

The seas in the North Atlantic were pretty rough, even for early March in 1992. It was bitterly cold, but we still had to muster for unreps (underway replenishment) to bring on fuel. We didn't bother with anything else, since nothing else was worth risking our lives for. But diesel man... we had to have diesel to make the steam to run the boat.

I'd been off of mess cranking for a few weeks by this time, so I was back in rotation up in the radar room. Actually, since I was one of the few people onboard that truly didn't get seasick, I was in the radar room permanently during the worst of the storm. All hands were ordered to say in the racks, tied down so that they wouldn't fall out when we took a big wave at the wrong angle. Literally tied into their racks.

Up in the radar room, we had a really expensive spectrum analyzer go ass over teakettle. It looked really bad, but it turned out to be mostly cosmetic. I'm glad that we didn't have to explain to the Weapons Officer that we'd lost a piece of gear worth 75k just because we hadn't secured it correctly.

After a time, we started heading back, out of the storm. The seas were calmer, and everyone was back doing their regular rotations. I had the 2000 to 0800 shift in the radar room (being the junior man and everything...) I had just gotten off of my shift when General Quarters sounded. I ran up to my post at the radar console in lower CIC, waiting to find out what happened.

Explosion in the #1 Fire Room

What had happened was that a high pressure steam pipe had ruptured while one of our shipmates was directly in front of it. We didn't know who he was at the time, just that they were scrambling a helo from the carrier to get him off of our ship and into whatever Scandinavian burn center was the closest. After the medevac departs and we stand down from GQ, we start to learn what happened. It was FN Daly, a young black kid, a Fireman (FN) assigned to the fire room, who had been so unlucky that morning. The high temperature and high pressure burned away his uniform and the top layer of his skin. He was pink, or so the rumors went. They got him to the best hospital that they could find, a great hospital, really. A few days later he was transferred to the burn unit at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, TX. It was the best treatment in the world for this kind of injury. But in the end, FN Daly didn't make it.

Daly had been mess cranking for a long three months. That's how I knew him. We cranked together. We got along well enough. The day before he died, I was hustling around trying to get something VERY IMPORTANT taken care of. It was his first say back in the boiler room, first day out of the mess decks. He needed some tape and couldn't find any, so he asked me for some. I was too busy, in a rush. Always in a rush. We were under the ladder that led up to my radar room. I told him to go up to the door and knock. When FC2 Proper answered, ask him for some tape... tell him that Fix sent him. He got the tape, and Proper was pissed... well, pissy, at least. Daly's accident happened the next day. To this day I'm grateful that I helped him to find some tape, that I didn't blow him off. I bet that Proper is pretty grateful too.

We knew when we got back to Charleston that there would be an investigation. The CO informed us of this. A tiger team was formed, and I was on it, of course. All of the E4's in Fox division were, to my knowledge. We went down into the engine room and painted. And painted. We literally white-washed the entire space. Days and days of painting over rust and dirt and whatever wasn't already white.

The first rule of naval painting is that you have to get rid of all of the rust. If you paint over rust, the rust continues to eat the steel from the inside. But there was too much rust. In the angle irons, we'd chip all the way through... it was just rust, being held together by some magic combination of iron paste and water. So we stopped the remediation and started slapping on coats of paint. Whatever we could do to show the inspectors that the ship was in tip top shape. Must have been a freak accident or something.....

The above is the version of what happened that's been floating around in my head for the last 25ish years. I don't even remember Daly's first name - I'm not sure if I ever knew it. If I had to guess, I would say that it might have been Frank. The problem is that I can't find anything about it on the internet. There's a new USS Mahan that had a different tragedy a few years back... a deranged civilian grabbed a weapon from a watchstander and started firing, killing one sailor before being shot and killed himself. Anyway - Daly was the only person that I served with who died in the line of duty.

A couple of weeks ago, I got some of the actual facts about what happened from some old shipmates on our Facebook page:

"FN Daly, happened in EBO1 #1 fire room, soot blower line exploded."
"The results of the investigation determined that is was replaced years before by the shipyard (Don't recall if it was Chasn Shipyard, or Metro Machine). The pipe had been Ultrasound tested, and records showed it passed the NDT, however, it was subsequently determined that the line should have been 1/2" larger (don't recall the pipe size), but the minimum tube wall thickness for the larger pipe would have failed the NDT, and consequently, had the right diameter pipe been in the system, likely the testing would have identified the problem and caused the pipe to be replaced."
"Yea, we had to steam all the way back from NA on one fire room."
"I was in the personnel office and it sounded like a bomb went off. Poor kid!"
"There were 5 of us standing in the same spot not 3 mins before it happened. I got called back to 2 fire, by the time I reached upper vestibule, GQ was sounded. I was #1 nozzleman when BT 1 pulled Daly out slung over his shoulder. Could not recognize it was a person he pulled out. Still have nightmares of this."
"I believe it was Daly. A steam pipe burst while he was under it? He was from Georgia, poor guy. I helped load his stretcher in the helo."

If you've stumbled across this page, and you knew Daly, feel free to contact me on facebook or send me an email. This page isn't a memorial to him, per se, but there needs to be some notice of his passing.

USS Mahan facebook group