Two weeks ago, I made a pilgrimage to the Port of Los Angeles to visit the ship that played a central part in setting me on the path that put me where I am today—the battleship USS Iowa. And as I walked toward the Big Stick at its new home in San Pedro, a ship's boat sitting on the pier alongside her triggered a recollection of one of the most memorable episodes in my tour aboard Iowa: a night in late September of 1987 when I left my somewhat minor mark on the history of drone warfare with a box of chocolate chip cookies.
I was an ensign aboard the USS Iowa, which was taking part in a joint military exercise with the Turkish military called Display Determination '87, a rehearsal for a reinforcement of Turkish forces by US Army, Navy, and Marine units in the event of a Soviet invasion. From off the Turkish coast in Saros Bay, the Iowa was to provide shore bombardment in advance of a Marine amphibious landing. But the helicopter we had used to put our Marine forward observer in the air the day before was "tits-up," as they say, and we needed eyes in the sky for the final bombardment.
As a division officer in the ship's Deck Department, I was ostensibly in charge of the Iowa's small boats. On the second evening of gunnery exercises, I was summoned to the bridge of the USS Iowa by the captain to undertake a mission of the utmost urgency: I was to deliver a box of the mess deck's somewhat famous "battlechip" cookies to a nearby Turkish patrol boat and keep them distracted while a flight crew on Iowa launched an RQ-2 Pioneer unmanned aerial vehicle.
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