Cipriano Griego US Navy USS Richard E Crouse Vietnam Interview recorded September 11, 2014 A: My name is Cipriano Griego. I was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico on December 5th, 1944. I lived in Albuquerque, New Mexico for the first 17 years of my life. I went to Lew Wallace Elementary School, I went to Washington Junior High and I graduated from Albuquerque High School. I was born in the Valley. If anyone knows about Albuquerque, there’s a valley and then there’s a heights. My family’s Hispanic. In those days, we call it Mexican-American. We – my dad was a contractor. He built homes. He built various kinds of things. My mother was mostly a stay-at-home mom but she did clean. She cleaned people’s houses. When I was younger, I remembered that she cleaned one lady’s house whose husband was an attorney which later on made me think about that profession. And a very interesting wife. When I was young, we – our family was normal extended family which means that my father had, I believe, eight brothers and sisters plus himself. My mother had seven brothers and sisters plus herself. Her mother raised her. Her dad was killed at a young age. He was in an accident. He worked for the railroad and was killed then. My father’s family, my uncles and aunts are very close, always having functions together as well as having so many children around when I was young. Every time we had an event, there was always kids around and we would always celebrate different kinds of events. Basically, holidays and things like that. Where I lived, it was, in the beginning, basically, Latino, Hispanic, Mexican-American community. And when I moved on to – my dad bought a home in downtown Albuquerque. We were the only Latino, Mexican-Americans in that community and our neighbors didn’t quite like us being there so it was a hard time. Q: How so? A: Well, one lady next door, she would not allow us to get on her property, things like that. But basically, it was a very uneventful life, I guess you would say. I just lived a normal thing. I went to high school and I went to Albuquerque High which is an interesting school because in those days, you had two options: you could either go on to the service or get a job. I was 17 years old when I graduated from high school so my brother-in-law who was in the Navy indicated that it would be a nice thing for me to look into getting into the Navy. Q: So you didn’t have any college prospects at that time? A: No, no, I never even thought of college. So I joined the Navy and in those days, they called it “Kiddie Cruise”. If you’re under 18 and you joined, you only have to serve three years instead of four. So I joined on a buddy program. A friend of mine went with me to boot camp. So we went to San Diego and went to a boot camp there and a very interesting experience; first time being away from home, first time ever flying in an airplane. And in those days, they were prop jobs. It was funny because we flew from Albuquerque to Flagstaff, Arizona, Flagstaff, Arizona to I think it was somewhere in Nevada, from Nevada to San Diego. By the time we got there, it was about two in the morning. So we were unloaded. A bunch of us were in a bus. They unloaded us into boot camp at two in the morning and we’re all nervous, scared. The people there acted like they – that we were nothing. They'd tell us to do something and we'd do it and somebody else would tell us to do something, we’d do it. We didn’t know what their ranks were or anything. But anyway, by the time we got everything settled, we had our bedding given to us and it was like four in the morning by the time we were able to get into our bunks. And lo and behold, at six o'clock, I believe it was, reveille. So I just had my head on the pillow and I had to get up again and they didn’t care whether you slept or not. So that told me that the Navy wasn’t as exciting as I thought it would be. But I did learn a lot while I was in the service. I learned how to discipline myself, I learned how to study for the first time in a long time, which was very helpful to me because I advanced in the ranks quickly. Out of boot camp, I went to San Francisco to school. One thing about the – when I joined, it was choice, not chance. That was their motto. In other words you could pick, whatever school you wanted to go to and you were assured one of the things that you’d picked, you’d get. So I looked at the catalog, I guess if you call it that, and decided I wanted to be a nuclear submarine sailor. So that was my number one pick. Q: What was the attraction to that? A: My brother-in-law was a submariner and I thought it sounded cool to be a nuclear- powered submarine. Well obviously, I didn’t have the education or experience to get into that but that was one of my choices. So the top three, I think, was electronics technician and some other thing but mainly around electronics. And finally, the person that I was interviewing with indicated, “Well, you get six choices,” and he said, “Well, you got one left,” and he says, “Here’s something,” he looked in the book and he says, “Radar. Have you ever-” “I’d never heard of Radar,” he said, “Would you like to go to Radar school?” I said, “Well, you said I’m not sure you’re going to get this, you’re going to get one of the top one.” Lo and behold, I got Radar school. So that was in San Francisco and I spent eight weeks in school and about three or four more weeks waiting my orders. Well, I got my orders and I went from San Diego to Newport, Rhode Island and I was put on board a destroyer. It was called the USS Abbot. What was interesting about that, it was a World War II destroyer and it was a sister ship of the Sullivan’s. I don’t know if anyone heard about the Sullivan brothers, they all got killed. Well, we were the sister ship of the Sullivan’s and what we did was we went out and trained officers how to be officers in terms of a destroyer. And we got a lot of midshipmen on board but we’d go out in the morning and come back at night [inaudible]. And so, I thought that was pretty boring so I put in for a transfer and I got a transfer to the USS Richard E. Kraus DD-849. Can you imagine I still remember that. Q: When did you join by the way? A: I joined when I was, well, I was 17 in 1962. So where was I? Richard E. Kraus. I wanted to see the world. Well, that ship never, left port and never came back. For three years, it was around the world. It went around the world twice. It hit every port. I was in Africa, I was in Greece, I was – I got to see everything until the end when we, from Newport Rhode Island, they assigned us to Subic Bay in Philippines for the Vietnam War. We were a support ship. We would do gunfire missions as well as we would chase the carriers for aircraft rescue which we did a couple of. But most of it, we did gunfire missions which means the closest I ever got to Vietnam was a thousand yards but I put a lot of holes in the country. I don’t know what we hit but as a radar member, I worked in what’s called CIC, that was Combat Information Center and one of my functions was to talk to the spotters that would tell us what our mission was, where were we going to shoot and that was very interesting. They would – I recall one mission where we spent the whole day going back and forth about two miles, back and forth, back and forth, training our guns on a bicycle path I guess it was where they carried their supplies and things like that. And we had a spotter up on a hill looking down at that and when they came through, he’d say, “Shoot!” where we’d just let go. And then after so many shots, he would say, “Target destroyed.” We wouldn’t know what it was, a bike, a car, a truck or whatever, people or anything but that’s – that’s all we got; was “Target destroyed” assuming that there would be human beings that we were hitting. So we never got face-to-face but what we did was very important as far as – the marines loved us because we had a computerized gun so we could shoot nine miles and hit a target right dead on with some adjustment because that’s what I did.