The TR had a collision one fine night with one of our accompanying cruisers (Leyte Gulf, IIRC) just before our winter '96 deployment to the Med. I came off midwatch and racked out, they started drills, including ahead-flank-to-back-emergency-full, and someone on the bridge during that evolution decided to call Leyte Gulf into close-in trailing position, about 1 mile back. Well, that became a REALLY-close-in trailing position, about contact-distance. Seems both ships' lookouts were... tired, let's say, and the phone talkers down in the Control Room said they heard a REALLY excited voice shout something about a "pop-up contact aft!" about 10 seconds beforehand. I remember being woken up by the sound of the Collision alarm, which had been leaned on by mistake by someone a few weeks prior
Yep, I was sitting in my shop at about 0200 when that collision alarm went off. I had just about finished cussing out the moron that tripped it accidentally when I about got knocked out of my chair. Good times. I'm pretty sure we had no aft look-outs, they had been pulled because the guys in my division were running a TF-30 (F-14 motor) on the fantail test cell. They had just shut down and a couple were setting up for a nap in the test cell booth. The motor got turned around sideways by the hit. I think our CO, Christensen, took most of the blame for not ensuring his officers de-conflicted their plans. I'm pretty sure we were EMCON with no radio contact with the Leyte Gulf, we had just finished flight ops, running the motor on the test cell, and then started the engineering drills. The LG was back there still in its plane guard position from flight ops. So we went dead in the water and collected them. I think Christensen still got his star but it was a desk drive in the Pentagon and he was out. Probably was on his way to at least Vice Admiral before that. The CO and XO of the Leyte Gulf were relieved.
Later on that cruise someone layed on the chemical alarm at about 3am in the gulf. I was sucking rubber rather quickly, took them a few minutes to pass the disregard signal. I was in no mood ever again to assume an alarm was an accident. Much later, as a team leader and locker leader on a boiler ship I learned the general alarms for major fuel oil leaks are not usually accidents. Much fun though, I get to go play fireman and see a whole bunch of hard infantry Marines pretty much panic like little girls.
Of course I felt bad during work-ups, we were in our engineering certification cycle with multiple drills and GQs for several weeks. It was about a week before I found out that the Marines attached to my division were unaware that the words being passed were drills. They thought the ship really was bursting into flames and trying to sink everyday.
