Navy leads to life’s vocation

Machinist mate to OSHA engineer

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BROOKINGS – After growing up on a farm in rural Clinton, Minnesota, and graduating from Clinton High School in 1967, Mike Monnens was not keen on college and the Navy looked good.

“The folks insisted I spend a year in college,” he said. “I really wanted to go in the Navy when I was in high school.”

“There were technical skills available in the Navy,” he explained. “I was already looking at the nuclear power program.”

“It did not work well,” Monnens said of his first year of college, at the University of Minnesota (Morris). “The slide rule got me in chemistry. I just was not doing well.”

He came home for the summer and worked for a neighbor who was a building mover. Come the end of summer, he didn’t want to return to the classroom. 

“I just could not stomach the thought of going back to college,” he said. “I went and enlisted and got a 90-day delay.” He reported to San Diego for basic training in February 1969. Next stop was three months at machinist mate “A” school in Great Lakes, Illinois.

He then joined the USS Yorktown (CVS-10), a World War II vintage aircraft carrier refurbished for anti-submarine warfare and home-ported in Norfolk, Virginia, and made his first cruise.

Monnens was assigned to “A” gang and worked on the power systems that powered the aircraft catapults.  

The Yorktown participated in Operation Peacemaker, a major NATO fleet exercise. Additionally, the ship visited major ports of call that included Brest, France; Copenhagen; Rotterdam, Holland; Portsmouth, England; and Kiel, Germany. Monnens visited both Paris and London. Finally, the Yorktown went far enough north to cross the Arctic Circle, gaining its crew coveted admission to the “Order of Blue Nose (Domain of the Polar Bear).” Monnens called those days at sea an “adventuresome cruise.”

Then, since he had signed on for a six-year enlistment to get what was considered especially good technical training, he reported in January 1970 to Nuclear Power School at Naval Training Center, Bainbridge, Maryland, for six months in the classroom to be followed by six months of hands-on “prototype training.”

After completing the classroom curriculum, Monnens was sent to upstate New York for the six months of prototype training. After 4 1/2 months, he voluntarily dropped out of the program and would soon be back to the fleet, where he would spend the rest of his days in the Navy.

‘Haze gray and underway’

As he knew it would, Monnens’ next assignment would take him back to the non-nuclear Navy.

“I went back to the West Coast,” he said. “I went into the conventional fleet. I’m still a machinist mate, with all the training.”

In January 1971, he went aboard USS Providence (CLG-6), a light cruiser and flagship of the First Fleet and home-ported in San Diego. He served there until July 1971. Providence made a couple cruises during that time: to Portland, Oregon, for the city’s annual Rose Festival, and to Hawaii.

Monnens, now a petty officer third class, admits that he “very quickly got tired of San Diego.” So he sought a different assignment and got orders to USS Gurke DD-783, another of those World War II destroyers that the Navy relied on so heavily during the Vietnam War.

Soon after He reported aboard, the Gurke shifted its homeport to Yokosuka, Japan.

After a short cruise to the Indian Ocean and the Persian Gulf, the ship returned to Japan and settled in before making several cruises to the Gulf of Tonkin and providing gunfire support for American forces ashore in Vietnam. Additionally, Gurke visited several ports in the area including Hong Kong, Singapore and Pusan, South Korea.

Monnens remained aboard Gurke until December 1973. 

“I was actually thinking of staying in,” Monnens said. However, he “decided to go back and try another ship, to see if it’s something I’d want to stay in on; so I transferred onto USS Berkeley (DDG-15), a guided-missile destroyer in San Diego.” By now Monnens is a second class petty officer.

After about four months in San Diego, he made one more Western Pacific cruise and revisited some those ports of call he was now familiar with: Yokosuka, Hong Kong and Singapore.

Monnens returned to the United States in December 1974. On Feb. 2, 1975, he walked off the Berkeley with Honorable Discharge in hand. He had served “six years to the hour.”

And many of the days of those six years in the Navy had been spent on ships at sea: “Haze gray and underway.”  

Back to the farm, back to school

Monnens bought a car in California and took about a month to drive back home to the farm in Clinton, visiting some buddies on the way back and arriving in early spring.

Come summer, Monnens joined a “custom wheat-harvesting crew” and headed to Texas. “We followed the wheat harvest up into South Dakota and then we ended up back home.” 

With the job done, he was looking around for something to do. One of his two brothers had attended West Community and Technical College in Granite Falls to study hydraulics.

With his own background in hydraulics, he saw that as something to do. He used his G.I. Bill dollars to cover the cost and completed a two-year curriculum in fluid-power hydraulics.

He went on to work in sales and service for a variety of companies in the Midwest. “I was in Minnesota, Iowa, Nebraska.”

Come 1989 Monnens saw that with the coming of computers he would have to further his education if he was to remain in that field. He stopped in Brookings “and liked what I saw.” His next stop was South Dakota State University.

He earned a Bachelor of Science degree in agricultural engineering in 1993 and a master’s degree in 1995. He stayed on campus and in 2000 became an Occupational Safety and Health Administration consultant to Engineering Extension. He stayed until retirement in 2015.

He and his wife Ann married in 1985 have a son, David, serving in the Peace Corps in Nicaragua.

Contact John Kubal at jkubal@brookingsregister.com.