[QUOTE="...OffGrid9--What was your rate? My brother was an HT on the OKC during that time. Chuck Nagel--sadly, we lost him in '95. He's the reason I enlisted in the Navy. We never refered to the Jersey as "The Black Dragon", I have no idea where that got started. She was always called the Big J.[/QUOTE]
Hi, BadKarma - I was a quartermaster, QM2. I was on Com7thFlt staff, which made up about 300 of the 1250 men on the Okie boat when I was there. I knew a lot of the ship's company, but never met your brother, as far as I can recall. There was a lot of friendly (...sometimes not so friendly) rivalry between the ship's company and us (they referred to us as "flag pukes"), but when we went ashore, and there was a brawl, we fought against all others, back to back, as one crew.
We had a QMCS in my section when I first came aboard the Okie boat, Feb '69...I think his name was Hurd...he retired a few months later. He had served as a seaman deuce aboard the New Jersey at the end of WWII, when she was painted dark blue, almost black, to make her nearly invisible at night. She got the nickname "Black Dragon" from that. I can't speak for the period when you knew her, but at least as late as 1969, there were still sailors who called her the Black Dragon.