Practice Makes Perfect CAPT John F. O,Connell During 1957 I served in USS CAIMAN (SS-323) with Lt. Commander Jack Hawkins as CO. Jack was a wonderful man to work for if you didn't mind being held to very high professional standards. We had a very good boat, and, as I recall we won the E that year. However, became concerned about the fire controll party's lack of precision at the firing point. So we retired to the conning tower one afternoon during the final week of upkeep before a a week of type training and we practiced and practiced and practiced. We responded to a dummy target introduced from sonar, solved for target motion and honed our skills at the firing point procedures. "Set, Shoot, Fire!" rang out time after time as we simlated firing torpedoes.This seemed to go on for hours. Jack never yelled at us but he was adept at Chinese water torture methods and he never let up for a minute. "Set, Shoot, Fire!" again and again, ad nauseam. Finally we quit, having honed ourselves to a very fine edge, with Jack confident that he had the best firing point fire team in the Pacific Submarine Force. On Monday we went to sea and started and approach on the target. I was fire control coodinator and Ray Heimbach, our XO, was assistant approach officer. We did a fine job of target motion analysis as I recall and were getting close to the point weher we could fire a Mk 14-5 steam torpedo with a high hit probability. Ray checked all the details: torpedo ready, tube flooded, and muzzle door open, as the range closed. Then he made a fatal mistake. He turned to John Shilling at the TDC and asked John "Are you set?" Immediatly Joe Smith, having heard the magic work "Set" and having already computed the spread yelled "Fire" and away went the exercise torpedo with poor Ray yelling "Nooooo" and trying to pull it back into tube with body English. I can still remember Jack Hawkins' look of disgust at his highly tuned fire control party as the torpedo went out and missed the target/