I served on Irex twice—I was assigned there after graduating from Officers' Submarine School in May 1965, but stayed only two months until I got transferred to Tigrone. After qualifying, I went to Tunny out in the Philippines for two years, then asked for orders back to a New London boat and ended up assigned back on Irex, where I stayed from December '68 to August '69, when I left the boat to get out of the Navy. During that time I was Weapons Officer and later was also Navigator and Senior Watch Officer.
Here's what I remember of our operations in 1969: We went down to the Caribbean in January for a month of SPRINGBOARD operations, visiting San Juan and St. Thomas. As I recall, we had local ops for the February–April time frame, and made a trip to Bermuda in May. In July we were deployed to the Mediterranean. Before I left, we stopped in Rota (Spain), then went through the Straits of Gibraltar and participated in an ASW operation in the Tyrrhenian Sea (west of Italy). My recollection is that that was 10-14 days long. After that we visited Naples for a few days and then went to Palma, where I got off. I heard second-hand that a few weeks after that the boat was sent back to the states for decommissioning—that would have been a surprise to the crew, as we thought it would be a full-length Med deployment.