Flights of Fancy

When we last left our stalwart young hero, he was poised to join the military. Twelfth grade, which I had already decided (with my mother’s approval) that I would not be attending, began in September. My birthday is in October, and it was right around then that President Johnson began leaning into his intention to draft 500,000 healthy young men and send them on a field trip to visit an ancient, exotic southeast Asian culture, and lay waste to everything in sight. This didn’t bode well for me, and it was beginning to look like a case of, “the best-laid plans of mice and men are generally about equal.”

Now, I don’t know what you’ve heard, but I’m not a heroic guy. I know, it’s hard to believe, but despite my adolescent attempts to come off that way, in my heart of hearts, I knew better. So my immediate plan became to find a way to avoid spending the next year humping a 60-pound pack and an assault rifle through flooded rice paddies and claustrophobic jungles while dedicated individuals tried to kill me. Mom, who had been married to a sailor, let me stew for a couple of days then reminded me that the navy was a viable service, and off to the recruiter we went.

The recruiter was pretty honest. He didn’t make any outrageous promises that he could get a high school dropout into the nuclear power program, for example, and he suggested that more options would be available to me if I completed my GEDs, so, armed with a voucher, it was up the hill to Monterey Peninsula College to take them. Having recently completed eleventh grade, and being, as I mentioned before, good at tests, I finished them all with good-to-excellent scores in one day, and on October 12th, 1965, five days after my seventeenth birthday, I was sworn in, and shipped off to boot camp.

Navy boot camp is not the ordeal that’s seen in Full Metal Jacket, but discipline is required, and I may have mentioned that I had just spent the last five years training myself to be a smart-mouthed, rebellious 4$$-hole. The bottom line: I didn’t get into enough trouble to do brig-time, and was never the subject of a court-martial. I got a lot out of the navy that contributed to my writing and my adulthood later, but I could have gotten so much more had I been more mature. They taught me skills from fire-fighting to ship handling, but the one that opened the most doors for me was typing. Yup, simple, mundane typing. It got me my civil-service job later where I met my wife of fifty years and built the career that supports us in comfort even now in retirement. Oh, why did they teach me to type? I was a radioman for most of the time. My first ship was an oceangoing minesweeper.

These little guys are small, made of wood, and ride like a cork. I rode out two hurricanes aboard her, which was all the adventure I could ask for! This is USS Notable in the rather dramatic picture; mine was USS Fidelity, #443, but they were all like 53 little peas in a pod. The thing about being on a small ship is that you learn not only your own job, but all the other jobs that impact it. As an E-2 or E-3, you’re performing tasks that on a “real” ship are held by mid-grade petty officers. I most highly recommend it for all newly-minted sailors.

After that and my “A” School for radioman, I was sent to the big communication hub on Guam in the Marianas. For a year and a half, I held a top-secret clearance and can’t say a thing about what I saw, did, or was involved in. The gear I used there is in the Smithsonian, and you can go there and encrypt and decrypt sample messages, but the content is secret for life. Sorry.

After a minor screwup in which I botched accountability for a secret publication, I was sent to the fleet for “arduous sea duty,” the fleet, in this case, being USS Tolovana, a fleet oiler servicing the Mighty Seventh, erstwhile known as the Tonkin Gulf Yacht Club, off the coast of Vietnam. Here’s another dramatic shot, taken from one of the destroyers, of us refueling USS Bennington, CVS-20.

In addition to almost non-stop ten-hour days, except when we returned to the Philippines to refill our replenishment tanks, I rode out a Pacific typhoon aboard the old swayback. She wasn’t near the seagoing roller coaster that the little minesweeper was!

Anyway, what I learned from the year of “arduous sea duty” was that the navy really wasn’t the life for me, and I took my skills and went home. I was 21-years-old and all set to find my real career and get it underway when life threw one of its ever-handy monkey wrenches into the plan. But that’s a story for another day.