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ONBOARD
USS MIDWAY 17 OCT 79 Hey, Good Lookin',
GOT YOUR LETTER 0F THE 7th today, first mail in a week. Red Letter day, or at least my trusty Seiko watch informs me. We have been steaming around in the vicinity of two typhoons, the first of which pounded old Ma Midway pretty hard. 'Tis the season and all that.
'Owen' was a nasty typhoon who finally wound up not rolling over Yokosuka after all. However, our Admiral is running in max fever to get his third star, and decided to sortie us on schedule anyway. Thus, it was our pleasure to go out and romp through the twenty-foot seas.
I should note that 57,000 dead weight tons don't move around a whole lot.
It can't, as our cargo of airplanes has a tendency to break tie down chains and roll around like the deck cannon of yore. But the cruel sea did sweep people overboard, even from the flight deck which is eighty feet above a calm sea, and it showed callous indifference to delicate missile launchers and antennas.
Our cozy little bunkroom arced through about thirty feet each minute. Great snoozing weather, since we obviously weren't going to be doing any flying for a while. Waking up is a trip, since no portholes or external amenities penetrate our little home, so if the lights are out, the darkness is as complete as the inside of a velvet glove. Sometimes, staring at the phosphorescence of the dial of the trusty watch, it is hard to believe (or recall) whether it is day or night.
Like tonight. It is 2200, and morning. We have the first brief going at midnight, for a launch at 0200. Thereafter, we will simulate that it is a regular day, and work through till noon. Then, we pull into Subic Bay in the Philippines for a day or two of replenishment and off for the Indian Ocean again. A I hope I can pull together enough to get to the Cubi Officer's Club for several Cubi Specials before I crash and bum.
Also, due to the storm down here, the Kitty Hawk Air Wing will be in town. You never can tell what will happen when two Air Wings are in the Wild West Philippines at the same time, and I'm glad I am not standing shore patrol out in Olongapo City. Last time we were here we found one of our sailors floating in Shit River with no shoes and no visible wounds. Strange.
Let's see: recapping the bids over the last ten years. Modesty was never my long suit, but I will overcome my natural tendency to embellish the facts long enough to run quickly down the calendar cycles.
Well, there I was (a typical fighter pilot line if there ever was one, usually followed by "flat on my back at thirty thousand feet with zeros/migs all around…) at crazy Ann Arbor. Let me pass lightly over those tumultuous times, when we changed the world, ended the war, and had a swell time.
The usual. I couldn't retrieve the year 1972 if my life depended on it. I seem to remember that the Wolverines were very large that year, and something about a factory job in the summer, but there all coherent recall abruptly ceases. Someone could have told me about the Wolverines.
Suddenly, virtually without warning, it was the middle of 1973. I skipped the graduation ceremony, but in due course the University mailed a diploma (not nearly as ornate as our high School's) and I was in a barber chair down on South University, feeling very strange as the long locks fell about me. Utilizing a few contacts (God, when you finally fall, it is hard and fastl) I suddenly discovered a burning desire to be a part of the wide world of publishing, a passion of which I had been completely unaware till moments before the interviewer's questions.
"Well, just why do you want a position at McGraw-Hill, Son?" said J. George Owen. He looked very bluff and collegiate in the steaming Missouri summer heat. White shirt, rep tie. He also looked like he had done his time on the road, back when there were just two salesmen, one east of the Mississippi, and one West.
"Well, er, I like books, man. " I was debonair in my wilted winter suit, and the bizarre Prince Valiant haircut that had replaced my pony tail.
"Hmmm," said the man But it came to pass, three months after my successful passage through the mine field of Vietnam-era education, I was the McGraw-Hill Book Company, College and University Division, for northern Ohio and Eastern Michigan. I was established in the maid's quarters of a vast brick mansion in the Palmer Woods neighborhood of Detroit. I had a package of traveler's checks, those marvelous two-hundred dollar checks, a company car, a telephone answering machine, a corduroy sport jacket.
I was ready. I sat down and got good and loaded with my buddies still in school and we all wondered at the change. "Hey, man, the bread's good, so what the fuck....."
So for the next twenty-three months I drove around, carried a brief case, made sales calls, and went to lunch a lot. My Boss thought I was a swell guy, I made plenty of money for the company and there was talk of a promotion out to the West Coast.
Thankfully, I blew it. I got into a beef with a book thief and told him what I thought about him. He got on a high horse and ratted me out to management. I had underestimated the man, a trait which I have now learned to avoid the hard way. An official uproar ensued, with many Memorandums generated. They asked for an apology. I told them to fuck off. The guy was a thief.
So, after a phrase, there I was. I had saved about ten grand, the enormous Chevrolet Caprice Classic in the driveway was paid for, and I determined it was time to take the major-league break I missed when I went to work right out of college.
I'll pause here in order to inject some hindsight- you know, the many little crossroads you turn down or pass by that in retrospect become the features that determine where you wind up, and how difficult it is to get back somewhere else. Anyhow, I was plumb convinced that the world was a Capital 'C' cinch. Had a couple job offers but rather contemptuously passed them up. I was working on a novel- or so I thought at the time- and was going to do some extended research. What I didn't realize at the time was that:
A) when you get away from the business, the offers disappear.
B) you can't go home again (thanks, Tom Wolf!) So I had a hell of a time. I cruised out to Beantown in my shiny car and took up with a collection of sea-going hippies.
They were divers, for the most part, and their love and passion was the yachting life. Everyone was living aboard boats, and a more outré collection could not be imagined. Thirty-six foot Columbia sailboats (minimum for real live-in comfort, I was told), tired old trawlers ("Hey, good for the business, man. We can get contracts and make some easy cash...)
Mulit-hulls, strange craft like waterbugs ("We built it ourselves. It is sorta small, but we have plans for an eighty footer we can blue water....) And a glorious white elephant of a boat, a former transatlantic racer from the golden era called Neith. She was sound as a dollar (it was weakening even then) and fifty-three feet of flush deck, Greyhound-lean lines. It was me and the Neith for the next year or so.
You see, Beckie and Ed, the owners, were having their second child.
Beckie finally put her diminutive foot down and told crazy Ed that she was not going to bring up another infant in the coal-sooted, draft infested, musty old lady. Enter yours truly. They were moving off, I was looking for a berth. We struck a deal. If I would agree (!) to move on and ensure the hatches were opened when the sun shone, closed when it did not, and pumped out the bilge once a week, they would let me have it.
Within reason. It was not sailable right at the moment, needed a working party of fifty Japanese to chip the paint, and sand, and varnish. I was already under the spell.
Let me digress for just a moment and tell you about her. She was a Nathaniel Herreshoff original design. He built it for his dentist, who had performed a valuable and difficult extraction for him. The white oak for her ribs was seasoned in the family salt pools for six years. The bronze strapping was the finest money could buy. Her pine decks were well caulked, her double-planked hull was constructed with the skill and the loving attention to detail that characterized the Herreshoff yards. Her mast was a virgin pine that tapered elegantly from the butt to the graceful tip seventy-odd feet above the cockpit. Her crew was numbered at four (permanent company) and of motors she had exactly none. The sun shone and the year was 1908.
Of her history there is reams; but condensed for the sake of brevity: in 1919 she sailed the Atlantic in nine days and that record stood for nearly a decade. Her ownership passed to a Scot of some means, and she became the flagship of the Royal
Clyde Yacht Club. She enjoyed that position until well after the Second Stupidity, when her third owner went overseas to defend the Crown's interest in Rhodesia. Neith, and the little clay Egyptian goddess whose name she bore were anchored up the Clyde, dismasted, her companionway exposed to the elements and seagulls shat on the upholstery which once only the fashionable clad yachtsmen had deigned to sit.
Lest I get mired down in all this trivia, she came back to America with a boatload of hippies from Ann Arbor after a Med cruise. With a crew of basically non-sailors she kicked her heels up and crossed in twenty-one days. Not bad for an old lady.
The editor from Wooden Boat went down to write an article about her, but the hippies offended him so much that he left in a huff.
I worked on her and sailed, and drank beer, and scribbled a few stories. But at length, the ice would sheath the masthead, and in the winter gales would split the icicles which would crash seventy feet down onto the skylight above ray bunk. I figured it was time for the Southwest. I scored an Armtrak ticket and got out of town.
The adventures of the next year and a half must (of needs be) cloaked in some mystery, if only because of my current trade.
Nevertheless, the travels were predominantly on this continent, spanning the sordid border towns of Mexico and the frigid waste of the Labradorian winter. In early 1976 I drove into the family shack up in Grand Rapids in my now rusty and mud splattered Chevrolet. Gas prices were going up. I was forced to make a decision.
You know the symptoms; the Folks would like you around, how about a nice job right here? Panic at the thought. Are you seeing anybody interesting?
Holy Cow! I quickly called up a few of the people I knew from McGraw. "No, not here," they said. "Maybe down at Saunders..." I took a plane ticket and talked to the people.
They offered a very nice package, out of a second story office in suburban St. Louis.
Drinking a stiff one on the plane going back I was chilled. The thought of going through it all again, just to save up another couple shekels, so I could go see Asia, and then come back and start all over again was oppressive.
I called the nice people up and told them thanks, but no thanks,
After all, how could a McGraw man go with a two-story office out in the suburbs?
I grabbed the bull by the tale and faced the situation. I moved up to the cottage and ski patrolled for the winter, completely exhausting my cash, and was sworn in as a Naval Officer (Special Duty- Intelligence) six months after the last ski-able stuff had melted and disappeared,
************ Goodness. I see I left out the bar we ran into the ground in Park City, Utah, my home away from home. I can still find my way to the county seat in Coleville blindfolded to bail out a pal. I sorta glossed over the decision to go into the dear old Navy, too.
(Or a potentially vastly profitable enterprise in Alexandria Bay, New York, too. Ah well, it has been quite a decade.) Quickly, as to the Navy: I walked into a recruiting station in Grand Rapids and was quickly pointed to the officer program's dude. I said "I want to be a Fighter Pilot." He said: "Don't think so. Maybe you noticed. The War is over." "Huh?" I responded cleverly. First time anyone ever told me I was too old for a job. The cold wind whistled around my neck. The terms on which the war ended was partly why i was there. "How 'bout being a Radar Intercept Officer?" I said hopefully. (RIOs are the trusty second-citizens who sit in the back of the F-4). "Nope, Full up this week. You can fill out an application, though, if you want." Now, you best believe that had me flummoxed. I thought all you had to do was be breathing to at least get a shot at it. Us Socotras have had pilots in the family ever since there was airy-planes. I filled the thing out and went home to watch a Tigers game and figure on plan Bravo. Four weeks later they called me up and said they had a Good Deal (a particularly Navy Phrase which doesn't mean anything like what it sounds like). If I Wanted it.
The fish bit. Three months later, as an Aviation Intelligence Officer Candidate, I was doing pushups with some very weird Marines running my life, head shaved bald. The USMC quickly disabused me of several long-cherished civilian beliefs I held. I did a few things I had never before thought my self capable of, and a couple dozen which god help me I will never do again.
It was the most intense experience, bar-none, of a fairly unsheltered life. (Or at least I thought until SERE (survivlal, evasion, resistance, escape) school, where we lived on grass and twigs for a week, and then got "captured" and forced into a couple days in a tiny box, interrogations, and a couple not-so simulated beatings. Live and Learn, I suppose.)
And so, here I am, steaming along at 17 knots in the South China Sea, onboard the latest in the long line of "most destructive of man's many tools." It is a truly fascinating machine. But of Carriers, and the reality of life on the bounding blue (and gray and green) more anon. Work calls tonight (or this morning) and then to the bar for the last time in a few weeks when we dock.
Malaysia will be the 25th country I have visited. Australia beckons after that. Only a hundred and thirty to go....
Hope to see you when I get home. Whenever that is.
Love,
Vic
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