Vic Socotra

03 October 2009

Personal Business Ashore

(Flag folded for retirement ceremony)

There was a phrase we were supposed to utter to the Officer of the Deck when we left the ship. I as delighted to find that there was more than one as time went by. It was a nuance of language, important only in the relative terms our captivity to the Navy.

It was as simple as making a statement or asking a question. You could request permission from the OOD for permission to leave the ship, or you could inform him that you were going to. Since he was an officer of the ship’s company, and I was not, he really did not get a vote. I was never actually assigned to the ship, but rather to the embarked Squadron, Airwing or Staff.

I was a cocky little shit in those days and sadly, did not seem to change very much over the years.

Accordingly, it became my custom snap a salute and inform the OOD that “I have permission to go ashore.”

As justification, you could always cite "Personal Business Ashore.” PBA was an all-purpose excuse for just about anything you can imagine, and some things you can't.

I started asserting my right to go ashore about the time I figured out that irritating Ship’s Company was one of the few hobbies we were permitted in the little gray steel world. In every other facet of life, we were literally all in the same boat, so to speak.

You will have to forgive me the digression, since that started a long time ago, and as I glanced at the program in the too-narrow seat in the auditorium of the National Maritime Intelligence Center yesterday there was a lot of nuance going on, more than a little of it unsettling to an old Fleet sailor.

For one, the Admiral who was retiring on the stage before us was commissioned the year after I was. I have made my peace with not being a Flag officer, and am quite content to leave the Navy Captain’s attitude in the cruise box where it belongs.

For another thing, the Admiral is a woman. That was an unusual thing in the Navy I joined, a curiosity restricted to the Nurse Corps or one of the pink-collar support organizations. That was only starting to change the on my first cruise, which was completely Old School: all male, far forward, and salty as hell.

The Admiral wore the surface warfare pin on her Service Dress Blue blouse. She came from a navy family and was determined to be as real an officer as her Dad, who was an aviator, and cary on the tradition of her mother, who had served as a Navy Nurse.

She talked about being assigned with another woman officer, her running mate, to a Submarine Tender, the USS Frank Cable, in 1978.

Until the Ship’s Doctor reported, a female pediatrician by gender and discipline, it was the two young officers amid 1,300 men.

I can’t imagine that, and having to prove oneself in an atmosphere that is complex and hard enough. Thinking about it, there in the crowd of old and new sailors, filled me with wonder.

The Admiral got a shore tour after qualifying not only as an OOD underway, but as an Engineering officer, qualified to run the plant of a warship underway. She got into my line of work, which was monitoring Soviet nuclear submarines, tracking the very real and quite potent threat to the homeland.

I met her years after that. She formally joined the intelligence corps on her transfer to the reserves, since she is nothing if not a whole person. She married, had three kids, and continued a lively career in what we now call the Reserve Component. That was another legacy, largely viewed with benign contempt by the Active Force before the Cold War ended, and then suddenly vastly relevant in DESERT STORM.

Without the Reserves, the astonishing deployments of personnel that followed 9/11 would not have been possible by the all-volunteer force.

The Admiral, and her fellow citizen sailors took up the slack that the regulars could not manage, and they did it with grace and aplomb.

The whole thing is mind-boggling, just as much as the three-star Army general who presided on the ceremony, the representative of the Director of National Intelligence, and who was piped aboard with all the fanfare of ancient naval tradition.

Bless him. He looked slightly bemused by the presence of the sideboys and keening of he Bos’uns pipe, He peered a bit owlishly at the crowd as he vowed not to mention football, and the admonition that “being relieved” was a considered a good thing in the Navy, not like what it means to an Army commander dismissed in the field.

It was a comfort, really, to hear that West Pointers still care about The Game with the Midshipmen as deeply as they always have. So much else has changed.

The building in which we sat was the last of the Cold War structures. The security is ridiculously and cloyingly tight. The little DNI- the Director of NavalIntelligence- has been elevated to the rank of Vice Admiral to formally integrate the communications and information capabilities of the whole service in support of warfare in the world to come.

I hope he succeeds in that effort, though I have my doubts about the triumph of the intelligence analysts over the communicators. I suspect his elevation is in preparation for the end of the discipline as I know it. But no matter. I went ashore a long time ago now, and it is his Navy to manage as the Chief deems fit.

As such, the bi-polar Cold War campus is now filled with law enforcement, Coast Guard, Homeland Security and Joint Service personnel. Hence, the Admiral;s retirement was also billed as a “Change of Office,” to comport with the sensitivities of those who might be uncomfortable with being “commanded.”

It is just a nuance, like the one I shared with the OOD on ships now decommissioned.

I am a veteran of these sorts of ceremonies, and saw with alarm that prior to the last piping over the side, the ritual of passing the flag would be conducted.

This is an incredibly sentimental poem about our flag, which is read as a line of sailors solemnly pass the National Ensign, folded in a severe blue starry triangle, from hand to hand, accompanied by the slow hand salute at each exchange.

It never fails to make me weep with emotion, and as a hard-boiled cynic, I hate that.

When the speeches were done, and the time for that ritual came, the line of people were summoned to line up on the rostrum. My eyes widened as they came. There was a Master Chief, all gold hashmarks up his sleeve; a male and female sailor, a pert young civilian analyst with long blonde hair. A retired Captain in mufti; a Navy Commander, and last in line, a Coast Guard Rear Admiral.

Considering the divergence in skills and military bearing, allowances to the honor guard tradition were made. But they performed magnificently, the salutes and hands to heart were impeccable, and by the end of it the tears were rolling down my cheeks.

Just as they are now, thinking about it.

The Admiral accepted the folded flag with gravity, and passed it in turn to her husband. Then the Admiral and her family were piped ashore for the last time and walked out of the auditorium as a retired Navy family with personal business ashore.

I took the opportunity to wipe the moisture from my cheeks.

I occurs to me that just because you go ashore doesn’t mean that the salt air does not sting as sweet as tears.

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