13 December 2009
Old School
USS Noa (DD-841)
I met my son and some of his pals at the Army-Navy Country Club yesterday afternoon. I don’t use the Club very much these days, and am a “member absent” by formal classification. I use the Culpeper dacha as my primary address since the knees started to go south, and the walk around the tight holes on the Old Course in Arlington became painful.
Too proud- or too cheap- to go the cart route, I decided to keep the membership but put it on the back burner. They had a deal on the initiation fee for my son, and since he came back to town to work, the Club is a great deal; literally the best value for sporting facilities in the region, if you qualify under the arcane rules of membership.
It is a thoroughly Old School sort of place. The joint service slate of Army, Marine and Naval officers who founded the place in the early 1930s were notoriously impecunious, which is why the location, nestled on the high ground around the derelict Fort Richardson from the Civil War was also in the middle of an old Freedman’s neighborhood that had grown up around the derelict military installation.
The Corps of Engineers built the place, clearing out the fairways with regular troopies and Army mules, which would be a crime today, but as I said, this is a thoroughly Old School kind of place. You can keep your own liquor in your locker there, and if smoking has been banned in restaurant in the rest of Virginia, you can still light up a stogie in the Men’s Grill and munch a complementary hot dog and chili for the Army-Navy football game, the Old School version of the college sport that closes out the regular season.
The game is an icon, and in no place more iconic than this.
I met my son in the former Men’s Grill, which until recent memory was for the male members only, and would have stayed that way if some commissar from Arlington County had not threatened to pull the tax-exempt status for violation of local civil rights laws.
Navy won, which was a comfort, but as Navy Coach Ken Niumatalolo said later, tears in his eyes, the seniors on both teams were headed, not for the NFL draft, but for Iraq and Afghanistan.
Old School.
Walking out across the darkened parking lot in the freshening breeze, I thought that was exactly the way to think about Rex, right down to the keel. Old School.
I was proud to be a friend in his later years, as he embarked on a quest to honor the memory of a man who had been lost long ago. I talked about Jack Graf yesterday, the Missing Man, who became the centerpiece of the Admiral’s last major initiative.
It is sort of funny; he left us as one of the last bastions of the Old School, and yet his greatest accomplishments were as the acolyte of the wildest Young Turk who ever rose to command the hide-bound old US Navy, Bud Zumwalt.
I have to ease into that, and it is going to take another installment. I need to lay out Rex’s Old School credentials, which are well founded. He came from Pittsburgh, one of those curious inland Naval people like my pal Mac, from Iowa, or Johnny Carson, from Nebraska.
Rex was born on March 16, 1926 to Howard and Margaret in the Keystone State, not far up the River from where my Mom grew up in the valley of the great River system that drains the midwest.
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Like my Dad and all the other members of that pivotal generation, he was eager to get with the program. He enlisted, as did Dad, in the U.S. Naval Reserve on May 22, 1943, under the provisions of the V-12 Program.
Participants were required to carry 17 credit hours and endure rigorous physical training each week. Study was year-round, heavy on math and science, and then on to the 12-week Officer Candidate Course that produced the “90-day Wonders.”
My Dad was a V-5 Cadet, the aviation program, and the challenge for the old Navy was to train the flood of new recruits. Both Rex and my Dad were shunted, as were all the young men, from place to place, awaiting the right place in the training pipeline. Dad went to Memphis and Stevens Tech along the way; Rex attended Bloomsburg State College and Mount St. Mary’s College in Maryland, before there was a seat at the Reserve Midshipman School at Fort Schuyler, New York.
Imagine for a moment what the world looked like that early summer. The Germans had recaptured Kharkov on the East Front in March, the same month that U-boats sank twenty-seven merchants carrying war material for Britain and Russia. Montgomery was still flailing against the Afrika Korps in north Africa, and the SS was savagely reducing the Warsaw Ghetto to rubble.
Rex got his commission in July of 1945, eight weeks after the Reich crumbled into dust, and the month before the mushroom clouds closed out the war in the Pacific.
Operation Magic Carpet began almost immediately, to bring home millions of kids overseas. The program assigned “points” to soldiers, sailors and Marines who were overseas based on the amount of time they had been gone. The mass of young men and women who were in the pipeline were offered a choice. The Fleet had needs, of course, though the war was over. Many were offered a choice of continuing service or going home.
Rex chose the Fleet. My Dad got his wings of gold and decided to go to New York as a private citizen. That is where their roads diverged.
Rex went on to the Naval Training Station, Miami, Florida, and the Mine Warfare School at the NavMag at Yorktown, Virginia. He was sent to WestPac in 1945, and was assigned as the CO of USS Progress (AMC-98), a small minesweeper built in 1942 and patrolled Hawaiian waters for most of her operational life. She could cross the ocean, no doubt, but such a voyage would be completely dependent on the weather.
Imagine, for a moment, that you are a young man, wearing the golden bar of an Ensign, and you are handed the keys- and the responsibility of a Captain on the high seas.
Progress was decommissioned in 1946, one of the glut of warships headed for the inactive reserve fleet or the scrap-heap, and then moved on through a series of billets on increasingly larger ships, arriving in 1948 as Gunnery Officer in the new-construction (1945) USS Noa (DD-842), second of the name in honor of a hero of the Philippine war.
She was a good ship, and lasted longer than Rex’s active service, being scrapped in 1991 after a last tour as part of the Spanish Navy. While Rex was aboard, Noa served as rescue destroyer for Mindoro (CVE-120) and made a MED deployment as part of the ASW Hunter-Killer Group of DesRon Eight.
That is about as Old School as you can get. Rex had performed well at each level of command in each type of ship to which he was sent. I can see him on the bridge of his little mineweeper, puffing on a Lucky and scanning the horizon, or taking the deck on the mid-watch on the sleek destroyer, bone in her teeth and headed for mischief.
The Navy, for its part, chafed against the new world. It struggled against the reorganization of the Defense Establishment that followed the war, and the new emphasis on atomic bombs and the notion of global airpower.
While Rex was assigned to Noa, the uniformed leadership actually conducted a sort of bureaucratic mutiny against the new establishment that became known as the Revolt of the Admirals.
Now that was Old School for you. From that unpleasantness came a soul-searching in the Fleet that resulted in the rise of “31-knot” Arlie Burke ahead of his peers and seniors. From the decisions made in those years came the supercarriers and atomic-bomb carrying jets and nuclear powered ballistic missile submarines.
But that was in the future. In 1949, Noa was at the Sonar School in the Florida Keys. Being assigned to a tin can out of Key West at a time when you could run into Hemingway himself at Sloppy Joe’s boggles the mind. I am not sure that life get any better for a Fleet sailor, but of course there was something missing.
Young veterans all over the nation were marrying their sweethearts and starting families, just as Mom and Dad did in 1948, and Rex tied the knot with his beloved Derlie.
They would be together, though deployment and war, for nearly a half-century. In the meantime, the year I was born, Rex left the Fleet and reported to the Naval Intelligence School, housed in the temporary wodden buildings of “Splinterville” on Naval Station Anacostia, on the east side of the river from Washington, D.C.
It was here that Rex started on his real life’s work, and that is where I am going to leave him for the moment. More tomorrow.
Copyright 2009 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
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