I don’t know why my Lieutenant wanted to get a picture of his Grandfather in his Navy dress blue uniform, but I was happy to dig out a couple pics and send them along. Of course, I was packing in Florida at the time, and naturally wound up sending them to someone else in the messaging program, which I am sure must have caused some mystified reaction, and I didn’t figure that out until we were on the Boeing 737-NG, the one with the jaunty winglets and about to launch out of Orlando for IAD and had to go to Airplane Mode. I managed to unscramble things as my adrenaline level began to come down to something normal and I was sitting at my computer cleaning up the wreckage of a travel day.

Anyway, once I got back via hurtling Korean cab from Dulles International, I did some dredging on the external hard-drive to give the LT some options.

My favorite picture about Navy uniforms was the one in which I am wearing Dad’s last set of Blues, and my son is wearing his newest. We were at the funeral reception for RADM Mac Showers, one of our greatest intelligence officers at Willow, a tri-fecta, of sorts. Sort of cool.

But here is what I sent him:

Here is Raven as the sorta wise-guy kid in the V5 aviation cadet program, circa 1943, in the Donald Duck flat-hat.

I do like the sullen one in the navy blue garrison cap. Kind of Gregory Peck, you know?

The mature one that looks normal was taken just before Big Mama made him quit flying because he now had three little kids for which to be responsible, and why didn’t he just grow up already?

Raven only rebelled a couple times, like at the airshow where he paid a guy to take us on a couple circuits around the field in a Boeing-Steerman Type-75 biplane like the one the Navy trained him to fly- Mike, me and Dad all in the front cockpit. It was the coolest thing in the air I have done and that includes the cat shots, which are better than Disneyland. No kidding. But I am sure that a vintage open cockpit aircraft with a radial engine spinning up front is the coolest thing on earth.

The last one I sent was Dad on the wing of his A-1 Skyraider- the famed SPAD of Vietnam days- is my favorite.

Dad had an almost complete WWII experience, which amounted to a lot of stand around and wait, except that we A-bombed the Japanese so he didn’t have the abrupt chance to get killed in Operation DOWNFALL and the invasion of the Home Islands. He was in the training command for like two years waiting for a Fleet seat (NAS Millington was one of the bases they shunted him to, BTW). If you ever wind up in Music City, (Millington is outside Nashville where they moved BuPers) you can even visit Graceland. I don’t know which was more fun, though on the whole The Jungle Room is probably cooler than the old wooden barracks.

Raven was in the third-to-last class to actually get their wings- the rest they just sent home. His buddy Robin “Robbie” Robinson took the Navy’s invitation to stay in, and Raven decided to go to industrial art school back at Pratt Institute on the GI Bill. After he and Big Mama tied the knot and produced for the 1951 model year, they gave me his name to put in the middle- Victor Robin Socotra. Robbie wound up commanding the USS Antietam (CV-36) and Dad got to go out and watch a day’s operations off P-Cola while we stayed ashore. Which was another of those odd coincidences since van Dyke and I had a couple drinks in the Villages with a guy who wore an Antietam ball-cap, and actually did a tour on the Essex-class carrier in the early sixties. His wife was a neat lady- she said she used to write him three times a day, and he personally accounted for most of the ship’s mail calls.

I still have Dad’s pictures of the outing, which I think are in the Facebook cloud or something. Robbie later wound up in Japan, Yokosuka, of course, and his daughter married a Japanese kid. It was sort of a reverse war-bride thing that I thought was culturally fascinating and would make a good story to tell. Sort of a inverted “Teahouse of the August Moon,” which I think was the subject of a minor controversy back in the day. Seems quaint now, right?

I dunno. Now, this early morning, I find I am back in Washington and reeling with the whole travel, family and memory thing all jubled up. There was a moment while having lunch on the water yesterday with the solicitous bartender LaLa and a nice BLT sandwich in front of with two-fer glasses of Chardonnay that I seriously considered just staying. By way of painful contrast, there is an all-day conference today out in appalling Fairfax County, early bright. The transition from Cody’s Roadhouse in The Villages down in Florida to nodding enthusiastically in the meetings with sufficient gravity is going to be a challenge.

Copyright 2016 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303