So, the holiday is over, gone with a faint blue flash that reminded me of something I couldn’t quite remember. To keep my mind off the other memories, I was working on a small project with a dual purpose. I have (somewhere) a pile of things that go back to days spent on what is now a memorial ship anchored in the harbor at lovely San Diego. I meant to get the curios to the Library on the ship, and was looking for other things, being digital, which would not require actually looking in the closet and finding one of the dozens of boxes holding crap that once had an immediate and useful purpose that passed years ago.

The holiday got wrapped up in it amid some great Family news that gave some context to other “news” that included vehicle-borne-improvised-explosive devices (VIEDs) going off in Nashville Christmas morning. The reports are still a bit disjointed. There were some Jihadi outlets calling for attacks on the Christian holiday, but this did not appear to be one of them. Religious extremists normally try to inflict civilian casualties. This one had a loudspeaker blaring a warning to get people away from what was about to occur. Three cops were reported injured in the blast, with the possibility that parts of another individual were found near the epicenter of the explosion.

A pal commented that an attack like this in Music City might represent a COVID suicide, and thus attributable to the pandemic. I dunno.

Anyway, looking for sources of material for the museum seemed safer than trying to figure out why someone would want to spread themselves across a two-block civic circle of destruction. I looked on Wiki to see if there were some insights into what my old ship had done when she was the most operational beast in a global fleet. I was startled at what came up on the screen when I searched for “Gonzo Station,” the nickname for the modified location in the northern Indian Ocean around which we (and many others) steamed a host of days preparing to create explosions.

You can imagine how startled I was to see the image above at the head of the digital file that appeared on the computer. It was a bit of an out-of-body experience and I sat for a couple minutes looking at the drawing. The text below it described the “Gulf of Oman Naval Zone of Operations (GONZO) Station. I had to put the laptop down and proceed to the galley to transfer the last of the morning coffee into a waiting cup. We called it “Gonzo,” but the other words were a cover the Navy used after the fact to make it seem grown up and official. It wasn’t. It was wild and rebellious and proud.

When the image was created in 1979, a significant number of the people on the ship and airwing team had been participants in the then-recent period of hostilities in Southeast Asia. There were places the ships of that time operated, noted by their positions relative to the coast of Vietnam, either “North” or “South.” Veterans of that conflict remembered them as “Yankee” and “Dixie” Stations, quotations from some other war. For those of us motoring in endless circles around the same patch of delicate blue water far from anything familiar, it was getting boring to hear about other patches of water and other wars. This was a historic place, we decided, and we ought to have our own name.

I was drinking some of USS Midway’s famous Mission Planning coffee. You know the stuff if you have had it- hours old, well cooked, with sort of a dull metallic taste flavored by just a tinge of jet fuel that had leaked, softly, between the vast network of pipes and tanks the ship carried. When the taste was noticable, it was entertaining to see if we could set the coffee alight. Then we would watch the low blue flame flicker happily against the interior cup wall. Some preferred it that way, and there being no alternative, we drank it. I suppose we should have considered the consequences of that, downstream, but there were so many potential consequences in what we were doing that it didn’t make the top ten list.

Dean Whetstine came into the space and decanted a cup of dangerously flammable caffeine. He had the same job I did, what was called an “Air Intelligence Officer,” and assigned to Attack Squadron 56. Underway, we were just part of the machine. We looked at the modest blue flame in my cup and began a creative discussion about what this particular place of blue water ought to be called. It seemed to us that we had a lot in common with a counter-cultural essayist named Dr. Hunter S. Thompson had used to describe his time with a Hells Angels motorcycle chapter in California, framed by the surreal customs of that time.

He called what he was doing “Gonzo Journalism,” which combined all sorts of anti-social behavior conducted with wild abandon. Under the blue-tinged florescent light, we thought it was a solid precept to generally describe carrier aviation activities, thousands of miles from home, and was exclusively our term for it. We decided to term our general location as “Gonzo Station,” and began to use it in the cyclic operations briefings as the term for “point of origin” we gave before each flight event.

It was a sentiment that a lot of people seemed to like, since we were indisputably “Gone.” It meant nothing more than that, except a sort of twisted pride that this place at that time was more gone than anyone else on the planet. I forget if Vince, the Commander we worked for, told us to knock it off. Whether he did or didn’t we kept using it, and I decided we needed a patch that the guys could sew on their flight gear to demonstrate our commitment to being Gonzo. The model came from a character in the wonderful hand puppet show created by Jim Henson, the Muppets man. He had transformed Hunter Thompson’s anarchic prose into something cute and cuddly.

Like us.

That is why the image above left me agape the other day, since I drew the original image one afternoon in a place far away. Not as nice, of course. But I think I know where the original is- behind the Christmas tree in a plastic box with some other old crap. I would dig it out and show you, but the tree isn’t going anywhere for a few days, and it is a relief that the holiday is behind us and nothing has to be done for a little while. There might be more in that box, but it is certainly unusual to have the past reach out of Wikipedia and grab you.

I am pretty sure the coffee here at Refuge Farm has a much lower flash point than the Midway coffee did, but I deferred an attempt to find out. Some things are gone, and I recall a couple young men of moderate means pointing that out four decades ago. I think they were right. Gone is good. GONZO, man.

Copyright 2020 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com