It is a tough morning getting ready for what is to come. It I supposed to be a day of joy to celebrate the Human miracle only mothers can deliver. In the background, the curious business of protestors outside the personal residences of Supreme Court Justices, by people who are protesting for the right of something that used to be- how did they put it? “Safe, Legal and Rare?”
In order to bring the discussion to the public square, protagonists have decided that demonstrating in one prominent Denomination’s services this morning is the best way to have a rational discussion. We asked around the Fire Ring under gray skies with a chill moisture and decided we agreed with Mother Nature’s Mood.
Then we remembered the other project. The Chairman has packaged some remarkable afternoons spent with an equally remarkable survivor of an age now three generations ago, Admiral Donald “Mac” Showers.
DeMille wanted to frame the discussion, so he got us centered on the events of the month of May eighty years ago. The Battle of the Coral Sea had just concluded. Results of the encounter were inconclusive, but represented the first time the Japanese Navy had not rolled to triumph. There was something else in the air back then. Something big.
Splash waved around a copy of the Chairman’s new book “Cocktails With the Admiral.” He flipped it open to a page marked with a yellow sticky note and began to read the Chairman’s words:
“I was sitting at the corner of the Willow bar, just a few minutes early for my date with the Admiral. The girls were just getting settled at the end of the bar where Old Jim normally holds court, pointedly drinking Bud in the upscale wine bar, and on the whole, I infinitely preferred the company of vibrant females.
We did the usual introductions: Lizzie was a dark-haired beauty with an expectant look, no ring, and Meghan, ring present, was a vivacious blonde.
The ladies had arrived for a glass of wine and a light snack from the neighborhood bar menu. As attractive as they were, I understood why bartender Peter paid them special deference. Linen and pearls were the motif, and considering how sweltering hot it was outside, they looked cool and elegant.
It had been a busy day. The Russian spy ring had all plead guilty that morning in the Rocket Docket of Federal Court System. The lot of them, ten spies, spouses and kids, were boarding a Vision charter jet headed for Vienna by the time the Admiral drove from the Madison in his Jaguar and parked at the curb in front of Willow.
I forget what I had been doing, except I seemed to be on the phone a lot trying to find the services of a hydrographic engineer with knowledge of the Empty Quarter of Arabia. I made a note on the office pad to see if Vision Airways was a wholly-owned subsidiary of an agency where I used to work.
Four other alleged intelligence operatives were being processed in Moscow, but they had a shorter flight to Austria, and there was a lesser sense of urgency about it. I thought of my pal Ed, who had been detained by the FSB in some trumped-up charges for nearly a year when the kleptocracy was reasserting itself in the Kremlin, and on the whole, decided I was much better now, off in the commercial side of the business.
Of course, in this screwy decade, who knows what that is anymore? Except for the Jihadis, I forget who the enemy is. And Sara, the dark-eyed knock-out waitress from a Lebanese family, could make you forget about the threat from the Middle East in a heartbeat.
Then the Admiral appeared beside me, looking tanned and ready after his time at the beach. As we settled in, the spies were getting on planes, and we were about to talk about the long-ago targeting issue for the 313th Bomb Wing against Japan.
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I told Meghan that she was sitting next to one of the people who made the victory in the Pacific possible, and that the Admiral had been part of the code-breaking team that made the Battle of Midway a winning proposition.
The Admiral leaned over and said that he didn’t think the ladies were old enough to know what the battle of Midway was, and Meghan sat up tall and took umbrage.
She certainly did know, and wanted to know precisely how the thing was done. The Admiral told her how they had penetrated the secret of the Japanese objective, and enabled Admiral Nimitz to set his own trap, the one that changed the course of the Pacific War and the fate of history. She looked amazed. She asked if he had told that story before?
Mac smiled, and his eyes twinkled behind his glasses. “Only about 10,000 times,” he said.
We all laughed, and the ladies eventually moved on to do something else while the sun was still shining, and the Admiral and I got down to the business of targeting the Japanese petroleum reserves, and the matter of why he had not spent the last 70 years entombed with “Mush” Morton and the entire crew of the USS Wahoo at the bottom of the La Perouse Strait.
This is going to take a minute, so you might want to go get a fresh morning drink.
Instead, we started talking about families. That is the way our detailed historic discussions normally went at the Willow. Mac told the story of his beloved Billie, whose given name was Sarah, like the dark-eyed waitress who melts my heart, although she drops the “h.” She hovered down the bar beyond bartender Peter as the crowd thickened, causing other males to ooze up close to our circle.
Mac told us that Billie’s Dad had been committed to the idea that she would be born a boy. Though it did not work out that way, he never stopped calling her “Bill.” Her friends softened it to “Billie,” and that is what Mac called her all through their marriage.
That discussion got Meghan’s attention, and then we wandered back to Mac’s story. He said he had three careers; one as a Naval Officer, one as a senior member of the Intelligence Community, and twenty years caring for Billie. It was an interesting perspective, given that the girls were just starting lives as married or about-to-be, and me dealing with the growing infirmity of my own folks back up in Michigan.
Mac wrapped up that part of the story as the young ladies got up to pursue other opportunities in the lowering light. Once they had departed, others filled their chairs and I asked Mac why he was here with us at the welcome Willow Bar, and had not been resting in the dark chill water of the La Perouse Strait.
He took a sip from his Virgin Mary and looked straight ahead morning toward the rows of fancy bottles under mirror behind the bar. It only took a moment, and he smiled. “That is an interesting story. Jasper Holmes saved my life by telling me I couldn’t be spared for Wahoo’s patrol. Her last patrol.”
Splash put the book down on the rock next to his. “There is a lot more, but the 80th anniversary of the Battle of Midway is coming up, and it is interesting to hear what the people who participated in it thought. While they lived.”
DeMille nodded, and things lurched on to the Mother’s Day celebration in this year, in our lives.
Copyright 2022 Vic Socotra
“Cocktails With the Admiral” is available at the Politics and Prose bookstore in DC and at their website.
www.vicsocotra.com