(You could look these guys up in the Cruisebook, if you had the right one. Here is a chance!)

Shipmates and fellow travelers,

I could rail on about what is going on this week- and which has been going on for some years in the context of the Conference theme of “Cognitive 5th Generation Warfare” from which I returned last night from downtown Saint Louis, MO. But I will restrain myself, unlike some members of the media as well as the Executive and Legislative Branches, since they are participating in it.

Rather, I am going to simmer the concept of 5th Gen Warfare- you know, the ‘Little Green Men’ in Crimea and the Ukraine- and when it is done, issue an essay on the topic. As to this afternoon, I chose to return to the land of the past when things did not seem safe at the time, but certainly appear so now.

The inspiration for this was a great note from one of the Old Spooks who does Docent Duty on our old Ship, the mighty ex-USS Midway (CV-41), proud memorial in glittering San Diego harbor.

In the course of his duties, he had a question from someone who thought that a close relative had served there in the gray hull around the time many of us were assigned. Turned out to not be true- well, sort of- but in the course of the subsequent research, he found a link to a bunch of cruisebooks online for free. A ‘cruisebook’ is exactly like a high school yearbook, only coarser and featuring more exotic locations in the pictures. They were much sought after, since they contained memories at least as powerful as Senior Year and some of them fatal.

My pal told me: “This guy in Germany has the best U.S. Navy website in the world. He doesn’t have all the carrier cruisebooks, but we sent him the three Midway cruisebooks he didn’t have, and he paid for the shipping back and forth. Now he has all the Midway cruisebooks scanned, and we just refer people to his website who don’t want to pay $150 and upwards for a cruisebook they paid for way back when but never got.”

There are more than 1,100 of the ancient tomes available for free at: http://www.navysite.de/cruisebooks/

The staff at the Daily- delightfully unsupervised while I was out of town- thought we would run this as one of the “who are these intel guys?” installments for the Web. We are not necessarily a lovable bunch, but the compiled information and images could be useful in future investigations.

The term ‘OZ’ in the margin below refers not to Australia, a place we all loved and would have preferred to be on liberty rather than under the florescent lights in the Carrier Intel Center, but rather to the Navy’s nomenclature for the space on the ship reserved for intelligence and mission planning. Look at them. Do you believe that these are the people we have sent- and continue to send- in harm’s way? They are- were- just kids.

These are the people who fight your wars, America.

And the location is exotic, if you consider they were taken in the bowels of a thousand foot warship underway. I think I prefer OZ, or Olongapo in the PI, all things considered, or perhaps best, Pattaya Beach in Thailand!

-Vic

Copyright 2017 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocora.com