Going Ashore

Wind and rain, gray skies and muted colors. The sound of the drops pummeling the concrete outside my window at Big Pink echoes, and a chill breeze blows through the place. The window is open for the first time this year. It may not stay open long, but the window is open.

The riot of Spring is about to begin. I got up a half hour early to begin the transition to Daylight Savings Time that happens tonight. That will make us all cranky on Monday, as if we all traveled east a time zone, which would make us wet indeed here on the Eastern Seaboard.

We will be dealing with other transitions as well. They are mourning in the square in front of Saint Peters. They say the Pope will be leaving, perhaps today. It is disconcerting. They fought over Terry Schiavo for a decade, and even the end of that story took a ponderous thirteen days. The parents and the husband seem to want to fight over her body, too. 

The Pope himself commented upon it, and then it appears that he has made his peace with things, and informed his aides that he would stay in his apartment and not return to the hospital. And now, in the course of a few days, he is leaving. At peace.

But naturally, he could make an informed decision and communicate it. He is setting another example for us, a great man, and a holy one.

I am not of his faith, but I take a certain comfort in the fact that I was in a throng that was blessed by him a decade ago. We in Rome, preparing for a trip into the mess that was the Balkans, and happened to be in the Square quite by chance. The skies were blue, and though I am sure I would have been last in line for heavenly favor, the blessing was welcome.

I had another of those incidental brushes with greatness yesterday. Not of the stature of the Holy Father who did so much by personal example to bring down the Communists.

But the encounter was with a Cold Warrior of some note, and a great man in his own right, and I knew him much better.

It was not much like the square in front of the great basilica, but it was an open space in front of a handsome building of glass and steel with flagpoles. A vast tent had been erected for the guests to the retirement ceremony and we milled around under the blue skies and the cold white light of the early Spring.

It was warm on our dark suits there in the sunlight, but as the military band played crisp nautical airs, we were summoned to our places for the arrival of the official party. In the shade, under the cover of the tent, it was cold. I shivered a bit, wishing I had my overcoat. The transition was not far enough along yet for comfort.

Rick Porterfield was putting the oar up on his shoulder, and preparing to walk inland until someone asked him what it might be. Then he would know that he was retired and the long career was over.

That isn’t quite true, but I have always liked the metaphor of the oar and retiring from the Navy, and getting far enough from the smell of the salt water that people didn’t know what it was.

The Admiral has been on watch for 33 years. That is a long time, and he would hasten to remind you that the four years at the Boat School on the Severn River before that, which do not count toward active-duty time, was no picnic, either. Call it 37 years in uniform, because it was. All the way back to 1968, when the guns roared in the American War in Asia, and it called to all of us of a certain age, unless you could figure out a way to get out of its clutches.

Rick did not. He went toward the sound of the guns. I don’t know if I ran into him when I first showed up in the Fleet. He was at Kami Seya, in 1978, assigned to the spook installation on Japan’s Kanto Plain, and he met schoolteacher Jody, his wife-to-be, at the Atsugi Officers Club, where we air wing types from the aircraft carrier Midway would occasionally make fools of ourselves.

Our paths crossed often in the years that passed. East Coast, West Coast, Washington. he was laboring at the desk in the National Joint Military Intelligence Center in the Pentagon after the first Gulf War, selected for Captain, as I was for Commander, but we could not assume the new titles or ranks because of the Tailhook Scandal .

All promotions were on hold by the Navy, even though the Senate had sorted it out. Rick had the honor of being selected to rotate out to the Desert on one of the endless Joint Task Forces that operated there, watching Saddam’s manic antics before his hash was finally settled two years ago.

It was thankless duty, and stressful. A sort of twilight non-peace, just like the other, larger struggle with the Soviets. It would be nice to have the comfort of the higher rank out there, and I was able to scheme a way to enter the Congressional Record of Senate Confirmation into the letter that permitted the Joint Staff to promote us, whether the Navy got around to it or not.

Rick went to the Desert as a Captain. It was the right thing.

The Chief of Naval Operations was at the ceremony to honor Rick’s service. I should call him Admiral, because that of course is what he became, and the 60th Director of Naval Intelligence. He served four and a half years as DNI, longer in that job than any of the 59 Directors before him.

It was quite a run. He had barely taken over when the USS Cole was smacked in Aden Harbor, and trying desperately to get the system to recognize the new threat that confronted the old navy. And then the airplanes were hijacked and the world changed.

The Admiral had gone up to the Hill that morning, and when the word came that the Towers had been hit, he began to make preparations to get back to his post and figure it out, get the word and analysis to the Chief, so something could be done.

Then the jet flew into the building just below the Intelligence Plot where Dan and Vince and the others were meeting to decide what to do, and what to tell Rick when he returned.

Naval Intelligence lost almost a quarter of all the Navy dead that day. To to get back through the paralyzed city, Rick and his aides jogged from the Capitol in their dress shoes and dress blues and briefcases, down the hill and up the Mall and past the Monument and over the bridge and the placid brown Potomac, seeing the smoke.

Then the horror began, trying to get the organization put back together from a place in South Parking, the building burning and the dead unaccounted.

Rick is a leader, and the Chief of Naval Operations commented on that at length, his eyes twinkling behind his glasses. I have been to a lot of these set-piece ceremonies of transition. I was seated with others like me who have made their transition from the Service. I was between Vinnie, and Tom and Bob. Behind me was Pete, still on active duty, and the throng of us that shared those days and duty stations far away.

We Spooks are a small community, less than 1% of all Navy officers. We are tight, and Rick extended that sense of community. The families of our dead were seated in their places of honor, always with us. They are special to Rick, because they are what remains of his kids, his people. I went to some of the funerals and the solemn ceremonies, because they were shipmates. But Rick went to all of them, personally presiding and sharing the grief.

Everyone was there. Tish, Rick’s Deputy that day, was walking away from the Intelligence Center when the airplane hit, and who pounded on the new firedoors that slammed shut between her and the inferno. Paula was there, Rick’s exec that day, wearing a smart civilian suit, looking youthful after decades in the severe dark uniform.

I saw her last when she was organizing a team to re-enter the devastated quadrant of the Pentagon to see what might be saved from the spreading mold, eyes rimmed dark with stress.

Tony was the master of ceremonies; he relieved Tom, who wore a suit like mine, dark pinstripes. Tony was crisp and authoritative. I don’t know if he knew that the Chief had signed out a memo days ago announcing his spring ahead to Admiral’s rank. It was released that afternoon. He had other things on his mind that morning, as did Bob, who got his second star and was going to assume Rick’s post after the DNI went ashore with his oar for the last time.

We stood as Rick strode to the podium. He was going to begin his remarks, but the polite applause that one expects at these things began to swell, and reverberate under the tent, and it rolled and crashed like the ocean for a minute or more. An expression of thanks at this transition, and an expression of loss for those who died, and for the man who brought us safe through the tears and the anger.

I had never seen anything like it in all my years, and neither had the Chief.

But I don’t think we should have been surprised. Rick Porterfield was a hell of a Flag Officer.

Copyright 2005 Vic Socotra

www.vicsocotra.com

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