Editor’s Note: I had a chance to find out the thousand-dollar surprise for April, and didn’t even have to wait until the end of the month. New spectacles are the order of the day, since I dropped the perfectly serviceable ones from the night table and they hit with precisely the perfect impact point to chip off a chunk of lens as perfectly as a master diamond-cutter. So there was that, and the long awaited eye-exam in which the Doc informed me that I should have my eyes dilated more than once every twenty years or so, which after being (temporarily) blinded (I hope) I was thinking back to the thrilling days of yesteryear, and now, sadly, you are stuck with it.

I do miss Naples. There are a lot of people who bash the city for the trash and the chaos, but once you are in it, the place is perfectly serviceable for liberty purposes for you and a couple thousand of your closest personal friends.

-Vic

04 DEC:

The day got off to a bad start. The anticipation of going ashore is a fierce desire, a burning flame. The urge to be under real skies and breath unprocessed air. Instead, Scooter found a new piece of tasking which would occupy us for three hours that morning. Lessons Learned for Distinguished Visitors…..it occurred to me that these were people we had known were coming since sometime in August and I was getting the tasking just at the first time I could have really got out of Mission Planning since we got here.

There is an undercurrent of trouble in the OPS department, more of which I was going to hear at the end of the port-call.

But of course none of this really mattered because they had difficulties getting the camel out to the fantail and they couldn’t start boating until about two or three in the afternoon.

We managed to escape by going on the Captain’s Gig with Skipper Thomassy and a cast of infamous commissioned Ship’s Company and Air Wing personnel. It was a lovely day. Some sort of Castle loomed on the top of the hill that dominates the city. A much more imposing structure- rather Bastille like- dominates the port near the Fleet Landing.

The city is generally low and the landmarks that have defined the skyline since about 1500 still do so. The buildings are stained dark with age and pollution and the steel mill down the coast belches out particulate smoke the like of which I haven’t seen back home since the ’50s.

Once we get ashore, we have a long wait for the Shore Patrol to arrive so the buses can to the Navy Support Activity (NSA, no not the other one) and AFSOUTH can start running.

The alternative is Ali Babba and the forty taxi drivers, the local version of the buccaneer. Since we have to wait anyway, Lutt-man and I enjoy four beers off a little cart while we get the scoop on the Birddog Affair. It was all much more messy than we thought, and it had all sorts of bizarre angles.

Makes you wonder why anyone would rationally aspire to be Commanding Officer.

As we talked, the man himself walked by. His face was grim and he didn’t look around. He was wearing a flight jacket and khakis. He borrowed some lira from Whiskey Bob for cab fare and got into one staring straight ahead. He roared off for the airport without looking around. I have rarely seen anyone looking so grim and alone. I guess that what you look like if your career just got tanked right in front of your eyes. One moment, a steely-eyed fighter pilot, leading twelve jets against the Godless Commies and then in a cab for home.

Eventually we got the Shore Patrol ashore and the Eurobuses started to run. We were sealed hermetically in the tall gleaming machines and plowed through the incredible confusion of Naples.

Anarchy. Madness.

There are ancient tunnels and antique narrow streets. Traffic is from a nightmare land, no rules, only the law of the right foot. The streets are so narrow that I can only presume each strange and terrifying encounter with oncoming vehicles will lead to death. No one has an exterior mirror left, but those are presumably only advisory in nature only. We roll north through the town to NATO’s Armed Forces Southern Command (AFSOUTH) compound, a former war-time Luftwaffe bunker complex and manage the trip from Fleet Landing to NATO HQ without ever actually setting foot in Italy.

The AFSOUTH Club is where all the Officers go the first night in Naples.

It is clean, fairly cheap, they take American money and you don’t have to deal with things Italian any more than you feel like.

In fact, you could be in just about any O Club anywhere and not notice the difference. The Admiral and his Staff are there, and everyone is big. So are the first ten beers.

This is where everyone is going and the crowd surges and the noise gets louder and louder. This must be the place where the famous mushroom soup trick was set in Pat Conroy’s epic novel The Great Santini.

You can see the locals are a little uncomfortable with our presence s an unknown and possibly dangerous presence. The female USAF light colonel who manages the place is holding her head as she walks away from a confrontation with RADM Allen, who told her she wasn’t closing the bar at 1800 while there were sixty Air Wing guys in there trying to relax and make phone calls just because it happened to be Monday….and then passing the hat to pay Tony the Bartender so she didn’t have a bureaucratic leg to stand on.

Turns out that the bartenders have been here since we won the war and with step increases and seniority bumps they are making more than the Admiral, but what the hell.

So Admiral Sweetpea is a hero and the light Colonel has a headache.

Copyright 2016 Vic Socotra
WWW.vicsocotra.com