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My sons are roaming around the island where they were born this morning- or better said, they are asleep, six hours behind us in the Midwest, and they will rise, in good time, to gentle breeze and an embracing climate redolent with the smell of blossoms.
There is lakes-effect snow here, and the temperature has fallen in to the basement. The flakes are flowing sideways and the wind off the big lake is slamming into the side of the garage apartment where I stay when I am up here.
Forgive me if I lose myself in the past, imagining the scent of hibiscus. I’m sure you understand. That lovely plant, all colors and varieties, was the official Territorial Flower, adopted in the early 1920s, when the Navy was building the major part of the infrastructure that the Japanese should have attacked instead of the gray ships. Oh well, you live and you learn, I guess.
That war had passed, but it was still not that long ago in the 1960s. My pal Mac had departed the islands after another tour in the Harbor, and Rex had arrived to assume the duties of the Current Intelligence Officer at the Fleet. It was deja vu all over again for him, too, having started his first operational tour right there in the placid blue waters
In 1968, the Fleet Intelligence Center was still located on Ford Island. I used to pass the building when I was there, a war later, and that is where more than a hundred junior officers labored producing support materials derived from imagery and human intelligence reporting from the war in Vietnam. The new gray building with the odd textured sides across the water at Makalapa was nearing completion, the one where I worked, and Rex spent a lot of time shuttling on the ferry between the island and the Admiral’s headquarters in Makalapa Crater.
I wish I had asked the question, but in the year’s long quest to recognize Jack Graf it never occurred to me to ask if Rex actually knew him, or if the was a symbol of all the men he later sent to the field of combat, and was the one among the living who survived and the handful who were killed that never came back. Jack was gone without a trace, and there was no closure for anyone involved with the hunt for him.
The crowd at FICPAC in 1968 was populated by the young officers of a wartime Navy. There were no women intelligence officers then, and most of the analysts were enlisted photomates, and know-it-all Lieutenants and Lieutenant Junior Grade with at best a single deployment to the war under their fancy custom belt buckles from the Philippines. Everyone had to have a strategy in those days. For me, a draft number of “76” was hanging over my head; it was common during the later 1960s for the Selective Service to take up to number 105 or so to make the numbers necessary to populate the war, so my college room-mate’s status as an enlisted Coast Guard Reservist was a thing of wonder and admiration for us, except when he had to get his haircut for his annual two week’s duty painting lighthouses in the Thousand Islands of New York.
His duties may have been menial, but he was in sanctuary, and we were not.
If you were subject to it, you do not know what an omnipresent fact the Draft was. Jack was a horse of another color; a lifer. He was older, seasoned, and more serious. He had come up the ranks from the World War II Navy, got his commission as an LDO in Antarctica, wintering over at McMurdo Station in the International Geophysical Year of 1959.
He used to laugh about it, as a sign of the Old Navy. When he went to the ceremony, wearing the full beard of the Frost Back, he was a Chief, and bunking in the Chief’s Mess, the most exclusive place on the station.
When he got back, he was an officer, and all his stuff was piled outside in the freezing blowing snow that makes my Michigan morning seem like balmy Waikiki. “Not a Chief anymore, Jack. Go find Officer’s Country!”
According to the Navy Register of Commissioned and Warrant Officers, Graf was never a designated intelligence officer (1630) or an aviation intelligence officer (135X). He was something special, neither fish nor fowl, enlisted or officer by the same commission pipeline as most of the kids at FICPAC.
Jack was an 1812 (limited duty officer aviation operations) as an ensign in 1959, that much is sure. Thereafter, all the Navy Registers from 1960 to 1969 show his designator as 6632, which is Limited Duty Officer -Photography.
In the 1977 Navy Register, long after his presumed but not proven death, his designator was 6472, which was the revised designator for limited duty officer photography.
Now, there are those of the orthodox persuasion who would insist that the only intelligence officers that “count” are those that have a dedicated intelligence designator. Rex didn’t buy that argument. His rag-tag bunch of Naval Intelligence Liaison Officers in Vietnam were from every source: designated intelligence officers, Air intelligence ground officers, and line officers of all stripes. They were in equal danger, based on their audacity or safe in their lack of it.
Jack was of the former, and among the boldest of them.
I got a note the other day from one of Jack’s shipmates from the FIC. He said that “Jack taught me the Navy. In it, Sailors need to know that there is a priority in spending their paycheck: get their uniform cleaned and repaired, get a haircut, then get a beer!”
The traditions of the Old Navy were clear and inviolate. “He taught me to be brutal during zone inspections, having served on both ends of them. He said the Chiefs will learn to respect you and the troops will learn to love a clean rack, clean head, and immaculate mess deck!”
Jack was an athlete. He could swim the PT-test distance of a mile any day; and he ran two miles every Saturday with his German Shepherd back before it was fashionable.
There was a Lieutenant, a one-tour wonder of the draft age, at the FIC in 1968. He had failed to join the reserves when he was playing football at LSU, so after a year of playing pro ball for the old Houston Oilers AFL franchise and had to join the Navy to avoid being drafted as a rifleman.
Some distinguished senior officers of my acquaintance came in the same way; that was the nature of things then. Anyway, according to our pal Jim, the former football player bet Jack that he could do more pushups than Jack could. It should not have been a big challenge- pro football player vs. a 43-year-old WW II vet. But Jack upped the odds and suggested that not only could he do more pushups but he could do twice his age and the LT couldn’t double his.
Jack shared the case of Olympia (“It’s the Water!”) that he won. He was a tough competitor but magnanimous to a fault.
It is someone else’s Navy now. In my day, as it was then, the Club and alcohol had not been deglamorized and the place to be after work was the bar at the Officer’s Club, where the prices were cheap. In 1968, it was the Ford Island or Pearl Harbor Mainside club for a daily cocktail.
You have to understand that Hawaii was unbelievably expensive in 1968. In those days most sailors were single, and Cost of Living Adjustments did not exist. An Ensign was paid a paltry $308 a month — the Bank of Graf was always there for the Junior Officers.
That made the club system an imperative, and a place of refuge. The club on the island was still there, brass torches out front, when I worked there, attached to what had been the Bachelor Officer’s Quarters, but the place was abandoned, and the folks who lived on the island said it was haunted.
I believe it- our bunkroom in the largely abandoned dispensary certainly was. It had been a makeshift morgue on The Day.
But then, the clubs were for blowing off steam and then heading out on the ferry for home. Jack lived in Kaneohe, across the Likelike Pass in the steep Pali Mountains, and he drove his cherry 1964 Ford Thunderbird convertible with élan and treated his younger shipmates with kindness.
He didn’t like to take the Thunderbird downtown to Honlulu to his absolute favorite place- the old Red Vest. He and Ann, the love of his life, used to go there for special occasions. It was beyond the reach of the JO’s for anything more than a special occasion, but Jack could afford to live a little with his bride. He had been to the war, and the quirky progressive music that played at the Red Vest them feel cool in a way the clubs never could.
Jack was not only a man of the Navy, but also of the world. That is what the Fleet gave you, back in the day when deployments didn’t mean being sealed up in a steel box for six months, and popping back out the same place you started.
It was in 1968 that Jack volunteered to go back to Vietnam for a second tour. As you imagine, he was no shrinking hibiscus when it came to risk, and he was as much a warrior as an analyst of photos on a light table.
Interestingly, he was a very special photo interpreter. It must have been something they missed at the Fleet headquarters, since the regular officers with the sort of clearances that Jack held were not permitted far out of Saigon when they went to The Show. I guess they thought that the time in language training at Monterey and the Naval Intelligence Liaison Officer (NILO) school in Coronado were enough to cool him off.
But Jack had been to the Eastman Kodak labs in New York to learn about how to handle extremely thin photo negatives that went to places where weight was at an absolute premium. Like Outer Space.
Even Rex did not have the sort of operational clearances for that, and it was one of the reasons that so many sweated Jack’s shoot-down so hard, and maybe why his loss was thought best forgotten for a long long time.
But that was a little while later and another half an ocean away in the Third Coastal Zone of the Republic of Vietnam.
Copyright 2009 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
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