Requisat

I was trying to find out what we had to do to spread Snidely’s ashes at sea when I saw the stupid old Navy is going to scuttle the O-Boat as an artificial reef in the Gulf.

There are four states, or five, if you include the joint proposal, that want the former USS Oriskany, Attack Carrier 34, entombed in the deeps off their coast. The Navy says it will make a swell reef and an excellent habitat for fish. Our Service does not want to maintain the ship for historical or any other purpose. The people in charge of the asylum at this moment want to stop paying money to maintain it.

Aircraft carriers are big complex things. The simplest thing to do is sink it and be done.

Last time I saw O-Boat she was a grimy hulk anchored in the Inactive Ship Facility at Bremerton in Washington. I marveled at how bad she looked, once the Queen of the 27-Charlie modifications to the World War Two Essex-class carriers. She had been famous in her day, and some of my friends had flown over Vietnam from her decks. In fact, Heavy Search and Rescue Squadron Eight had flown from her.

Snidely Whiplash was not mentioned in the artificial reef proposal, but he might as well have been. We are seeking to do the same thing to him this weekend that the Navy is trying to do to the O-Boat. But this is what he wanted, and the ship has not expressed any opinion, one way or the other.

Snidely will be cremated in his favorite Tommy Bahama shirt with a fresh pack of Camels in the top pocket. The unfiltered kind, the ones without the filter so you can shred the butt and leave nothing for the Viet Cong to find.

It was not a good morning, the day after the New Year. I was pounding out the monthly newsletter for the office, ornery at the prospect of going back to work today. My stupid Wolverines had lost the Rose Bowl to the Longhorns out of Texas, a magnificent game of back and forth, lost on a medium kick in the expiring seconds. I called my son on the West Coast. He had gone to the game.

I said: ”It was one of the best Rose Bowl games ever played.”

He said: ”It is only a great game if you win.” I clicked off, realizing he was right.

So I had just finished typing the last nuance in the newsletter and gone back to my e-mail when I saw it. It was a note from a pal down in Atlanta, saying that Snidely was gone.

It was a physical blow. Snidely had a fierce handle-bat moustache when I first met him, and he covered my ass from the pranks of the fighter squadron I had joined in the Far East. He had been a door-gunner in armored helicopters in the American war in Vietnam before he became an officer. The mission of his squadron had been to go feet-dry from the sea to retrieve downed aviators.

As part of his day at the office, he shot it out with the locals. Sometimes the men he rescued died in his arms. He was one of the original tough guys, but he had a tender side that he showed only if you knew him. We wrote back and forth for all the years after we were together, sometimes daily. That was in the world before the internet.

He had been in intense pain from a degenerative spinal condition for a couple years, and his brilliant and ironic letters stopped several months ago. So it was not a surprise that he was gone. But it still hurt..

He lost his home in the Florida hurricane and just got his check from the insurance company for fair market price. He moved his beloved wife into a house in Oklahoma, to be near her children. He was far from the water. I believe he considered his work done.

Ours is not complete yet. I need to find out if we need to file an environmental impact statement about scattering the ashes from a Government installation. I talked to the duty Chaplain at the Air Station in Pensacola late the night before. He did not know if there were special requirements.

I told him if it was “too hard” on the base, I would be happy to rent a boat and float down the bay to spread the ashes off the base, between the concrete where we marched next to the seaplane ramps, and Santa Rosa Island where my Dad’s generation did land survival. Maybe in the precise place where we were plucked by helicopter out of the water in the survival training where the sharks frolicked.

Snidely said he wanted to be buried at sea, but this is a new Navy. It is a two year wait to have the ceremony done from a ship of war. I don’t think he would want to do that.

But it occurred to me that there was a ship available. A proud ship that the Navy doesn’t have any use for, any more than it needs us. Maybe the Oriskany has some space available.

I’ll ask.

Copyright 2005 Vic Socotra

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