(USS Forrestal (CV-59) greets a happy couple at Mayport, Florida prior to a Med deployment).

Well, it wasn’t. The long stream of gray ships steaming across components of the gray ocean continued after the Soviet Union collapsed. It wasn’t even our personal last cruise, since there was another to follow on a ship assigned to carry the Fleet Commander around on a different body of water. And this morning there are men and women afloat in all sorts of places as a nation we used to fight a (Japan) re-arms as a much larger one we used to be allied with (China) expands its reach on the World Ocean.

We were embarked on a peripheral task, which was to take an experimental batch of manuscript and get it ready to depict what it was like to actually be there amid the leaders who were determined to end the long chilly conflict between two heavily armed nuclear powers. The account is one of pure happenstance. At the time, those of us who deployed to the Mediterranean Sea were simply the latest place-holders in a long line of ships and sailors who performed a mission of resolve and presence on the Wine Dark Sea. The end of conflict was the decision of those who were in charge at the time. But it was breathtaking to look up and find ourselves in the middle of it.

We had been working on that manuscript in spurts across three decades. The original work was sandwiched into the events long ago. We carried out a few hundred Plans of the Day that were involved in moving a gigantic ship filled with 4,000 sailors in training areas in the Caribbean, then across the Atlantic Ocean, through the pillars of Gibraltar, and finally into a majestic procession across the three major operating zones of an ancient sea- West, Middle and East- before returning home to Mayport in Florida. It took about a year, broken in pieces of execution.

We attempted to capture the days as they occurred, filled with the inexplicable detail of the things compose a Navy Day underway. I cannot recall if those days were captured on computer or typewriter. We caught it “on the fly,” and got it printed to hand around to the others who participated in the adventure. Only later did we realize the times had made something unique of the voyage. The Saltwater- or Seasick- Summit brought the leaders together at sea, detached from the usual summitry talks at hallowed places ashore. Then, as part of a joint effort to minimize miscalculations, we spent a lot of time in a series of ancient ports. We were in a tense peace made surreal by the concerted effort to be peaceful.

Which begins the story of this morning. The manuscript has had its own history, gathered together in the creation and the dozens of software iterations as it was transformed from the original format down through generations of Microsoft word processing applications. And a dozen or more computers in offices and homes across a few states and a District.

In a way, the assorted digits had survived in a semi-legible fashion. But the medium had replaced some characters with others, and creation of a “book” required intervention. The latest attempt at that involved a professional lady in Arizona who did cover-art and formatting, following on a similar effort with the project we did on our mentor Mac Showers. We had learned enough from that project to make entirely new mistakes on Last Cruise. And some of them returned as nightfall wrapped us in darkness last night.

Christine-out-west was eager to get the project off her plate. Artwork for the cover was complete, along with the publishing information that will convey ISBN and copyright information. I had made a stab at correcting the character substitutions provided by Mr. Bill Gates over the years- the character “@” that had replaced the original “-” in the various updates across decades. Our pal Heather, one of the stalwart members of the Willow Crew, had done some compiling for the Socotra House, and despite her status now as a new-wife and mother, she willingly took up the task of replacing the transformed characters for shipment to Christine.

After some yeoman’s work, parts of the manuscript were shipped off to the Desert, thinking the work was complete.

It wasn’t, as we heard via plaintive complaint from Arizona. So, it is back to work on old words this morning as the peace achieved back then seems to have veered once more to the brink of something. Our current President summed it up as “Armageddon” last night. Some aspects of history are more circular than linear, we suppose. But we are here to report we are lurching toward resolution and publication.

Nor is that the end of the road. Publishing “Last Cruise of the Cold War” will clear the deck for another manuscript that has hung in juvenile incompletion since leaving the Republic of Korea a long time ago. That is another of those former hot spots heating up again. It is actually a little appalling, looking at it now, four decades along from the daily recounting of a military coup conducted in the shadow of an older war settled not by “victory” but by Armistice.

We will get to that as soon as the Last Cruise is re-worked and recycled through the Piedmont and Grand Canyon State.

The raw emotions of that time are a little more stark than the ones in the Med. But it was a time to be alive, and we actually lived most of the way through it. More on all that as it comes along. The Long Shadows project is also hovering gently with the memory of those who fought in the last great global conflict. As we hover on the brink of another. There may be a book in that one, too. We will see, won’t we?

Copyright 2022 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocora.com