At the AFSOUTH Club, I tried to get on a phone and then, worse, when I did I had to try to figure out how to use it. By the time I cracked the code and get a Transatlantic line there is no one home to speak to. The Italians can’t hold a candle to the French for telecommunications. I was frustrated and drunk and finally just said the hell with it and climbed back on a bus for the hermetically-sealed trip back the Fleet Landing, nothing accomplished except getting a headache and wasting the day. The only saving grace was the wonderful prosciutto et fromaggio sandwich in that hole in the wall right before the landing….

Otherwise, I returned to the ship depressed and tired. And utterly determined not to be sealed in this gigantic steel box the next day.

05 DEC:

My eyes flew open when Chop started to stir in the rack above me. I had to get up and go to Italy. I literally bounded out of bed and into my slightly-wrinkled khakis. It was 0620. I had fallen asleep about 2100 the night before and had more uninterrupted rest than the last two weeks. I went to breakfast as a rare treat. Talked to CDR Kirkpatrick about meeting the ship’s Intel guy from Sarah who happened to be in town and wanted to come out and tour the ship.

My omelette from Cookie was delicious. CAPT Riley, the senior Ship’s DOC was making some wild and erroneous statements about officers being searched on the Quarterdeck. He was of the opinion that such individuals should be brought to
Mast if they refused. I bit my tongue rather than get into a beef with the idiot. He had missed the point entirely. The issue was not of being searched, but rather ”who• was doing the searching. I trust our Senior Medical Officer is a good doctor because his grasp of tradition and protocol are conspicuously deficient.

I went up to Mission Planning and read the message boards. After 0700, I called Josh Randall, who was to be my wingman for the day, and told him to get on the 0830 standby for departure to Ercolano and points south to Sorrento. Although CAG wanted a pre-brief on the Campaign Plan, my bet was that he was going to be hung up on the Birddog issue all day and I didn’t want to get trapped aboard waiting. I swung down past CAG Admin and saw the Deputy, who had just arisen to discover that he was to be the next EA to USCINCLANT, the four-buzzer Joint Commander of the Atlantic.

He was a made man now. This job would give him the connections and the horsepower to go all the way. If he didn’t fuck up on his deep draft command, he would be a shoe-in for Flag. He was happy and I took advantage of the opportunity to state that I was leaving and expeditiously exited stage left.

Josh and I made the first boat (which did not actually leave the stern until 0910) and ventured forth into the strange world of Italy. You have to admire the total anarchy of the Italian system. Really.

Trying to walk to the train station we wound up on the median on the main drag, which narrowed from a sidewalk into a narrow strip on which pedestrians, cars, and motorbikes competed in about equal shares for passage. Finally terrified, Josh and I ducked off the thing and tried to walk up a side-street. Which was impossible, due to the fact that the insane little cars were parked helter-skelter bumper to bumper so you couldn’t cross the streets or the alleyways.

Everywhere there were quaint shops, bakeries, fashion clothing, strange looking Neapolitans everywhere and a light drizzle that brought the shipboard oils out on my sneakers and made the paving stones as slippery as ice. Cars and traffic and people and garbage were everywhere, and we had no clear idea where we were headed. We finally broke right down a diagonal alley and through an ancient gate into a square in front of a theater.

The direction felt right, but in the free form urban structure we were essentially clueless. We picked our way through the trash and made a point of not stepping in the dogshit. Another aimless right turn and sure enough we were directly in front of the
Circumvesuvia Station.

We had some problems in getting across what we wanted to the little man behind the biglietta window, but after some minor hand waving and repetition of the word “Sorrento” we came into the possession of two bargain tickets to the peninsular city. We got down to the tracks under grey skies and found a train leaving in about five minutes. We piled in with a significant number of people who clearly did not enjoy the same modern bathing facilities that we do back home. We rolled off across the
industrial city right on time, stopping with less frequency as we rolled out toward the slopes of Vesuvius. I had found the name we were looking for on a map at the terminal; at least I assumed “Ercolano” was the modern term for classical Herculaneum.

We rolled into the station and wondered if we could get off without invalidating our tickets. Is this the honor system? In Italy?

We walked out of the station and saw some signs reading “Scavi Ercolano” (Herculaneum Ecavations?) and wondered if meant what I thought it did. We took a 5,000 lira cab ride to ensure we would find out; it was just down the hill, impossible to miss.

We walked from the pandemonium ofmodern Italy into the tranquility of the grave.

The Herculaneum gate leads into a free park and a great bridge that takes you down over the scavi. There below you is the Roman town, lying beneath up to 60 meters of dark volcanic tufa, the rest of the city brooding above, the ancient city running right into the cliff and uch more obviously sleeping below. Josh and I had the place to ourselves, except for some hey-joe kids who hassled us for cigarettes. Walking through the doors and into the chambers, looking at the murals, the bones and through the baths and temples of the ancient city.

It was wonderful, strange, and utterly silent.

The suburban baths; marble, silent as a tomb, the terrible violence of that day 2,013 years before frozen with the lava left cascading through a door; surrounding the ancient wood of a door left ajar; freezing the image of a great marble basin as the scalding flow carried it across a room.

At the ancient waterfront, a Roman boat is lying forlorn in a cradle beneath a tin roof.

Odd, strange, weird for the city to be exhumed and then to see the decay begin again, slowly allowing the plants and the corrosive atmosphere to resume the slow entropic dissolution…to save it, we have to expose it to the air and destroy it for all time, accomplishing with love what the raw fury of the volcano could not.

Walking back up the hill to the train station and back on the slow train to Sorrento we will filled with thoughts as gray and moist as the sky. Now raining without pity. The train tracks took us on a ride around around the living mountain that had killed the cities below.

Ah, Sorrento…A toy resort town. Lovely shops, handsome people and pretty girls dodging the rain. Quaint streets and outstanding opportunities to buy all manner of things. A music box at the shop of the Three Sisters, with little inlaid boxes for the boys at home. A rakish beret for me. Now I am at one with my environment; invisible and completely local. We enjoyed lunch at the Pizza Fauna Ristorante. Real pizza, with the liquid olive oil and cheese pooling in the middle and thin crust; picante sun dried tomatoes; tall draft beers; watching the people come and go and the guys from the Staff line up at the pay phone.

I called Rick, the Judge in charge of all Navy Legal matters in the Med; he was busy the next day with the Randy Traverse Concert at the aeroporto, so it was that night or nothing; oh well, what the hell, we thought, it was raining anyway, so back to Napoli on the train.

Rick had given us exacting directions, and we rode the main station at Plaza Garibaldi; transferring to the Metropolitana Line to Pozoulli; meeting Rick at the station, he was fortuitously able to escape the rigors of Command a trifle early. We took a wild ride through Pozuolli to get to his house; past the third largest extant Stadium remaining from the classical world, its great concrete buttresses erupting from the low-tech, low-aspiring modern city around it. Along the modern highway, laid over the Roman road, great anonymous masses of Roman buildings still erupt in incongruous places.

A truncated arch forms the boundary of a Fina Service Station. I ask Rick “Who are these pygmies that now inhabit this world wrought by giants?” He says it was the lead lining to the wine Jugs that got them, a point to ponder. We arrive at the high security Casa Schiff; all white tile and bidet in the head. Judy is gone, on business, and Rick cooks Rigatoni as we listen to Elvis and drink Heiniken, fine white wine and fiery brandy.

He has Air Force dependent kids in town from Germany or England who were visiting to attend a math and science competition. He directs them on a tangerine hunt in the orchard which surrounds the building. Finally the wild autostrada ride around the city and back into the gloom of Napoli at night.

Making it right to the boat safely, we see CAG and company, only to discover Rooter and Beth P are in town, TDY, and have the googly eyes for one another. The couple and I first met at Aviation Officer Candidate School in Pensacola, ‘Cradle of Naval Aviation.’ The memory of the screaming Marine Drill Instructors will be with us forever.

Another gratuitous beer in the Gut before the groping on theater side of the table convinced Josh and I to hold to the better part of valor and get our asses back to the ship and let the lovers have their way.

Copyright 2016 Vic Socotra
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