The Seven Seas: Port Call Al-Iskandriya, 1990

Port Call Al-Iskandariya, 1990

Downsizing is an interesting evolution. We are in the process at the moment. Looking through the different old directories stacked up in the computer was interesting in attempting unscramble the past. Part of it is a numbers thing. Did we make all 50 States? How many nations? And was it six or seven seas? A lot of stuff turned up. Below are some images from the USS Forrestal (CV-59) Med Cruise that included three of the current Seven Seas and ended the Cold War.

Below is the Great Pyramid at Giza as we walked up to it from the buses, surrounded by ‘HeyJoes’ actively marketing souvenirs. Then a hike up the side of the massive thing to an entrance carved into the side, and then the hunched transit down to the Burial Chambers below. I briefly occupied part of it in 1990.

It is an interesting walk up about a third of the height of the thing to enter the passageway down to what had been the tomb gallery. The passage is designed for smaller people than live today. Mildly oppressive in still ancient air, there still was a place to stretch out for a moment:

It was an interesting Med Cruise, since our underway time before making the East Coast transition had all been out in the Pacific and Indian Oceans. What turned that deployment into something unusual was the nature of the historic moment in progress. The Malta Summit meeting between Gorbachev and Bush in late 1989 had (maybe) ended the Cold War (we weren’t sure).

In Alexandria- Al-Iskandriya they call it- I asked Diocletian, the guy they put up the Pillar to honor in Al-Iskandriya. No luck on that, since it turned out he had retired a few centuries ago when the Black and Caspian Seas were still “distant waters.”

That is when the phrase “Seven Seas” originated, but there has been change in what was described. In ancient times there were six areas named as “seas” in just the Med. The adjoining Red Sea covered the waterfront, so to speak.

In our time, the ‘Seven Seas’ had changed to bodies of water along trade routes in the Med, Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans. The northern and southern extremes of those oceans were termed ‘Arctic,’ and the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico fill it out. We have looked north from Adak in the Aleutian islands to the northern Arctic waters. So, we got to six of the modern Seven Seas on warships underway. We have no plans to return to complete our presence on all of them, but we have steamed on six and put a boot-toe into the seventh.

After the Summit, we received subsequent deliberate direction from our Commander at 6th Fleet to accomplish everything on the existing schedule but minimize the PR sort of stuff that usually goes with the exercises and port calls. We wound up with a lot of time on the hook in some amazing places. We had a great liberty in Egypt, accomplishing the “presence” mission and the later magic four days of improvised pilgrimage in the Holy Land.

There was something else about the uncertainty. For the only time in our careers there was not the looming possibility of an incident that meant real and personal trouble for all hands. On whichever of the Seas we happened to be.

The last few months of that somewhat unsettled cruise? I think we were on the Cote D’Azur (Marseille and west to Nice and Canne) for more than three weeks. But that is another story…or three or four!

The whole tale is also available in book form, the one we immodestly call “The Last Cold War Cruise.”

(That is The Sphinx under scaffolding behind that guy.)