The Cruise

The Cruise
Part 13

The minarets of Port Said were eight miles dead ahead when I came up to the bridge for my watch. It was the middle of March, 1967 and we were proceeding to the northern end of the Suez Canal to begin a two-month assignment in the Middle East Force. It was hardly a force back then, consisting of a seaplane tender as the permanent flagship, along with two destroyers at a time, each staying about two months on a rotating basis.

The trip through the Suez Canal was a great experience for me, having always heard of the mystique surrounding the canal. On this trip from the Mediterranean to the Red Sea, we took our place at Port Said in the southbound convoy, made up mostly of empty commercial tankers that were on their way to fill up at one of the oil storage ports. Our voyage started out on a funny note, as a small Egyptian boat took a mooring line from our ship and secured it to a bitt on their own boat. They were moving at about six knots toward the sea buoy to which they were going to tie our ship, when suddenly they reached the end of our line which brought their boat to an abrupt halt and almost ripped their bitt right out of their deck. They got really angry with us since we hadn’t given them enough line to work with, and they shook their fists at us for quite a while, even after we fed them more line. When they finally realized that shaking their fists didn’t solve anything, they quit doing it.

When it was time to start the trip, they untied us and we were off in the convoy proceeding south through the canal, which was incredibly narrow. There was sand for as far as you could see both to port and to starboard. If I thought the canal was narrow for our little destroyer, imagine what the crews on the huge tankers must have thought. Of course, this voyage was old hat for them as they made it all the time, while it was a first for me as well as for most of the rest of us on the ROAN.

Here’s a picture of an aircraft carrier going through the canal.

http://web.mst.edu/~rogersda/umrcour...anal today.jpg

We had to stop and anchor in Great Bitter Lake, which was halfway between the ends of the canal, to let the northbound convoy pass. They were all filled with oil and sitting low in the water, so that is why we had to give way to them. While we were anchored in the lake, I decided to get a little practice at two things at the same time. I had been learning to send flashing light signals from some of our signalmen, and I noticed that there was an Italian tanker anchored close to us.

Since I had studied Italian as my foreign language at college and had visited Italy during two of my summer vacations, I sent the ship a message in Italian by flashing light, just to see if I could talk to them a little and make myself understood. Souza, our Signalman First Class, told me I was a little too ragged in my signals and that I wasn’t aiming the light properly, and sure enough, they didn’t answer. I tried to concentrate on what Souza had told me and sent my message again. This time they answered, and furthermore, did it in Italian. I now forget what the message was, but I remember that I felt good that I was able to be understood and that I could understand their response. We traded a few messages before we knocked off our communications because it was time to weigh anchor and continue our journey.

When we reached Port Suez at the southern end of the canal, the convoy broke up and we all proceeded our different ways. We went to Aden, a British protectorate at the time, and the tankers went off to pick up their next loads of oil. We had to anchor out at Aden, and nobody got to leave the ship but the Supply Officer, who was to purchase a load of stores, and the Postal Clerk, who was to drop off a load of outgoing mail and pick up whatever they had in the way of incoming. Remembering that one of my collateral duties was Postal Officer, I asked the Executive Officer if I could go in, just to make sure the Postal Clerk didn’t screw up our precious mail pickup. I was given permission to go, so I rushed to our motor whaleboat which took us into town.

Aden was still a British Protectorate at the time, and there had been some sort of terrorist activity against the British going on for a few days. There were imposing British Marines carrying submachine guns and patrolling all the major streets. I don’t know if being 6’3” and at least 200 pounds were prerequisites for being a Royal Marine, but it sure seemed like they probably were.

From Aden, we went to Bahrain, a small island inhabited by Arabs, which had a lot of oil wells. We went shopping and I found some really nice buff-colored suede desert boots that were quite cheap, so I bought three pairs. On Bahrain, there was a British naval station, which they named just like ships. The name of this one was HMS JUFAIR, although I don’t know what JUFAIR signified. I had a few too many drinks and started doing my impression of a British accent to a Royal Marine, who was at least twice my size and in very good shape. I kept saying “I say there” with what I thought was a pretty good British accent, but which the Marine apparently didn’t think was all that funny. My shipmates got me out of there before I alienated him enough to do any serious damage to me.

From Bahrain, we went on to Abadan, Iran. I was out in town shopping when I noticed a nice looking silver Kiddush cup with a Star of David. As I was buying it, a man a few years older than me introduced himself as a fellow Jew. Apparently he had served for a few years in the Israeli army, even though he was Irani. I don’t remember if I asked him why he came back to Iran rather than staying in Israel. We went out a few times, and he showed me the local synagogue, which was very nice and much better than I probably would have expected had I thought about it beforehand.

Years later, I heard that during the Iran-Iraq War, Abadan was pretty much leveled in the fighting. I worried about what might have happened to my friend.

On our way to Kenya, we crossed the equator and I got to participate in the age-old Shellback ceremony in which those who had previously crossed and hence had become ‘shellbacks’ got to initiate those who hadn’t, who were called ‘pollywogs.’ There was a buildup in anticipation of the ceremony itself for a few days before we made the crossing, during which the shellbacks made life difficult for us pollywogs by paddling us and by imposing other similar ‘hardships’ on us. It was relatively tame compared to Plebe Year at the Naval Academy, so I didn’t find this to be particularly grueling.

When we actually crossed the line, all the shellbacks were dressed up like pirates and we pollywogs were shirtless in old pants so as not to ruin any good clothes. We got ‘haircuts’ which entailed getting a few snips taken out of our heads- it took about two months for our hair to grow back so we would again look normal. We had to crawl through a ‘garbage’ trough which was filled with oil taken from the bilges along with the garbage, and we had to kiss the greased belly of the Royal Baby, who was the fattest shellback they could find. Ours happened to be a steward whose name I don’t remember.

Shortly after our crossing-the-line ceremony, we went into port at Mombassa, Kenya. I remember the very scenic approach with jungle all around the channel, and every leg of the channel was marked by a range, which consists of two fixed landmarks that line up when you are properly positioned in the channel. I remember that we moored next to a German ship carrying animals back to a zoo, and they had cages with growling sounds all over the weather deck.

Karen Blixen, who wrote Out of Africa, had similar thoughts which she expressed much better than I did. I didn’t know about this until many years later when I actually read the book. It was eerie thinking that Karen, seeing the exact same situation that I saw, penned a lengthy discussion about what these animals might be thinking in their cages, having been wrenched from their wild habitat. She also described what they might be thinking later during the trip to Germany and after arriving in their zoo.

Mombassa featured huge metal archways over the main street which looked like large elephant tusks, but with rivets in them. Here is what they looked like.

http://i72.photobucket.com/albums/i1...d/kenya193.jpg

There were some unique shopping opportunities, with carved wooden kitchen utensils and wild animal statues being in plentiful supply. I got a few of these and still use them forty years later.

We also were able to make a ‘camera safari’ where you go to take pictures of the wild animals in Tsavo National Park, rather than shooting at them. I would later find out that this place was part of the story Out of Africa, but I didn’t know it at the time I was there.

Here’s a site about the park:

http://images.google.com/imgres?imgu...=/images%3Fq%3

And here’s a site that rings a bell from Out of Africa, if you want to do a little exploring on your own:

http://www.finchhattons.com/index.htm

We went on from Mombassa to a French colony, Reunion Island with its capitol city (and probably the only city on the small island) where at a reception that was given for the officers of our ship, I had the best meal I had ever eaten. They claimed to have worked on that meal for over two days. I guess that there weren’t too many US Navy ships that visited the island, so they really rolled out the red carpet for us.

In late May, we returned to Suez to make our transit back into the Med. I remember waiting at Port Suez at the southern end of the canal for the southbound convoy which included the destroyer that was to relieve us. I don’t, however, remember which ship it was. Whoever it was, we started exchanging flashing light signals while the ship was barely visible, still in the canal. It was a good feeling to see another American ship, and shortly after the southbound convoy cleared the canal, our northbound convoy started its transit. It wasn’t long before we were back in the Med with the rest of the Sixth Fleet, and on our way to more conventional ports like Cannes, Barcelona, and Valencia.

The Cruise
Part 14

In early June, 1967, we were steaming independently on a westerly course in the Med, enroute to Cannes for a week on the sunny beaches, when we got a message to proceed at 25 knots to a rendezvous in the Eastern Med. I was the Officer of the Deck on the bridge who had to reverse course and speed AWAY from Cannes. Shortly after this initial message, we got another giving a rendezvous point and time and ships’ station assignments (there were two attack aircraft carriers, two cruisers, fifteen destroyers, a few submarines, and some replenishment ships all converging on the rendezvous point from different directions), and then still another message explaining why we were doing all this. The Arabs and Israelis were at it again.

I remember passing through the mess decks on my way back to my stateroom after my bridge watch and hearing one of the radiomen, proud of the fact that he had direct access to the outside world, telling all who would listen that “The Egyptians are bombing Cairo!!” Whenever you needed some garbled and confused information, you could always get it on the mess decks.

I later had the 4-8 morning watch as OOD, during which we joined up with the rest of the Sixth Fleet. This was done in total darkness, a couple of hours before first light, and under electronic silence. There were ships’ lights all over the horizon and both cruisers and both carriers were already there when we arrived. The cruiser serving as Sixth Fleet flagship (LITTLE ROCK) was the guide and was showing some sort of distinguishing visual signal to identify herself – I forget exactly what the signal was. There was another cruiser, either ALBANY or COLUMBUS, I think. I remember wondering if the carriers, AMERICA and SARATOGA, would be able to take station since they had always been the guide before, but they both did very well in maneuvering, as did the other cruiser.

We slipped into our station well before first light, with the bearing right on and the range as close as we could determine in the darkness without radar. Shortly after first light, electronic silence was lifted and we lit off our surface search radar. I remember one of my first class radarmen came running out onto the bridge amazed to see that, when his radar scope came alive, all the ships were already on station. He didn’t seem to believe it was possible to do this without the benefit of radar, radio, and maneuvering boards.

What a sight that was in the daylight - two aircraft carriers, two cruisers, and fifteen destroyers all within a tight circle. Later the carriers started launching aircraft, just as a limbering up process in case they had to later fly some real missions. Our planes never joined in the fighting, nor did any of our ships. We were there only to monitor the situation and not to take any action unless some kind of emergency arose. Both carriers were even launching at the same time for a while, and the sky overhead was full of planes zooming around all of the ships below.

The battle between the Israelis and several Arab nations later became known as the Six Days’ War, as that was how long it took.

The Cruise
Part 15

After our ship had been sidetracked to rush off to the Eastern Med until the Six-Days War had reached its conclusion, we finally set our course again for Cannes on the French Riviera. If you can remember back that far, to the previous episode, Cannes was where we were headed when we were suddenly diverted to the Eastern Mediterranean.

It was still June, 1967, and perfect weather for the beaches at Cannes. We had just missed the Cannes Film Festival, as it was held from April 27 - May 12, but it was unlikely that we would have gotten tickets anyway, so that didn’t matter. We certainly didn’t really know anybody who was anybody in those circles.

Now I’m not a big fan of beaches, because I hate the sand that works its way into every place you have and is really uncomfortable and I don’t really know why beaches are such popular places except among people who like to get sand into everything they have. But here on the beaches of Cannes were lots of gorgeous ladies, and what they were wearing was way ahead of what they were wearing on Jacksonville Beach in Florida and we sailors really liked the French version. So to see these ladies on the beach at Cannes, I decided I could put up with the hardships of having sand everywhere. As for Jax Beach, we’ll leave that as another story for another day and we’ll stick to the Mediterranean for a while.

Anyway, here’s what the Bay of Cannes looks like from a helicopter or a tall building ashore, but remember that these are photos taken from the internet so I don’t know exactly where the photographer was sitting when he or she took the picture. And besides, who cares? So rather than rambling on a meaningless discourse about who took the picture or where it was taken from, I’ll zero in on Cannes itself.

Here’s that shot of the bay.

http://www.manningkrull.com/photo_al...es_2005/13.jpg

The beach we decided to invade was just opposite the Carlton Hotel, which I now know is one of the classier places in town. It was the hotel in the movie To Catch a Thief. But at the time I was there, I was only at the tender age of 25, and I have now come to realize that I really don’t know much of anything back then - despite the fact that at the time, I sure thought I did.

Here is a distant shot of the hotel, so you can see the building as a whole, as well as the beach where we spent most of our time:

http://images.sportsnetwork.com/misc...ce_carlton.jpg

And here’s what the main entrance looked like:

http://www.mitrax.de/artikel/mbx/carlton_hotel.jpg

Not exactly like Red Roof Inn or Howard Johnsons. I think we went in just to check out the lobby - I always love nice hotel lobbies. We couldn’t have afforded a glass of water in the restaurant, so after checking out the lobby, we went off to the beach where all the grit and the gorgeous women were. The sacrifices we made just to see some babes in bikinis.

We won’t go into any of the gruesome details of where the sand wound up, or what we saw. But I’ll just say that there was one woman who must have been a movie star or something because she was really beautiful and she had all these guys buzzing around her. And while she undid her bikini top to improve the quality of her suntan, she remained face down the entire time it was in that particular configuration.

Here’s a view of one of the beaches, but not the one by the Carlton Hotel that I mentioned above, which is the beach we used even though we weren’t staying at the Carlton - we were staying on our destroyer which was anchored out in the bay.

http://p.vtourist.com/749032-Beach_in_Cannes-Cannes.jpg

In the evening, we went to neighboring Nice, and looked around the waterfront area before having a nice meal in a sidewalk café.

The next day, I had to perform Shore Patrol duty, which meant that I had to walk around town in my tropical white uniform making sure all of our sailors behaved themselves. Along with me was a Midshipman from the Naval Academy, who was on his summer training cruise aboard our destroyer, and we were patrolling our beat in downtown Cannes.

Would you believe that this red sports car with two lovely British lasses stopped and asked us if we would like a ride to the Whiskey-A-Go-Go? I sure didn’t believe it because I didn’t get offers like this every day, and I was really tempted to take them up on it. But I had an impressionable young Midshipman with me and I couldn’t allow him to think it was okay to go driving around Cannes with lovely British ladies in a sports car when we’re supposed to be doing our Shore Patrol duties. So I let the ladies know how much I appreciated the invitation but we had to finish our duty today. I asked them if they were still going to be in town tomorrow when we weren’t going to be on duty anymore. Sure enough, they were. We were able to quickly make our arrangements for a rendezvous the next day without missing too much of our Shore Patrol duty today.

The Cruise
Part 16

So the day after we had met those two lovely British girls in their red sports car, we were anxiously awaiting the end of the working day so we could go back onto the beach and see them again. You have to remember that to a sailor, the “beach” means any dry land, and not necessarily the kind of beach you might be thinking of. We of course also went to the beach, that is the conventional use of the word, as was discussed in the bikini watching portion of the last episode.

We still had to do our work, so we didn’t leave the ship until 1700, which is what the civilians called 5 PM. We went to the nice little sidewalk café where we had agreed to meet the ladies, and they arrived about four minutes after we did. They told us all about their travels throughout France and Italy, and we told them all about ours, and that’s about all the information you’re going to get out of me without a rubber hose.

The next day, we weighed anchor and set our course for Tripoli, Libya, which provides the second half of the Marine Corps Hymn opening, the part that says “From the Halls of Montezuma to the Shores of Tripoli.”

On the way to Tripoli, we practiced our shipboard skills, so we’ll quickly run through one of these. Before we get into the story, I should tell you that we carried a couple of small unmanned helicopters, called DASH because we couldn’t always remember that they meant Drone Anti-Submarine Helicopter which took much longer to say than it took to say DASH.

Here is one landing aboard a destroyer:

http://www.vtol.org/uavpaper/Image7.jpg

Now I had always thought I understood the meaning of the word embarrassment, but one day on the way to Tripoli, I came to have a much deeper appreciation of exactly what the word really means. That was the day I had to pick up a radiotelephone handset and say for all the world to hear “Baithook, Billfold, Elmira, this is Eskimo. Can any of you see my DASH? Over.”

As the CIC Officer (CIC stands for Combat Information Center - it’s that dark room with lots of radarscopes and displays of where other ships and aircraft are - you may have seen one in a movie), I often controlled our DASH helicopter from CIC. I would give it course and speed vectors to maneuver it out over submarine contacts, where I could then release a torpedo. We used to practice using this weapon a lot, because we had to coordinate keeping its position with keeping the submarine contact’s position. We would lock onto the DASH with our fire control radar and would track the submarine with our sonar, and operators at both of these sensors would report contact ranges and bearings to me in CIC.

One day as we were flying our DASH, I got three consecutive marks at the same point from our fire control radar, making me wonder if the radar operator had lost contact with the DASH and was stuck on some stationary object or maybe a ship, since the helo moved pretty fast. It turned out that yes, he had lost contact, and we didn’t have the helo visually (it was about ten miles away) nor on any radars.

There was a heavy wind blowing, which could really make it difficult to get the helo back to the ship, but I started bringing it back doing my best having only an approximate position and having to account for the wind which would alter its return course and speed significantly. I had watched our DASH Officer drop one bird (that’s what we called the DASH when we were tired of calling it DASH) into the drink (you can figure that one out for yourself), and I didn’t want to have anything to do with losing another. We kept our lookouts alert for the helo, as well as our surface search radar which was better at locating ‘low fliers’ than our air search. We were also radioing some of the other ships in company, asking if they could see our bird.

Finally, one ship reported that she had made visual contact and gave us the range and bearing from her. It turned out to be pretty close to where I had hoped it would be, given the wind conditions and the course/speed orders I had given it, but it really felt good to get a visual confirmation on it. I kept bringing the helo in until our own lookouts spotted it, and then when it was close enough I transferred control back to our DASH Officer on the flight deck. He brought the helo aboard from back there, and when he finally got it down on deck, it turned out that it had about two more minutes worth of fuel in its tanks.

It made me wonder, with all that fuel remaining, if maybe I could have gotten away without that radio call after all.

The Cruise
Part 17

Shortly after we dropped anchor in Tripoli’s harbor, all the officers had to assemble in the wardroom (in case you’ve forgotten this from a much earlier episode, the wardroom is what we called the dining room, where we not only ate, but also watched movies in the evening). The purpose of this particular call to the wardroom was to get a briefing on how we should behave out in town. I have forgotten all the rules they gave us, except for one, since it happened almost 40 years ago.

The one thing I still remember after all these years was when the briefer asked if we had any Jewish personnel aboard. The ship’s doctor and I raised our hands, and we mentioned a couple of the Jewish enlisted men who had attended our shipboard Seder a while back. Now we had hoped to have our Seder in the Red Sea, but our schedule didn’t work out quite that way. But we weren’t all that far from the Red Sea when we had our Seder, either. However, our Seder near the Red Sea has nothing to do with this particular visit to Tripoli, so don’t get me sidetracked or I’ll never get to the point of the briefing.

Anyway, the briefer then said “Don’t tell anyone out in town that you are Jewish.” Well, that sure made the whole idea of sightseeing even more thrilling than we had expected, but we eventually came to understand this. Even though the doctor technically outranked me, he was still a doctor, so I was the SJOB (Senior Jew on Board). I got the message about “mum’s the word” to all the others.

Now Tripoli is probably not high on anyone’s list of places to visit when they are shelling out money to do the visiting, and that’s true even for people who don’t have to worry about getting caught being Jewish out in town. But as long as we were there, and didn’t have to pay for the trip or for a hotel since we had our destroyer along, it proved to be a very interesting place.

If you haven’t been to Tripoli yet, I should probably say it’s on the Mediterranean coast of North Africa, near Egypt, which is a country you probably know from the Bible. It is believed that the city of Tripoli was founded by Phoenicians from Tyre in the seventh century BC, around the same time Phoenician blinds were invented. It was later conquered by the Romans some time in the first century BC. There were lots of ruins from that time period - not quite like they have in Rome, but a lot more substantial than I expected.

Here is a shot of the Libyan version of the Forum:

http://www.travelinstyle.com/Libya/images/columns.jpg

Here is the Arch of Marcus Aurelius, built to honor a Roman emperor who ruled from 161 to 180 AD. It’s in relatively good condition compared to other Roman ruins.

http://www.caravanserai-tours.com/im...s_aurelius.jpg

Here are a couple of pictures of Roman ruins in Cyrene, near Tripoli. First we have a couple of shots of the Temple of Zeus.

http://www.caravanserai-tours.com/im...ya/ds_zeus.jpg

To see a better view of the Temple of Zeus, first click on the following site, and then click on the first photo, which is the Temple.

http://images.google.com/imgres?imgu...7RmAJpdp6BPSM:

Then here is what’s still remaining from the Temple of Apollo, which isn’t much.

http://www.farhorizon.com/Africa/lib...apollo3_lg.jpg

The Arabs took charge of the city some time in the seventh century AD, and Tripoli was an important terminus of trans-Saharan caravan routes. It was captured in 1510 by the Spanish, who granted the city to the Knights of St. John, who held it until 1551, when it was taken by the Ottoman Turks. From 1711 to 1835, Tripoli was the seat of the Karamanli dynasty, which ruled most of what later became Libya with little control from Constantinople.

If you remember your American history (except for those of you probably didn’t have to take that particular course in school because you live somewhere else), there was a war which the USA fought against the so-called Barbary Pirates, who were plundering our merchant ships in the Mediterranean during the early 1800s and demanding huge ransoms if we wanted them to release our ships and crews. Well, someone in charge of the government decided that we weren’t going to put up with this nonsense, so we sent some naval vessels over there and cleaned up the joint. There were several great names in naval history who came out of that war. We won’t get into any of the gruesome details of the war, but suffice it to say that it was because of this war that “the Shores of Tripoli” got put into the Marine Corps Hymn, right after “the Halls of Montezuma” which come from another story in another part of the world that we didn’t visit on this particular cruise.

After several days of fun with the Tripolitans, it was back to sea, where I could again tell people I’m Jewish.

The Cruise
Part 18

I was sound asleep in the port side upper berth in the ‘JO (Junior Officer) Bunkroom,’ a four-man stateroom of ensigns and lieutenant junior grades on the main deck back aft. It was about 2320 (11:20 PM) a few nights after we had left Tripoli. I was dreaming about our earlier stopover in Cannes, where one of the Midshipmen on his summer training cruise and I had met some nice young British ladies driving a red sports car, so it was a pleasant dream.

Suddenly someone was shaking my mattress and shining a red flashlight into my eyes, and it wasn’t any lovely lady with a British accent! It was Kowalski, the bridge messenger, telling me I had to get up so I could go relieve the watch. I told him it was supposed to be Mr. Young’s watch, but Kowalski wouldn’t fall for that old line. Bob Young, who slept in the starboard side upper berth of this same bunkroom, was already on the bridge anxiously awaiting my arrival so he could get off the bridge and into his bunk.

I got washed up and put on some clean khakis in case someone important came onto the bridge during the midwatch (that’s the watch that goes from midnight to 4 AM). Nobody important had ever done this, but these were the days when Isaac Kidd (a famous, or infamous depending on whom you asked, naval officer who eventually made Admiral) was in his glory, and I’d heard a story separately from two guys who probably didn’t even know each other that Kidd had once come up behind an OOD (Officer of the Deck) during a midwatch on a destroyer and said “Hi, I’m Captain Kidd.” The OOD was said to have replied, “Hi, Captain, I’m John Paul Jones.” And both sources swore this story was true, and furthermore that the OOD really was named John Paul Jones, but I’m still not sure I believed either one of them.

As I walked forward through the main passageway on my way to the wardroom for our delicious midrats (which was our shortcut name for midnight rations and had absolutely nothing to do with rodents), I passed the firerooms which were both gushing unbelievable quantities of hot air upward, and I silently cursed the snipes down below (snipes are the black gang - the guys who ran the boilers and turbines in the lower reaches of the ship) who were responsible for this. Being the CIC Officer and hence always accustomed to air conditioning, I thought of the snipes as being good only for making hot air and black smoke, as well as losing the load (dropping the electrical plant off the line, resulting in a blackout), always at the worst possible time. Had I known that in a couple of years I would be the Officer in Charge of Hot Air and Black Smoke Production and the Leading Load Loser on another ship, I probably would have been more kind in my appraisal of those hard-working guys down below.

In my clean khakis, I slumped into a chair in the wardroom, which was all lit up in red so as not to impair our night vision, which we would need in just a few minutes. Then I looked to see what sort of delectable midrats Flauta had prepared for us. They were our old standby, non-Kosher bologna sandwiches, which I had gotten very tired of over the past several months. So I went into the wardroom pantry to see what I could make myself. At the risk of ruining my night vision, I turned on the white lights.

Ah, great! There was some bacon left over from breakfast earlier that day (at least I hoped it was from that same day), and lots of tomatoes, lettuce, and even some cheddar cheese in the refrigerator. So I made myself a couple of BLTs, even though the bacon probably wasn’t any more Kosher than the bologna that I didn’t care for. But at least it was a break from that same old stuff. It always amazed me that the coffee for the midwatch was never fresh, even when Flauta swore up and down that he had just made it five minutes earlier.

I finished my second sandwich at 2340 and went up the ladder to the bridge, which had the same red lighting scheme as the wardroom. Since my night vision was already in full swing despite my stop in the pantry, I had no trouble finding the OOD Bob Young, who was leaning on the Captain’s chair and intently watching the aircraft carrier USS SARATOGA 2,000 yards dead ahead. The moonlight accentuated the luminescence of the carrier’s wake which would have been visible even without the moonlight. I never understood why the wake seemed to glow all on its own like that. When Bob finished his rundown of the situation, I took the deck and the conn, and Bob beat a hasty retreat to the ladder on his way back to the bunkroom I had just left just a few minutes before.

As soon as he left, the SARA started an unannounced slow turn to starboard to take her course for flight operations. The radio was blaring with the chatter of all the aviators getting ready to land when the carrier steadied on her upwind course. By alternating rudder commands between right two degrees and amidships, I was able to stay just on the inboard edge of the clearly-visible wake for the whole turn.

I checked via the sound-powered phone talker to make sure the plane guard crew (we were assigned the duties of rescue destroyer in the event a plane didn’t make it safely onto the flight deck) on the foc’sl (actually spelled forecastle but you leave out lots of letters when you say it - so you say it like FOLK sul - it’s the forward extreme of the ship, like the place in the movie Titanic where they had that idiotic famous scene about being King of the World which would have frozen both members of the couple into solid blocks of ice) was manned and ready, and did the same for the guys back aft at the motor whaleboat.

Then I called the Captain in his sea cabin just aft of the bridge, to tell him the carrier was about to start flight ops. He came out just as we could see the first plane way back on our starboard quarter roll into the landing pattern and start his steady descent to the flight deck in almost total blackness.

The Cruise
Part 19

The plane that I mentioned in the last episode landed safely on the carrier’s flight deck, as did eight others who had been sharpening up their nighttime landing abilities. But that’s enough of sea stories.

At the fleet landing at Naples, where all shipboard people arrive at the port, there was a little kiosk with a man who would change dollars - just like magic - into lire. I would talk to this man a little with the Italian I had learned, even though what I had learned in school wasn’t really the Neapolitan dialect. I remembered him very well, as I had seen him several other times when we stopped at Naples, both on this cruise and the one we had taken the previous year.

I remember as if it were yesterday thinking something to myself after running into him for about the fourth time. While I had been seeing lots of places elsewhere in the Med and the Caribbean and the region East of Suez and places around the United States in between the occasions on which I encountered him, he was always there in that same place. I remembered feeling sorry for him, in that he had to stay in that same city, in that same kiosk, month after month and year after year, while I got to visit exciting places all over the world.

Looking back on this remembrance from a point forty years later, where I am now, I don’t think that staying in the same place is really all that bad. In fact, NOW I am sure I don’t care to keep moving around, and much prefer being able to stay in the same place. I’ve had enough traveling.

But it was so different when I was young - great responsibilities, adventure, and exploration were fantastic opportunities back then. I still treasure very much my chances to explore the world and see so many places I wouldn’t have otherwise had the chance to see had I not been in the Navy. And there were of course more important duties and learning experiences that came with being in the Navy - visiting ports all over the world was only a small and relatively trivial part of the overall experience.

I sit in an office all day now, and I’m quite content with that. But I’m sure glad I had the chance to get around the world in my younger days, before I reached the point where I would be happy I could sit in an office all day.

There were lots of other cities that I could talk about, and lots of experiences considerably more important than frivolous matters like visiting ports of call.

But it could theoretically go on forever, and this is as good a place as any to stop. And to those of you who have stuck with the story through all these episodes, I say THANKS for reading it.

THE END

Outstanding memoir. I see that the thread has had over 1400 hits -- well deserved.

Bravo!

Auntie