Committed to Memory
(Part the Third): “Mama! See the funny man?” “Hush, son, and you
mustn’t stare. He can’t help it. He’s a lieutenant”
As a new sailor, I wanted to be just like my “sea daddies,”
elder sailors each of whom had a whole raft of epic sea stories to tell as part
of the education of a fresh-caught youngster.
One such sailor, an elderly First Class Photographer’s Mate named Jon
Pfingsten, spun fascinating tale of himself and a very young Bosun’s Mate who (like
me) wanted to be considered a true Fleet Sailor.
Jon coached him through the various steps, carefully upping
the ante each time the young Bosun came back to him to get this apocryphal –
some might say “mythical” – list checked off.
But it was what the mathematicians would call an “asymptotic”
approach – the more the youngster achieved; the more Jon kept raising the bar. The youngster never quite got there.
It was pretty much the same with me during my first few
years … I never seemed to have anything “epic” to contribute to the daily bull
sessions. Somehow, sea stories always
seemed to include other people. Nothing
I did ever seemed to have the “larger than life” quality that a good sea story
requires.
***Now
jump ahead several decades ***
As a seasoned (translation: semi-elderly) Lieutenant, I was
part of a special detachment to board the Ticonderoga-class cruiser U.S.S. Vela
Gulf, for fleet operations with our NATO partners up in the Baltic Sea, just
off the coast of Sweden and Denmark.
Here it must be noted that, even though the rank of
“lieutenant” is a fairly junior officer rank, I had spent the previous 17 years
coming up through the ranks of enlisted sailors, before taking a commission as
an officer. Thus, junior I might have
been as officers go, but I already had gray hair and a former Chief
Photographer’s Mate’s cynical attitude … and a penchant for voicing my opinions
where other juniors might have opted for silence.
Officers like me – junior in rank but loudmouthed and
opinionated – made a strange set of people who never really fit into the rigid
hierarchy of the Naval Service. So
already, I stood apart from the other junior officers of our detachment aboard
the ship. I was a fairly elderly odd
duck.
Back to the story.
The Baltic, as you might know, is a relatively shallow sea,
but one which can blow up a truly noteworthy storm without much notice. Thus it was on the last day of our fleet
operations. It had stormed the night
before, so the air had that freshly scrubbed look to it, and the lightning-sparked
scent of ozone still lent a coppery tang to the clear salty air.
The sea itself was azure blue, due in part to the white
sands on the bottom only a few tens of feet below our keels, and also due to
the reflected pure glory of the turquoise sky above. It was going on towards an early autumn, and
the wind had a chill to it that portended the long Scandinavian Winter to come,
but today simply added a bracing coolness to the warm sun.
Above, the sun shone through the racing scud clouds leftover
from the storm, and painted everything with clarity and the definition one
might expect of a laser-enhanced photograph.
God’s own Photoshop, if you will.
I was all the way aft on the cruiser, and our battlegroup’s commander,
Rear Admiral William “Mad Dog” Copeland (a Navy aviator, who rarely got the
chance to play with surface ships) was up on the bridge, actually conning the
ship. Like all Navy jet pilots, he
wanted to go fast, so he was putting our turbine-powered cruiser through her
paces. Each time he shifted the ship’s
throttle, it produced a huge roostertail of white water from our madly spinning
props, and a wake that sent the ships behind us surfing across the man-made
waves.
Directly in our wake, the German destroyer Molders bobbed in
and out of our wake.
She was a former U.S. Navy Charles F. Adams-class destroyer,
of Post WWII design. As such, she was
the direct inheritor of everything that made a ship beautiful; long, lean,
swept lines, knife-edged bow, menacing gun emplacements everywhere in place of
the more modern (but far less beautiful) missile mounts that covered our ships.
In every motion and movement, she showed her classic
“Greyhound of the Seas” heritage, taking the jumps and leaps through the waves
like the thoroughbred she was.
She was a classic beauty: long, lean, gorgeous, agile,
lethal.
That’s when the image of the too-beautiful day at sea hit
me: The perfect sky, the azure waves,
the warm sun, the cool breeze, the freshly scrubbed atmosphere, a gorgeous ship
knifing through the waves … this was an episode straight out of the 50’s TV
show “Victory at Sea” … or better yet, it was a classic sea story … and it was
all mine.
You ever have one of those perfect moments when you couldn’t
do anything other than just grin like a maniac and laugh out loud at the utter
perfection of it all? This was one of
those.
Standing back on the fantail of a warship, marveling at the
timeless beauty of the scene before me, I started chuckling to myself and
planning how I would turn it all into a sea story. I mentally rehearsed my lines, chuckling with
inner mirth at how it would all sound.
Or at least, I thought it was “inner mirth.”
Other sailors, to whom I was still a mysterious cypher since
I belonged to that odd “Who-were-those-guys?” detachment in their midst, turned
at the sound of laughter and stared at the strange lieutenant (me), staring out
to sea and talking and laughing to himself.
Their reaction set me off even more. Chuckles gave way to guffaws of laughter at
the pure joy of the moment.
The sailors glanced at each other and began moving away from
me.
Guffaws now started to double me over in paroxysms of
uncontrolled laughter and tears of joy rolling down my cheeks. (To this day, I’m reasonably sure I am
referred to as “…that odd Lieutenant, who was talking to himself and laughing
out loud at the voices in his head… and just who were those guys he was with,
anyway?”)
I didn’t care a bit.
It was a beautiful moment, straight out of a postcard.
… or straight out of a sea story.
And now I’ve told my sea story to you.
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