Memorandum for the Record (continued): My first real sea story

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.

Memorandum for the Record (Continued)

Committed to Memory (Part the Second)—“My God … It’s full of stars!”

Keir Dullea’s character in the iconic movie “2001: A Space Odyssey” uttered those words as an alien artifact transported him through fiery, acid-etched dimensions far from ordinary Human ken. Despite the drug-induced “enhancement” of our senses in the 1960s when I first saw that movie, one need not engage in any kind of chemical vacation to experience a truly mind-altering experience.

It happened to me at night, on the decks of a ship, far out at sea.

As soon as you open the ship’s watertight doors and go out onto the darkened weather decks, a blast of humid air almost knocks you off your feet and your senses begin to scream at you. You are, they insist, standing on the edge of a precipice that drops a lifetime away in every direction.

You see, a warship always switches to red interior illumination and darkens its outer decks at night. The red interior battle lanterns cast a blood-red glow about everything and – theoretically, at least -- enable you to save some of your night vision when you step outside. Black rubber sealed light traps about all exterior doors trap that same red light, keeping enemies from seeing a sudden glow of light and thus giving away your ship’s position. (We are told that the sudden flare of lighting a cigarette on deck at night can be seen by a lookout five miles away.)
Net result: As soon as you step out onto the weather decks of a ship at sea, you can HEAR the water rushing along the ship’s hull … and it sounds as though it’s only a few inches away from your outstretched hands … but you are blind, despite the red lanterns’ attempts at granting you night vision.

All about you is warm, humid, black, black, black … and the rush of damp air from your ship’s passage makes it feel as though the night itself were breathing into your face. You continue reaching blindly for the ship’s railing, as your senses continue to insist there’s nothing in front of you and you’re about to fall overboard into water that’s miles deep.

Finally, step by cautious step, your hands feel their way to the taught steel lifelines stretched all the way around the weather decks, and you cling to them, sidling your body the rest of the way and leaning into their solidity.
Then the magic show begins, as your night vision returns.

The deeper parts of the oceans are inhabited by tiny, unicellular creatures whose primary purposes are to (a) provide food for the food chain, and (b) start to glow brightly when they’re disturbed. Thus, when our ship rushes past, these tiny creatures begin to glow furiously, until the whole of the ocean around our hull seems to be luminous with witchfire. Further away from our hull, the creatures sparkle on and off, winking in some sort of glowing semaphore language at each other.

But that’s only the Overture to this magnificent symphony.
Far out at sea, the nearest land is several miles straight down beneath your keel, and the only light is that which comes straight from the Almighty’s paint brush. No light pollution out here to spoil the view, and your wondering eyes begin to realize exactly how vast is Creation and how tiny are all Human endeavors.
Because that’s when the stars start to come out.
First one tentative point of light appears above, then another, and another, until the stars and galaxies cascade into view in a kind of cosmic rush. All at once the sky – empty to your night blinded senses only a few moments before -- is a vast streak of light as the Milky Way burns its way across the sky, brighter than you’ve ever seen anything before. Familiar constellations are obscured and fade into the fiery background as millions and millions of unfamiliar stars come out of hiding.

That’s when you first notice that the majesty of the star show above is mirrored in the black water all around you. Winking fiery points above are reflected in the endless sea all around you.
Then you notice that the glowing little sea creatures outlining your ship’s hull are adding their own glowing counterpoint to the glory above and all around you.

All at once, it’s as though you’ve been floated bodily off your ship and now are suspended in a vast, glowing bowl of jewels … like you’ve been whisked away without realizing it and are floating somewhere near the Face of God itself.

Timeless.

Memorandum for the Record

Committed to Memory

There are just some moments – usually intensely private, I find – that nevertheless need to be committed to the record. Such moments, for me, illustrate the person I’ve become and am still becoming, and I want to write them down and share them here:

My father, hereinafter spoken of in the Third Person – “The Colonel” – was career Army. He entered the enlisted ranks as a buck private prior to the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and rose steadily through the ranks during World War II. Orphaned at an early age, he and his twin brother Stan kicked around Kansas, going from one relative’s home to another. Frankly, Stan found an easier time finding a home with relatives, being the more easy-going and (some would say) tractable of the two. My dad, eventually, was sent to military school.

It was there he found his true home.

Dad was always more comfortable in uniform than he was sitting at home with his own family. “I get up in the morning and take off running, glad to be alive,” he told me, “because I’m going to work.”

Thus, when he died suddenly before his birthday, it was only natural he’d be buried with full military honors at Arlington National Cemetery.

Let me paint a picture for you.

Riding in the military-supplied limo, the funeral cortege stretched out behind us. Soldiers of the Old Guard marched in full panoply, while an Army band played the funeral dirge. Dad’s casket was carried on an artillery caisson, covered by the US flag he’d served for so many years.

At the graveside, Mom, my sisters and I sat while the ages old pageant unfolded about us.

But I was also in uniform you see – full dress Navy crackerjack whites. As everyone else sat in numbed silence, I had to stand at attention in full view of everyone else … the only Navy uniform in that Army crowd.

Thus, when the firing party shot three volleys of 7 rounds each, followed by the mournful notes of taps from a pair of buglers stationed up the hill, I damned near bit the inside of my cheek out of my mouth to keep from breaking down in tears. The pain of a gnawed cheek gave me something else to concentrate upon besides the sense of grief and loss that comes when a parent dies suddenly.

Not that I’m against tears, mind you, but the military is a club that both Dad and I willingly joined … and kept rejoining when our hitches were up. We knew the rules of that club, including the strictures against public displays of grief and accepted them as simple facts of life (and death.)

As the last, long, low notes of taps died away, echoing into the distance, I sighed inwardly through the numbness. I had done it. I had gotten through it without breaking down.

As the crowd began to melt away, I felt Dad looking over my shoulder nodding approvingly.

He understood.