Veteran's Day

By: duckhunter15 Mood: Hunting Date: 11/10/2008 10:36:45 Music: Victory at Sea

I remember…the air seemed built of salt spray blowing
forcefully at ones body, the sea gray foam flying off the tops of waves like
someone blowing the froth off a glass of beer, real beer like it used to be
fresh from the barrel, not the ersatz junk that passes for beer nowadays.  Beer now is “less filling” or “tastes
great” and is neither of these advertised things…beer tastes faintly like
Kool-aid now unless it’s some mini-brewery-way-too-expensive brand. But then as
a friend often says, “We all taste with different tongues.” One is forced to
ponder on how the generations are separated by much more than age.

We were on a combined operation with S.E.A.T.O., learning to
operate together in the face of the threats of the Great Bear that was Russia
and the Tiger that was China. It was the sea that wasn’t cooperating. But I,
like my fellow squids, was looking forward to a trip to Canberra. I would be a
“pollywog,” a person who hasn’t been across the equator on a ship of the line.
I looked forward to seeing the Southern Cross and the Great Magellanic clouds
in the night sky.

Instead we spent time after the storm cleaning the ship of
the salt deposited there, the salt turning the battleship gray to an
off-white…using precious fresh water to wash it clean…The ship’s XO, a hated
human who once wrote speeches for Admiral Arleigh Burke, was much more
interested in looking good than in being operational. Gear started failing at
alarming rates (one couldn’t shut down equipment in those days…there were no
solid state electronics, only tubes)…

The Captain announced over the 1MC…”Let’s get this gear
working, this is the real thing.” We all looked at each other, dumbfounded with
misunderstanding.  The watch
schedule changed into condition three watches. I sat in the five inch gun director,
I could peek out at the carrier which was launching planes, their afterburners
lighting up the night skies as they launched, flames and noise, a terrible
force of war machines. I was, I found, in the waters off Viet Nam, I was I
found, in a war. Only it wasn’t a war in those pre-Gulf of Tonkin days.

The carrier was the Midway, which is now a museum in San
Diego. I am a museum of memories living in Southern Maryland. It was five years
after I moved to the east from Colorado before I could bring myself to visit
the Viet Nam Memorial. It is traumatizing to look at all of those names carved
into the black monolith. I remember all of those ‘support our troops’ stickers
I see all over. What we, as a nation have never supported is our veterans. We
sicked the troops on the WW1 veterans who just wanted what they were promised…we
have forgotten to treat the vets from Nam in any honest way (think agent
orange)…we now have a dismal experience waiting our Gulf and Afghanistan veterans
at places like Walter Reed.

Well, I remember them and I will toast them tomorrow with
honest beer, not the junk from bottles…