All posts by Jim

A Tale of the Sea and Me – A Wild and Crazy Year, the Beginning

Sea Stories

This has taken me a while. 1970 was indeed a wild and crazy year. It had it’s ups and downs and i did a lot of things a sailor does in lands faraway, some good, some not so good but very good in another way (think Mae West). i became engaged and i landed a job from long distance, a job i thought would be my life time career.

It really was a little more than a year. My father and uncle picked me up in Norfolk in my uncle’s ’59 Pontiac Star Chief and took me home the first weekend in December 1969.

i had just over three weeks of bliss before heading to San Diego for my one-week course on Classified Materials.

Then i boarded a MAC flight that stopped in Fukuoka, Japan, before going on to Yokosuka, which was the western Pacific headquarters for the Military Sea Transport System (MSTS) — about half-way through my year’s tour, it was renamed Military Sealift Command (MSC). i arrived the Yokosuka BOQ around 2200 and crashed. The trip had taken about 20 hours.

i was also on the back end of an inoculation issue. Just before i transferred from the Hawkins, our chief corpsman reviewed my records and determined i needed no shots. Apparently, his sources were not the same as the West Coast medical folks. When i went to pick up my flight orders on Friday morning, i was informed i must have a bunch of inoculations. Since i was departing on Monday, i could not do them in sequence, but had to get them all that afternoon. i did.

i spent my week with my hometown friend Lee Dowdy in his apartment. Lee had served on the USS New Jersey (BB 62) and was on an amphibious squadron staff. After my shots, we went to Mickey Finn’s in El Cajon to watch the Dixieland Jazz Show. We had to leave after about a half hour as those shots, a bunch of them, took their toll.

After a cold night in the transit BOQ in Yokosuka, a small Breeko block building with a broken heater, i walked to the MSTS office. It was a cloudy, damp morning. The overweight civilian behind the desk informed me that my detailer had missed on several salient points, i.e.

  • “Every major port in the Pacific” was actually four: Sasebo, Japan; Pusan, Korea; Quy Nhon, Vietnam; and Nha Trang, Vietnam.
  • “The only Navy personnel aboard the troop ship” was actually 18. In addition to me as XO, there was a CO, a chaplain, two doctors, a chief boatswain mate, a chief storekeeper (SKC), a SK2 who was also the barber, a second class personnel man (PN2), and eight corpsman, including a master chief corpsman (HMCM).
  • “Families, civilian independents” were actually 1500 Republic of Korea troops being carried to the two Vietnamese ports and returned to Pusan.

i left that afternoon and flew to Sasebo on a Navy C-2 cargo plane. i spent another night in a rather unimpressive BOQ, and reported to the USNS Geiger (T-AP 197). i immediately put a letter in the mail to my detailer, informing him of the slight difference between what he told me about my tour and what it really was.

The wild and crazy adventure was about to begin.

Excessive Length Gives Way to a Short Thought

A Pocket of Resistance

The photo below is of a Mexican fan palm. i am working on stuff i want to capture but it’s turning into a tome. So, let’s go with a thought i had when i found the photo.

These suckers can get upward of sixty feet tall. This one was dropped as a seed into our front side yard by some unknown bird. i thought it would add to the local aura of our landscape. It, along with another planted by another bird dropping a bit later looked like a permanent fixture.

Hey, i’m from Lebanon, Tennessee. i am not an agronomy expert for high desert vegetation. Those Mexican fan palms grew rapidly. i was pleased with the look…but then they grew. When the fronds died, they hung ugly off the top until they reached over 20 feet. i cleaned them up until my ladders wouldn’t let me reach the fronds. The tree trimming guy came out, trimmed the dead stuff off and charged me 200 bucks. i recognized the charges would increase exponentially as these things continued to reach for the sky.

i had the tree guy cut them down and removed the stump and roots. A good decision.

Of course, i had this beautiful Labrador, Cass, who knew long before me and showed his contempt for Mexican fan palms. He was right. If you look closely in the center of the fan palm, Cass showed his contempt: