i walked out in the early morning of a seaport town in the Southwest corner. It was dark to most folks.

i, however, saw the beauty of first light.

Hardly any folks would have noticed. Even those who stood watches on the bridge or lookout might not have recognized first light with a cloudy sky. But the old Officer of the Deck who stood countless morning watches (0400-0800) before they had satellites taking away the romance by pinpointing your ship’s position at sea, recognized again the subtle beauty of first light with a cloudy sky.

There are no stars nor moon to discern the approaching new day. It is more of a shadow outlining a cloud or two, just a slight variation in the sky of darkness.

Soon, it will beat back the darkness in its march to a new day, but for a few moments it will suggest the future of the day and beyond has much more than we could comprehend.

Good night, night, and good morning morning. You have told me with the clouds and first light, it is time to move on in a beautiful way.

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.

It was time for the last operation at sea for me on the Hawkins. It was November 1969. That spring, the Hawk had been selected to be the backup recovery ship for Apollo 12. She would be the ship in the Atlantic on the takeoff in case of an emergency and after the spacecraft had landed on the moon and men walked on the moon for the second time.

First, we had to go to Portsmouth Naval Shipyard just south of Norfolk. Our fantail had to be strengthened to support the crane designed to lift the Apollo spacecraft fromN the sea onto our main deck.

Then, we headed to Bermuda, one of the most wonderful places in the world, where we we would stand out on daily operations to practice picking up a dummy replica of the capsule. i was the “Apollo Recovery Officer of the Deck” and felt like i had attained the top of my seamanship skills maneuvering to pick the dummy capsule in open seas.

This was serious and treated as such, but we knew the primary landing spot was the Pacific and the aircraft carrier USS Hornet (CVS 12) was the primary recovery ship.

Finally, we went to our station in the Atlantic roughly halfway between coast and the Azores. We had franked envelopes that signified the ship and its crew was part of the team for Apollo 12. We listened on the radio waves from Houston. It was a happy moment even though we were a distant part of it.

Then, just after they took off, NASA reported the capsule had experienced two lightning strikes. As I recall, the rocket took two extra orbits around earth while the NASA team worked on the problem. We were told Hawkins would likely be the recovery ship if the problem could not be resolved. The astronauts switched to auxiliary power, which resolved the problem. But for several moments we went to full alert.

Pete Conrad, Alan Bean, and Richard Gordon were on their way to the moon. The Hawkins stood down from our alert status. We bored holes in the ocean, listened while Apollo 12 landed in the Pacific and headed back to Norfolk.

It was my last time at sea on the USS Hawkins. It had been a wonderful eighteen months. I’m sure i’ve omitted many of the sea story adventures and hopefully will remember them all and include them later.

i thought my next year would really distance me from the Navy, and i would pursue sports writing for a newspaper.

It didn’t quite work out that way.

But the Hawkins was one of my best experiences ever.

There was one more big operation that occurred before i left the USS Hawkins (DD 873) in December 1969. In between at-sea time, it was party time. Oh, we worked and worked hard, but if we didn’t have the duty, it was liberty, fun.

One of my favorite escapes was when Andrew Nemethy, the Damage Control Assistant (DCA) and Rob Dewitt, Main Propulsion Assistant (MPA), and moi, Anti-Submarine Warfare Officer (ASWO) did not have duty on the weekends. i hadn’t had a vehicle since the wreck in ’68 summer Newport with Rob as my passenger who took a bigger hit than i did, and after my divorce when my former wife took our car home with her. So i was always a passenger. However, i took turns driving when the trio headed to the side of Virginia.

Andrew had a Fiat Spider and Rob had a powerful BMW road bike (Rob or Andrew, you will have to provide the details on that beautiful beast). We swapped off from driving the bike, to driving the Spider, and riding shotgun. i was more shotgun than anything else. Our target was to visit the hills with the primary focus of taking in women’s colleges. Mostly, we would just spend time in the elements of real Virginia. Rob had his banjo, Andrew had his guitar, and both were accomplished. Me? i played a very poor jaw harp. But i did stay in rhythm. Oh, i don’t think we met any of the students at those women colleges. But damn, it was fun.

And then, there was Naval Station, Norfolk; Amphibious Base, Little Creek, Naval Air Station, Oceania, and the Army’s Fort Story. Each of these, some with a couple each week, would open the gates to folks of the human persuasion and invite them to a dance or event at their officers’ clubs. Now today, this is politically incorrect and i’m guessing most females back then weren’t real pleased with us calling these gatherings “hog calls.” An officer could, if his body could tolerate it, attend a hog call every night of the week in the Norfolk area. In fact, the “hog calls” was pretty straight up, not like the “Westerner” in National City, close to the Naval Station, San Diego where sailors went with hopes of meeting up with “West PAC widows,” wives of sailors who were deployed to the Western Pacific and looking for some side action. i have several friends who met their wives at these so called “hog calls,” and they weren’t hogs at all but pretty, intelligent women. Think of the Richard Gere movie “Officer and a Gentleman.”

My favorite was the Tuesday and Thursday nights at the O’Club at the Amphibious Base, Little Creek. When you entered, you were handed a song book. “Pappy,” a rotund, old, bald, and great piano boogie woogie player would sit down at his 88 keys and begin. Every one sang along with all of the old piano standards. The favorites and oft repeated service ‘s song, the Navy’s “Anchors Away,” the Army’s “When the Cassions Go Rolling Along,” the Marine’s “Marine Hymn.” The favorite for everyone in Pappy’s place was when he would bang out the Air Force’s song. Everyone would raise their steins and lustily sing, “Off We Go Into the Wild Blue Yonder…Crash!” and the song would end.

Time at sea was work, hard, long work. We didn’t feel guilty when we hit the beach, hard.

As we entered autumn of 1969, the end of my Naval career, i thought, was set even though it would be nothing like i thought it would be. There were two more operations for the Hawkins with me on board.

First, we headed to the North Atlantic operating areas to serve as a ship to be tracked on what i believe was a submarine towed sonar array. The second ship was an oiler taking the place of another destroyer which had experienced engineering problems.

En route, we hit a rogue storm. The after engine room had not set x-ray properly. It was standard practice to leave the starboard side hatch open as it was set forward behind the main deck bulkhead, designed to keep sea water from hitting the hatch. The fresh air contributed just a bit in providing fresh, cooling air into the tropical conditions of the engine room. It also, occasionally, would allow a watch stander to emerge and get some relief from the heat and the humidity in the space. As the ship rolled about on the evening watch, a wave of sea water caught the starboard side main deck, flowed aft and flipped into the bulkhead opening and down the hatch. It splashed down the hatch ladder and hit the secondary ship’s switchboard (the main switchboard was in the forward engine room, main control. A machinist mate on watch reported an electrical arc light a bolt of lightning jumped between the switchboard and the ladder, a distance of about four feet. The ship went dark immediately. Tin cans were built to survive and almost every piece of electrical gear had a steam backup. The Hawkins kept on steaming.

This happened 55 years ago, so forgive me if my recollection is a bit shaky. If anyone who was on the Hawk during that operation, please send me corrections.

Damage Control entered the problem quickly and efficiently (Thank you, Andrew Nemethy). Emergency electrical cables about six to eight inches in diameter ran down the main passageways and up and down ladders.

The seas were rough and it was cold. We weren’t sure if we could continue on for our rendezvous with the sub and the oiler. But our electricians and damage control got us back on close to normal operations.

It was a scary time. But what happened next was even scarier.