TRAVELINGWITHTOOLS

My dad was a career naval officer, which is probably part of why I’m a nomad with no roots in the ground. The US Navy would change its sailors’ assignments every few years, so our family spent roughly three years in each location. For me, that meant making lasting friendships was rare to nigh impossible. I don’t have any contact with any of the people I knew prior to high school. Making friends and maintaining friendships is a skill that I have never managed to master, but that’s not the Navy’s fault.

Dad’s command of the USS John Paul Jones, DDG-32 was from June 23, 1978 to June 21, 1980, and we lived in Bonita, CA, a San Diego suburb about 5 miles from the Mexican border. I remember that I was in the 7th grade the year that we left, at Bonita Vista Jr High, which was something of a shock after experiencing a relatively bucolic couple of years at Sunny Side Elementary. We walked to school every day at Sunnyside, but had to take a yellow bus to Bonita Vista. The bus rides were no fun and the older kids were assholes. “Can’t sit here!”, I remember frequently being told, while the bus driver yelled over his shoulder, “Sit down, already!”.

The two stoners that shared lockers on either side of me once had a conversation that went like this, while looking at snapshots of pot plants they were growing:

“Dude! That one is so radical! I’ve never seen it before, what happened?”

“Oh, man. My dad found out about it and he burned it in dog shit!”

“No way! Bummer!”

SoCal in 1980, man.

As the child of a sailor, one of the few really great things about the Navy was, and apparently still is, Operation Tiger Cruise.

“Operation Tiger Cruise is the unclassified code name for a very special guest cruise program that includes two or more consecutive days underway. The primary purpose of a Tiger Cruise is for service members to acquaint their family members with their ship and their shipboard duties.”

https://navyhistory.org/2019/08/tiger-cruises/

I was lucky enough to go on two Tiger Cruises with my Dad, but my memory of the dates seems to be fishy. I have mostly recalled that the two ships I sailed on were separated in time by a stint in a different city, but in researching for this post, I found that both were while we lived on Watercress Drive in Bonita. After his command of the John Paul Jones, Dad moved to be Chief Engineer on the aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk, CV-63. He never talked much about his job and I regret that I didn’t pester him with questions about it. Such a huge responsibility he had, and the technical knowledge to be able to stay on top of an engineering marvel like an aircraft carrier!

Somewhere prior to 1980, the John Paul Jones hosted a tiger cruise from Hawaii to San Diego. We had already lived on the island of Oahu prior to ’78 so the solo airplane ride wasn’t especially remarkable to me, but going to sea in a guided missile destroyer certainly was! I was seasick for the first few days, hunched over the stainless steel can in Captain’s Quarters. It was not any fun.

It’s kind of crazy that I don’t remember much of anything from that cruise, other than being sick for three days. Saltine crackers and ginger ale, that was the treatment for sustained nausea. And I remember the sight and sound of the 5 inch deck gun being fired at targets off in the distance. Seven days, if I recall correctly, that was how long it took to go from Pearl Harbor in Oahu to San Diego.

Though I thought there was more time between the Tiger Cruises, the next one must have been in 1981, because that was the year Dad was on the Kitty Hawk. I have no pictures from that sailing, but I have many more live memories. The carrier was so huge that I had no sea sickness this time. I got to lay prone on the aft flight deck and fire an M-16 under the direction of some Marines, shooting at bags of trash that were dumped overboard. (Real nice, USN!)

There was a fly-by display of some of the F-14 Tomcats from the air wing, with a live fire demonstration, and somehow unrelated to the carrier group, a flight of B-52s roared overhead at low altitude. It was the first time, (maybe the only time?) that I got to hear a Vulcan cannon in person, and 6,000 rounds a minute makes a musical note more than a pew-pew sound. Amazing stuff for an eleven year old boy to experience.

After San Diego, we moved east to Newport, Rhode Island, where the Navy War College is, and I don’t know what kind of work Dad did there. We lived in Navy housing just off base, in a big old duplex and we fished the waters around the College a lot. We’d catch flounder and tautog using sand worms and crabs for bait, and I fished some of the local ponds for bass and perch.

I had stopped fishing altogether around the time that I went to college, and didn’t start again until after I was 40. My Dad was strictly a gear fisherman… so the fly fishing bug that I caught late in life was certainly not genetic. Now it is pretty central to my life outside of work.

Despite our estrangement late in his life, my father was a good and decent man who always tried to do the right thing. After his passing, on Father’s Day in 2018, one of his former crew reached out to me to tell me how much he had enjoyed working for him. I wish Dad and I had talked more about his time in the Navy and what it was like, but he just wasn’t a talker or a story teller. He was content to just quietly exist.

I miss you, Dad.