Faith of My Fathers (21 page)

He began with his combat patrol in the Atlantic, when the
Gunnel
had reconnoitered the North African coast. He told me about losing power in all his ship's engines, save the auxiliary engine, and how nerve-racking was the
Gunnel
's slow progress to Scotland and safety. He described bleak Midway Island, and how ironic it seemed that men were sent to such a desolate, inhospitable place to recover from the hardships of war. He recounted the terrifying hours he had spent submerged as exploding depth charges unrelentingly shook his submarine. He talked about his narrow escape after sinking the destroyer, how they had been hunted relentlessly by its sister ships. He described how badly his crew had been affected by the experience, and the measures he had taken to prevent them from wasting oxygen and losing their minds. He talked warmly about the friendships he had formed during the war, and how important they were to enduring the strain and deprivations that war imposes on a commanding officer.

He told me all about his war, letting the facts speak for themselves. My father respected the facts of war. He felt no need to embellish them to make a point or to make any obvious pronouncements like “Let this be a lesson to you, boy.” He assumed his story, briefly but honestly told, would answer my curiosity, and that I would derive from it what lessons I should.

Implicit in his assumption was his respect for me, and I was grateful to have it. I was not a member of the audience attending his seapower lectures. I was the son and grandson of Navy officers, and I had his trust that I would prepare myself for my turn at war.

I had known less of my father's attention than had many of my friends whose fathers were not as deeply involved in their work or absent as often as my father was. My father could often be a distant, inscrutable patriarch. But I always had a sense that he was special, a man who had set his mind to accomplishing great things, and had ransomed his life to the task. I admired him, and wanted badly to be admired by him, yet indications of his regard for me were more often found in the things he didn't say than in the things he did.

He wasn't purposely sparing with praise or encouragement, but neither did he lavish such generous attention on his children. He set an example for us, an example that took all his strength and courage to live. That, I believe, is how he expressed his devotion to us, as his father had expressed his devotion to him.

He assumed that I had the qualities necessary to live a life like his; that I would be drawn by some inherited proclivity to a life of adventure. He trusted that when I met with adversity, I would use the example he had set for me just as he had relied all his life on his father's example.

The sanctity of personal honor was the only lesson my father felt necessary to impart to me, and he faithfully saw to my instruction, frequently using my grandfather as his model. All my life, he had implored me not to lie, cheat, or steal; to be fair with friend and stranger alike; to respect my superiors and my subordinates; to know my duty and devote myself to its accomplishment without hesitation or complaint. All else, he reasoned, would be satisfactorily managed were I to accept, gratefully, the demands of honor. His father had taught him that, and the lesson had served him well.

“There is a term which has slipped somewhat into disuse,” he remarked late in his life, “which I always used till the moment I retired, and that is the term ‘an officer and a gentleman.' And those two imply everything that the highest sense of personal honor implies.”

For nine months after leaving my squadron on the
Enterprise,
I served on the staff of the Chief of Air Basic Training in Pensacola. A job on an admiral's staff is considered a plumb assignment for an ambitious junior officer, and I was lucky to have it. But I was more eager to build my reputation as a combat pilot, and I looked for any opportunity to hurry the day when I would deploy to Vietnam.

One day, I got word that Paul Fay, Undersecretary of the Navy at the time, was coming to visit. After a round of meetings, Fay wanted to play a little tennis to relax. I was asked to play with him. After tennis, we went swimming at the officers' club. I took the opportunity to ask the undersecretary if he could help get me a combat tour in Vietnam.

Navy pilots rotate tours of sea and shore duty. I had left my squadron immediately after my last deployment in the Mediterranean. Fay knew that I had just begun my rotation on shore duty, but he promised to see what he could do. A few weeks after Fay returned to Washington, I got a call from one of his aides informing me that I would be sent to Vietnam, but not before I had finished my current rotation. I decided to put in for a transfer to Meridian, Mississippi, where, as a flight instructor at McCain Field, I could fly more in preparation for my combat tour.

Because Meridian was a remote, isolated location that offered few obvious attractions for pilots at play, I was reasonably serious about my work, and I became a better pilot. My fitness reports began to reflect these first signs of maturity. My superiors began to notice in me faint traces of qualities associated with capable officers. They once selected me as instructor of the month.

We worked long hours at Meridian, twelve or more hours a day. Every day began with the morning briefing at five-thirty, followed by the first of three training flights. After our third flight, we ended the long day with a debriefing. Meridian was a dry town at the time, and besides the officers' club, the only place where alcohol could be found was at an old roadhouse located outside the city limits. The county sheriff had come to the base one day, announcing at the gate that he had come to demand that alcohol no longer be served at the O club. He was refused entry. It was, as one pilot put it, “a hard town to have any fun in.”

Given the challenge that our colorless circumstances posed to our imaginations, however, my fellow officers and I expended considerable energy devising entertainments to make time pass quickly and pleasantly. We organized a number of legendary bacchanals that abide, fondly, in the memory of many middle-aged, retired, and nearly retired Navy and Marine officers under the name of the legendary Key Fess Yacht Club.

Early in my time at McCain Field, a base beautification project had been launched by our well-intentioned commanding officer, at the behest of his wife and the wives of other senior officers. The plan to improve our plain surroundings included the construction of several man-made lakes. Bulldozers dug large holes in the base's clay soil, which stood empty until enough rainfall filled them with water to give them, it was hoped, a natural appearance. Sadly, they looked more like swamps than lakes, and they stank like a swamp as well.

One particularly unattractive and malodorous lagoon, called Lake Helen in honor of the CO's wife, lay just off the back of the BOQ, a prospect most of us regarded with bemusement as we walked along the outdoor corridors along which the doors to our rooms were located. Living among us at the time was a Marine captain who worked in an administrative capacity at the base. He was a man with a great thirst, which he attempted to slake virtually around the clock. He set up a bar on a card table in his room, and day and night we would hear him beckon any passerby, from young ensigns to room stewards, into his quarters for “a drink before din-din.”

Late in the evening, we would often find him outside his room, leaning precariously on the balcony railing, cursing the eyesore that was Lake Helen. He had taken an intense dislike to the offending lagoon and would rage at it profanely for hours. Refusing to acknowledge its given name, he called it Lake Fester. Planted in the middle of the lake was a small island, nothing more than a little mound of dirt with a few spindly trees perched there pathetically. Our hard-drinking Marine neighbor called it Key Fess. And soon most of the residents of the BOQ referred derisively to the lake and its ridiculous island by those names.

One evening, several of us were bemoaning the sorry condition of our social life when someone came up with the brilliant idea of forming the Key Fess Yacht Club. The next weekend, attired in yachting dress of blue jackets and white trousers, we commissioned the club. We had strung lights on the trees of Key Fess and draped banners and flags over the BOQ's railings. We elected the club's officers, choosing Lake Fester's chief critic, the Marine captain, as the club's first commodore. I was elected vice commodore. We christened an old aluminum dinghy the
Fighting Lady,
and as “Victory at Sea” blasted over loudspeakers, we launched her ceremoniously on her maiden voyage to Key Fess, with the new commodore standing comically amidships, hand tucked inside his jacket like Washington crossing the Delaware.

Over the next several months, the weekend revels of the Key Fess Yacht Club became famous in Meridian and throughout the world of naval aviation. Huge throngs of people could now be found every Saturday night on the shores of Lake Fester, throwing themselves wholeheartedly into the evening's festivities. We held a toga party in the officers' club one night, replacing all its furniture with the mattresses from our rooms, which I still remember as one of the most exhausting experiences of my life. We often paid bands to come in from Memphis and entertain us.

Some of the club's members dated local girls, who spread the word in sleepy Meridian about our riotous activities, and soon a fair share of the town's single women were regular guests at our parties. One Sunday morning, BOQ residents were awakened by cries of help coming from Key Fess. Someone had rowed a few young ladies out to Key Fess the night before and stranded them there. We rowed the
Fighting Lady
out to rescue them. Despite their weariness, they still managed to give full vent to their anger, complaining bitterly about the mosquito bites that covered them.

Aviators from both east and west coasts began showing up for the fun. An admiral even flew in from Pensacola one Saturday to see for himself what all the fuss was about. Eventually, our commodore received orders to transfer to another base. I was elected the new commodore. Aviators flew in from everywhere to attend the huge party celebrating the change of command. We had put Naval Air Station, Meridian, on the Navy's map.

Despite the demands of my office as commodore of the Key Fess Yacht Club, I managed to devote at least as much energy to my job as I did to my extracurricular activities. Correspondingly, my reputation in the Navy improved. Anticipating my forthcoming tour in Vietnam, and confident that I could perform credibly in combat, I had begun to believe that I would someday have command of a carrier or squadron. I finally felt that I had settled into the family business and was on my way to a successful career as a naval officer.

I was also in the middle of a serious romance with Carol Shepp of Philadelphia, a relationship that added to my creeping sense that I might have been put on earth for some other purpose than my own constant amusement.

I had known and admired Carol since Academy days, when she was engaged to one of my classmates. She was a divorced mother of two young sons when we renewed our acquaintance shortly before I left for Meridian. She was attractive, clever, and kind, and I was instantly attracted to her, and delighted to discover that she was attracted to me.

Carol would occasionally visit me at Meridian and good-naturedly join in the weekend's festivities. But most weekends during our brief courtship, I abjured the social activities at Meridian, preferring Carol's company to the usual revelry at the Key Fess Yacht Club. On Friday afternoons, I would take a student pilot on a four-hour training flight to Philadelphia, refueling at Norfolk on the way. I would arrive at seven or eight o'clock in the evening. Carol would be waiting at the airfield to pick me up, and we would go out to dinner.

Connie Bookbinder, whose family owned Bookbinder's Restaurant, had been Carol's college roommate, so every evening we dined there on lobster and drank with friends. On Saturdays we would go to a football game at Memorial Stadium or a college basketball game at the Pallestra. We would enjoy some other entertainment on Sunday before I flew back to Meridian on Sunday night.

We had been dating for less than a year when I realized I wanted to marry Carol. The carefree life of an unattached naval aviator no longer held the allure for me that it once had. Nor had I ever been as happy in a relationship as I was now. I was elated when Carol instantly consented to my proposal.

We married on July 3, 1965. My marriage required that I relinquish my office as commodore of the yacht club, which I did without regret. The party held to celebrate my retirement was a memorable one.

Carol's two sons, Doug and Andy, were great kids, and I quickly formed a strong affection for them. I adopted them a year after our marriage, and I have been a proud father ever since. A few months later, Carol gave birth to our beautiful daughter, Sidney.

That December, I flew to Philadelphia to join my parents at the Army-Navy football game. My mother had brought Christmas presents for Carol and the kids, and I stowed them in the baggage compartment of my airplane on the return flight to Meridian. Somewhere between the Eastern Shore of Maryland and Norfolk, Virginia, as I was preparing to come in to refuel, my engine flamed out, and I had to eject at a thousand feet. The Christmas gifts were lost with my airplane.