Anchors aweigh! (revised and consolidated)

My time in the US Navy: 1978-1991

May I for my own self song's truth reckon,
Journey's jargon, how I in harsh days
Hardship endured oft.
Bitter breast-cares have I abided,
Known on my keel many a care's hold,
And dire sea-surge, and there I oft spent
Narrow nightwatch nigh the ship's head
While she tossed close to cliffs.

Ezra Pound. The Seafarer

Navy Memories: 1978 -1981 - Enlisting, Nuke School, Submarine School

My life was two out of sync sine waves, maybe three, maybe four, actually, and my best efforts couldn’t pull them into sync. Ups and downs constantly, between my courses and campus activities, work and service at the mosque, family obligations, and balancing part-time jobs, constantly pushing and pulling energies and thoughts in various directions.

I was working on an A&T Econ department co-op job in Reidsville, NC, Farmers Home Administration, an agency of the Department of Agriculture. In my third year I changed my major (yet again, after switching back and forth between electrical engineering and biology) to economics. In this coop job I worked in rural communities in neighboring Rockingham County, making loans to farmers until their crops were harvested and doing collateral checks on the land and equipment that secured their loans (it was called “chattel checks,” a throwback to slavery, perhaps).

Walking back and forth to work everyday, I passed a Navy and Air Force Recruiting office. Over time, they changed the posters in the window. When they put up a poster advertising the Navy’s Nuclear Power program it caught my eye and I went inside for a closer look. I was greeted by an Air Force recruiter who was very off-putting and stressed the standardized exam, called ASVAB. I had always done very well on standardized exams and took it very lightly when the recruiter stressed the overwhelming importance of the exam. The Navy recruiter, on the other hand, regaled me with sea stories, no doubt from his own experience on submarines, that I found quite charming.

One day I stopped by and the Navy recruiter offered to let me take an abbreviated version of the Nuclear Power Program qualifying exam, a second exam after the ASVAB. It had some mathematics, some chemistry, some physics, and some basic engineering questions. He checked my results when I finished and I had aced the thing! He asked me if I’d be willing to go to Greensboro to take the full Nuclear Power Program exam along with the ASVAB. I agreed to do it. He called me after a few days and told me my score on the ASVAB was the highest he had ever seen, plus I had qualifying scores on the Nuclear Power exam. So, he asked me, was I interested in signing up?

It was the summer and I was already registered for my classes in the fall, along with continuing work at Farmer’s Home Administration. He said I could sign up but wouldn’t have to report until December. He called it the delayed enlistment program. I saw it as the solution to all my problems, balancing work, school, and life. So I signed up!

December came, I enjoyed Christmas with the family, said my farewells, and got on a plane to Orlando for Navy boot camp. I told folks at the Mosque, but I didn’t say anything to anybody at school.

Navy recruit training and Nuke School

Other than catching pneumonia from standing around in Orlando’s winter rain, and missing three days of boot training and returning to my training unit still weak from the illness, boot camp was fairly uneventful. Our sister unit had an interesting person who was headed for dental technician training. We corresponded for a couple of years and I even met her family in Hartford, but a future between us was not in the stars.

From Orlando I went to Great Lakes, IL for Machinist Mate A School. That was fun because on the weekends I could take the train into Chicago where I had friends and relatives, including the distant cousin my mother stayed with during her Chicago sojourn. Good food and happy times in the Windy City! The training was a self-paced study of equipment and systems in a propulsion plant where the toughest part was actually tracing pipes and systems and then drawing them from memory. It would be excellent practice for later submarine quals.

I finished ahead of schedule and had a four month delay before returning to Orlando for Nuclear Power School. I got TDY orders to an aircraft carrier in Mayport, the Saratoga, CV-60, also known at the time as the Sorry Sara. I was assigned to an auxiliary division, maintaining refrigeration and AC units, hydraulic power plants, and fire pump stations throughout the ship. Also I did my share of painting out of engineering spaces. I must have done something right because when it came time for my departure the Chief Engineer offered me immediate promotion to E-5 and my own shop in the propulsion plant. In retrospect, I should have taken it. There was a government shutdown and a resulting delay in getting my orders cut to Orlando. But it all worked out in time.

We were in Class 8001, Section 7, some twenty of us, all machinist mates I seem to recall, the first class of FY 1980. My best buds were Max Gross and Jerry Merrill. Great guys with great heart. Class 8002 was the first class to admit “girl nukes,” the first females in the enlisted nuclear power program. Not an inconsiderable achievement for the US Navy. I had two buddies in 8002, Rhia Walton and Carole Davis. Rhia passed away in a motorcycle accident and I lost touch with Carole over the years. Rhia and Carole were a couple and three is a crowd, but they always made space for me, especially later in Ballston Spa. I can confess 40 years later that I was deeply in love with Rhia. Upon learning of her passing I wrote her an elegy, which I posted to my poetry blog some years later. 

For Rhia Walton

Each time I pass through Richmond
I feel your presence,
More strongly than I ever did when
You were here with us,
Sharing with us our laughter and our tears.

Your departure was so sudden,
So unexpected, so tragic.
We miss you terribly and
We've exhausted all attempts to fill the vacuum
That your withdrawal has created
In our hearts and in our conversations.

My love for you was a helpless infant
That, orphaned, must now fend for itself.
From time to time I intuitively feel that
Some quality in my life is conspicuously absent.
I know what is missing is you.

Life at Nuke School was very regimented. Breakfast at 7, classes from 8 to noon, lunch, classes from 1-4, Star Trek in the barracks common area followed by Kung Fu, dinner at 6, and study hall from 7 to 10:30. Repressive would be putting it mildly. The beginning was straight forward math, physics, chemistry, basic engineering principles. But the end was electrical theory, material science, thermodynamics, reactor operations, rad/con chemistry. In the 19th week my father passed away and I went to Greensboro for a week, breaking the study routine. When I returned I had four weeks to go and, still grieving my father’s passing, I basically pushed it through to the end. My on and off again relationship with Jan and weekend moonlit night strolls down Orange Blossom Trail helped me through those last few weeks. I can’t not give Jan credit for helping me through that dark time. Anyway, I made it.

But at the next stage of training, Nuclear Prototype at D1G in Ballston Spa, New York, I sort of unravelled from the stress of it all. The rotating 12-hour shifts didn’t agree with me and as soon as I got a couple days off I was on the road to Albany to spend time with an old friend and love interest. That relationship was up and down for reasons I couldn’t fathom at the time. But hey, it is what it is, as they say. Both Jerry and Max were my roommates in Ballston Spa.

One of my Orlando roommates, Desi Ward, was a real cowboy from Oklahoma. I had never known anybody with his persona. And the Navy girls loved him. I lost track of Jerry after he got married but kept in touch with Max as we both ended up on fast boats out of Norfolk. Desi and I were together for prototype training. Desi was way ahead in his quals but he got into some kind of trouble and got shipped off to the fleet. Demonstrated unreliability they called it. He went on to the fleet and did well, so I heard, making it to chief petty officer in record time.

About two months into prototype training I went to the officials and threw the towel in the ring. I told them I just didn’t want to do it anymore. Blamed it on stress over my father’s passing. Plus our whole class was headed to the USS Carl Vinson, the newest nuclear-powered aircraft carrier. My days on the Sorry Sara convinced me I wanted nothing to do with no more aircraft carriers no more. They tried to convince me otherwise but I had already convinced myself that my mind was made up. They cut me orders to the nearest Navy base, Submarine Base Groton, in Connecticut, and sent me on my way.

Groton gave me a shit assignment checking people into the chow hall. Very boring but I worked with a cute girl from Reno whose name I can’t recall. She was a bit of a tomboy and we spent our free weekends together at a house she shared with two guys in a rural area outside New London. This was before the Navy’s “Not on my watch, not on my ship, not in my Navy” zero tolerance for drugs policy. The guys were never around and I assumed they were deployed and she was house-sitting. Don’t ask, don’t tell.

She had an interesting, sort of counter-culture, devil-may-care personality. “Ray, I like you because you are not constantly trying to get into my pants,” she told me. She was cute but she wasn’t THAT cute. It turned out the biggest thing we had in common was that we were both voracious readers. When the library at Connecticut College had a used book sale, we practically went beserk buying old books. It’s a shame I can’t remember her name.

Among the books I bought and read from that college book store sale was a whole section of turn of the century books on Epictetus and Stoicism. About the same time, Admiral Stockdale wrote an excellent piece in the Atlantic on Stoicism among soldiers in the Vietnam POW camps. It filled a void for me. I adopted Stoicism as my personal life philosophy. It is a practice that continues to this day and has ruled many subsequent life decisions.

After a couple of months I was informed that I was getting orders to a destroyer tender unless I wanted to volunteer for submarine duty. Submarine duty involved three more months in rotten Groton that I could spend with my new friend, otherwise immediate transfer to a tender in Norfolk. I volunteered for submarine duty. Once I started submarine training our paths never crossed again. Maybe all it ever was was a mirage anyway.

Submarine basic training was uneventful. During follow-on auxiliary machinery training I reconnected with Jan, who by that time was in prototype training at Ballston Spa. But we were star-crossed lovers and we knew it. For a short while I dated a lady, a wave who worked with base security. She lived in a small house off base and it was good to go to her place and get off base every now and then. She was very kind to me. I teasingly would call her “sweet at a Georgia peach,” because she was from a coastal town in Georgia, just up the road from Waycross. Amazing I can remember the name of her hometown but only recently remembered her name. Let’s call her Betina. Betina was, to quote an August Wilson play, “soft as cotton and sweet as watermelon.” We can add to that poetry, “dark as night.” Years later I would memorialize the time in verse:

I do regret
my youthful indiscretions, those nights
I spent with a girl who turned out to be
a drug dealer could have been my last,
not for drugs, mind you, let’s be clear.
A cute, sweet girl, a Georgia peach,
a country girl my mother would have loved.

Whenever I spent the night, I noticed she had lots of night visitors knocking at the door. They never actually came in. It took me a minute to figure out she was selling drugs. So she was not the innocent country girl my mother always told me to try to find. So much for “sweet as a Georgia peach.” Too close for comfort. I eased away from the relationship and never looked back. 

I was offered orders to a diesel boat in Subic Bay, but I saw The Philippines as very far away from home. Plus plenty others were dying to get a Subic Bay assignment. I really didn’t get it (the lure to sailors of Subic Bay) at the time and I’m glad I didn’t. Ultimately I got orders to a fast attack out of Norfolk, the Hammerhead (SSN-663).

*************************************

Some poems from the period

End of Life Criteria: (Notes from Reactor Theory class)

like a piano tune
that starts and ends,
so is life …

death cuts in:
a toneless key;
a nameless chord;
a sharp discontinuity …

judgment occurs
without a moment’s notice;
and on the second half
one regrets not doing
what should have been done …

every second is judgment –
and every opportunity
affords one yet another
to correct the incorrection –
before the final hour …
has passed.

Thoughts about judgment day (D1G)

the hour actively approaches
while we, its victims, sit and wait,
with folded arms, trying to appear
comfortable and carefree,
and mutually exclusive.

days pass quickly, and nights,
like the blink of an eye…
nay, the pupil’s dilation…
time races to its destination
while we, in our lethargy,
approximate suspended animation.

there is no conclusion,
only the vain pleadings
for a fresh new start,
another sequel,
a couple more opportunities.

The rope by which we hang,
is long, connecting us, tethering
us to our past and future,
but its knot is sure.

Mind is cluttered (D1G)

mind is cluttered -
fragments of thoughts uncompleted
dangling modifiers fill
the lower heavens.

thunder would quiet the
noisy confusion and clamor,
lightning would illuminate
the darkness and charge the
atmosphere with order,
raindrops would dampen
the soil and give new seeds
the chance to germinate and grow,
but there is none of neither.

deep in the inner chamber
there is completion, and order,
and noiselessness, and illumination,
and freedom from famine and drought,
if we could only find the entrance -

if we could only find the entrance,
we would enter.

To Towanna

A peculiar beauty,
A gentle glow,
A kindness
and a caring –

an attractiveness,
a radiance,
a heart that tends
toward sharing –

a pleasant smile,
a friendliness,
though hardship
she is bearing –

a tender kiss,
a warm caress,
her love makes
life endearing.

As you depart (to J)

As you depart
It breaks my heart
That you would leave my life

But leave you must
And so I trust
That soon you will return

These poems I write
Reveal the plight
Of one who loved and lost

So bear with me
And soon you’ll see
This life’s a short sojourn.

Inside me burns a fire

inside me burns a fire
consuming and refining
fueled by stone
contained and self-sustained

it’s your love I desire
to soothe and warm and please me
but now I am alone
and circumscribed by pain

tonight we shall conspire
the stars in heaven to guide us
to where our souls are one -
the goal of love to attain

Nothing survives

nothing of flesh survives the ordeal.
friendships are forgotten,
and associations, disassociated.
‘tis a tortuous path we travel,
sharp curves and bends
that baffle the mind, only
the soul survives the ordeal.

conflicts go unresolved,
obligations, unfulfilled, and
there’s no time to stop and/or
backtrack. The moratorium
has ended and the battle is raging
for the soul’s survival

after the migration,
from the realm of nothingness
into the new reality,
the ordeal ends and
the soul finds peace.

1981-1982. Navy Memories II: USS Hammerhead SSN-663

I drove from rotten Groton training command south and reported to the Hammerhead in early February, 1981. The boat evoked an image of awesomeness, long and black, sleek, moored at D&S piers at Norfolk Naval Station. In less than a month (or perhaps it was my newness) we would begin in earnest our workup for an extended deployment.

USS Hammerhead SSN-663, underway as always.

It was billed as a 9-month deployment that would include a port visit in Perth, Australia and a circumnavigation of the globe. Guys extended and re-enlisted for just the Perth part because of all these rumors about sailor fun down under. Some hung around for the circumnavigation part, crossing the Equator, rounding the Cape of Good Hope AND Cape Horn, or with any luck, navigating the Straits of Magellan, stuff that old salts live and breathe for.

We got underway in April. The water was still cold. It was very stormy and I got seasick for the first time. I ended up “hugging Ralph” a couple of times (that’s submarine talk for the only relief there is for seasickness, though it’s still no relief!). We hit the dive point by supper time – then it was smooth sailing.

Let me make a small confession here: I had never been underway for an Atlantic crossing and I was frankly terrified. A lot about submarine operations I only understood academically, increasing my fears. At that point I really didn’t get how all the systems worked together to ensure survival of the boat and crew. And I had no idea just how unforgiving the sea environment could be, nor how vicious some of my shipmates could become while shaking off the various addictions they were able to maintain while ashore. One lives and learns. Quickly. Within a couple of weeks the newness of it all wore off and I was able to settle into a routine – standing watch, keeping up my assigned preventive maintenance (PMS), doing whatever divisional work, drills, field-days, and working on submarine quals.

Getting qualified in submarines is every non-qual’s dream. Getting qualified requires drawing all the systems, bow to stern, understanding operations, ship control, sonar, navigation, weapons systems and having a grasp of propulsion and power systems and being able to sketch them out from memory. A lot of good things happen once you get qualified and wear the dolphins: you can watch movies after the evening meal without being hazed; on a fast attack boat you get an assigned rack instead of sleeping open bay in the torpedo handling room. After getting the dolphins you are a made man, so to speak. Being in engineering got me an assigned rack, but I fell behind in my quals as the workload picked and I lost my rack to a newly qualified guy. I did my time bunking open bay in the torpedo room. 

Meanwhile, I developed serious skills standing watch at the control stations, the inboard station controlling the rudder and fairwater planes, the outboard station controlling the stern planes aft. First hand knowledge of the hydraulics system and power plant gave me a big leg up. Archimedes principle in full effect (still in my memory: pressure applied to an enclosed fluid at rest is transmitted evenly and undiminished to all points of the system and to the walls of the container). I got appointed battle stations helmsman (battle stations is the position you occupy when the real shit is about to go down and we had more than our share of them), a tremendous honor. I think I made a lasting impression on the commanding officer one night on a slow midwatch when I broke out into an impromptu recitation, from memory, of Tennyson’s Crossing the Bar. He was hiding out in the rear and I didn’t know he was there or I probably would have been more reserved. (As an aside, from that point on, the captain, Commander Edison Lee Watkins, referred to me as “Maxwellington” for my poetic exploits on a warship). Nevertheless, with progress on getting my quals done falling behind, I joined the ranks of the “delinquent,” also called “dinks.” I envied somewhat the non-rated guys who had limited division work requirements and could dedicate their off watch time exclusively to completing ship-wide qualifications.

Dolphin Ceremony on the Hammerhead mess decks, 1982

Eventually, and in the ultimate disgrace, as time wore on, all the non-rates either completed their quals or completed their 90 days of mandatory mess cooking. At that point, even non-qual engineers had to fill the gaps, leaving their divisions to work full time cleaning the mess decks, serving meals, and busing tables, every six hours around the clock. I was the first from engineering and the first petty officer so designated, though many followed in my wake. I took it all in stride and did what was required. 

I must have made an impression because the Chief of the Boat, himself a mess management specialist, made me an offer to change my rating (enlisted career designation) from engineering to supply. I was totally invested in engineering though. It was part and parcel of my long range plan. He explained that although being a cook in the junior ranks, as you advance you get into contracting and with contracting there were lots of shore billets that could turn into well-paying and lucrative defense contracting positions. I stuck to my guns, but in retrospect, I probably should have been more circumspect. (Didn’t mean to rhyme, I swear it!). Later when I joined State my first assignment overseas would be as general services officer and lead contracting officer. Imagine I could have had a head start in contracting! 

On months long deployments I always carried stacks of books to read. I read my first Thomas Sowell book on the Hammerhead, Knowledge and Decisions. It blew my mind, his way of analysing things seemed so unorthodox to me, and so refreshing. Later I would stumble upon his economics stuff and it would lead me to a study of economics when I finally returned to college. And I distinctly remember reading Tolstoy’s last novel,  Resurrection, and the huge tome, War and Peace, though I’d only read so large a book in my rack, shielded from ridicule by my shipmates. 

Speaking of shielding from my shipmates, at some point in the deployment, one of the void spaces in the submarine’s superstructure sprung a leak in a seawater pipe and flooded out. It was easy enough to compensate through the trim and drain system of pumps and tanks, but with one tiny exception: this particular void space was being used to store the ship’s supply of toilet paper! All the toilet paper stored was soaked with seawater! Not to worry, I always packed a roll in my seabag, training from my time in the Boy Scouts. But I would need to avoid detection as my shipmates were using magazine pages and those thick, industrial, brown paper towels to do their business. When the occasion required, I would unroll us enough for my use, put it in the pocket of my poopy suit, and sneak into the bathroom (called “the head” on submarines) stall.

Here’s another traumatic memory. One of the toilets sprung a leak where it penetrated the deck. Dave Bowman and I had just gotten off watch and we inherited the job. Because of the lack of two valve closure safety to sea, we had to come up to 300 feet for the duration of the job, which we thought would be quick and effective. We found the gasket and removed the toilet to replace the seal. The “hole” in the deck was encrusted with you-know-what, so we had to wire brush the whole thing clean before replacing the gasket and reassembling. The clean-up job took hours and by the time we were ready to test the seal, our little job had earned attention of the Chief Engineer and the Captain.

The seal did not hold. We disassembled the fixture and wire-brushed it some more. When we tested the seal for the second time, there was still a seawater leak. We did the whole thing again and the third time was a charm. The seal held and we were able to clear emergency tags and return the ship to normal underway operations.

My time on the mess decks came and went and I rejoined A division in engineering. We were scheduled for a maintenance upkeep period in Mombasa, Kenya to tide us over until a full maintenance period in Perth, but something happened and there was no submarine tender coverage in Mombasa. Cold War shit. It would have been my first visit to the African continent, not counting periscope operations off the coast of Angola when we first crossed the Atlantic. More Cold War shit. Plus our operational tempo had picked up with reports of a certain adversary’s submarines operating in the area. More Cold War shit. So we remained on station. At one point, after spending several weeks at periscope depth at the mouth of the Gulf of Aden, and just when we thought we’d get some relief, we were repositioned for several weeks of the same reconnaissance duty at the mouth of the Gulf of Oman. Google these places. Oh, but submarines didn’t operate in the Indian Ocean, according to SALT and START. That’s why we called it the Western Pacific. Fast attack. Long and black and never get back. 

With the change in schedule we were not able to pick up supplies from the tender that was no longer in Mombasa and at some point we began running out of food. Except there was plenty of breaded veal in frozen stores and plenty of canned vegetables, mostly green peas, underneath long sections of plywood stored in crew berthing. So that is what we ate, breakfast, lunch, supper and midrats (for the uninitiated, midrats is a meal served on Navy ships at 11pm, right before the midwatch).

The schedule shift set a bunch of changes in motion. We missed the tender in Perth, so that meant that leg of the trip would be cancelled. But there was a destroyer tender harbored in Diego Garcia and that would have to do. And since we wouldn’t be getting the full maintenance upkeep scheduled for Perth, we would be returning the way we came instead of the originally planned circumnavigation. That change disappointed a lot of guys who had re-upped for the adventure and bragging rights, but at least we got some “down time” in Diego Garcia. 

There was no “pier” for us to tie up to in Diego Garcia, so we had to anchor out, which meant engineering plant watchstanders had to keep on standing watches and that was a bit of a drag. But there was nothing to “do” ashore, so most of us stayed on the ship. We did a bit of fishing and caught beautiful red snappers which the cooks prepared for meals. So there was that. I went ashore one time and found a rather poorly staffed Navy Exchange. I remember buying a John Lennon/Yoko Ono cassette that was popular at the time – Double Fantasy. We were able to load up on fresh stores, eggs, milk, vegetables, frozen meats, and mix for the soft serve ice cream machine.

One other weird thing is worth mentioning. You could go onboard the tender to the communications shack and the duty radio guy could patch you through to a ham operator in or near your hometown and he could put you in a phone call with your family. There was a name for this procedure, MARS (Military Auxiliary Radio System) calls. Anyway, I “called” my aunt and my sister from Diego Garcia. My aunt teased me for many years afterwards about having to say “over” after each burst of thought.

Finally, for folks who were expecting some sexual release in Perth, Diego Garcia was not so demographically endowed, the only women being those few on the tender crew. That’s life!

As a slight nod to crew morale, on the way back we got a port visit in Rio de Janeiro. It was in Rio that I figured out I could dress down and blend in with the locals. My skin color was a definite advantage! I had some fun, but not too much! I will never forget a place we stumbled upon off the beaten path called the Florida Bar. The lovely ladies there spoke no English but knew the lyrics to every top 40’s song. I wrote a poem about one of them who made a special impression. A few guys got sick from drinks laced with hallucinating drugs. 

From Rio we headed home. It was a reasonably short transit. We were lucky, though. The diesel broke while we were anchored out in Rio, and we soon discovered we did not have nor could we manufacture the repair parts. The diesel was the primary backup to the reactor and we probably shouldn’t have gotten underway without it being operational. We casrepped (a casualty report drafted for broken and/or in-operable engineering equipment) the diesel pulling into Norfolk and Squadron was never the wiser.

We limped into homeport. As was my practice, I took duty the first night back to allow guys in the division with kids to go home. I didn’t have kids or a wife at the time. Heck, I didn’t even have a girlfriend!

One would think that perhaps we’d pause and catch our breath. No. That’s why they say of fast attacks, “Long and black and never comes back.” Our captain, folks said, hated home port, and we somehow got volunteered for every special project that came down the pike. And we got port stops out of it: GITMO, Port Everglades, Charleston, Groton. Nothing very exotic.

After completing my quals I did metrology training and took on a second subspecialty in addition to auxiliary machinery, gauge calibration, which included thermometers, pressure gauges, pressure switches, and depth gauges. Doing gauge calibration got me somewhat integrated with the nukes back aft, the weapons guys forward, and even the sonar guys way forward, all of whom lived and died by the accuracy of measuring devices like pressure gauges and thermometers. I owned the only piece of equipment to measure and calibrate their accuracy. One fascinating annual preventive maintenance task I had to accomplish was testing the deep depth alarm, which meant going to designated depth and calibrate the alarm mechanism. So we went there. And the alarm setting worked. And it was deep. So deep the walls creaked. So deep that if I told you, I’d have to kill you. Just joking!

Here’s an unrelated story. I was underway on the Hammerhead, working on my quals in the torpedo room and talking to an older guy about a particular weapons system that I needed to understand. Out of the clear blue he said, “Maxwell, you are the religious type, I can tell. But there is no G-d down here at 750 feet, just a long black tube chocked full of machinery of war, just the captain and the crew. There IS no G-d down here to hear and answer your prayers.” I figured he was going through something, so I let it go. Plus, I needed his signature on my qual card.

Later, I found a quiet place in one of the auxiliary spaces to continue reading Ardistan and Djinnistan, one of a bag full of books I took to sea. In it the author cited a specific Psalm that I found very applicable to my earlier encounter. Here is it:

“Whither shall I go from thy spirit? or whither shall I flee from thy presence? If I ascend up into heaven, thou are there: if I make my bed in hell. behold, thou art there. If I take the wings of the morning, AND DWELL IN THE UTTERMOST PARTS OF THE SEA; Even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hold shall hold me.” – Psalms 139: 7-10

I continued as battlestations helmsman. We practiced and rehearsed for under hull surveillance after getting a special fixture on our periscope that allowed the scope to look straight up. The rehearsal involved going underneath ships (and sometimes, surfaced submarines!) and taking photographs of the bottom of the surveilled ship. There is a lot of interesting stuff underneath a ship. Special fixtures. Operational equipment. It required maintaining a +/- six inch depth band between the bottom of the ship and the top of the periscope. Six inches because we needed to mask the sound of our ship within the operating sound of the ship being surveilled and any distance greater than six inches would have made us detectable by the ship’s sonar. We would make passes up and down the length of the surveilled ship all the while taking photographs of the hull and its fixtures. Then Jamie H., my quals buddy, would develop the film into photographs and hold a briefing in the wardroom of what had been discovered. I watched him lay out the complete geography of a ships’ under hull. 

It was very stressful operating the fairwater planes for such detailed depth control but I mastered the ability to feel the ship changing depth before the depth gauges registered it and applying the correct up or down angle of the planes to correct for the depth excursion. During those intense evolutions I could actually feel beads of sweat forming on my forehead and dropping from my armpits! There was a sort of enhanced sensory awareness that was not induced by drugs, just the stress of the moment. I will only tell you here about the rehearsals, but you may imagine what use that capability may have been to intelligence gathering during the Cold War. Later we got a fixture attached to the periscope that gave us the ability to do a 360 degree panoramic rotation at night. It was called “dark eyes.” You can only imagine what we did with that, especially at periscope depth in unfriendly deepwater shipyard ports (where maybe submarines were being built, maybe not). 

At the one year mark onboard, I heard talk that the Navy was looking for experienced engineering guys to staff the new Trident-class submarines. I spoke to my COB (chief of the boat) who was also the command career counselor. He told me about a “deal” involving reenlistment, advanced training, automatic promotion, a reenlistment bonus, and immediate assignment to one of the new Trident boats. The reenlistment was for six years, but if you had at least two years in already, they would drop the remaining years and sign you up for six more. I had done three years and had three years left at that point.  

Trident boats had two crews each, so your time was rotated and deployments never exceeded 72 days. I had a plan that involved taking courses during the off-crew and going for a commissioning program within three years when I came up for shore duty. I thought about it for about a week (what was there really to think about?) and signed up. I got immediate orders to the USS Michigan, still in the shipyard, promotion to E5, and a fat check for the annual installment of one sixth of my $16,000 bonus. I bought a used, low mileage diesel Volkswagen Rabbit and packed it full for the trip to Electric Boat Shipyard in New London, CT.

Some poems from the period:

Hammerhead – First Dive

as we descend into the depths
I think about the things left loose:

the promises I should have kept;
the yesterdays; they all reduce

to a fleeting moment of awe and dread;
I offer no reason, I make no excuse–

The nightmare ends, I lay in bed.
The journey is over: it was all in my head.

Hammerhead – Second Dive

begin in the affirmative
I am, this is, we are
erase all doubt
but allow for error
make no excuses
and assign no blame
remember yesterday
while you yearn for tomorrow
begin in the affirmative.

Endurance 81 (poem written for the 1981 cruise book)

We left home port.
Midst tears and sobs we parted
From our loved ones.
A journey hard and arduous
We knew we had ahead;
Trials and calamities would befall us
But we knew we would endure.

Sleepless nights and restless days,
Drills to test us (they just pestered us);
Never getting too much praise,
But who complained?
We knew we would endure.

Liberty port –
The run almost complete;
New places, new faces,
A chance to wet our feet…
Good times helped us to endure.

Homecoming!
What joy! What happiness!
Wives, children, loved ones,
All waiting on the pier to receive us!
Months and months of work and sweat
Bear fruit, what a reward!
We accomplished our mission,
Achieved our goals,
But most of all,
We endured.

To Luciana (port of call, Rio)

Your voice is a blooming flower
beckoning the bumblebee
to alight and pollinate–

your charm is sweet like honey
and warm like fresh milk
in a wooden bucket—

your style is simple and easy
yet your demands are complex
and difficult to fathom –

but the satisfaction you give is so complete,
so absolute, so gratifying that
heaven itself turns green with envy-

Your love is as the sunlight
and the rain, free to all though
each wants it for himself alone–

you were created for all the world,
and sufficient it is for me
to share your love with all.

Letters to Amantha

USS Hammerhead (SSN-663)
October 7, 1981

Dear Amantha:

I’m writing you in pencil
‘cause I’m not sure what
I want to say to you
And I want to allow for
erasures should the need arise…
a margin for error –
we do make mistakes,
and sometimes, oftimes,
overplay our hands…
except that our actions are
not written with pencil
on notebook paper
but with permanent ink
on a perfect, everlasting medium…
“forgive us our trespasses
as we forgive those
who trespass against us.”
I’m questioning myself:
what are my demands?
what can I supply?
do I have any right
to desire your company
as much as I do?
the way that I do?
I spoke with our friend
​t​onight. She alone knows
the degree to which
I care for you…
to the exclusion of all others.
none of the conventional
rationalizations/justifications
are valid with respect to
this relationship. I know
better than to try to feed you
any bullshit; as Shelley
wrote: “one word is too often
profaned for me to profane it.”
(He was talking about love.)
I digress…
mere words fall short,
far short of their intended meaning.

Torpedo Room
USS Hammerhead SSN-663
October 12, 1981

Dear Amantha:

I’ve had time to contemplate,
to think things through…
I’ve busted through the fallacies,
the hypocritical rationalizations,
the bullshit justifications that underlie
the reasons why, we say,
things are as they are…
I’ve built for myself,
step by step,
a new world view,
tested it for structural strength
for internal stability,
and for resistance to extreme
changes in temperature…
I’ve tested it at deep depths
and at high altitudes…
I’ve put it in a vacuum
and I’ve pressurized it until
it has become hard as diamond,
clear as crystal, and pure as
water in a mountain stream…
life in a monastery –
ideology reaches perfection –
works arrive at completion –
material wants lose their significance,
their urgency, their nearness to the heart…

Torpedo Room
USS Hammerhead SSN-663
October 22, 1981

Dear Amantha:

Thinking about you…
out of stationery,
writing on loose-leaf,
college rule…
Loose-leaf…
considering the possibility
this heaven-made union
may never exist on earth…
Nothing but our future together
is at stake here…
one more union will not
change the course of human events,
and one less union is
one less division…
we can be happy without each other,
we can be satisfied alone…
we can reach fulfillment unaccompanied…
we can…we are…we will…
we will into existence what
most pleases us (again he is talking
about love, what a bore…)
we give rise to circumstances
which produce a moment…
we build around ourselves the environment
most conducive to reaching the ends we seek…
we determine our destiny
‘cause God, inside us, is always with us.

Talked to Lynne

talked to Lynne again today
talked about my Georgy girl
and how my head is in a twirl
over that lady, who’s driving me crazy
and haunting me night and day

talked to Lynne again last night
told her how my soul was hurt
how my mind has gone beserk
over this woman, more ghost than a woman,
who’s haunting me night and day

talked to Lynne again this morning
talked to her ‘cross land and sea
‘cause I need her sympathy
she knows my heart, she knows the part
that haunts me night and day

talked to Lynne tonight, tomorrow
shared with her my joy, my sorrow,
told her my love has found another;
such is life, so ends the strife
that’s been haunting me night and day

Fragments from a letter to LW

the more I think about you,
the fonder of you I grow, albeit
in an abstract kind of way.
I treasure and cherish
the memories I hold of you
and of the time we've spent
in each other’s presence,
however fleeting,
and I hope, with all my heart,
that the future holds in store
some measure of time, again,
that we can share.

I love my love (to J)

I love my love
’tis true I do
with all my heart, my soul.

I care for her
and long for her,
and shall when I’ve grown old.

‘Tis true, ’tis true I must confess,
She loves me not, no more, no less.

It grieves me so
but I should know:
that apparitions disappear;
that summer passes every year;
that tears are often insincere;
that all the reasons are not clear
why people love, why lovers fear;
thus, I shall fill my cup with cheer
and search ’til I have found the best.

November 1981

Ch. 8. USS Michigan SSBN-727(B) 1982-1985

Suffice it to say I wrote a lot of poetry during this period. I served aboard the USS Michigan from 1982 to 1985.

It was early spring when, departing Norfolk and the Hammerhead, I arrived at Electric Boat in New London, CT. It was still cold. The Blue and Gold crews were working together getting the boat ready, seaworthy and shiny for a September commissioning. The Ohio, the first in the class and its namesake was overdue for its commissioning with delays and corresponding cost overruns. That would not be the case with the Michigan.

I remember having to arrive before the crack of dawn to get a good parking spot at the shipyard. We worked long hours, both crews in tandem with the shipyard workers to get the ship ship-shape and ready to go. As spring became summer, the days grew long and hot. There was lots of welding and lots of testing of piping, hydraulic, pneumatic and steam, and that was just the part our division knew about. And equipment under our supervision had to be run and tested – the emergency diesel generator, the low pressure blower, AC and refrigeration units forward and aft, all the atmosphere control equipment, sewage pumps and tanks, the hydraulic power plant back aft and associated piping, hydraulics for weapons systems, hydraulic operators for the nuclear plant, and hydraulics for the periscopes, masts, and antennae.

We formed a strong team across both crews and with the shipyard folks. I became tight friends with a shipyard welder who used to let me come to her place in New London to cook on the weekends. I would wine and dine her, so happy to be away from the barracks for a moment. I’d buy fresh fish from the market down the street. She would feast and go to sleep. Every time. And I would clean up, listen to some music, and return to my barracks. Maybe she was fooling me. I never figured it out. Besides, it actually worked for both of us. Can’t remember her name. Was she Jamaican? Perhaps. Sometimes we’d go to a reggae club in downtown New London, Cool Runnings, where local and regional bands did covers of Bob Marley, Peter Tosh, Jimmy Cliff, and Steel Pulse songs that were popular in the tiny expat Caribbean community in New London.

We commissioned in September 1982 to huge fanfare and public acclaim. It was as if everybody and their brother knew that even though the Ohio was the first, the Michigan was the real deal, the workhorse, and the sea going vessel of the working man.

Postmark of commissioning day, September 11, 1982

Following commissioning, the Blue crew took possession of the boat and the Gold crew traveled to the west coast to get their families settled. After a couple of preliminary day long sea trial excursions, we took the boat to Port Canaveral, Florida, where we would do serious sea trials and daily ops in and out of port. Daily ops are always hard but we pushed it through and the Gold crew came in December to relieve us.

I returned to Greensboro for the holidays, spent some time with my sister and my niece, and in late December headed out I-40 for points west. This was before GPS, of course, but I had something from AAA called trip tickets that outlined the journey for you. I decided on I-40, thinking I would avoid bad weather, but boy was I wrong. I should have traveled further south and taken I-10. But that’s water over the dam, as my father would say. I got in touch with Jan, (yes, the same Jan I slightly courted in Orlando and Ballston Spa) who was in Bremerton by that time and working at the Trident Refit Facility where the Michigan would be home ported. She told me she had a cute little cottage on the bay and I could stop in when I arrived. So of course I was hyped for the journey. Love conquers all.

Day one I drove from Greensboro to Memphis, Tennessee. Day two took me from Memphis to Amarillo, Texas, where I got snowed in and was lucky to get a hotel room. Day three after the roads cleared I drove from Amarillo to Flagstaff, Arizona. Day four from Flagstaff to Bakersfield, CA. Day five from Bakersfield to Reno, Nevada. I was getting tired of driving and the distances per day were getting correspondingly shorter. Day six was a relatively short sprint from Reno to Eugene, Oregon, where I had to stop to pay homage to my childhood hero, middle distance running star Steve Prefontaine. Day seven I pushed into Bremerton and Jan had a big supper awaiting!

The Ohio returned to Electric Boat (EB) for its PSA, post shakedown availability, the maintenance period after sea trials to fix stuff that either broke or failed. Admiral Rickover was pissed and accused EB of shoddy workmanship in the first instance because they knew the boat would return after sea trials, extending work opportunities for the shipyard. Meanwhile there were already three more Tridents in the EB pipeline after us, the Florida, the Georgia, and the Alabama, and the Ohio was years late getting to commissioning with corresponding cost overruns. So Rickover decided we would do our PSA in Bremerton shipyard to spite EB and General Dynamics. That was fine in theory, but Bremerton workers had never seen a Trident boat before. So the burden came down to the crew to get the shipyard work done following sea trials. We went from four sections (overnight duty every four days) to three sections, to port and starboard (overnight duty every other night), wearing down both crews and crushing our social lives, i.e., my social life with Jan. We got the job done and trained Bremerton shipyard workers for future Trident shipyard availabilities.

At length, we emerged from the shipyard and transited to our new home port, Bangor. We settled into a standard ballistic missile submarine schedule, 72 days underway, 21 days of joint crew repair, and transfer to the other crew.

My time on the Michigan, once we hit a normal stride, was somewhat unremarkable. I gave it my best at work. I did my time underway, making four deterrent patrols and one horrible extended shipyard availability. I earned promotion to E6 and the command strongly supported my application for the Enlisted Commissioning Program at the end of my sea duty rotation three years later.

The USS Michigan, the second boat of the OHIO class, was a workhorse, not a showboat.

One thing worth mentioning is meeting the Trident protestors. They were in small boats blocking the straits when the Michigan first arrived. I frankly found that curiously courageous and even ballsy. I stopped to chat with them while they were handing out pamphlets outside the gate. I met the leader, Jim Douglass, and told him I was on a Trident crew and we were actually human beings, not monsters. He invited me to his house for a home cooked meal. I am always up for a home cooked meal! They were actually interesting people.

Later the Seattle Times came on base and interviewed the crew and somehow I got caught up in it. They quoted me saying something very pro-Trident and very pro-nuclear deterrent. I was a true believer! When it reached my new radical friends they had written me off forever. Too bad because they were really cool people.

My new friend Deborah from Seattle was into jazz big time. We saw, at various occasions, George Winston, Esther Phillips, Ernestine Anderson, Chuck Mangione, George Benson, and others I cannot remember. We saw a couple of good plays that I remember, A Soldier’s Story (Charles Fuller) and Lorca’s Blood Wedding. 

Meanwhile Jan and I were up and down, on and off, a very bipolar relationship. I should have read the room. I remember we saw the premiere of the new Gandhi film together, followed by dinner at a very posh Indian restaurant in Seattle. We also drove up to Vancouver, British Colombia once to see Bad Brains, a band Jan’s cousin Garry was in. Eventually she moved in with her new boyfriend. We spoke on the phone occasionally but the relationship was over.

In the interim, I hung out with Ms. Stockton’s niece who went to Bennett (I can’t remember her name) and her half-sister, a Japanese girl whose name I also cannot remember. What I do remember is that they would take me to dance clubs on Friday nights that turned into gay clubs at the stroke of midnight. I remember not liking that switcheroo.

There were wonderful weekends in Seattle and Tacoma, visiting with relatives and new friends, going to jazz concerts, exploring bookstores and art galleries in the Pike Place Market. I met my cousin Mary Ann, who as a brave young woman in the 1960’s took a Greyhound bus from Greensboro to Seattle for graduate studies. Mary Ann passed on but her daughter Angela and I have kept in touch. I became friends with Tom Griffith after reading his book and reaching out to him by letter. Both families adopted me and it was good to have family so far from home. Once I moved to Poulsbo, Seattle was just a ferry ride away via Bainbridge Island. I was a stranger and they fed me, welcomed me.

Oh! And fast food visits to Ivars were the best. And browsing used record and book shops in the U District and on Capitol Hill. My favorites were Left Bank Books in Pike’s Market and Elliott Bay Books. Life was grand on the west coast. Finally, during every off crew I took courses at Chapman College on base in fulfillment of my long range plan of returning to school when the time presented itself.

Underway, my principal place of employment and watch-standing was Auxiliary Machinery Room #2, AMR II for short. AMR II had all the atmosphere control equipment, the O2 Generator, the CO2 Scrubber, and the H2 Burner. Very poetic names, I’m sure.

Quickly, the O2 Generator produced oxygen for the ship’s atmosphere as oxygen was constantly being depleted by humans breathing. But it was also known as “the Bomb” because the very controlled process of using electrolysis to strip oxygen atoms off of water molecules had its detractors. The machine had to be constantly monitored for temperature and pressure changes across its internal components. Sometimes the little oxygen atoms didn’t want to separate and instead rushed back to their hydrogen buddies. This could potentially cause a big bang that could sink the ship! To prevent that big bang, alarms were set to alert the watchstander to drastically changing temperature and pressure excursions that would accompany such a condition. At this point you have to “block” the machine, which involves rapidly shutting five or six valves in rapid succession. That was the 80’s though, and I suspect, I hope the builders of submarines have improved on that technology. At any rate, folks were afraid to operate the machine because of those inherent dangers. I had some good mentors in AMR II, Ed Pesca, John Novak and Cliff Taylor, who taught me how to operate and maintain the machinery. I stood all my under instruction watches with them. They showed me all the ropes, so to speak. When I tell my wife submarine stories, she says, “One person does all that?” I laugh so hard. 

There is another whole paragraph each on the CO2 Scrubber (necessary because people are constantly exhaling carbon dioxide) and the H2 Burner (necessary because the ship’s battery is constantly being charged, a process that gives off hydrogen, and people are constantly farting, passing gas). I will leave it to the dear reader to Google “submarine atmosphere control.” The internet has everything!

Old memories literally flood the space. A shipmate reminded me on Facebook about the time a bird got sucked into the snorkel mast during diesel operations. How could I forget that? Wasn’t I the on-watch diesel operator at the time? And how about that time the Commanding Officer made a decision, coming out of the Panama Canal locks, to steer south for some crossing the Equator fun. It was just like this, only more confining inside a submarine. I was already a shellback from my Hammerhead days and there were only three of us onboard so we had to initiate the rest of the crew, a bunch of pollywogs that they were.

Another underway memory. My Ramadhan fasting on the USS Michigan underway was neither the first nor the last on a Naval vessel. But because of the areas where we were operating at the time, one year was very special. Without going into too much detail, when Ramadhan came we were in a place where the sun set around midnight and rose around 1:30 am, maybe 2:00 am. I arranged with the cooks to stash me a plate from the dinner meal (as midrats chow was always hit and miss). I would show up in the kitchen of the crew’s mess around midnight, have my meal and my suhoor, the snack you have just before sunrise. I may have actually gained weight during that period.

When we were doing daily ops out of Port Canaveral there was Cocoa Beach liberty after work. We hung out with the British submariners who were in port for a liberty call after their extended wartime deployment in the waters surrounding the Falklands. I swore never to go to another “titty bar” again as long as I lived. I kept that promise. And I remember that night-time Space Shuttle launch from Port Canaveral. We were doing daily ops (and sometimes nightly ops, that’s the way submarines roll) but the Captain delayed setting the maneuvering watch) so everybody could see that spectacular launch. Transiting the Canal got us all a new designation, Order of the Ditch. Don’t know where I misplaced that certificate. We had a cookout topside transiting the locks. Fun times and beautiful sights on the shore. 

Another memory. I seem to recall getting paid in advance before each patrol. 72 days, 11 weeks, a bit over four paychecks. A nice lump of cash up front. I would buy a few books and some toilet articles for the patrol and bank the rest. There was nothing to buy underway, no bills to pay. I think married guys’ families continued to get their pay twice a month. Well, as soon as the last line was cast off, a poker game would begin and it would continue for 72 days, until return to port when the first mooring line went across. One continuous poker game. 

On the Michigan we had two poker kings. A big white guy, I think he may have been a Nav ET (navigation electronics technician) whose name I can’t remember went by the moniker Big Money. Those ops guys took three showers a day and always had sharp creases in their poopy suits (a poopy suit is a set of coveralls, normally blue, which substituted for a uniform, but only underway. Worn on top of underwear, poopy suits saved you from wearing out your uniforms because you wore it on top of underwear only. They issued us three sets.) The other poker king, a slender short black guy named Jeff Dozier who was an IC man (interior communications tech), went by the name “Little Money.” When we returned to home port, without fail, Big Money and Little Money would have won huge stashes of cash, tens of thousands of dollars. Some guys managed to break even. But there was always a handful of guys who owed thousands of dollars to the poker kings. And they had to pay. And often it was not pretty,

What have I omitted, consciously or unconsciously? I moved off base to a large three bedroom apartment with two guys in the Gold Crew, Alan Parks and Wayne Cameron. It was old military housing that had been rehabbed and repurposed in Poulsbo. When they deployed and left me with huge utility and phone bills, I put their stuff in storage and moved out on my own to a section of the same housing but closer to Jan’s apartment. That proximity probably spelled the doom of the relationship. The following year, 1984, I moved to a small above garage apartment in Bremerton, right on Kitsap Bay. it would be my final residence while attached to the Michigan.

On my final off-crew, I put my package together for the Enlisted Commissioning Program. It was a type of mustang program where enlisted guys could apply, get their undergraduate degree and a naval commission. The Commanding Officer gave me his blessing but put me through a Chief Petty Officer Board AND and Officer Board to give me the proper send-off and a stack of recommendations. I had been with those guys for three years - they knew me. The deal included spending a summer at Naval Science Institute in Newport, RI to complete the first two years of NROTC courses. It all went well and we mailed off the package just before deploying.

In the Spring of 1985 I packed my newer model diesel Volkswagen Rabbit and headed back to the east coast for shore duty. It was just after the big Walker spy scandal and JCS was hiring a new bunch of locksmiths at the Pentagon to supervise burn runs and change out door and safe locks. I got selected. I was at JCS for three weeks when I got orders to report to the summer-long Naval Science Institute in Newport.

Naval Science Institute was designed to cover the first two years of NROTC courses and training. There was the classroom phase, covering Naval history and traditions, navigation, operations, and what I called the outdoor phase, which covered marching, drilling and PT, physical training. The running and calisthenics parts were fine, but I did have some problems with the obstacle course, especially the Wall (note I capitalized Wall – I have great respect for it) and climbing the rope. After several embarrassing attempts, I finally got the hang of it and by the end I was mounting the wall and climbing the rope with the best of them. 

At the end of the summer we graduated and I set off on the long drive from Newport, RI, through Greensboro, to Tallahassee and Florida A&M University.

*************************************

Poems from the period

Thank you (End of Year)

Thank you for the thunderstorm
on the eve of the final departure —
that cleanses the air and
charges every ion in the atmosphere —
that clears the path of obstructions.

Thank you for every raindrop
that waters the good crops
as well as the bad ones,
and replenishes the water supply,
that baptizes the once wayward soul
and steers its direction.

Thank you for sisters and nieces,
for aunts and uncles and cousins,
for fathers who teach by example,
for mothers whose special love is irreplaceable,
for friends and for strangers,
for meetings and for farewells,
for departures and arrivals that are happy.

O2 Generator watch

Sometimes I feel it coming
From a dark and distant past,
Rising to the surface,
Freeing my soul, at last.

Occasionally it haunts me,
The urge to write and weave,
Up from the deep it calls me,
I answer but can’t always receive.

From time to time he visits,
This spectre from the deep,
He sits down at my station,
And sows that I may reap.
************************
breathing manufactured air
eating plastic food
drinking water from a still
sleeping in a tomb
such is life aboard a submarine
adventure all the way
in its mission to pursue
deterrent (deferment) to judgment day.

where we left off (to J)

where we left off…
do you really suppose
it is worth the time and effort
to return there?

let’s just start
something new…
we’ll call it
our rediscovery

red ink…
don’t write like I used to…
lost my style,
lost my spirit,
inspiration got transferred
to San Diego…

yes, I know the source
and origin of your attitude,
you could say I have
a preformed judgment,
a prejudice about
these things…

wish you were here,
wish you could hear
me wishing for you…
and I wish you were
the same person you were
two years ago…

Broken pieces

broken pieces of a vision
spread about the cabin floor
the next line won’t quite come to me
trying to write is such a bore…

writing poems can be a chore
when all your love is lost, forsaken;
the rhyming spirit comes, then goes,
then from your daydreams you awaken…

the rhythm flows, a new creation
distilled from timelessness and void
presents itself and seeks relation
to a world that’s paranoid…

And so, you see, it is so useless,
and all your time is spent in vain,
trying to write some verse of substance:
these poems you write
won’t soothe your pain.

Postscript (to J)

just thought I’d write
a line or two
to let you know
I’m feeling blue.

My boat just launched
an atom bomb.
it flew so high,
then kissed the ground.

I wonder how
the people felt
to watch their homes
and children, melt?

passing thoughts (to J)

passing thoughts…
better to let you pass….
not worth the worry,
the guilt-ridden conscience,
the shame, the disgrace,
the fear of showing my face…
(thought I’d throw in a little rhyme…)

don’t need to be tainted
by the uncleanness
of having made love to you…….
(it’s too soon for the end…)

going home,
don’t need to be thinking
about rushing back,
about screwing you,
about who may be screwing you –

I thought you understood,
thought you caught my drift,
thought you could dig
where I was coming from…
when I said it was a shame
I was telling you that it
could never happen again…
How come you didn’t understand?
How come I didn’t understand?

This morning I’m bubbling over

this morning I’m bubbling over
out of the clear blue
some spark of creativeness, of inspiration
has awakened inside me
thoughts, words, phrases
emerge in rapid succession,
like fireworks in the summer,
or like raindrops in Seattle…
images flashing, reminiscences with
the power to stop me in my tracks
assail me from all corners,
all dimensions: nowhere can I hide…
is it some external stimulus,
or am I just overdue?

Love Song

faster than the speed of light,
constant and abiding
come with me and let’s take flight
what a high we’re riding

you chase all my clouds away
and make my life worth living
in your arms I’ll always stay
so much love you are giving

sweet as candy, peppermint
always there to please me
warm like summer’s evening sun
when you hug and squeeze me

your smile makes darkness disappear
bad feelings, clouds depart
your voice fills very soul with cheer
your ways touch every heart

if I could write a song of love
of tender feelings unexpressed
I’d write about the joy it brings
just thinking of your sweet caress.

Missile Launch Sonnet

“This is the Captain, this is a strategic launch!
Man Battlestations!” rings around my soul,
And rousing me from sleepiness and slumber,
Demands that I assume my chosen role.
We rise up, like a beast, from ocean’s bottom,
The hatches open, doomsday is at hand—
We push the buttons, random pick the numbers,
Then send the missiles after our command.

And afterward the afterword is zero…
There’s no one left to tell us how we sinned;
We’re the survivors, that makes us the hero,
We build the world anew and make amends.
But how can we ignore, erase our wrong?
We pay the price. Are we the best, the strong?

Would that I’d never tasted (to J)

Would that I’d never tasted passions’ cursed
forbidden fruit, nor drank deeply of that
poison which deprived me of all reason,
sapped away all reservation, left my soul
and spirit wasted, broken down, diseased and hurt.

Apparitions of an angel I was seeing,
so completely was I cast beneath its spell.
Wanting it kept me inspired, its embrace,
my sole desire, but it bathed my soul in fire,
forged like iron, cooled in pain.

Now it’s over. I’ve recovered from the guilt,
the misery. Self forgiveness isn’t easy;
but once reached, the soul grows stronger,
finds the power, searches longer
for that quintessential something
every soul is hoping for.

NROTC at Florida A&M University, 1985-1987

It was a long drive from Seattle to Newport, Rhode Island and back to Greensboro, NC. Had a good time with old friends. Then south to Tallahassee by way of Jacksonville to visit with aging relatives. Arriving in Tallahassee I checked into a very seedy motel (lots of them in Tallahassee), bought a newspaper, went to the classified ads section and began my apartment search. I found something in the right price range that first day, made the call, met with my prospective landlord the next morning, and inked the deal. Moved in that evening and went shopping for little things for the house. Within two weeks my stuff arrived from Bremerton, right in time for the start of classes in late August.

I signed up for 23 hours my first semester. A heavy load but I had a plan. Finish in two years, return to the fleet for the four years I would owe, then resign my commission and get my life back on track. The Navy paid my E6 salary, as if on shore duty, but tuition and fees were on my own dime. Lucky for me the NROTC provided all textbooks and after the first semester I qualified for tuition scholarships from the University each semester I maintained a 3.8 average. Minimizing the partying life and really buckling down to studying was an integral part of my plan. I hung out with an economics classmate between classes, She called me “the Navy man.” That lasted for a whole semester.

Reggie Coles was the brother I’d never had. We met at Naval Science Institute and arrived at FAMU around the same time. Both previously enlisted, we had some things in common. Reggie had been a hospital corpsman. He helped me overcome my fear of the water and get my swimming qualifications done. For that he deserves special and honorable mention. And we both had similar somewhat right-of-center politics. 

Reggie would always say, “slow down Ray, and smell the flowers. These are the best years of your life.” And for better or for worse, and I am willing to consider both sides, I was not interested in smelling no flowers. I had study groups in all my economics and business classes, and granted, some of those study sessions ended in overnights, but I remained focused on steering clear of trouble and getting top grades.

There were some side benefits to my NROTC participation. As the ECP (Enlisted Commissioning Program) in the NROTC we were required to wear our khaki officer candidate uniforms to all classes, so clothing and wardrobe costs were minimal. The NROTC had lots of community involvement, like supervising the Special Olympics, JR ROTC trainings, etc. When a Tallahassee native was killed on the USS Stark, we attended the funeral and performed honor guard and 21-gun salute services. And of course, we Coke hawked, selling drinks in racks in the stands at FAMU and Florida State football games, for which the NROTC Unit received a tidy profit to sustain our operations. 

Some of the guys in the ROTC were also in fraternities. The only fraternity that ever really appealed to me was Groove Phi Groove when I was at A&T, and there was not a chapter at FAMU. Later I would think about doing the graduate chapter thing in DC. It wasn’t a big enough thing for me to get worked up about and I wasn’t at all insecure about my identity, which I concluded was why people found those things attractive enough to interrupt one’s life over.

How did I leave out football games? We didn’t have Coke-hawk duty every week. Sometimes we just enjoyed the games. And while FAMU football was hit or miss, the Marching 100 never failed to score! President Humphrey would take to the field after the halftime band performance and recite a poem he wrote (some say it may have been written by FAMU’s fifth president, Dr. George Gore), also known as Rattler charge. I was delighted to find one of his performances on YouTube:

“When the dark clouds gather on the horizon
And thunder and lightning pierce the sky:
When faith is but a glint in the eyes of
The fallen Rattler, and hope, a lost friend –
When the sinews in the chest grow weary,
And the muscles in the legs grow tired,
From those hard charging linebackers –
You must always remember: 
the Rattler will strike, and strike, and strike again.”

-FAMU Rattler Charge    

I dated a woman from the Army ROTC. Very compatible. I gave her a key to my apartment, and drove her to Alabama to meet her grandparents. But by semester’s end I had developed a low tolerance for her wish to meet with ROTC guys at the house. All collegial but I didn’t like it. It was my boundary. She graduated and moved on. At the end of the semester I sublet the apartment to a classmate in advance of my move to Washington, DC for a summer internship. 

Here’s an almost lost memory. I spent an entire Saturday at the Smithsonian Natural History Museum, which became my all-time favorite. But we had a very special tour guide.

A group of black people gathered outside the museum. I joined them. A tour guide emerged from the group and we entered. I had stumbled upon an Afro-centric tour where every exhibit was explained in terms African people and the African diaspora. Quite an enlightening experience. Is it still being conducted? I don’t know, but I imagine the new NMAAHC drains away all such innovations.

But that summer I had my Waterloo. I met a woman while on a summer internship in Washington, DC who changed the course of the rest of my life. Now, before you go imagining something tawdry and lascivious and maybe even promiscuous, it was none of that, or, it never went that far, but I would never be the same man again. It began with little emails exchanged at work. Emails at work were a new thing in the mid 80’s, full of promise and potential. Marie used email to share with me samples of poems she wrote, mostly sonnets. I hadn’t written a sonnet since my mother’s death, so there was that reawakening. I tried writing sonnets back to her but fell flat on my face. I was not good at it. But I didn’t stop trying to write. The summer ended, I completed my internship and wrote a paper for which I would get academic credit in the fall. We parted ways and I returned to Tallahassee. But it would not be the end of our poetry interludes.

It was supposed to be just a summer fling. We talked about it. We promised each other we would just walk away when the time came to leave DC and head back, me to Tallahassee, and she, to her university life in Washington and ultimately, to Palo Alto.  But what happened? Too many lunches together. Too many conversations. Too many after work walks through Lafayette Park and Dupont Circle. Too many times gently kissing each other good night. Too long a subway ride to Tacoma Park to the boarding house where I was staying. Too many sleepless nights wondering where it all might be headed between us. And then the poetry. And bringing it to work the next morning to send to each other by email. I didn’t want to fall in love. But I fell. She was stronger, always was, and kept to the plan. So it goes. I didn’t know it at the time, but I would remain deeply in love with Marie until we saw each other again, four years later, and even beyond.

I was actually a bit crestfallen if not heartbroken upon my return that fall but I buried myself in my coursework, venturing over to the business school to take a course that was known as a GPA buster, Corporate Finance. At the foundation of the course, I discovered tons of microeconomic theory, my forte at the time, and very likely the element that most business majors lacked familiarity with and that made the course so difficult for them. Implicit in all that was a longstanding split between the business school, highly recognized and regarded, and the economics program, pushed out in a crazy power struggle between deans and professors, and eventually buried in the College of Arts and Sciences, nestled with history and political science. Ultimately, the business students paid the price, having to take the finance course over and over again until they got a sympathy pass. 

Everybody in my study group got A’s, even the one or two who were taking the course for a second time and hoping for a C. We worked every problem at the end of each chapter, not just the assigned ones. And we found similar problem sets in related textbooks.  

It turned out that a good reputation in the business school was lucrative in a manner of speaking – I attracted perhaps unwanted attention. At the end I was recruited for the MBA program and offered a scholarship, but staying one more year was not a part of my plan. Maybe it should have been and the NROTC commanding officer told me a provision could be made to delay my return to the fleet to complete the MBA since I was finishing way ahead of my allotted time. But I was intent on sticking to MY plan.

One more story before it falls through the memory cracks. One Saturday afternoon, while I was home working through finance problem sets, I received a phone call from a classmate from my technical writing class. I know, technical writing sounds almost remedial, but it was actually an interesting class where we learned “technical” composition, writing for business, engineering, etc. It was actually one of the more useful writing courses I ever took. Penelope, a technical writing classmate, and I became friends after working on a couple of group projects together. And we had a few conversations that went deep below the surface. So, here is the conversation we had by telephone, a most extraordinary and memorable one, more or less blow by blow:

Penelope: Hi, Raymond, this is Penelope.  

Me: Of course it is, Pen. I recognize your voice. How are you? It’s been a while.  

Penelope: Yeah. Not too good today. Are you free? I need one of our conversations right about now. Can you talk?  

Me: Sure. I’m just doing some Finance homework. Do you want to come over?  

Penelope: Naw. I just need to talk to somebody.  

Me: Would you like me to come over?  

Penelope: Naw. My boyfriend took the car and I’m not sure when he'll be back. Let’s just talk.  

Me: OK.  

Penelope: (deep breath) I had an abortion this morning.   (exhale)  

Me: (exhale) Wow. How are you feeling?  

Penelope: A little queasy. I’ll be ok. Can I tell you what happened?  

Me: OK.  

Penelope: The doctor stuck a tube inside me. Then he turned on a machine and sucked the thing out. It was just a glob, hardly any bones or anything. But I heard it rattle through the tube and out into the container, and I heard a light thud when it hit the bottom. Has a girl ever told you this before?  

Me: No, Pen, this is a first for me.  

Penelope: It was a first for me too.  

Me: Was your boyfriend with you?  

Penelope: He waited outside. His mother phoned this morning before we left, though. She said she would pay the medical bill.  

Me: Wow, Pen. I’m pretty speechless.  

Penelope: Not like you to be speechless, Raymond, You always have something to say.  

Me: (pause)  

Penelope: Raymond, do you think I’m a bad person because I did it? The abortion?  

Me: No Pen. I’d never think you were a bad person. There is nothing you could do to make me think that.  

Penelope: But I killed it. I . . . murdered it.  

Me: Hold up, Pen. You said it was just a glob.  

Penelope: I know. My boyfriend is back with the car. Thanks for listening. Raymond, can I call you later?  

Me: Any time, Pen.  

Penelope: OK. Gotta go. Bye now.  

Me: Bye-bye.   

Following the conversation I went back to my studying. But the conversation stayed with me, kept circling inside my head. I thought about what I had been told, about the significance of sharing that information with me. I wondered had I responded appropriately and with the proper amount of care and concern. I mean, we are all pastors and shepherds to one another in this life and the disposition of our fellow man is often in our hands. In life, people have entrusted me with information, very personal information and there is the need and the intention to share human experiences with another human. I have tried to keep that in mind over the years and I hope I have been successful in my efforts.

Could it have been my baby? I didn’t count the weeks, the months. But as a colleague told me with whom I shared this story, it was me she called to narrate the whole process.

**************************

Some poems from the period:

Poem for Margaret Rose

When I visited Brazil I rented a bicycle
and rode out,
away from the city,
into the countryside,
trying to escape the tourist traps,
the nightclubs,
the crowded beaches,
the shops.
What I discovered convinced me
I had found paradise.

When I invited you to lunch
after calculus class,
your response
(Why do you want to have lunch with me?)
surprised and thrilled me.
I sought your company because you seemed
so pleasant, so unique, so different,
so attractive, yet so unassuming,
and I was so swept away by your charm.

And like the forests and jungles outside Rio,
what I discovered convinced me
I had found paradise.
Your friendship,
your kindness,
your trust are paradise:
all one; all the same.
Why should I draw a boundary?

Tallahassee, May 1986

USS Luce DDG-38. 1987-1991.

Somehow, Jon Klongerbo, Rick Saltzman and I got separated from the ship, maybe it was some training we all took and couldn’t get back in time for the ship’s movement. Anyway we had to go out to Jacksonville Naval Air Station and catch a MAC flight to meet the ship in GITMO. We arrived a couple days early and decided to “take in the sights.” Somehow or other we decided to check out some equipment and go snorkeling off the coast.

It was my first time, but I took to it like a fish in water. I wandered off and discovered an underground cave at the shoreline. I decided to check it out, but upon entering the cave the water temperature dropped precipitously. So I backed out. On the way out, I discovered a big turtle crawling along the bottom and decided to watch him from the surface.

I lost track of the passage of time and apparently, simultaneously, the tide was headed out. At some point, I stopped to look up and see my distance from the shoreline. Not only was I way, way out, but I could see Jon and Rick jumping up and down and yelling and screaming at me. 

So I put my head down and stroked for what seemed like forever. When I stopped to see how close I was back in, it seemed I was even further out. The tide was heading out and I could not overcome it. Now shit was getting serious! 

I faced down and started swimming back in the direction of where we started. I swam and swam as hard as I could and at some point, totally exhausted, I lost consciousness. I think that’s when the angels took over propulsion. When I “came to” I was back in the harbor, the water was still, and I could hear Rick and Jon’s voices. Pretty much exhausted, I dog-pedaled my way back to the beach

USS Luce Wardroom, 1990

Some memoirs “leave out” sections that may not contribute to a predetermined narrative. I’m not going to do that. You get it all, warts and all. Here is a case in point. In my final semester at FAMU, Evette, a business student, and I started dating. By the time of graduation the following May we were discussing marriage plans. It was a mistake, in retrospect, to allow things to move so fast, but I can’t just leave it out. 

I had orders to an aged tin can, a destroyer out of Mayport. Evette got a job in Jacksonville, nearby, working in the trust department of a major bank. We got married in January after I finished my training in Newport and found an apartment together in a Jacksonville suburb. It, the various causes of a failed marriage created in too much haste, would turn out to be a cloud that overshadowed everything that happened over the next four years.

Here I have a confession to make. Throughout this whole period I was writing sonnets that I occasionally shared by snail mail with Marie, who by this time had moved to the west coast for graduate school. Marie had previously introduced me to the poetic works of Henry Dumas, whose out of print works I was able to locate at the public library in Jacksonville. I sought to emulate his writing style at the time, but that is neither here nor there. To be totally honest, it was Marie, during this same period, who stirred my interest in Baudelaire and Rilke, but I’ll not take that detour here.

Meanwhile, daily work on the USS Luce, and all the accompanying stress continued to affect all our lives. We deployed six months to the Mediterranean. Some of the guys in my division got in a bit of trouble in a French port, Marseille, and I met the foreign service officers at the US Consulate in my efforts to get them set free by the local authorities. It was my very first exposure to the foreign service. I asked them, “How do you get into this career path?” They told me about the foreign service exam. I filed it away and forgot about it. We made several port visits in France (Cavalaire, Sainte Maxime, Saint-Tropez, Cannes), Turkey (Antalya, Izmir), Spain (Benidorm), and Israel (Haifa). For a week we did a joint operation with the Israelis, with Israeli officers on board. I swear those guys didn’t slept for a solid week!

We spent several months in the shipyard in Pascagoula, MS, a seven-hour drive from homeport in Jacksonville. Most weekends I drove back to Jacksonville, which meant I began every week exhausted from the long ride back. The absences were enough to severely weaken a strong marriage, much less a frail one. Pascagoula had its bright lights, however. During the week we all went to Ma Farmer’s everyday for lunch. For $12, it was all you could eat of good home cooking, served family style. But shipyard work was brutal. 

As the first Gulf War came into being, Operation Desert Storm, many ships got orders to deploy. But not the Luce. We were too old and burned too much fuel. So Squadron basically rented us out to the Coast Guard, who would pay our high fuel bills, and we got assigned law enforcement ops in the Caribbean, stopping the flow of cocaine into the country.

Not that we weren’t still an effective shooting platform. We proved that conclusively in an exercise where we not only destroyed an incoming unmanned drone with our first shot, but effectively obliterated the space where it might have been had the first one missed with our second shot. I take some level of pride in our success in this exercise as I was the missiles officer and put a lot of time into the training that resulted in my eventual “pushing of the button” to fire.

Domestically, Evette and I were clearly headed in two different directions. Eventually, we grew to a point where we couldn’t stand the sight of each other, and I moved out and got an apartment in a trendy section of town near the city’s art museum. In fact, it was on Art Museum Way. At this point, my shared writings with Marie were like a reactor suddenly going critical, even supercritical. Delayed from four years prior, we fell deeply, perhaps madly in love via the postal system and via messages on telephone answering machines. In every beginning, there is always the Word.

Evette moved to Madison, Wisconsin for law school and we closed out the apartment we had shared. Shortly thereafter, I enrolled in a linear algebra course at night at Jacksonville Community College to beef up (a friend told me I needed a course in linear algebra for graduate school economics) and on a lark had filled out one of those bulletin board postcards to take the Foreign Service Exam (FSE). But when the package came to our former address at Belle Rive, it wasn’t forwarded to Art Museum Drive, where I was, but to Evette’s new address in Madison. Luckily, without even knowing what it was, she forwarded the package back to me. I filled in all the forms and met the submission deadline to take the exam.

And there were dark non-linearities, I can call them now in retrospect, even though I was fully aware of what I was doing at the time. In my loneliness, and in rapid succession, there was the fling with the mutual friend of a neighbor, the one night stand after a series of hours long phone calls with a friend just up the road in Kings Bay, Georgia, the crazy woman in Orlando with bizarre tastes and preferences, and the hospital administrator in Jacksonville who came to her senses and appropriately dumped me. I was slipping into darkness and none of this was part of my original plan.

The work on the ship kept getting more intense, more demanding, more extracting of whatever human spirit I had retained after all these extracurricular episodes previously mentioned. At the end of that year I momentarily made up with Evette and helped her with the drive and move to Wisconsin for graduate school, returned and completed a do-it-yourself divorce, took the foreign service exam, prepared my divisions for the ship’s decommissioning, and applied for graduate school in St. Louis. All these things were swirling around me like a drain vortex and I was desperately trying to cling to something fixed, anything, in an attempt to anchor, to save my soul. The only constant, the only continuity through it all was the poetry shared in letters, on the answering machine and exchanged in phone calls with Marie. I needed a west coast trip.

The LUCE was scheduled to do a two-month law enforcement ops with a Coast Guard detachment in the Caribbean during the period when the Foreign Service Exam (FSE) was scheduled. I talked with my Executive Officer and together worked it out with the ship’s education officer to receive the test and administer it to me underway. At least that was what they promised me. They lied. So when I checked with the XO a week before deploying, he offered me the following deal: I could stay in port and TDY to the civil engineering detachment for the six weeks deployment period, freeing up a spot on the watchbill for one of the newer officers. Sounded like a good idea to me, since I had already completed all my quals. Knowing the XO, it was probably a trick. He was a tricky guy. But it served my needs, so I took him up on it.

I spent a month working up a database of Mayport Naval Base contracts and warranties on emergency sprinkler fire suppression systems (a bit boring, but it saved the government a ton of money to get systems repaired on existing warranties, vice re-contracting and paying each time something broke. It would be excellent training for my GSO contracting future). Then, the second month, I inventoried each emergency hurricane kit (and there were hundreds of them on base), all of which were missing key pieces of equipment).

And I had a study program for the foreign service exam (FSE). At night, I read Economist, cover to cover. I read Scientific American. I read the Atlantic Monthly. And I took sample GRE exams under time, all in preparation for the FSE. On the appointed Saturday, I went to Jacksonville Community College and took the written exam. It seemed easy. I actually left early.

The LUCE returned. The crew had had a lot of fun in the Caribbean. I missed out. Life and work returned to normal. A few months later, I heard from State that I had passed the written exam and should make an appointment for the oral assessment. I chose to take it in Atlanta, a four hour drive from Jacksonville. My ship only allowed me one day off as we were working up for some type of inspection. I got off at 6pm, headed home, showered, packed a small bag, and hit the road. I stopped outside Savannah en route, to say hello to old ROTC buddies at Fort Gordon, then, around 10 pm, hit the road for Atlanta.

I ran into a heavy thunderstorm en route, and of all times, my windshield wipers broke, so I had to pull over to the side of the highway to wait out the storm. I resumed the trip around midnight, arriving at the hotel, way out on one of the Atlanta beltways, around 2:30 am, totally exhausted. I set the alarm for 5 am, and left at 5:45 to find the assessment site in downtown Atlanta.

I made it through the oral assessment. The interviewers called me in and told me they had one more question for me. I had a sense that everything would be riding on the response. They told me that I had a critical piece of information in the group discussion that I failed to reveal. Why had I not revealed it? 

I told them the whole story, the truth. My windshield wiper broke. I got to the hotel at 2:30 am. I was operating on 2.5 hours of sleep. Sorry if I screwed it up.

I passed. One of seven. They told me they really liked my biographic statement. It was much more than the resume that others provided, they told me. I’ve always enjoyed biographies, since Governor’s School. Why not make mine special and authentic? I still have that statement buried in a blog somewhere. That’ll be grist for another mill, as they say.

USS Luce, DDG-38, at decommissioning in Mayport, Fl, 1991

The LUCE decommissioned, I got into the graduate program of my choice, I passed the foreign service written and oral exams, and I scheduled a flight to San Francisco. New choices gave rise to a new chapter in my life following a season of darkness.