Posted on

Hold the presses! Now get those puppies underway!!!

Work looms ahead in an hour-and-a-half. This is another night to work until 8 p.m. and earn an extra two hours in “premium pay.” It’s not as good as overtime but getting paid for nine hours when in actuality working seven is not terrible.

Since I have a few tasks to accomplish before work — shaving my head among those tasks — this will be short.

A matter of little import except to perhaps English teachers and copy editors today with changes in “The Associated Press Stylebook” which includes using the word “underway” for all uses. The journalism word from upon high previously used two words except ” … when used as an adjective before a noun in a nautical sense … ” During my stint in the Navy I sometimes composed correspondence or military jurisprudence forms as well as the “Plan of the Day.” I would have the occasion during such cases to use the one-word word “underway.” This is Navy style, in no small part, because ships or units getting “underway” is a big deal. After all, ships are a big deal to the Navy for some strange reason.

During my time as a journalist I often continued the naval practice of writing “underway” as one word. Lazy? Yes, but also practical. Editors and journalism teachers always preached the doctrine of simplicity so I bought into this dogma — which is NOT a dog’s mother — by utilizing the pragmatism of writing one word for under way instead of two. That would get a story sent back by an editor, depending on pressing deadlines, in order that I might use the space bar between the two words. So, perhaps it was lazy. It was definitely force of habit that continued from the Navy although I seldom use “port and starboard” in conversation or writing these days.

I suppose a bit vindicated and perhaps a smidgen petty. But then again, I was a Navy petty officer.

So there you are.

Posted on

The old sayings about the weather leave us forever wondering

The wind in the great out of doors a short-short ago was slicing like a Saturday evening straight razor. We are supposed to be kissed here abouts 45 miles north of the Gulf of Mexico with sea breezes that gently caress the evening. But alas those winds, like the 30-plus mph gusts that ripped me a new one as I walked out of the office today, were more like a nasal-to-chin sloppy one planted by the town drunk on a suicide mission.

Metaphoric pictures, and not necessarily pleasant ones at that, aside are the “March Crazies” as I call them. It isn’t a particular weather feature but more like a pre-Spring phenomenon that leaves you not knowing whether to fly a kite or tie your ass down to a sturdy oak tree.

The old sayings about the weather leading into Spring have now faded into memory. With the possibility — and for many probability — of intercontinental travel these days could only a meteorologist who has studied weather of areas traversing the big ponds know if these sayings universally hold water, pardon the pun.

Had I not witnessed it myself would I have known the old mariner’s weather verse is as true — many times — on the Big Sur side of the mighty Pacific as it off the Indochina coast looking fore and aft while sailing down the middle of the South China Sea. I once knew what basis in fact was “Red sky at morning, sailors take warning. Red sky at night, sailor’s delight.” Of course, that verse is also as foretelling sometimes as does the old saw: “If your left hand itches, it means you will be blessed with money.” That very circumstance has proven true at times, though just as often as when my left butt cheek itched.

My mother was not overtly superstitious but I think that she loved when these old sayings with which she heard all of her life became a reality. She used to point out “Thunder in February, frost in April.” And I can remember those times more than not.

The most confusing of the old weather sayings has been how “March comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb.” Or is it vice versa? At least in my part of the world does the former seem to be the most evident.

As entertaining are these old wise tales does the same go for the completely unpredictable. The wild and sometimes dangerous storms of Spring are still as great a wonder as can be imagined. Were it not so, perhaps L. Frank Baum might have spun an epic story around a blizzard or a drought rather than a tornado which caused a farm house to conk Dorothy on the head and heave her ho out into Oz.

The nugget of wisdom that points out how “April showers bring May flowers” seems as if it is making up for a ruined day, perhaps it is why Johnny had to stay inside. But it is just as true as “April showers bring April flooding.”

Times were back during the recent droughts when it seemed as if it would never rain again. But it did. Like that rainy July 4th I remember. Nothing was ruined for me on that festive day as the blessed steady showers came during a severe rain-free period.

Talk though you may about that weather and say there is nothing that could be done. Someday science may prove that just as empty as some lakes left dry by drought. But I had just as soon weather be left alone with perhaps the great advances in forecasting being a welcome exception. It is those winds that blew from the sea with gusto and which seemed to tear my bones apart likewise provide me a great comfort in its mystery.

 

Posted on

Texas is full of heroes with nary an umbrella

Business took me to the university today. The weather felt more like late March than late January. Folks have told me that this might be it for winter. This might be Texas but people shouldn’t say the winter is done until it is done.

It has been awhile since I have seen a late winter though.

Not a lot of kids were stirring on the school quadrangle or whatever they call it. The place has a big head of a man who once was a president of the Republic of Texas. The big-headed man has a name. Mirabeau Buonaparte Lamar. I wonder if voters gave him the crap that Obama got from his middle name — Fillmore? Lamar is described as a poet, politician, diplomat and soldier. Hmmm. I wrote poems. I even had some published. So can I be known as a poet? I guess you have to have a big head too. Which makes me wonder …

Did you ever know a man named Umbrella Jones? He had a big head and thus he carried around a big umbrella with which to fit his big head. He had a lot of things in his head. Like Richard Brautigan poems.

Mirabeau Big Head Lamar was accepted to Princeton but instead worked at two failing businesses including a newspaper. When president, Lamar drove the Cherokees from Texas which made him at odds with Sam Houston. The Cherokees liked Big Sam — he has a big statue on Interstate 45 outside of Huntsville, Texas. He has no umbrella. Big Sam had stayed with the Cherokees. They called Sam “the Big Drunk.” Perhaps they knew that one day he would have a big statue. Maybe even the Cherokees saw in their visions that one day a great general with five stars would build what was called the “Interstate System.”

The system would be known at one time for roadside trading posts called “Stuckey’s” with pee-can log rolls and places off the highway where traders and travelers might rest and do the pee pee. But damned if there wasn’t a lack of umbrella.

Lamar was known as the “Father of Education” in Texas. Which makes one wonder who is the Uncle of Education? Or perhaps the Mother’s Half-Brother’s Aunt of Education? Mirabeau later fought in the Mexican-American War and was appointed by President Buchanan, when Texas became a state, as Minister to Nicaragua. Much much later they named this college in Beaumont, Lamar University, after him.

Even though it is nice to have a university in town named after a poet and diplomat, it is much more satisfying to have graduated from a fine school named after the Father of Texas: “Umbrella “Peabody” Jones State College for the Foolish. Just kidding. I was a graduate of the university named after the “real” Father of Texas, Stephen F Austin. I don’t think his head is all that big and he has no statue on the freeway. However, Steve is honored with a life-sized statue of him in front of the library where he is surfing the big waves off Galveston during a hurricane. Good ol’ Surfing Steve. By golly. And wouldn’t you know he forgot his umbrella.

 

Posted on

I second that a’ motion

My mind is out in space this afternoon, figuratively speaking of course. Where would I be if my mind was literally out in space and the rest of me was sitting in this chair while poking a keyboard ? That raises the question: How long would it take a thought to travel from the edge of space to near sea level?

I am pretty sure someone could answer that question or at least give it a shot. It seems like there are as many answers out there, perhaps even more, than there are questions. Here’s a question for you. How fast does the Earth move around the Sun? I had to find — on the Internet — an astrophysicist to answer this one.

“Earth’s average distance to the Sun is 150,000,000 km (93 million miles), therefore the distance it travels as it circles the Sun in one year is that radius x 2 x pi, or 942,000,000 million kilometers in a year of 24 hours/day x 365 1/4 = 8,766 hours so you divide to get 107,000 km/h or about 67,000 mph. You could also say the Earth moves around the Sun at 30 km/s. The Sun circles the center of our Galaxy at about 250 km/s. Our Galaxy is moving relative to the ‘average velocity of the universe at 600 km/second’ “– From “Ask the Astrophysicist, 1997.”

It certainly doesn’t feel as if we are traveling that fast. I bet if we felt that velocity, then even us Texans would talk fast.

Perhaps it is that I might make a couple of airline trips later this year that I ponder the many illusions one confronts when traveling in a physics-laden universe. I think in specific, why it seems one isn’t really going anywhere, or at least, isn’t going anywhere fast, while traveling at hundreds of miles per hour.

Oh, I’m not talking about takeoff or landing or making airborne turns or experiencing turbulence. I speak of the motionless feeling of flight itself. You can close your eyes and practically feel as if you are sitting in your favorite uncomfortable chair at home. Then, if it is daytime and not cloudy outside your little air cabin porthole, you peer downward some seven miles to terra firma and can tell the plane is moving somewhat. That is even though it doesn’t feel as if you are traveling 500 mph.

While you are looking at the ground to see what’s there or if you are trying to locate something you recognize, all of a sudden you see another airline in the distance and it is literally flying by. It’s flying by, as in “zoom,” it’s out of here!

It’s all just an illusion, you remind yourself. Such trickery doesn’t find limits in flight either.

I remember when my brother brought a motor boat home from Connecticut that he won playing poker with some Navy shipmates. We set “sail” out on Lake Sam Rayburn in East Texas, and when my brother cranked the outboard to full speed, it felt like we were “flying,” as in we felt like we were hauling ass! Yes, I know. It’s an odd idiom. But you know what I mean. We were maybe going 25 mph, but it seemed even faster out there on the lake.

Years later when I was in the Navy I joined my ship, a mid-1940s version destroyer, which was in a San Pedro, Calif., drydock having a new hull installed. It was only a month or so after I reported on board that the work was completed and we took the ship to water for the first time in several months for a “shakedown cruise”

It seemed to take forever to transit from the shipyards, under the Vincent Thomas Bridge and out past the breakwaters. Once on a bit more open water the captain ordered “All Ahead, Full” and the 30-year-old warship let its engines rip. I was standing out on the fantail watching the screws churn thousands of gallons of seawater effortlessly. I can recall the smile that came across my face as it did some of my new friends who were goofing off, getting sun and tasting the salty air spraying us all. I don’t know how fast we were going. I guess technically a warship’s speed is classified, but the Fletcher class destroyer as we were on was designed for almost 45 mph. Were we going that fast that day? Who cared, as long as little springs of water didn’t start popping out of the hull.

One of those other strange sensations on water, but even in the air or on the ground is how one feels after concluding a journey. In a car after a long ride, you might go to bed that night feeling like you are still riding. Or perhaps you feel “bouncy” after a long flight.

The sensation I found even more bizarre was docking in port after encountering heavy weather. I learned pretty fast how to walk down a passageway during big waves, thus gaining my “sea legs.” It came to be second nature, so it wasn’t a total surprise when I walked with sea legs off the brow and on down the pier for a ways.

Your body, nature, the land, sea, physics all seem to converge at times to play a little joke upon the unsuspecting. I adapted like a duck in water when I rode the Pacific on a 390-foot, 2,400-ton tin can. It took a bit longer not to tighten-up when the bumps began while flying the friendly skies. But it took only one ride that day at the carnival when my Daddy and I made the idiot decision to ride the gravity-defying Tilt O’ Whirl.

Life’s a trip, isn’t it?

 

 

 

Posted on

Turn out the lights, the party’s over for West Pac sailors

A lot of myths surround military life. It seems those stories appear much more in frequency and intensity when you talk about the Navy life, at least that’s how it seems to me since I served four years in “the Nav,” as we called it back then. One perpetual stereotype of sailors deals with drinking and drunkenness. Why, the sea shanty “What Shall We Do With A Drunken Sailor” dates back at least to the mid-1800s.

When our ship pulled into Subic Bay — ending my first voyage at sea though it was just the beginning of our deployment to the Western Pacific (West Pac) — I learned first hand that the drunken sailor was no myth.

That was September 1977, when the U.S. still had the Subic Bay Naval Station and Clark A.F.B. near Manilla. Today, at least with rules recently handed down by Navy and other military commanders, the drunken sailor is perhaps as close as it has ever been to a myth.

A spate of incidents involving U.S. military personnel in West Pac and particularly in Japan have prompted some of the harshest liberty restrictions in ages. Sailors stationed in Japan have an 11 o’clock curfew. If sailors stay at home they are not allowed to drink after 10 o’clock. If they go to a bar they must have an accompanying adult. They are also not allowed to leave home after more than one drink. As rightly pointed out in a Stars and Stripes article, some high school kids are allowed to state out later.

Incidents such as the rape of a 13-year-old girl in Okinawa had pressured the military to keep a tighter rein on all personnel, not just sailors. Two Texas-base sailors were arrested in the October crime. The military has dealt with a number of infractions, many with a civilian misdemeanor equivalent, committed by service members throughout Asia. Brawls and even worse behavior in Okinawa have long been a touchy point between the U.S. military and its Japanese hosts.

The result has been severe crackdowns and almost unheard of restrictions on sailors, Marine and other service members serving in or deployed to Asia. Restrictions are part of life for the military. Past restrictions usually emanated from unit-level or above.

The first transit on our destroyer’s West Pac deployment was from San Diego to the Philippines. We stopped off for six-hours on-base “liberty” at Pearl Harbor. I had duty that day and on the overnight visit on the way home. The first time, I got to take some trash off the ship to the pier. Such a Hawaiian adventure! And other time-eaters on the way to our home port away from home port in the Philippines included Naval Gunfire Support in which we fired our 5” cannons on some desolate, I suppose, island in the Hawaii chain. Although two weeks is not really a long time at sea we were nonetheless ready for liberty at Subic Bay and adjacent Olangapo. The latter is another story.

Plenty of drinking and bad behavior commenced when we sat foot on Philippine soil the first time and other times we docked here and elsewhere. The ship’s compliment as a whole was probably better-behaved — I was the ship’s legal yeoman so I knew who got in trouble — during our port visits to New Zealand and Australia. Part of the reason was the friendliness and genteel manner of our hosts. That isn’t to say a few incidents took place, even between the hard-drinking Aussies and the Americans. Some guys though, just couldn’t handle their liquor or had emotional problems which were compounded to produce some real screwups.

What surprised me the most about the time I spent on liberty in various locales of West Pac and the Southern Pacific is that behavioral incidents were not limited to the young, lower-ranked sailors. Our ship’s career counselor, a chief petty officer, went to Captain’s Mast for dancing on an Olangapo bar table, fighting with Shore Patrol and talking smack to our Command Duty Officer. The Old Man gave the chief seven-day’s restriction to the ship — those days were served after we were under way! I had come to the fleet from shore duty where senior enlisteds or officers either stayed out of trouble or who were an asset to the command so their report chits often got “lost.” I don’t know why I suspected the higher up’s didn’t cut loose some time.

We had restrictions sometimes and often they made no sense. Of course, the ultimate restriction was a midnight curfew in the Philippines due to martial law imposed by President Ferdinand Marcos. If we weren’t off the streets at midnight we could be, quite simply, shot by the M-16-carrying Constabulary, or so we were warned.

Certain sailors, E-5 and below, were given “Cinderella Liberty” in Jakarta, where we had to return to the ship at midnight. We also had uniform restrictions. Originally, E-4s — a third class petty officer, which I was at the time — and below had to wear their uniforms on liberty in Jakarta. All others could wear civvies. I think I made a reasoned, respectful argument to the Executive Officer as to how E-4s were as well non-commissioned officers and noted the Navy’s NCO corps was dropping out like flies at the time. I opined that perhaps such a small gesture as E-4s being allowed to wear civvies on liberty as was the norm then, might help restore a little RHIP (Rank Has Its Privileges) for new petty officers. He agreed and so third class petty officers on the ships, including myself, wore civies in Indonesia.

We had one other restriction. We were tied up outbound of a frigate that was sailing with us and we had to cross it to get to our ship. The scuttlebutt was that our ship was known for having drug problems — this was the late 1970s — so the docking would help prevent smuggling illegal substances aboard. Also, which I found rather extreme, each of us returning from liberty were given a die to roll and if it hit the magic number, ta ta!, we got body cavity searches for drugs. I was lucky in that I didn’t hit the magic number. As it turned out, all the attention to our sailors may not have achieved its goal. I knew of at least a couple of folks who, with one sailor swimming to our unattended port side, managed to smuggle two pounds of Indonesian hashish on board. Those were different days.

Such restrictions we faced often achieved no real results and were offensive to many. The Navy has tackled abuse of both alcohol and other drugs over the past 30 years since I was a sailor. It really had to be done, I suppose. You had old lifers getting up popping cans of beer from the barracks vending machine at 0630 before going to work. The enlisted club was open all day and you could get a couple of cold ones for lunch with your burger and fries at the Navy Exchange grill. And drugs, of course, were a “whole ‘nother thang.”

But the Navy and other services have gone overboard, pardon the pun, with the crackdown in the Pacific. The consequences of what some term “infantilezation” may blow up in the military’s face, as noted here. These are adults, like it or not, the military needs to treat them like responsible adults they should be and punish them or get rid of them if they are grossly irresponsible. It has been that simple for years now.