1 March, 1956

I find myself, every now and then, going back in time via the letters I wrote my parents while I was in the Navy so very long ago, and which I have put into my aptly-named blog, "A World Ago" (http://www.doriengrey.blogspot.com). I look at myself through the long lens of time and realize I was still pretty much just a kid, and the fact that it is not so much a matter of youth being "wasted on the young" as it is in the fact that it is taken away from us far too soon.

At the time of the letter below, I was aboard the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Ticonderoga, to which I had been assigned after being dropped from the Naval Aviation Cadet program. We were, at the time of this writing, in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea and at the height of the Cold War. The threats and dangers of a cataclysmic war were very real to us, and while we didn't dwell on it, it was never far from our minds. So here we are, in the Commissary Office of the Ti, writing yet another letter to my far-away parents.

1 March 1956

Dear Folks
Just been talking over “old times” with a kid who wants to join the NavCads. I have an awful lot to be proud of—things most other guys would never dream of doing. Up to the point, that is, where they ask, “Well how come you quit?”

In my locker I still have a box of stationery from Pensacola and in it an unfinished letter saying I didn’t think I’d be with the NavCads very long.

I hope you’ve received the two large envelopes I sent yesterday and the day before. You know, at times I think: “Now suppose you got off the boat at Fleet Landing and there were Mom & Dad.” Then I think of all the things I’d show you and everything we could do and wonder if you’d be as thrilled with it all as I’d want you to be.

Let’s face it, parents—you have a weird son. But personally, I’d be bored green to be average.

Chief Sewell and I spent a good two hours today hotly debating whether, if war came and we were cut off in the Mediterranean (it would be very easy—there are only two ways out—Gibraltar and the Suez), and if we had expended our bombs, planes, fuel, whether we would surrender the ship or scuttle. I claimed that rather give the enemy a potential weapon to be used against us somewhere else, we would most definitely sink ourselves. The Chief contended that we wouldn’t dare sink $200,000,000 of the taxpayer’s money—that we should put into port and surrender, having first disabled all our guns and instruments, in hopes that we’d be able to take the ship back by force or sit in port till the American armies (victorious as ever) should come and recapture it. He claimed I was very stubborn because I couldn’t agree. What do you think?

“What in hell good reason would we have for sinking it?”

“So they couldn’t get it.”

“There are 3,000 men on this thing—what are they supposed to do?”

“We have lifeboats & life jackets.”

“You know how long they’d last in that water? We haven’t got that many lifeboats to begin with.”

“So you’d going to sail blissfully into port and say: ‘Here we are, take us’? Oh, no, Chief. If you were kicking me in the face, I wouldn’t offer you my shoes.”

And so on into the night. We finally agreed that we would make a run for it, even if we knew we could never make it, and go down fighting.

The United States Sixth Fleet—consisting entirely of thirty-five ships, including two submarines and two aircraft carriers, is right now in the awkward position of being a sacrificial lamb.

But we only have 107 days until we get back to the good old U.S.; and only 163 until I get out.

Love,

Roge

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