In which I return to the scene of my youthful crime

Well I’m not the kind to live in the past
The years run too short and the days too fast
The things you lean on are the things that don’t last
Well it’s just now and then my line gets cast into these
Time passages: Al Stewart.

It was sheer coincidence – or, who knows, maybe kismet – that the day I returned to a magic city on the sea that I had last visited as a young man in uniform fell on Veterans Day.

This after an absence of 55 years.

We were winding up a 16-day trip that took us from Paris to the Rivera. And the final day before our long flight home I had reserved for a very special homecoming.

I didn’t even know it was Veterans Day until we got to the train station in Nice and somebody mentioned it.

The train took just minutes to deliver us up to Villefranche sur Mer.

How to describe Villefranche? It’s a small harbor town on the Mediterranean that rises abruptly and steeply up onto surrounding limestone cliffs. The buildings tend to be painted in pastels, and its streets winding, narrow and dimly lit.

All of it giving the impression that something mysterious, and wonderful, awaited just around the next curve.

It was the winter of 1969, my 21st year. And thanks to my good fortune to be serving on a small destroyer (the carriers, tenders and other large ships in our group all had to put into Marseille) I was able to spend two weeks in Villefranche, including Christmas and New Year’s.

Listen, I was no callow youth by that time. I was in the final months of a four year enlistment, and I already had a “WesPac” cruise (Norfolk to the Gulf of Tonkin and back via the Panama Canal) under my webbed belt.

I had criss-crossed the biggest ocean in the world. But that North Atlantic passage aboard the USS Johnson plunged us into seemingly endless days of frigid winds and extremely turbulent seas.

It was rather like being aboard a cork bobbing in a tempest.

I became fond of saltines, because that’s about all I could keep down.

It was my last cruise as a destroyer man, and it was the height of the Cold War. No kidding, as soon as we passed Gibraltar a Russian “fishing trawler” picked us up and shadowed us all over the Med.

Even today it’s difficult to describe why the unassuming port town of Villafranche occupies such a prominent place in my memory and my psyche.

I mean, we visited some amazing liberty ports on that cruise. Palma certainly held more, um, earthly delights for sailers. I’ll never forget standing on top of the Acropolis in Athens. Rome, Trieste, Venice, Naples all invited us to stay awhile and have a little fun.

Back in those days it was as though the government delivered us to exotic locals, gave us money and asked us to please not get arrested.

So what was it about Villafranche that has beckoned and haunted me all these years?

Maybe it was because we were there longer than the other ports. Or the sheer novelty of not having to share this little gem of a town with the thousands of sailors required to man all of those larger ships in Marseilles.

Not sure why this sticks in my memory: A lot of young women used their lunch hour to take a quick dip on the town’s beach. There would be a line of sailers up on our bridge at noon waiting for their turn on the binoculars.

All I can tell you is that I’m not the only old salt who continues to harbor warm feelings about this tiny port town.

While walking its streets I was surprised to come upon a local – well let’s just call it a club house – frequented by guys my age who had also visited this port of call as young men and never got over it.

The club house – AKA the headquarters of the U.S. Sixth Fleet in Villefranche-sur-Mer – exists to “convey the history of the American Naval presence” in Villafranche.

Its slogan: etait une fois.

Once upon a time.

How cool is that?

Club president Barry Probst – late of the USS Boston – told me that several American vets have retired here. Apparently the U.S. Navy has been making port calls in Villefranche since the 18th century.

So maybe I just feel warm and fuzzy about being part of a naval tradition that stretches back more than 200 years.

Or maybe it’s something else.

Listen. I’m not the kind of guy to live in the past. The years really do run too short and the days too fast…

But these days I’ve been feeling uncommonly nostalgic about my Navy days. And not just because of my brief love affair with a magic city perched on the edge of the sea.

Perhaps it’s because, back then, America still felt to me like an idea worth pledging my allegiance to.

Worth fighting for.

Worth loving.

Back before I became a liberal “enemy of the people” in the eyes of so many of my fellow Americans.

As though I had served on that Russian trawler rather than the American destroyer it was shadowing.

And maybe it was something else as well.

Maybe my sojourn in that magic town represented a sort of perverse coming of age. A transition. A doorway between youthful immaturity and responsible adulthood.

Which brings me back to the scene of my crime.

How to say this? I was busted for drinking on the ship during our Christmas anchorage in Villefranche-sur Mer.

Long story short: I received a care package in the mail. It was from my childhood friend Lou, a marine posted in Vietnam.

The package contained a cassette tape and a bottle. And as I listened to the tape – basically Lou rambling on as artillery fire resounded in the background – I opened the bottle….

…just before the Captain, of all people, walked into the Combat Information Center

…which is normally deserted during liberty calls.

Heavy sigh!

Well there was a Captain’s Mast, my crime being deemed too trivial to merit a court martial. I got a good talking to and a blot on my previously unblemished record. It likely cost me promotion to petty officer second class.

But it wasn’t the end of the world.

Within weeks of returning to Charleston I was mustered out of the Navy, honorable discharge in hand. And I forthwith set out in hot pursuit of the rest of my life.

But I did leave The Navy without a good conduct medal thanks to the aforementioned record blot.

Listen, we used to say that a good conduct medal was awarded for four years of crime undetected, and there’s some truth to that. During our WesPac cruise sailors would gather on the fantail of the USS Steinaker in the dead of night to smoke marijuana.

Nobody ever got caught because as soon an authority figure approached the offending objects – i.e. the evidence – would be flicked overboard into the Steinaker’s phosphorous, churning wake.

BTW: You’ve never seen stars like those you can see in mid-Pacific in the dead of night with nothing to distort your vision save the wafting smoke of a proscribed substance.

In contrast we never even saw the stars from the deck of our destroyer while crossing the stormy North Atlantic and living on saltines. Hanging out on the Johnson’s fantail in the dead of night would have amounted to a death wish.

Good times those..