Listen, I’m sitting in the Atlanta airport. And who knows what’s gonna happen next?
So I’ve decided that it’s time to clarify a couple a things.
First. It is true that, as a callow youth, I burned my draft card.
It was the height of Lyndon Johnson’s war. Some of my contemporaries were fleeing to Canada. Others were getting married and churning out kids in assembly-line fashion. Still others were hoping that college might keep them out from the draft.
But I burned my draft card.
(BTW: Draft cards were not that easily combustible. Instead of bursting into flames, they kind of turned brown and shrank. Probably the DOD’s way of discouraging guys like me from, you know, burning our draft cards.)
But I digress.
Yes, I burned my draft card…
…on the day after I enlisted in the U.S. Navy.
Right out of high school.
Now, I wish I could tell you that I enlisted right out of high school because, like my buddy Scott Camil, I desperately wanted to defend my country against The Communist Peril.
But Scott joined the Marines, shipped out to Vietnam, endured living hell there…and then came home to become a lifelong peace activist.
Which is why Scott Camil remains, all of these decades later, one of my all time favorite carbon based life forms.
Alas, I wasn’t Scott.
No, I enlisted in the U.S. Navy right out of high school because…..
…I was a reader.
And I read a lot of sea stories.
Mutiny On The Bounty. Two Years Before The Mast. Sea Fever.
John Masefield grabbed me by the throat. “All I need is a tall ship and a star to steer her by.”
So when I walked into the Navy recruiter and told him I wanted to go to sea, he laughed at me.
Because if you are joining the Navy, they weren’t exactly going to assign you to Nebraska.
Which is how I ended up on destroyer duty. And for four years, I actually did live my avid down to the sea in ships dreams.
My first cruise took me from Norfolk Va. to the Panama Canal and then across the vast Pacific to the Gulf of Tonkin. Where we spent a lot of time shooting at things we couldn’t see because they were so far away.
That’s not what I remember most about my WesPac cruise.
No, I remember liberty days and nights in the Philippines, Singapore, Hong Kong, Yokohama and points north, south, east and west.
I remember living on a small ship in a vast sea. And times when our tiny ship felt like a cork bobbing helplessly on a stormy tempest.
Listen Richard Dana had nothing on me. Except that our food was better.
But, again, I digress.
What I wanted to tell you is that I’m headed back – after a more than half century absence – to a mythical sea that fascinated me as a young reader.
I was a Greek mythology geek. An avid follower of the Gods and the Heroes and that guy who flew too close to the sun.
Zeus. Odysseus. Hercules. The sacking of Troy. The 300 Spartans. That Golden Fleece guy.
And don’t even get me started on Cassandra.
Who was gifted the ability to see the future by Apollo. Who, when she wouldn’t sleep with him, made sure that no one would ever believe her.
Long story short. It was a big deal for me when, during our Mediterranian tour, the USS Johnston entered the Aegean Sea. That fabled land of gods and heroes and monsters and vagabonds.
I mean, it took Kirk Douglas (or Ralph Fiennes or Mat Damion depending on how old you are) years and years to return from Troy to his faithful wife in Ithaca.
Hell, we did it in just a day or so. (But, to be fair, no cyclops or sirens stood in our way.)
Which brings me back to my original point.
I am on my way back to the Aegean. Back to Greece. Back to the roots of the mythology that so captivated me in my callow youth that I burned my draft card and cast my fate to the wind.
That made me believe a man should…must…go down to the sea in ships.
Not on a destroyer, this time. But on a jet plane.
The last time I was in Athens I was a 20-year old sailor. And I still have a photo of myself sitting on the steps of the Acropolis.
This time around I suspect I won’t be doing the same things that young tar who set out to see the world in ships did.
On the other hand, I’m still ambulatory. So who knows?
Later.
FreeGNV 