I was raised in a small Virginia town, read every sea story in the library and managed to get into the Naval Academy in 1953 after barely turning 17. Four years later, I lowered the top on my new convertible and headed for a destroyer based in Long Beach, California. One year later, I was headed for flight training at Pensacola with memories of San Francisco, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Samoa, Tasmania, the Philippines, Japan and Hong Kong.
Flight training seemed easier after standing long bridge watches on a destroyer bridge. The Navy moves students along so gradually that I hardly noticed my progress. The first solo was traditional; we practiced landings at an outlying grass field, stopped after one, the instructor climbed out and said, “It’s yours.” I can still see him as I taxied out with the grass strip soon to be receding in my mirrors. More solos in faster planes followed over the next year as I moved to air stations in Tennessee and Texas while learning to fly jets, finishing with carrier landings, gunnery and supersonic flight over the Gulf.
The fastest fighter then was the single seat F8 Crusader with wings so swept back that you had to look in the mirrors to see them. I joined a squadron in Jacksonville and we practiced for the carrier. For the first time in my fledgling career, my planes developed mechanical problems and I lost two canopies, one at altitude and one on takeoff. Another caught fire on takeoff. I was okay but my confidence suffered and I lost the edge you need for carrier landings.
The Navy decided I needed some more real sea duty and put me in charge of the deck force on a hydrographic ship based in Brooklyn. I fell in love with New York when we were not charting enchanting parts of the Caribbean. All this changed abruptly when we were quickly refitted in Norfolk and sent on a secret mission to the Barents Sea north of Russia to spy on their atomic testing. New port stops in Edinburgh, Tromso, and Amsterdam added variety but most of the cruising was in empty green waters a few hundred miles south of the Pole with the only company a shadowing Russian destroyer.
I had decided to resign my commission for law school but this was 1964, the Vietnam War was beginning to simmer and I volunteered to experience shots fired in anger. I did, getting an AK-47 slug in my arm, a couple of medals and the intense satisfaction of serving with courageous men in demanding and dangerous conditions. Trips to Bangkok and New Delhi broke the routine but the Navy had shown me enough of the world to make me grateful to return home where I kept a promise made in Vietnam and kissed the grass at the University of Virginia.