Apologies for digging into the Socotra Archives, Gentle Readers, but the Chairman sent a note to Section Leader Miles with a copy of a battered old green notebook attached. He suggested we could use it as the conflict overseas enters a second week of steady-state explosive activity. It began a long time ago. The notebook is filled with the minutiae of a deployment conducted some 47 years ago by a wonderful ship, commissioned in 1945, the mighty USS Midway (CV-41).

What started as a simple force-deployment exercise by a floating military airfield across WESTPAC, the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean to Australia became something else. Something dramatic due to circumstance perpetrated by the father of the man who is now Supreme Leader of Iran.

The UPI then told it started in the Embassy in Tehran. For us, it started after great port visits to our usual haunt in Subic Bay, Republic of the Philippines and Pattaya Beach in Thailand. We then enjoyed the sojourn with the wonderful people- particularly the ladies- of Australia. They seemed pleased to see our grizzled Yank faces.

While on that tremendous port visit to Perth, West Australia, the events of today began to unfold and extended that journey across the Millennium. The carrier that was supposed to conduct an extended stay of show-the-flag in the I.O. had a mishap in the Malacca Straits. She was forced to return to Japan for emergency repairs and we were ordered to complete that deployment to keep the flag flying. No big deal- or “NBD,” as we used to say.

Except the Shah was overthrown in Iran and our Embassy staff was taken hostage for the beginning of their more than a year in the hands of the religious zealots. An the 47 years we have all shared.

We continued northwest from Perth to Mombasa in NE Africa and had time for a memorable East African rail ride down to the Kenyan capital of Nairobi. All the art is original from a drawing pad that survived the years. It depicts how things looked when the current mess started. 47 Years Ago.

That is, clockwise, the hills of Bagio, RP, a patch commemorating completion of 200 cyclical mission briefings at sea, a scene from the New Florida Club in Subic City, and the cover of the notebook that contained them.

These were the units who conducted the deployment.

That is a charitable depiction of the visit to the Beach at Pattaya in Thailand. And a cartoon captured in the back seat of the lime-green Cadillac operated by it’s owner Nick Yarow, of Nicks Number One Steakhouse in Bangkok.

There is more, but we will have to get to that tomorrow due to limitations of bandwidth, a concept the Chairman never considered nearly a half century ago! We’ll see how the war goes manana.

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