(The Diamond Hotel, Manila. Photo DH).

I enjoyed the snow day. For fun, I got the Bluesmobile stuck in the snow down by the barn, and got some exercise shoveling out the decks. They say there is another kick-ass storm heading this way for next week, and I am thinking a lot about the tropics, and Key West in particular.

The Keys are about as good as port visits go in the Continental United States, but I was drawn back to the more exotic ones by the fact that the JG is on the loose in the Philippines.

He didn’t write to tell me- that would be old school. I saw that the JG was staying at the Diamond Hotel on Roxas Blvd, at the corner of Dr. J. Quintos Street in downtown Manila on Facebook. Finally, he is getting to see the reason to love being in the Fleet! He has been there since October and aside from the oddly familiar exotic fact that his ship is home-ported in Japan, this is the magic of the experience and not just the part of Navy that totally sucks.

It sounds like the direct involvement with the missing jetliner is in the rear-view and the Fleet has moved on. There is too much uncertainty about that case that remains to be sorted out. The latest out of the investigators in Malaysia is that the way-points in the aircraft navigation system were reprogrammed after take-off, which is curious indeed.

USS Kidd has been relieved of the duty of boring holes in the Bay of Bengal, and the flagship on which the JG rides is apparently returning to the scheduled movements.

His previous update was a cryptic note that “Hong Kong was my kind of town,” a sentiment with which I fervently agree. There was something magical about the Crown Colony that has survived the transition to Special Administrative Region of the PRC. I am equally proud that both my sons have had a chance to visit China’s Front Porch, and experience the amazing fusion of British and Chinese life.

I am a little jealous of the JG’s presence in the capital of the Republic of the Philippines. I never got there in all my trips to the P.I.- there are clear advantages to traveling on the flagship, rather than some clunky but serviceable man of war. We bird farm sailors were restricted to the usual list of places: Pusan. Subic, Hong Kong, Singapore, Pattaya Beach, Mombasa and Perth were all Fleet Favorites.

The recruiting slogan used to be “join the Navy and see the world.” With the rise in terrorism, though, and the increased tempo of operations in the Indian Ocean to service the wars, things got pretty tough for exotic liberty ports of call.

(CV-41 USS Midway at anchor off Freemantle, West Australia in 1981. Photo USN).

The most legendary of the port calls from my time in the Foreign Legion was at Freemantle, the port city of Perth, Western Australia. The welcome from the residents, and particularly the ladies of W.A. was so legendary that some marital relations did not survive the four-day encounter, and there were some rueful faces on some USS Enterprise sailors who were waiting on the pier at Fleet Landing to turn themselves in after four years ashore from the last carrier visit. To this day, the most striking woman I have met was a raven-haired French-Vietnamese bartender who greeted us on the way back to the Landing on the last night ashore with a cheery “G’Day, Mate!”

Or maybe it was memorable because it was the last woman I saw for several months.

Anyway, it being a snow day, the internet was alive with misplaced energy. An old shipmate posted a picture of our ship at anchor off Freemantle. I thought it might have been our visit- the one in which we announced our arrival with an Air Wing FIVE mass formation flying up the Swann Estuary to Perth, announcing “Hi! We’re the US Seventh Fleet. How do you like us so far?”

Oh, man. The adventures the ensued. Sigh.

But it turned out it was the Freemantle visit the year after I did the PCS move to Korea- 1981. The comments were illuminating; and reflected the legacy of a crew determined to outdo their performance in 1979.

“that first day out of port, steaming north….. was probably the quietest day I have ever seem aboard a carrier at sea…… late, late sleepers……

“When the ship left port… as scheduled…. headed north along the west coast of Australia…. and for the next two days flew numerous COD flights to pick up late departees….”

“There were also a couple of young Aussie ladies discovered later on board by the time we hit Subic…”

Actually, according to official USN records, the count of Absent Without Leave was more than 200 officers and sailors, many of whom had to be constrained (the normal drill was to “clamshell” them in two wire Stokes Litters, and then they were lifted by C-141 to RAAF Learmonth on the northwest corner of the country, where we helo’d them back aboard…”

That beat my story from our visit, where our Squadron Operations Officer Black Cloud was the OIC of the UA Detachment and wore a big grin when he climbed off the helicopter with a handful of chagrinned troops.

The 1981 visit had a more spectacular defection: the Ship’s Surgeon. He stayed behind, resigned his commission and left his family in Yokosuka. One of my shipmates commented that it was crazy, and remembered writing all the OPREP-3’s to 7th Fleet, who responded that Midway was again setting PACFLT records.

You will note in the picture that Midway’s stern has a certain rakish angle to it. It is true, and that is what eventually ended her career.

CV-41 started life in 1945, built with the lessons of the Kamikazi attacks at Okinawa as a cautionary factor. She was altogether new class- a straight-deck carrier designated a CVB- or armored flight deck aircraft carrier. Sister ships were Coral Maru and FDR. They were impressive ships- Midway was the first to be modified with an angle deck. The acreage of the new flight deck was actually larger than that of a Nimitz class- and the solution to all that new center-of-gravity problem was to flood some of the voids on the starboard side of the ship with concrete.

That produced an odd, circular motion to the stern, which was quite startling for nugget pilots seeing it for the first time. It was a stately motion, not abrupt, and in a way, sort of appealing. It was a sway reminiscent of that of a lady of a certain age with confidence in her carriage.

Some idiot decided to base his Legion of Merit citation on fixing that stately motion. At an availability in the late 1980s, after returning from exile in Japan, she was modified with extended “blisters” along the waterline that significantly changed the slow, predictable and attractive sway into snap rolls that were very difficult to deal with. A couple hundred million in ship-alts, and they succeeded in ruining her.

I don’t know if the Captain that thought it up got his LOM or not. . That is what killed her as an active warship- they “improved” her into retirement.

At least she is still safe and sound from becoming razorblades or an artificial reef like all my other ships. As a museum and attraction in San Diego Harbor I think she still has a future under the Pacific skies. I think about those days under the Southern Cross with a certain longing. The sailors that are left behind to look for wreckage will continue to plow the skies to the west. They are gong to like Perth a lot, I think.

Copyright 2014 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303