The word about Truman’s entry to the Med came in through the dozen or so addressees in the Old Salt Collective distro. The Salts are as tough a lot as I have been privileged to know in this world, and their grizzle was earned in brilliant day and dusky night out on the World Ocean. Their service as a group now spans four wars with names. Plus the long religious one that has enmeshed the followers of the Patriarchal Faiths for the last two thousand years.

We are supposed to pretend that is not the underpinning of where and how they were fought and a dozen or so operations with ones intended to evoke something else in a martial-sounding and morale-enhancing manner.

Like “Rough Rider,” the one we think was just completed in the Red Sea. It was where the Houthi Rebels had interfered with the major east-west commercial shipping channel of the earth. They were acting as proxies for the Iranian regime in their strange obsession with the nation of Israel. The establishment of the secular theocratic state in Tel Aviv is viewed by some as a sort of international monument memorializing the atrocities of Germany in World War Two.

And the incidental overthrow of the great Diaspora of a people from their biblical homeland.

You can see how the motion of great ships of steel operated by fragile humans gets complicated quickly. The Salts cover the bases in the abrupt rhythm of cyclical operations on large ships made small by the speed and motion of wind and wave and of roaring jet engines.

As a group, we have all been out there and the successful extrication of USS Harry Truman from combat operations of the last few months in the Red Sea comes as an almost physical relief analogous to ones actually suffered.

Vic was moved by the situation to issue a second edition of his first book, originally published in the USS Midway’s newspaper 46 years ago. Almost a half century ago, the collected antics of a fictional Private Detective and his winsome assistant signified a successful tweak of the Iranian nose, and eventually the peaceful withdrawal from the approaches to the Red Sea.

Harry Truman is withdrawing to the north, into the relative piece of the Mediterranean Sea. Her aircraft and crew had generated a thousand strikes on precision targets whose similarity to those of the Barbary Coast had one caused creation of a Corps of Marines to invest the shores of Tripoli.

Mules handled it best in the laconic manner we shared as practitioners of the operational military art. It combines a short-hand merger with the calligraphy that accompanies the fluid motion of waves. He kept the clock. “Harry Truman deployed in Sept of 2024 ….. and is coming up on 8 months deployed ….. and did a north-bound Suez transit today …”

Imagine that for a moment, taking the better part of a year from your life to pinion to the forward end of a powerful wake cleaving the sea. This is a chart that does not convey what it is like to see something like Gibraltar or the Bab al Mandeb slide abeam and then far astern:

So, well done, Carrier Strike Group 8. There will be some endless discussion of the two jets lost, or endless only by the opening of discussions on the next seemingly endless series of gray ships and blue skies above blue waters,

We hope they will have a chance to relax for a bit. These things have long consequences, though. We are still recycling ours even as we did the distant evacuation of Saigon just a month or two ago. This naval movement likely marks the conclusion of the strike group’s mission in the Red Sea, where it has been operating for the past few months. There will be another assortment of sailors and Marines forthcoming as required.
Funny how inviting the waters of the Med can be, isn’t it? And so unlike the ones in the shallow sea just to the south…

• Vic