Tales of the Pacific

on
Day sailing/powerboating off the coast of Korea
My dad was in the army in WWII.  His brother was too.  Ships were transportation to a foot soldier.

He told me one time about when he was being transported to Bougainville in the South Pacific.  It was a 3 day cruise from where he was before, so he was "on deck" a lot on the transport and as an officer he liked the boat ride until the enemy planes started to appear thick as mosquitoes.  It suddenly (so he says) struck him that they seemed like sitting ducks.  When enemy ships started firing from what thought was the edge of the earth, he claimed his legs gave out.

He had made friends with a navy office as supposedly they were from the same home town in Michigan or something like that. So there is my dad, trying to dig a hole in the metal deck and his friend, standing by the rail in some sort of posture that reminded him of a good golfer after a fine round soaking up gin and tonics at the club bar.

The navy fella was talking about how lucky they were to have this big task force around them and
plenty of air support, not to worry, how's tricks? type of thing. Then he got real serious and told my father that what he (my dad) was gonna have to go do, well by golly, was the scariest thing he could imagine.  He said something my dad never forgot:  "Boats are like islands except when need be they could sail away while if you got stuck on an island - nothing good come of it".

Our task force built around the carrier Vincent is off Korea now and our hapless government isn't quite sure why and what they are going to do.  Korea has nuclear weapons and a madman, just as we do, so where they might be a swarm of Zeros in my dad's day, they have been replaced more than adequately by a big bomb that the ships simply couldn't and can't out run.

You see, things have changed a lot since my dad was scared on the deck of a troop transport and his friend was striking a Harvard Club pose.  There is no longer any safe place, real or perceived, anywhere.  I hope when these hapless dullards in Washington figure out what the real world is all about, so that the fellas on task force Vincent can keep their composure.