The Captain

(Last week I attended a reunion of former crew members of the U. S. S. SAUFLEY. The ship was commissioned and sent into action in 1943. I was an officer in her in the mid 1950s. She was in active service until 1964. This is about the Ship and about two men who served in her.)
He and I sat late into the night. Our common bond is the sea, and the link in our conversation is an old ship, now resting on the bottom in twenty fathoms of water a few miles east of Key West. Once a fighting ship with sixteen battle stars emblazoned on its bridge wings, stars won in arduous duty with the Pacific Fleet in World War II, she now is a diving and fishing destination. We are two different men, but somewhat alike. He is just over ninety years of age, nearly blind, and he depended on his daughter to bring him across country from California. He is a retired Navy Captain, one of the original complement of young officers and men who took the U. S. S. SAUFLEY from New York harbor through the Panama Canal into action in the fighting against a superior Japanese fleet. I am only eighty. My time in our ship was in the mid 1950s when she was serving her nation as a moving platform that evaluated yet-to-be accepted undersea weapons. Weapons that just might even the odds against our Cold War foe. The Captain’s experiences encompassed shore bombardments so that our Marine forces on small Pacific islands could defeat a tenacious force of jungle fighters. There were air attacks that the ship had to fend off: powerful dive bombers, fighter planes that strafed her decks and the most dreaded of all, the Kamikazes thrown at our fleet off Okinawa. The SAUFLEY took a direct hit from one of these, and even in the 1950s one could still see the hull plates that had been replaced where she was struck.
We compared notes on great storms that we had both encountered. SAUFLEY rode out “Halsey’s Typhoon”, a tragedy that sunk five similar ships. I told him of the time, on another ship, when I had seen the forces of nature in the “Ash Wednesday Storm of 1962”. Two decades separated the storms, but the recollection of them remains fresh in our minds. He had patrolled off the Aleutians in Arctic waters, and I had done the same in the Atlantic near Greenland. We spoke of the futility of rescue attempts when a man fell into such oceans, where he could only survive three or four minutes before succumbing to hydrothermal effects. Always we spoke of our ship with awe and respect, as a home should be, for it had been his home and my home, and we were as brothers because of her. Then the conversation shifted to our civilian careers. By this time the rest of our shipmates had drifted off to bed, but we continued. The Captain has a Jurist Doctor degree, and a graduate degree in psychology. My education was in business and economics, a poor comparison. I described my venture into writing columns for a newspaper. He was excited over the upcoming two hundred year celebration of the founding of his home town in California. He told me how much he loved his wife, and how he missed her, even on his short trips to our reunions. I expressed my regrets that I did not hold Theresa’s hand more often in her last days with me. We spoke of children and experiences that were sometimes similar and sometimes far apart. He told me that I should travel, and I should go to Paris in August, when the Parisians would likely be on vacation, but I should go only with a “lovely lady”, for Paris would not be the same without one. And I was to tell no one about her, for it was no one’s business. Then we poured one more small drink in this quiet room filled with pictures of our ship, and with our memories. We chatted for a few more minutes, and then he walked to the door, looking closely at the shadowed forms that his weakened vision revealed to him. His room was down the hall to the west. Mine was in the opposite direction. I stood quietly. I watched him check the room numbers and then fumble with the key card until it opened his door. I “covered his back”, unknown to him, until I was certain that he was safe.
After all, the Captain, and others like him, once covered our backs until we were safe from harm.
I could never do less.