Chapter 1

We were married on February 11, 1960, at Naval Station, Bainbridge, MD by a Navy Chaplain. We were turned down by several civilian ministers, smart guys, before we modified our story and told the Chaplain we were high school sweethearts before I joined the Navy and now wanted to do what we had been planning for years. It’s not nice to lie to a minister, but we paid the price in the following years.

We moved into the house trailer that I was renting with a roommate, a real WWII hero who had a gazillion medals earned when he was a radioman on a PBY navy anti-submarine amphibious aircraft. He very graciously found other digs and left the trailer to the newly-weds. On our wedding night I found my new bride was, in fact, a 24 year-virgin. Our sex was very plain vanilla and it took me 10 years to get my first blow-job (under less than perfect circumstances as it turned out).

Although not exciting or great sex, our couplings did the job as our first child, a boy, was born on April 18, 1961, in the Yokosuka, Japan, Naval Hospital.

Our daughter was conceived in Japan, but was born at the Navy Hospital Pensacola, FL on 24 June, 1962. We wanted to stop with the two, but MaryAnn could not take birth control pill because of an allergic reaction. Her face would break out in brown splotches. Not a pretty sight. We used spermicide jelly as an imperfect birth control and had our third child, a boy, on Jan. 6, 1964. My wife was the model mother and faithful lover, I have no doubts my children are mine.

From Pensacola, I was transferred to NAS Sanford, FL. I deployed on the USS Saratoga in March and on 1 Sept, 1966, while in the Mediterranean, I was promoted to Warrant Officer, and returned early to Sanford. My (then) faithful wife was happy to see me home early. She was not happy when I told her that my new Officer orders were to report to the USS Forrestal and deploy to the waters off Vietnam in a few months.

On July 29, 1967 the second day on Yankee Station off the coast of Viet Nam, the Forrestal had a massive fire and bomb explosions killing over 300 of the crew.

As a squadron, we lost all our aircraft, but suffered no personnel casualties. RVAH-9, a sister squadron of RA-5C photo bombers was not doing well on the USS Kitty Hawk in San Diego during workup before deployment to Southeast Asia. The performance of the RVAH-9 pilots in carrier landings on the Hawk was so poor the CO of the ship kicked them off to NAS Miramar, CA, to practice landings ashore before someone was killed.

The importance of all this was that my squadron, RVAH-11 had a full complement of competent pilots, but no aircraft. The logical solution was for RVAH-11 to take RVAH-9’s six RA-5C Vigilante birds and embark on the Kitty Hawk for a nine month deployment to the South China Sea. As a squadron, we had already had been away from home for four months which meant we were facing a 13 month separation from our families. As it turned out we had a 90 day stay at Albany and went back to the Gulf of Tonkin for 10 months. We were separated from our families for a total of 23 months from April, 1967 to September, 1969. War is hell.