Author: Eric Saretsky

Hurghada by the sea

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When I last saw Hurghada, Egypt, it was at the end of a nineteen- hour series of flights from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.   My orders had me wait in this port city on the Red Sea until my ship arrived.   This was 1993 and our East Coast ships patrolled the Mediterranean,  Red Sea and the Gulf of Arabia 249-37-l(Persian Gulf).

While recent images online show a fancy beach resort (!) in Hurghada,  I recall then only sand, heat, scorpions, and prickly pear cactus.  Hotels were still in a state of construction – apparently as their proprietors were not taxed until construction had complete.  To this day I recall the port worker and a shopkeeper who both spoke english.   I got to learn a little about the culture and the European visitors.  I don’t think americans generally visited along the Red Sea as the ancient Egypt they come to see is along the Nile and in Cairo museums.    Back then Hurghada main clientele were German tourists vacationing on the beach.   Egypt is also where I presumed America’s contribution to the world must have been the car horn.  It certainly was not the turn signal.  Perhaps because one hand on the horn and the other gesturing angrily at a pedestrian leaves no hand free?

Egyptian cabbies have a penchant for three things – their vehicles travel at a high rate of speed,  they constantly are honk the horn, and at night, headlamps are strictly of optional use.  You have to realize how crazy riding in a cab at night is: camels, donkeys, street vendors, and folk fill the streets.   None seem ever involved in an accident with these mad drivers.   From visits to our New York City on several occasions,  I now know where these Egyptians learned to drive.   And Turks.  And Africans.

In memoriam

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Their feet rush into sin;
    they are swift to shed innocent blood.
They pursue evil schemes;
    acts of violence mark their ways. Isaiah 59:7

Prayers go out tonight to the victims of yet another terror attack in London.  Mayhem and murder committed by corrupt men.   In London, Manchester, Kabul or Manila the violent seem to strike randomly.

What these acts of terror have generated however is a resolve among the population to oppose evil.  While many, myself included want to take up arms to defend against these monsters,  those who prowl around looking to shed blood (1 Peter 5: 8) are ultimately opposed by love.  When children no longer are taught to hate from remote corners of the world, then terror will have no power here.

 Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. 5 It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. 6 Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. 7 It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.  

-1 Corinthians 13: 4 -7

 

Entertaining “Shipshape”

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46 Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, 47 praising God and enjoying the favor of all the people. And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved. -Acts 2:46 (NIV)

As a Navy man, I know the difference between cleanliness and “white glove” clean.  In the ten years since retirement, that is NAVY retirement,  I have not kept up the rigor of four-a-day “sweepers”, field days, and “change of command” – mode painting and sprucing.  With dogs that shed hair hourly, there only just keeping up with the general clean during the week.   0512-0707-1115-1056On those weekend evenings that we entertain – which is something we are doing again now that we have no children at home – my spouse,   and sometimes one of our adult sons – is (are) conscripted in the early afternoon to field day.  While Chiefs supervising junior Sailors prepare official Navy functions – at USS Homestead, Chiefs and indians provide the labor.   But my bride, formerly the Senior Enlisted Leader’s spouse, has got the whole affair managed.   My role subsequently is to take out trash, walk the dogs, put my work-week items away and clean up before guests arrive.  ( I went out to obtain the dessert as my contribution to the evening.)

On a Friday night, we enjoy a home-cooked dinner with friends.  With friends you can relax;   nobody comments on incongruous objects in the dining room – a framed Japanese watercolor cat on rice paper ( hiding a still-to-be sanded hole in the drywall);  a framed hawaiian turtle motif on handmade, dyed paper that eventually will move to a more esthetic location; and a bag of dog food that was overlooked in setting the dinner table.  While the room needs a fresh coat of paint, the house is clean and welcoming.  The dogs are mostly behaved.  The dining table is polished,  scented candles and the dinner-party china are pulled out.

Entertaining has become fashionable again; we may not have granite counters, but we have solar-powered air conditioning.  And games.  Mexican Train, a dominoes game, is quite popular with our friends.  And with our group of friends a late evening is 9 PM.     Best of all,  Saturday is not a work day.  After an early prayer walk with friends, walking dogs, taking out trash, doing yard work, and putting away laundry I will have time to sit and write.

 

Popeye’d Off!

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I  sort of “lost” it today, in a manner of speaking reading a blog post.   There’s all sorts of pain, dismay, anger and ranting about the shape America is in.

I have loved and respected America and Americans all my life. I served in the military 26 years.  The ugliness and anger in this country is due to failure of the country, following anything and everything but God and the letter/ spirit of  moral values;  some pick or interpret what to believe; some actually try, fail and try again to follow a peaceful path;  however, there are more than a few who practice a faith whose God is Self.

Second, the failure of the Family to instill a self-respect and respect for others. Single-parent families, absentee dads,  dysfunction  or disinterest in raising children.  A lack of training from earliest childhood.  FB_IMG_1491759647178 And third,  a failure of a people to have ethics, education, and motivation to hold ALL levels of leadership accountable.  Laziness, godlessness, and self-indulged people looking to blame and hate others is what causes this country, which had been the pinnacle of UNITY in the world,  pain.

Sailors, Cigars and Grog

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Having a cigar called Post-Embargo reminds me of a deployment in the Caribbean.  14961909287502141989829   In the 1995, the USS PETERSON made a summer counter-narcotics sweep through the Caribbean Sea.  Unexpectedly, ship and crew made an extended port visit to the Dutch Antilles island of Curacao.  We had one of our gas turbine engines fail.  Waiting for shipment of a new engine from the United States allowed me,  as a “topsider”,  extra liberty.  We passed time sampling the locally brewed Carlsberg beer,  enjoying Cuban cigars, sightseeing and taking in a tropical Netherlands.  For “snipes” (Engineering personnel) however,  they spent long hours to remove and replace a major ship system.   As we learned later, the casualty to the engine cooling system was a symptom of an unexpected honor on Memorial Day weekend:  representing the Navy at the re-opening of the Philadelphia Maritime Museum (as the Independence Seaport Museum) .

Curacao4

Two life lessons we learned that summer.   First, some thanked while others cursed the bureaucrats who sent an ocean-dwelling warship into freshwater (the Philadelphia river)  for public relations.  The engine cooling system was fouled by dead marine life.  And second, inexpensive boxes of quality Cuban cigars during deployment were worth spending a month in the tropics. For those who enjoyed cigars, the remaining month at sea was “smoke ’em if you got ’em”;  they were contraband at home.

In the last few years, the end to the Cuban embargo has not meant much to me.  With Cuban seed planted for decades in Central America, obtaining a post-embargo “Cuban” is off my “bucket list”.

A festive deployment

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shipI am looking forward to going back to sea.  But this time I will not be standing in a dress uniform, “manning the rail”, as we deploy but rather a festive cruise line.   Even the company,  Royal Caribbean Oasis of the Seas, sounds like a festive destination rather than a vessel to get from Point A to Point B.   The scheduled departure is still months in the future, but it is something to look forward in anticipation.   I still have some hesitation about putting to sea.   “Underway. Shift Colors!”, is a phrase all deployed U.S. Navy Sailors know as the moment the ship leaves the mooring and begins to put to sea.  While today’s Sailors may have six  or seven- or even nine- month deployments away from their home,  the routine of everyday blurs the calendar.  Menus define the day of the week –  sliders (hamburgers) Wednesday, spaghetti ( with crumbled sliders for meat sauce) Thursdays,  and so on.  unnamed

A cruise line does not operate that way.  From what I have been told,  there’s food,  drink, and entertainment twenty-four hours a day, if you pay for it.  (Well,  in the Chiefs’ Mess, we were able to fund some pretty wonderful food, snacks and even ice cream during deployment ).   But today’s cruise liners make the last cruise ship I was on,  the former Cunard Lines , Queen Mary seem tame in comparison.  As a child accompanying my mother, I sailed on the RMS Queen Mary and the  RMS Sylvania between Liverpool and New York in the 1960s.   And in 2016,  my wife and I stayed aboard the now-hotel Queen Mary in the city of Long Beach, California.    Cruise lines,  prior to the heyday of jumbo jets and routine flights to and from Europe, was a great form of travel.  Both movie star Cary Grant and the vacationing nurse traveled in style albeit at substantially different accommodations and traveling companions.

Although manning a Navy ship does not give you many opportunities to enjoy the sea air, wind or waves,  it is still something incredible when looking at the vast ocean.  That is what I will look forward to seeing again.  Along the east coast of North America, the Gulf Stream is a great conduit for whales, dolphins, game fish, and adventurous sailors in sailboats and other craft.  I also know that the sea could be like glass or the gray-black of a squall on the horizon.  But I imagine, instead of chow lines, field day, and drills, it will be cocktails, suntan lotion and enthusiastic support for my wife’s plans for ashore zip-lines and water slides.

DD969

“when it’s time for leavin’ “

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Lord, I was born a ramblin’ man,
Tryin’ to make a livin’ and doin’ the best I can.  – Ramblin’ Man, 1973)

American music lost another icon.   Tonight I read that Gregg Allman, a founder of the Allman Brothers Band,  died today at age 69.   By the time my musical taste broadened from the British Invasion,  Beatles Rolling Stones,  Elton John, the Who to Southern Rock, I was 18 and enlisted a year in the Navy.   My barracks room -mate, Ferdinand W,   was another enlisted Navy technician, a few years my senior at the training command, Great Lakes.  In the early morning hours, he would be returning from liberty (we had a rotating duty schedule and class) and usually wasted (very drunk).  He wrecked his sportscar, on base, on one of those binges.  But I remember him mostly for the southern Rock he listened to, and the squeeze box (concertina) he would play along.  A broken ankle from the car accident kept his partying subdued- and the while the Navy was investigating the incident.   download

When I was given orders to the cryptologic maintenance school at Fort Gordon, Georgia in 1978,  I had gained a little exposure to Southern rock- music of Lynrd Skynrd,  the Allman Brothers, Molly Hatchet, and Marshall Tucker Band.   About the time that the Navy students in my class were earning top marks, which gave us some early liberty ( we attended an evening schedule of classes) several of us found a small club in nearby Athens, Georgia that must have been named for the Allman Brothers’ song,  the Whippin’ Post.    Many live bands played there.  I remember one Saturday night,  whether a cover band – or the actual Lynrd Skynrd (I don’t recall) played there.  One guy kept screaming “FREE BIRD!!” In forty years, I forgot about those times when you could sit in a club twenty feet from bands that defined a rock era, and then next weekend do it all again.   But history dims with time.  I read a report from 2013 that the long-closed club was torn down.

May memories

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A lot changes in forty years. In  May, 1977,  prior to my departure for Boot Camp at Naval Training Center, San Diego in October,  I was graduating high school.   Jimmy Carter was President, a fact that I thought, being a former naval submariner officer, would make him an excellent leader.   People didn’t want Gerald Ford as he had pardoned ‘criminal’ Richard Nixon, but I remember him for sending in Marines to retrieve the Mayaguez, which had been seized by the Khmer Rouge a month after the last battle involving U.S. troops of the Vietnam War.

In those last two years of the Seventies,  the Zumwalt-era of loosened grooming standards – longer hair, mustaches and beards worn by Sailors were okay.  Dungarees (bell-bottom style) and dixie cups, were the working uniform.   Pot was a problem on military bases including San Diego.   A community that now is marked by the upwardly-mobile, well-heeled beach crowd, Ocean Beach, was then a place where druggies and ex-military,  tattoo parlors and bars were less restrictive than up the coast near the UCSD campus.

A visit over the Coronado Bridge to the Naval Station Coronado, where carriers were berthed was my first view of a ship – the USS Recruit was a wood and metal reproduction on the Recruit Training Command, to introduce us to naming convention, etc – so did not count.  The ‘aroma’ of the interior of the USS Kitty Hawk was the first ‘knock out’ that I will never forget.  Jet fuel, grease, human sweat, urinals and generally,  the stink of at times, 3500 men (no women then) wafted fresh new sailors who had more recently been accustomed to PINE SOL clean scent.

At the time, I was a student learning to work on complex electronics and mechanical maintenance of teletypes.  Where I now cannot see without at least one or two orders of magnitude, I was able then to discern two from three centimeters adjustments.  The instructor was quite ADAMANT about that ability before graduation.   We had Iranian military students – this was prior to the Iranian Revolution – and when they were recalled by their government,  we were relieved.   Suffice it to say that American and Iranian hygiene were on different tracks.

In May of 1982,  with several of my fellow Russian Language students and the professor – I was able to travel  to Russia – prior to the end of the USSR (1989) – visiting cities – St Petersburg, Moscow, Kiev and Tbilisi.  If only for all but one – a socialist-  the trip was very informative and probably saved them and their future families from the ‘snowflake’ sensibilities, the mantra of “coexistence” and “socialism’s great”.  The people may have been interesting and interested, but the economy was a shambles. Ambition was reserved for the underground economy — some of whom are today’s Russian millionaires and billionaires.

In May of 1984,  I had been out of the Navy four years, attending the university in Tucson, Arizona.  Four three of those four years I had been actively involved in the Veteran students organization on campus,  and while peers were pursuing commissioning programs,  I was looking toward a government job after graduation.  Strangely,  in my second year after graduation,  when my graduate school plans went unfunded – I re-enlisted in the Navy -Reserve – that is.  The entreaties of one of my friends finally had me join his unit, only to see him quit!

After petitioning to resume an Active Duty career in 1987,  the next major May milestone I recall was May of 1997 when I was transferred from Norfolk, Virginia to San Diego, California.    1970 Dodge Chargers, if you could find one in decent shape were then ten thousand dollars or more,  homes which had been an unheard of, eighty thousand dollars – for an ocean view, were nearly eight hundred thousand,  and NTC was closed but for a few administrative medical functions.

And in the twenty years since that time,  friends and mentors went to war in Afghanistan and Iraq,  the Soviets became Russian trade partners, the Chinese became the world’s second-most powerful economy, the Islamic world tried to separate the economic need for the non-Islamic world – from the ideology that wants to reduce infidels to ashes,  and we are again at some form of odds over military preparedness against the adversaries that were no longer adversaries?

 

 

Red Sky in the morning….

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There’s an ancient mariner’s rhyme that says, “Red sky at night, Sailors’ delight; red sky at morning, Sailors take warning”.  From Wikipedia,

It is based on the reddish glow of the morning or evening sky, caused by haze or clouds related to storms in the region.[2][3][5] If the morning skies are red, it is because clear skies over the horizon to the east permit the sun to light the undersides of moisture-bearing clouds. The saying assumes that more such clouds are coming in from the west. Conversely, in order to see red clouds in the evening, sunlight must have a clear path from the west, so therefore the prevailing westerly wind must be bringing clear skies.

Talking with a elder friend and mentor this morning,  Jack related a story how, as a Navy man fifty or more years ago, he had been a Tin Can Sailor ( alternately known as a destroyerman)  on a World War II-era ship.  He had been a yeoman and the Captain’s bridge talker.   Jack relished telling me how he had been selected for that job by the CO as he could translate the southern drawl of the Engineering crew muddled by ship’s intercom system.  And he loved to share with me the story of his ship taking 40 to 50 degree rolls in a Pacific storm they rode out for a week.

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A ship of Task Force 38

I too, was blessed with a strong constitution, riding out a few violent Atlantic storms in the destroyer PETERSON, ( launched in the 1970s) where most personnel not on the binnacle list,  were at their positions with barf bags at the ready.   I do recall the one or two times I foolishly ventured on the upper deck by our workspace – the “Oh- three”  (03) Level, to witness the power of the wind and the waves.  Metal bent or was torn away by the power of the sea.   Fortunately with modern navigation, we did not ride through the center of these storms where the waves were reportedly fifty feet high from trough to crest.

typhoon20cobra
Typhoon Cobra

I started to think what the Sailors of WWII dealt with – battling the Japanese in the Western Pacific and typhoons.   On a website this morning,  I discovered that an error underestimating the weather put a heavily armed Task Force, with some top-heavy ships directly through a violent typhoon – Typhoon Cobra –  with fatal results.   Ships were heavily damaged, some capsized and sank with hundreds of men lost,  and generally raised more havoc than the enemy they were to battle.

 

Don’t give up the ship!

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Thirty years ago today, May 17, 1987,  the USS STARK (FFG-31) was attacked by Iraq with Exocet missiles, resulting in the death of 37 Sailors.   It was a credit to the training and resolve of the officers and crew that the ship was saved and no further life was lost.  i do not regret an American presence in that region of the world.  The politics, economics and diplomacy of a world power dictates that we sometimes have to deal with bad actors, complex religious and cultural forces.  While we have made missteps and overly-optimistic assessment of our objectives,   I do regret American blood that has been spilled in that region while politicians pushed agendas and abandoned hard-won ground.  Yet no adversary has ever been dissuaded by diplomacy not backed up by a willing use of force.

Two hundred years ago, the Barbary pirates harassed commerce through piracy and extortion,  and the new American Navy ( and Marines) responded to protect our interests.  A hundred years ago, oil was discovered in vast reserves in that part of the world, fueling a development in technology, sciences and living standards – and setting the stage for a widening gulf between the “First World”,   the oil wealth-rich Sheikhs who secured wealth and benefits, and their impoverished subjects — in those same places. After a world war, that was won as much by American blood and industrial resources as by the combined might of friends and future adversaries,  a nation was founded – a democracy- embroiled in a fight for survival ever since.  And that nation as well is not without its own responsibility for shedding American blood ( USS Liberty).  We Americans have shed blood supporting friends and combating tyranny and terrorism originating in the Middle East for decades.

Thank you to the men and women who have served and continue to serve in our military.   Don’t give up the ship!

Veterans or prospective veterans: Get Hired!

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My employer is GROWING and looking to hire veterans of the U.S. Armed Forces.  Locations across the United States and overseas.   Job Fair information:

ViaSat is hosting a free transition workshop for veterans and their spouses from 8 a.m.-5 p.m. on June 14. The event will assist those moving from the military to the civilian workforce.

Hands-on sessions include compensation and benefits, LinkedIn tutorial, resume building, StrengthFinder assessment, interview skills and more.

Lunch is included for all participants. RSVP by June 10 at www.surveymonkey.com/r/ViaSatTransitionWorkshop.

For more information, contact Adrian Haskamp at veterans@viasat.com or call (760) 476-2200.