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Its the first full non-holiday weekend of the month and that means…drill weekend in Norfolk (and at hundreds of other drill sites around the world).

And for the first time in about 15 years (give or take the one or two – I’m serious – drill weekends when I had something else going on), I am not in khaki.  It *is* weird.

It is slightly strange, knowing that I’m off the bus  now, watching it drive on without me.  The latest organization chart for the unit was passed out last month, collateral duties were assigned, jobs delegated – and I’m, of course, nowhere to be found.  I’ve already been dropped from the email list!  lol…haven’t had anything over the last 3+ weeks.  Why can’t our government show such efficiency?

With the exception of the summer of 1994 when I left active duty and spent a year teaching high school in North Carolina, my life in the navy, for the first time since fall of 1984, is finally done with.  Fort the first time in nearly half my life I am not looking forward to anything else Navy-wise – no next duty stations, no follow-on assignments, no possibility of heading off to a dry, sandy environment, no nothing.

Melancholy much?  I’ll try not to be, but this life, this uniform, this commitment, this duty has been a huge part of my adult life.  My dad retired from the navy when I was 19.  I started my own career in Sept of 1984, so my retirement in Jan 2010 give me my own 25-plus years.  That is 43 of my 51 years in and/or around the Navy family  - planes, ships, bases, exchanges, uniforms, inspections, heartache, elation,  deployments (my dad’s, my own), homecomings (my dad’s, my own), absolutely spectacular experiences and the most morbidly boring watchstanding.

Singing Irish songs while drinking German beer in a British pub with a bunch of Americans in Italy.  Climbing Gibraltar.  While dressed in service dress blues, walking down the main road of the Black Sea Naval Headquarters in Odessa, Ukraine, all by myself, heading to a meeting for something or other.  Intercepting a Soviet Badger in the eastern Med.  Pyramids, Pompeii, the Holy Land, fighting Moroccan F-5s, French F-8s, Egyptian F-16s, Canadian Hornets, Gibraltar, Majorca, Marseilles, Tunis,  Toulon, Antalya, Alexandria, Rhodes.  Haircuts, physical readiness tests, annual flight physicals (Doc: “This may feel a bit uncomfortable….”  Pinch: “Fine doc…..whatever”), pulling 10 g’s in a dogfight with a F-16 after telling Doc Hicks “Bogey, right 2 o’clock high”.  Flipping a Tomcat  end-over-end with Kevin McHugh when, at 15,000 feet and without fuel tanks (it was our first flight back home after cruise and when you drop the fuel tanks, it is a whole new aircraft) we pulled a tad too tight to convert on a TA-4.  Flight suits (green, tan, orange!), khakis, summer whites, chokers (Having to bag out of a reception in Egypt because you couldn’t get into your choker whites after not wearing them since your AOCS days: “I swear Skipper!  Those chokers must have shrunk!”), mess dress later in the career, the “Aviation working greens” that we all got into during our RAG time – my Uncle Ken had a set from his Navy days in the early 70’s he let me have.

A catapult shot off Kennedy’s number 1 catapult in a Tomcat weighing about as heavy as can be – 72,000 lbs. My last catapult shot, as well, was on Kennedy’s number 1 catapult, with John “Stump” Woods in the front.  After a couple hundred of those things you know what a good shot was.  This was not “good”.  I remember settling a bit (when all you start with is 70′ above the water, settling *any* is not good).  Add in that it was night.  Add in I could see the rotating beacon on the bottom of the aircraft reflecting off the water.  In times like that you eschew loquacious verbiage in trying to communicate to your nose gunner what you want, and all I could do is jam my foot on the intercom button and say “Climb climb climb CLIMBCLIMB!”  I never went for the ejection handle – the training kicked in (I think it was our skipper, Pete Strickland , who had told us junior officers about his Test Pilot program of doing progressively slower catapult shots to determining the absolute lowest speed you could leave the deck with and still fly.  Bottom line? Even if it was a bad cat shot of around 100 knots (normal was around 140-150), if you had the capability to move the nose of the aircraft (“nose authority”), you could fly it away) and I felt the aircraft stop its settle and start to fly.  What gave me a good feeling that I knew what was going on was immediately after the cat stroke the Mini Boss in the tower called to us “Off the bow….you ok?”  HE saw something bad, too.

Standing the midwatch (1200 to 4am) as Officer of the Deck (OOD) on a carrier in a drydock when Daylights Savings Time kicked in, which tossed in that “fall back” hour, making it a 5 hour watch (believe me….it sucked).  I was promised I’d get the Spring Forward day as something of a mollifying tidbit, which would have made it a 3 hour watch, but I don’t  remember that happening.

Also being blessed to have the OOD  watch – yes, still in the drydock – when a hurricane blew by Hampton Roads, just off the coast (Emily, 1993) – you’ve never seen a bunch of more stressed out senior officers, I swear.

ALSO having the somewhat dubious distinction of having the OOD watch when your previously-grounded ship was refloated – yes, again when we were in the drydock (good deals abounded back then, and I’m sure it hasn’t changed a bit).  Usually the OOD of a grounded ship is destined for a courtmartial.

That whole OOD experience was something else.  Service dress blues was the proscribed uniform we donned, complete with a .45 strapped to our waist with its holster hooked onto a US Marine Corps combat green belt (Martha Stewart would have had a heart attack). The interesting thing was that since we were behind something like 3 security fences at Norfolk Naval Shipyard in Portsmouth with some of the best nuclear-reactor-servicing  trained civilian security forces, there wasn’t much of a threat of anything.  So, in the best tradition of Deputy Barney Fife when Andy made him keep his one bullet in his shirt pocket, we were only issued a magazine with 3 bullets in it.

Sun rises in Naples with Vesuvius surrounded by the morning reddish glow of sunrise.  A bazillion stars overhead at 3 am on a cap station 100 miles behind  the ship with nobody else besides us in the central Med except an E-2C Hawkeye and an airliner from Cairo headed to Rome.

Those clouds.  ‘Nuff said.

The Reserve life.  Weekends in Atlanta or DC or Norfolk.  Leaving active duty in August of 94, lamenting the fact that I probably wouldn’t be headed back to Europe again – and being on a plane to Italy less than a year later with the reserve SIXTH FLEET unit.   Being promoted to Lieutenant Commander after being out of the Navy for a year (I remember mumbling “Buggers didn’t want me to stick around on active duty, but as soon as I leave, within a year they promote me to 0-4”).  Putting on Commander 6 years later and buying that scrambled eggs cover was neat.

Spent time in Officer Quarters rooms – BOQ or VOQ or Whatever-OQ – in Pensacola, Oceana, Norfolk, Little Creek, Mayport, Jax, Charleston, North Island, Miramar, Pt Mugu, Denver, Dallas, Whidbey Island, Alameda, Sigonella, Naples, Atlanta, Roosevelt Roads, Key West, Pearl Harbor, Maxwell AFB, Tinker AFB and probably a couple of dozen other places.

Getting to be pretty good friends with and becoming a pretty good tactical aircrew with some pretty good pilots – Mark “Cherry” Marcione, Jim “Rev” Jones, Dave “Doc” Hicks, Dave “Hooter” Hoffman – just to name a few.  As you became more senior in the squadron, you were of course crewed with some of the newer pilots coming through.  One thing you always watched out for was the reaction of the pilot AND the jet on their first catapult shot with fuel tanks attached.  The newbies never flew with fuel tanks while in the F-14 training squadron, and those tanks, when filled with an additional 4,000 lbs of JP-5 fuel, changes the center of gravity on the jet a great deal.  That first cat shot with tanks usually ends up with a honkin’ big yahoo of a nose up attitude immediately after the cat stroke (Vince “Zac” Zaccardi!  Come on down!!).  Colorful.

Work on board USS Enterprise (t’wasn’t much – just a walk-aboard meeting, but it remains the only carrier that both my dad and I worked on), USS John F Kennedy, USS Nimitz, USS Dwight D Eisenhower, USS Theodore Roosevelt, USS George Washington, USS Harry S Truman, USS LaSalle, USS Mount Whitney and USS Shiloh.

Duty stations in Pensacola, Virginia Beach, Calverton, Norfolk and DC.  Reserve duty in Atlanta, The Pentagon, Italy, Ukraine, Qatar, Djibouti  and a bunch of other places.

Flight time in T-34 A and B, T-2C, TA-4, F-14 A,B,D, A-6E, EA-6B,  S-211, C-2.

Going Mach 2 off the coast of San Clemente Island.  1200 total hours, 1000 in the F-14.

Fun stuff.