Faith of My Fathers (20 page)

In those days, the military emphasized escape and evasion more than it dwelled on life in a prison camp. However, an Air Force major who had been a POW in Korea was brought in to brief us on his experiences, and I shared quarters with him for the two days I remained at Bad Tolz. He told us that while he had not experienced a great deal of torture as a POW, American prisoners in Korea had been kept isolated, and on near-starvation rations.

What I remember most from my conversations with him was my astonishment at learning that this congenial, well-adjusted former POW had been kept in solitary confinement. I commended him for his physical and mental courage, and remarked that I seriously doubted I could have survived such a long stretch in solitary. He told me I would be surprised what suffering a man could endure when he had no alternative.

While at Bad Tolz, I and the pilot I had escaped and evaded with met two college girls from the States who were spending the summer in Europe. Since the
Intrepid
wasn't due in port for another ten days, we joined them on their drive through southern Germany to Italy, ending our brief time as fugitives with a very pleasant holiday. There was little we had experienced during our Bavarian excursion that approximated the experiences of pilots who were hunted and captured in a real war.

There were occasional setbacks in my efforts to round out my Navy profile. My reputation was certainly not enhanced when I knocked down some power lines while flying too low over southern Spain. My daredevil clowning had cut off electricity to a great many Spanish homes and created a small international incident.

While I was stationed at Norfolk during my service on the
Intrepid
and
Enterprise,
a few pilots in my squadron and I lived in Virginia Beach in a beach house known far and wide in the Navy as the infamous “House on 37th Street.” We enjoyed a reputation for hosting the most raucous and longest beach parties of any squadron in the Navy. On the whole, however, I made steady, if slow, progress toward becoming a respectable officer.

In October 1962, I was just returning to home port at Norfolk after completing a Mediterranean deployment aboard the
Enterprise.
The air wing of a carrier always leaves the ship just before she comes into home port. My squadron had flown off the
Enterprise
and returned to Oceana Naval Air Station while the ship put in at Norfolk. While at Oceana we would train out of land bases until the
Enterprise
's next deployment.

A few days after our return, we unexpectedly received orders to fly our planes back to the carrier. Our superiors explained the unusual order by informing us that a hurricane was headed our way. The explanation only aroused our curiosity further, since none of us had heard any forecast of an approaching storm, nor did putting to sea strike us as a reasonable course of evasion.

Nevertheless, we flew all our planes back to the carrier within twenty-four hours and headed out to sea. In addition to our A-1s, the
Enterprise
carried long-range attack planes, which typically had a hard time managing carrier takeoffs and landings. We embarked on our mysterious deployment without them.

As the
Enterprise
passed Cherry Point, Virginia, a Marine squadron of A-4s approached and attempted to land. I watched the scene from up in the air tower. Several of the Marine pilots experienced considerable difficulty trying to land. Our air boss turned to a representative of the Marine squadron and said we didn't have time to wait for all their planes to land; some of them would have to return to their base. The Marine replied that his planes were already below bingo fuel, which meant that they did not have sufficient fuel to return to base and had to land on the
Enterprise
.

I was quite puzzled by the apparent urgency of our mission—we'd been hustled back in one day, leaving some of our planes behind; the Marine squadron had been ordered to join us with only enough fuel to land or ditch. The mystery was solved a short while later when all pilots were assembled in the
Enterprise
's ready room to listen to a broadcast of President Kennedy informing the nation that the Soviets were basing nuclear missiles in Cuba.

The
Enterprise,
sailing at full speed under nuclear power, was the first U.S. carrier to reach waters off Cuba. For about five days, the pilots on the
Enterprise
believed we were going into action. We had never been in combat before, and despite the global confrontation a strike on Cuba portended, we were prepared and anxious to fly our first mission. The atmosphere aboard ship was fairly tense, but not overly so. Pilots and crewmen alike adopted a cool-headed, business-as-usual attitude toward the mission. Inwardly, of course, we were excited as hell, but we kept our composure and aped the standard image of a laconic, reserved, and fearless American at war.

After five days the tension eased, as it became apparent the crisis would be resolved peacefully. We weren't disappointed to be denied our first combat experience, but our appetites were whetted and our imaginations fueled. We eagerly anticipated the occasion when we would have the chance to do what we were trained to do, and discover, at last, if we were brave enough for the job.

We remained in the Caribbean for another two or three months. We did a lot of heavy flying, landing at various Caribbean nations, and our accident rates began to increase. Our commanders arranged for the pilots to get some R&R, and I soon found myself boarding a carrier Onboard delivery plane for four days of fun in Montego Bay, Jamaica.

Shortly after I got back to the ship from my Jamaican holiday, the
Enterprise
left the Caribbean and returned to port in Norfolk. A little while later, I embarked on my last Mediterranean cruise, an event that marked the end of my days as a completely carefree, unattached, and less than serious Navy flyer.

My newly formed professional aspirations were not as far-reaching as were my father's as he diligently pursued flag rank, single-minded in his intention to emulate his famous father. Certainly I would have been proud to achieve the feat myself, but I doubt I ever allowed myself to daydream about someday wearing an admiral's stars.

I had, by this time, begun to aspire to command. I didn't possess any particular notion of greatness, but I did hold strong notions of honor. And I worried that my deserved reputation for foolishness would make command of a squadron or a carrier, the pinnacle of a young pilot's aspiration, too grand an ambition for an obstreperous admiral's son, and my failure to reach command would dishonor me and my family.

Despite my concerns, I resolved to follow the conventional course to command. With the country at war, that course led to Vietnam. The best way to raise my profile as an aviator, perhaps the only way, was to achieve a creditable combat record. I was eager to begin.

More than professional considerations lay beneath my desire to go to war. Nearly all the men in my family had made their reputations at war. It was my family's pride. And the Naval Academy, with its celebration of martial valor, had penetrated enough of my defenses to recall me to that honor. I wanted to go Vietnam, and to keep faith with the family creed.

When I was a young boy, I would often sit quietly, unobserved, and listen to my father and his friends, who had gathered in our home for a cocktail or dinner party, reminisce about their wartime experiences. They talked about battles on sea and land, kamikaze attacks, depth-charge attacks, Marine landings on fiercely defended Pacific atolls, submerged battles between submarines, gun battles between ships of the line—all the drama and fury of war that most kids went to the movies to experience.

But the men in my house who spoke about war did so with an unstudied nonchalance, a style reserved for commanders who had long ago proved whatever martial virtues their egos required them to possess. They did not bluster or brag or swap war stories to impress each other. They talked about combat as they talked about other experiences in the service. They talked about the lessons of leadership they learned and how they could apply them to current situations.

They talked about how their commanding officers had performed in battle, who had been the most capable and steady leaders, and who had not measured up to the demands of their offices. It was evident in the way my father's friends talked about my father, especially those who had served on submarines with him, that they revered him as a fighting commander. They treated him differently, more respectfully, than they did one another. They often regaled a party with descriptions of my father biting down hard on an unlit cigar in the middle of a fight, unafraid and intensely focused on destroying the enemy.

They talked about how the men under my father's command had been affected by combat, and how my father had inspired their confidence in his leadership. They remembered how my father had quieted his crew's fear by making clear to them that he cared about them, respected them, and would show them the way to fight the Japanese without getting them all killed. They made military life seem more exciting and attractive to me.

They were proud veterans of an epic war, and they never felt the need to exaggerate their experiences. They took dramatic license only with stories about their days away from combat, when they were sent to distant, sometimes exotic, more often bleak refuges for a few weeks' respite from war. Midway Island loomed large in their personal folklore of war, and they seemed to take a curious pride in having endured its charmless environs, a pride they displayed more openly than their pride as conquerors of a formidable enemy. My father often sang to us, and sometimes quietly to himself, the ditty he had sung so often in war, “Beautiful Midway,” seeming to recall in its incantation some memorable irony of battle.

Beautiful, beautiful Midway,

Land where the gooney birds play.

We're proud of our predecessors,

Who kept the Japs at bay.

We live in the sand and skavole,

Down where the sea breezes blow.

There will always be a Midway,

The goddammdest place I know.

He also often recounted, with more humor than embarrassment, an occasion early in the war when he and my grandfather were both briefly on leave and had accepted my invitation to address the students at my grade school in Vallejo, California. Both men liked the idea of appearing before a group of admiring kids as father and son warriors and bringing tales of courage and adventure to impressionable schoolkids. My grandfather spoke first, my father in the front row watching him. He had become accustomed during the war to public speaking and had inspired a number of audiences with stories from the Solomon Islands campaign. He would bring them to their feet with tales about great naval battles; about the gallant Marines who held their ground and beat the Japanese in the enemy's preferred form of warfare, jungle fighting; and about his intrepid pilots at Henderson Field, who persevered through savage bombing and shelling.

This time, however, was different. The tender youth of his audience seemed to distract him, and rendered his usually robust delivery a little flat. His found it difficult to give his usual rousing call to arms, filled as it was with ridicule and scorn for the enemy, and laced extensively with profanity for punctuation and emphasis. He had always prided himself on his rough ways, as a man for whom salty language had always been a perfectly serviceable means of communication. Now he was knocked off his stride as he searched for ways to commend to a group of children their fathers' courage in language their mothers would approve.

My father watched his father's discomfort with obvious amusement, at times laughing out loud as the old sailor struggled to find some way to hold his audience's attention without resorting to impolite language. Further confounded by his son's delight in his dilemma, he abruptly ended his remarks without ever having hit his high notes. But his wit had not entirely deserted him. He concluded his speech by gesturing toward my father, who had expected to give the audience a riveting description of his battles beneath the sea. “Now, children, my son will sing ‘Beautiful Midway' for you,” my grandfather said as he grinned and winked at my father.

Crestfallen, my father did as he was instructed and sang to my schoolmates his favorite tune, but in a soft, low voice and with none of his usual enthusiasm. We all watched with puzzled looks on our faces. I perked up a little at the end when I thought I heard my father change the last line of the song from “the goddammdest place I know” to the “gosh-darnedest place I know.” After he finished, he hurried away, escorted by his grinning father, who clapped him on the back and complimented him on his performance.

My father never had to sit me down and explain the nature of an officer's life to me, to spell out the demands and expectations that came with the uniform. As the son of a professional officer, I had abundant opportunity to observe the long absences, hard work, and frequent upheavals that attended a military career. I knew firsthand the dominance the Navy's priorities held over family considerations.

But it was war, the great test of character, that made the prospect of joining my father's profession attractive, and I was very curious about my father's knowledge of it. I listened intently to every conversation about war that my father and his friends had in my presence. I admired them as they relaxed with drinks in hand, their thoughts turned again to the days when their dreams of adventure had become harshly real and the last attributes of their youth had been lost in the noise and gun smoke of battle. I hoped that I, too, would know days when I would learn that courage was finding the will to act despite the fear and chaos of battle.

One summer, on leave from the Academy, I went to see my father in his study in our house on Capitol Hill and asked him to tell me about his experiences in the Second World War. He set aside what he was reading and described in detail, but in a very businesslike manner, his war.