I Never Saw...

We were in our bunks, sleeping soundly, when the door burst open with a crash. He stood there at the threshold for an instant, silhouetted against the outside light cast by a mercury vapor lamp. He swore something unintelligible at us, went to take a step, his right foot caught on the worn wood before moving barely an inch and down he went. I never saw a man fall so flat. His knees, stomach, chest, chin, nose and forehead all hit the sandy plywood floor at the same time. His arms remained motionless at his side as he toppled. It was like watching a statue fall. The eighth inch door sill was all it took to trip him up. I was on my left side, face to the door, and lifted my head. I could see the rest of my crew staring at him in the dim light streaming through the moist, tropical air of Diego Garcia.

All of us, Hot’n’tot, Low Boy, Wild Bill, Taipan, and me, Spice, threw back our scratchy, yellowed sheets and leapt to him. He had rolled over on his side and was brushing at his shoulder. Blood was boozing from his nose and the scrape on his forehead. He was trying to brush away the floor, unaware he had fallen. His cursing continued unabated, misdirected at the world in general. We picked John up gently and carried him to his bunk. We wiped his face with a damp cloth, set him on his side, he was all the time mumbling, placed the trash can at his head, from experience, and crept back to our bunks, trying to resurrect our sleep. The waves outside clapped the sand without pause…

The day had started with us rising at “oh-dark thirty” to attend our usual 3:00 AM preflight. We were VP-19 and completing our rotation on the “circuit”. The circuit consisted of flying from NAS Subic Bay, Philippines to Utapao AFB, Thailand, to NAS Diego Garcia, Indian Ocean, on to Bandar Abbas, Iran. We would spend anywhere from 2-hours to 2-weeks at any of these stations. When our mission was completed we reversed course, ending back at Subic, where we would stay for 2-3-weeks before departing on the circuit again. We arrived in the Philippines in December 1974 and left in May 1975, returning to NAS Moffet Field, California, our home base. We hunted submarines and tracked the world’s shipping as the cold war peaked in Vietnam and was now waning. The line had been drawn in the sand, the ideology of nations tested. The Shah’s power and influence over his own people had also peaked and was now waning, signs we had seen in-country but weren’t apparent, yet, in Washington, D.C. The undercurrent of Islamic fundamentalism was ebbing.

At 4:00 AM we filed out of our briefing and headed to our plane, a P-3B Orion, starting our equipment checks. As the dawn intensified and the stars began fading into the graying sky, it was my duty to check the wheel wells. Exiting the bright interior I would descend the ladder with my “Mickey Mouse” ears on, the auxiliary power unit screaming in the depleting night. This had quickly become one of my favorite responsibilities. Coconut crabs were fond of hiding in-between the tires and chocks. Five to seven of them could usually be found in-between each of the wing tires, and three to five in the smaller nose gear. I would pull the chocks, shine my flashlight and watch them scurry from their hiding to the sandy edge of the concrete apron. I fancied myself a crab wrangler, herding them en masse to their natural habitat. I was amazed to discover that, yes; they do walk sideways, pincers in the air, clicking, rising tall on their spindly legs, looking as vicious as they possibly could. I would flip them on their back with the toe of my flight boot, standing over them, their legs writhing in the air, till they righted themselves. It was one of my fondest diversions, better than harassing the hermit crabs on the beach in front of our plywooden barracks. Then back to the wheel wells to search for any strays that may have avoided detection or had crawled up into the bay. The warm morning breeze started to pick up as the red ribbon slowly passed overhead and the first rays beat back the dusk, the underbellies of the clouds deep into the horizon ablaze with color. The waves continued their clap…

By 6:00 AM we were wheels up and heading to our patrol station. We would spend 6-hours on station before returning to “Dodge”, always getting back around noon. Post-flight responsibilities and debriefing took 3-hours. At 3:00 in the afternoon we were in the duty truck speeding over the crushed coral road to our plywood homes on stilts, nestled in-between the palm trees, the white sand reflecting heat and light up from below. Because of our air crew status, we enjoyed having one of the few air-conditioned huts on the island, thanks to the Seabees. Our mail would follow us when we were on the circuit. We could go for weeks without a letter and then arrive at one of our destination points to find a sack of mail waiting for us, dropped off by another crew heading out. So it happened this day we each had a stack of letters to read, except John, he had one letter. We were busy reading our mail in the back of the open-air duty truck when I saw John wad up his green pastel letter and flip it out the back, watching it bounce and skitter off the road, litter by the wayside. Looking up from our letters we saw John sitting with his back to us. We went back to our reading after casting knowing glances to each other. When we jumped off the truck “downtown”, we headed to our hut, pealing off our flight suits to reveal our Diego Garcia shorts, our official off-duty uniform. All except John; he had gone directly to the Enlisted Club. We looked for him after the obligatory dip in the warm ocean water, searching the club, the beach, the ball field, and the mess. He was hiding. We gave up, respecting his privacy.

We didn’t see him until the door burst open that night, revealing a vulnerable, lonely, heartbroken ship-mate. He wavered on that threshold half a world away, and then stumbled in an alcohol-induced stupor, brought on by a letter from home that began, “Dear John...”