What did I do during my 6 years in the Navy? Not a lot, really. I was in from 11-85 to 11-91, and it was a different world back then. The Cold War was nearly over, but nobody knew that yet. The job of the US military at the time was less about "boots on the ground" and more about giving Ivan a case of insomnia.

I was on the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise (CVN 65) for my last 4 years. The first two were spent learning how not to break the ship (nuclear-powered, ya know, so if I broke something, hippies would cry, and nobody wanted that). Most of my time was spent doing little circles in the Indian Ocean. A carrier is pretty easy duty. If there was trouble, we'd stay pretty far away from it. As a floating airport, we sent the planes in to do all the blowing stuff up parts. The downside was that, if the Russians got seriously frisky, they'd probably skip the quaint little ship-to-ship battles that we had in WWII, and just pop a nuke overhead.

But aside from Mikhail threatening us with the Dr. Strangelove treatment, there were other duties to be done. In the 80's, the big focus was the Persian Gulf. Iran & Iraq were still having their little pissing contest. Since Iran had, in relative terms, only recently released the American hostages they were holding, we were more on Iraq's side.

Frankly, though, we didn't give a shit how many towelheads got greased. We were more concerned with the oil in the region. Those wacky Islamists had a bad habit of screwing with non-combatant oil tankers out of Kuwait, and this rather displeased us. So we sent US combat vessels to do a little escort duty, the theory being that no one would be stupid enough to screw with the Stars & Stripes.

Except they were. The Iranians were disposed to mining the Persian Gulf, and they didn't care if there was non-Iraqi collateral damage. Part of that damage was the USS Samuel B. Roberts.

We were not amused, and thus retaliated with Operation Praying Mantis.

Before OPM, the Iranians had 4 frigates in their navy. Afterwards, thanks to a little Enterprise airpower, they had two (well, 2.5, since one was still floating, although useless). After that bloody nose, they behaved themselves a little better, and oil continued to flow out of the Gulf uninterrupted.

By the time Saddam lost his mind and tried to adopt Kuwait in 1990, me & the Enterprise were sitting in the Virginia shipyards, looking to drop in a little fresh uranium, so I was stateside for Desert Shield/Desert Storm. I was still plenty nervous, though. I kept imagining that some truckload of explosive Muslims might try to drive through the security gate, but it never happened. And of course I had some concern that the "we're at war, so your contract has been extended" clause might kick in, but that didn't happen either, so I was discharged right on schedule.

So outside of helping arrange a conference between some lunatic Iranians and Davy Jones, my service was relatively uneventful. I was just a tiny link in the chain of the American habit of keeping the world's shipping lanes free from the depradations of pirates & murderers. Still, I had a small part in history, and I guess that's something to be proud of.

So now that my job is finished, I turn my thoughts to those good men and women whose jobs are not. There are pirates, murderers, and other things that go bump in the night that free people need to be protected from. And to all those with the courage to stand a post and walk the wall that separates liberty from chaos, I say thank you.

Posted by: Harvey at 09:49 AM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
Post contains 643 words, total size 4 kb.