Faith of My Fathers

–– CHAPTER 9 –– Worst Rat

I was not quite two years old when my parents felt it necessary to instill in me a little self-restraint and my instruction in some of the colder realities of life began in earnest. During an otherwise tranquil early childhood, I had quite unexpectedly developed an outsized temper that I expressed in an unusual way. At the smallest provocation, I would go off in a mad frenzy, and then, suddenly, crash to the floor unconscious. Alarmed at this odd behavior and worried that I was suffering from a strange and possibly serious illness, my parents consulted a Navy physician for an explanation. The doctor assured them that the malady was not serious. It was self-induced. When I got angry I held my breath until I blacked out.

The doctor prescribed a treatment that seems a little severe by modern standards of child care. He instructed my parents to fill a bathtub with cold water whenever I commenced a tantrum, and when I appeared to be holding my breath to drop me, fully clothed, into it.

I do not recall at all these traumatic early encounters with the harsh consequences of my misbehavior, buried, as they must be, deep in my subconscious. But my mother assures me that they occurred, and went on for some time until I was finally “cured.” Whenever I worked myself into a tiny rage, my mother shouted to my father, “Get the water!” Moments later I would find myself thrashing, wide-eyed and gasping for breath, in a tub of icy-cold water. Eventually, I achieved a satisfactory (if only temporary) control over my emotions. And as a side benefit, the treatment apparently instilled in me an early reverence for the principle of equal justice under the law. After my first few experiences with the dreaded immersion therapy, I would shout, “Get the water! Get the water!” whenever my older sister, Sandy, momentarily lost control of her temper.

My mother often despaired over the quality of our education. When asked today how her children were educated she is apt to respond that we were “raised to be completely ignorant.”

The frequent relocations imposed on Navy families were the chief obstacle to a decent education. As soon as I had begun to settle into a school, my father would be reassigned, and I would find myself again a stranger in new surroundings forced to establish myself quickly in another social order. I was often required in a new school to study things I had already learned. Other times, the curriculum assumed knowledge I had not yet acquired.

Many of the base schools I attended were substandard institutions. Sometimes the school building was nothing more than a converted aircraft hangar. The classes mixed children of varying ages. We might have one teacher on Monday and a different one on Tuesday. On other days, we lacked the services of any teacher at all. My first purpose during my brief stay in these schools was to impress upon my classmates that I was not a person to suffer slights lightly. My second purpose was to prove myself as an athlete. When I was disciplined by my teachers, which happened regularly, it was often for fighting.

My parents worried a great deal about our irregular schooling. Once, when we were transferred to Long Beach, California, my father resolved to improve upon the educational circumstances to which we had grown accustomed. He drove to the rectory of a Catholic parish and pleaded with the monsignor to allow us to attend the parish school. He even offered to convert to Catholicism if that was necessary. The good monsignor admitted us without obliging my parents to abandon their church.

My mother’s complaint not withstanding, I enjoyed my early education. I enjoyed it for the very quality that caused my parents to despair—its informality. Until I was sent at fifteen to a boarding school, I relied on the members of my family to be my principal instructors. My mother assumed most of this responsibility, and she proved to be an imaginative and amusing educator.

Like wealthy parents who “finish” their children’s education with a tour of the European continent, my mother saw our frequent cross-country trips to join my father as an opportunity to supplement our irregular schooling. She was forever routing our journeys through locations that offered a site of historical significance or a notable institute of the arts or sciences.

When we passed through cities we searched for whatever the locals considered their most prominent attraction—art galleries, museums, churches, buildings designed by celebrated architects, natural phenomena, and the homes of historical figures. I recall being greatly impressed with Carlsbad Caverns, the Grand Canyon, the Petrified Forest, the high bluffs and Civil War history of Natchez, Mississippi, and the venerated shrines of American heroes, especially Washington’s Mount Vernon and Andrew Jackson’s Hermitage. They were all memorable events in my childhood, and I recall them today with gratitude.

We once spent a night in El Paso, Texas, so that my mother could take us across the border to Juárez, Mexico, the next day. She wanted us to see a cathedral that her father had taken her to see when she was a young girl; he had regaled her with stories of its difficult construction, how its enormous wooden beams had to be floated down the Colorado River. We arrived in Juárez to find the city much changed from my mother’s recollection of it. She could not locate the cathedral, which she said had dominated the town when she saw it last. We became lost, and when we found ourselves in a rough neighborhood where the men were all dressed in zoot suits, she sensibly called off the search and beat a hasty retreat for the border.

My mother went about these tours with her usual direct, enthusiastic approach to life and her extraordinary self-confidence. The difficulties we encountered en route seldom proved superior to her problem-solving skills. And when her children posed a problem to her progress, we too proved inferior to her resolve.

I earned my reputation as a “hell-raiser”—my mother’s term—in high school and at the Naval Academy. But, appropriately, it was in my mother’s mobile classroom that I gave the first indication that I was headed in a troubling direction. On an exhausting trip from Washington to Coronado, my mother had become exasperated with Sandy and me. We had been quarreling for hours on end. Reaching back from the front seat to throw a banana at me for making a smart-aleck reply to her most recent rebuke, she accidentally hit Sandy. When I laughed at her for missing her target, my mother grabbed the first object in reach, an empty aluminum thermos, and flung it at me, hitting me on the brow, knocking me temporarily mute, and denting the thermos.

Having now reached the end of her maternal patience, she resolved to hasten our arrival in Coronado. We diverted from our course so that we could stop in College Station, Texas. Upon arriving there, my mother located the dean of students at Texas A&M and appealed to him to help her find a student who was in need of transportation to California and would agree to travel with us and share the driving. We checked into a hotel that evening, and my mother wrote to my father to inform him that for the first time in my life I had been “a real pain in the neck.” Apparently she had forgotten by this time my brief period of defiance as a two-year-old, which had ended in complete surrender to parental authority. After the cold-water treatment had subdued my incipient rebelliousness, I possessed for the next ten years a rather meek disposition.

The next morning two students arrived to take my mother up on her offer. As the trip progressed, my mother charmed our new companions. One of them remarked how fortunate we were to have such an attractive and clever mother. The compliment was too much for me, as I was still angry over the previous day’s swift and unexpected punishment. Holding up the damaged thermos and pointing to my head, I replied, “Oh yeah, you think she’s so great. Look what she did to me.” My denunciation prompted gales of laughter from my mother. She laughed about it intermittently for most of the remainder of the trip, as did our new traveling companions. And she still laughs when reminded of the incident today.

I became my mother’s son. What I lacked of her charm and grace I made up for by emulating and exaggerating other of her characteristics. She was loquacious, and I was boisterous. Her exuberance became rowdiness in me. She taught me to find so much pleasure in life that misfortune could not rob me of the joy of living. She has an irrepressible spirit that yields to no adversity, and that part of her spirit she shared with us was as fine a gift as any mother ever gave her children. My father, as she will admit if asked, always came first with her. She loved him deeply, and made his life whole, mending as best she could the breaches in his life, the times when doubt and insecurity would cloud his sense of his destiny. Even today, many years after his death, my mother still keeps a card on which, after his passing, she wrote down a list of the things my father had found pleasure in, from his favorite meal to his favorite music, as well as a list of the things he had disliked. But although there was never any doubt about the primacy my father enjoyed in my mother’s affections, her heart has always been large enough to encompass her children with as much love and care as any mother’s child has ever enjoyed.

When I was young, similarities between my mother and me were more apparent than were those between my father and me. My father and I probably seemed in many respects, at least superficial ones, very different people. My keen-eyed brother in his observations on our family’s domestic life often remarked on our father’s and my contrasting dispositions in those long-ago days. We were, he thought, mirror opposites. My father was taciturn, while I was noisy. My father was shy, while I “loved working a crowd.” My father “was often quiet at the dinner table, while the rest of us raised hell, argued, until Dad would intervene—always on my mother’s behalf. John was either fiercely immersed in the squabble or the root cause of it.”

My father was a more learned man than his grades at the Naval Academy indicated. He taught physics at the Academy for two years and was regarded as an able instructor. He had many intellectual interests, but he especially loved history and English literature. An “outstanding command of the English language,” he often remarked, “will stand you in good stead as time moves on.” He was an avid reader of Toynbee and Spengler. He could recite great lengths of poetry from memory. He loved Edgar Allan Poe, Kipling, Dante, Tennyson, and Lewis Carroll. But his favorite poem was Oscar Wilde’s ode to the British Empire, “Ave Imperatrix,” which he quoted from at length in his lectures on seapower:

He was a great admirer of the British Empire, crediting it with keeping “a relative measure of peace” in the world for “someplace in the neighborhood of two centuries.”

He read and reread the biographies of historical figures whose lives, he felt, would always be an inspiration to others. “I heard some man make a statement one time not so long ago,” he once recalled of a popular futurist, “that reading the lives of great men was somewhat a waste of time because this was past history. Well, this is stupid on the face of it, because one of the real factors of life is what you learn from reading about the lives of great men, because there are certain fundamentals of human relationships that never change.”

Alfred Thayer Mahan, the great naval historian, author of the seminal work on the importance of naval expansion, The Influence of Sea Power upon History, was my father’s inspiration and his passion. He quoted from Mahan’s book often and at length, not only in his seapower lectures but to almost anyone he thought could profit from Mahan’s wisdom. He talked about Mahan to me quite often, during his occasional attempts to help steer me toward a successful naval career.

My paternal grandmother was a well-educated woman of gifted intellect and refined manner. She had been an instructor of Latin and Greek at the University of Mississippi, where she taught my grandfather. Bookish and eight years his senior, she won the devotion of the much coarser but widely read naval officer. Throughout their union, they indulged together their shared love of literature, reading aloud to each other whenever time allowed. That my father was well versed in the classics is undoubtedly a tribute to both his parents: his mother, the scholarly taskmaster; his father, the rough adventurer who in glamour resembled the fictional heroes who had enlivened the provincial world of his Mississippi childhood. Together they instilled in my father their love of literature and learning, encouraged his imagination, gave him responsibilities early in life, and fortified him with their values. As a schoolboy, he got in trouble once for telling his classmates a tall tale about having seen a bear on the way to school. His mother excused the lapse, remarking, “All little boys must have an imagination. Don’t worry, he’ll know about honesty and the truth.”

It was while I was in my grandmother’s care that I began to develop my own interest in literature. I spent the summer of 1946 with my widowed grandmother and her daughter, my Aunt Katherine, at their house in Coronado. My grandmother was a composed, straight-laced woman who kept a formal house. I still recall quite vividly their maid summoning me to tea and supper every day, at precisely four and seven, by ringing a bell. If I lingered too long at whatever activity I was preoccupied with and arrived a minute or two past the appointed hour, my grandmother would dismiss me very politely from her presence. She would observe that she had looked forward to dining with me, but as I had failed to arrive promptly, she would have to forgo the pleasure of my company until the next meal. She never yielded to any of the elaborate excuses I devised to coax her into allowing an exception to her daily routine.

The room I occupied in my grandmother’s house was furnished with my father’s boyhood belongings. It contained a substantial collection of the authors he had favored as a boy. I spent most of the summer reading one volume after another. Among the authors who most impressed me in that summer of unsupervised study were Mark Twain, Robert Louis Stevenson, James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Booth Tarkington. I was also taken with the tales of King Arthur’s court. These works instilled in me a lifelong love of reading. And, with their straightforward moral lessons, they reinforced my sense of right and wrong and impressed upon me the virtue of treating people fairly.

Among the Stevenson volumes was a collection of his poetry. It included the poem he wrote for his own epitaph, “Requiem.”

In his brief life, Stevenson had been quite an adventurer, wandering the continent of Europe, and later the Americas and the South Pacific. He had lived in the capitals of Europe, in the Adirondacks of upstate New York, and in Monterey, California. He spent the last years of his life in a house he had built in Western Samoa, a location as remote from the cold austerity of his native Scotland as could be imagined. He is buried there on a low hill overlooking the Pacific.

Stevenson is recalled in biographies as a restless, striving man. Crediting a tropical grave as the place “he longed to be” struck me as a brave declaration of self-determination. I thought the poem the perfect motto for all who lived a life according to their own lights, and a moving tribute to the lives of strong-willed, valorous men like my grandfather and father. I read it as an exhortation to “be your own man.” It influenced my childhood aspiration to find adventures, pursue each one avidly, and, when it had run its course, find another.

Like my father and grandfather, I lacked as a boy the physical size to appear imposing on first acquaintance. Together with the challenges of my transient childhood, my small stature motivated me to prove quickly to new schoolmates that I could stand up for myself. The quickest way to do so was to fight the first kid who provoked me.

Whether I won or lost those fights wasn’t as important as establishing myself as someone who could adapt to the challenges of a new environment without betraying apprehension. I foolishly believed that fighting, as well as challenging school authorities and ignoring school regulations, was indispensable to my self-esteem and helped me to form new friendships.

The repeated farewells to friends rank among the saddest regrets of a childhood constantly disrupted by the demands of my father’s career. I would arrive at a new school, go to considerable lengths to make new friends, and, shortly thereafter, be transplanted to a new town to begin the process all over again. Seldom if ever did I see again the friends I left behind. If you have never known any other life, these experiences seem a natural part of existence. You come to expect friendships to last but a short time. I believe this breeds in a child a desire to make the most of friendships while they last. The relationships make up with intensity what they lack in length. That’s one of the benefits of an itinerant childhood.

On the other hand, you never lose the expectation that friendships come and go and should not be expected to do otherwise. That fatalistic expectation is reinforced later in life when war imposes a sad finality on relationships grown extremely close under difficult conditions. Even when you are an adult, when passing time and changing circumstances separate you from old friends, their absence seems unremarkable and in accord with the normal course of things.

This is not to say that I value my friends less than other people value theirs. On the contrary, I have made friends with many people over the years, and whether I see them or not, whether they are still living or not, their friendship honored me, and honors me still. Many of my friendships exist only in memory. But they are memories I cherish for the lessons they taught me and the values they imparted to me, gifts that proved invaluable in later years.

At each new school I arrived eager to make, by means of my insolent attitude, new friends to compensate for the loss of others. At each new school I grew more determined to assert my crude individualism. At each new school I became a more unrepentant pain in the neck.

These are the attitudes I brought to Episcopal High School in Alexandria, Virginia, when I enrolled there, Class of ’54. My parents had resolved to put an end to our haphazard education and arranged for my sister, my brother, and me to attend private boarding schools. I was sent to Episcopal to prepare for my unavoidable appointment to the United States Naval Academy three years later.

I liked EHS more than I liked my previous schools. No doubt my memory of it has softened over time as it became mixed with nostalgia for the pleasurable vanities of youth—vanities that the Naval Academy worked hard to suppress in its resolve to make a man of me. I did not at first acquaintance recognize Episcopal and its antique traditions as hospitable. Unlike my classmates, I arrived without any allegiance to those traditions, having had no share of them in my roving childhood. The traditions in which I was raised were peculiar to military families, and the dimensions of my small Navy world had mapped the limits of experience for most of my earliest friends.

When I entered Episcopal I encountered another small world, but one so unfamiliar to me that I thought it exotic. The Episcopal High School Class of 1954 was all male and all white. But more than the racial bigotry and gender segregation of the times distinguished the class from the rest of our generation. Most of the students came from families who lived south of the Mason-Dixon line and east of the Mississippi River, and their fathers, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers had preceded them at the school. Almost all were sons of wealthy men. None but me were sons of professional officers in the armed services.

The Navy has, of course, its own aristocracy, but not one that seemed to me as exclusive, mannered, and fixed as the aristocracy from which EHS drew its ranks. Most of my classmates were so settled in their society that they had an air of serenity uncommon in the young. They were not snobs. But they had envisaged the whole of their futures before they came to EHS, and what they had foreseen was so pleasant an existence that the certainty of it made them very self-assured young men.

After graduation, about half of my class would enroll in the University of Virginia, an arcadia of genteel Southern learning. The other half would venture north to one or another Ivy League school where wealthy children from North and South mixed and the friction of differing regional cultures was eased by their common appreciation for refined living. When they had completed their education, many of my classmates returned to their families and settled into careers in their fathers’ businesses, law firms, and medical practices.

I, too, had a clear sense of how my life would unfold after I left Episcopal. I, too, was destined to join my father’s business. But I knew my life would diverge from those of my classmates as sharply as my childhood had differed from theirs. I was on leave from the Navy while I attended high school. And the Navy expected me to return when I graduated.

I cannot recall any other student at EHS who expected to enter military service. Some would be drafted into the Army. I am sure they accepted that responsibility without complaint, and served honorably. But no one in the Class of ’54 except me anticipated a career in the armed forces.

The most pervasive military influence at the school was the heroic legends taken from the annals of Civil War history. More precisely, they were the stories of Confederate heroes. There is a memorial at the school that commemorates those students who were among the fallen in the Civil War. It’s a long list. You would be hard-pressed to find among those honored dead the name of anyone who gave his last full measure of devotion to the Union. More Episcopal graduates died in the Civil War than in any subsequent war in our nation’s history.

EHS gave me a sense of what life could be like were I somehow to elude a Navy career. On a school holiday, some friends and I visited Princeton University. Long afterward, I would daydream about enrolling at Princeton, joining one of its stately eating clubs, and sharing in the romance of a place that seemed to me to offer equal parts of scholastic excellence and gracious leisure. But I was never so enthralled by the attraction of such a life that I deluded myself into sincerely believing it would be mine. I was bound for the Naval Academy, and while I seldom discussed with my high school friends the fate that awaited me, I knew that were we ever to meet again, they would find me in uniform.

My father never ordered me to attend the Naval Academy. Although I am sure we must have talked about it from time to time, I cannot recall the conversations. There are no scenes in my memory of sitting in my father’s study listening to him expound on the virtues of an Academy education, or explain the reasons why I must follow him to Annapolis as he had followed his father. Neither do I recall any arguments with my parents about my wanting to consider an alternative future. I remember simply recognizing my eventual enrollment at the Academy as an immutable fact of life, and accepting it without comment.

I remember my parents frequently commenting on it to their friends. “He’s going to the Naval Academy,” they would casually remark, not with the evident satisfaction one derives from a welcome discovery of a child’s potential, but as if they were discussing an inheritance that had been marked for my eventual possession. It was as if they were saying, “Someday this house will be Johnny’s”—which, in a way, was what they meant.

My father and grandfather believed they had discovered the perfect life for a man. To them, the Navy was the most accommodating profession for good men who craved adventure. They never imagined possessing a greater treasure than a life at sea, and they regarded it as a legacy they were proud to bestow on their descendants, who, they assumed, would be appropriately grateful.

EHS offered me more than a glimpse at a different culture. It shared certain aspects of service academies. Life there was regimented. Jackets and ties were worn at all times. Students attended chapel every morning. On Sundays, we held morning services at the church on Seminary Hill and evening services at the chapel. The academics were superb and serious. But athletics were accorded equal importance in our education. Classes were held in the morning, including Saturday morning. We broke for lunch at twelve-thirty. The afternoons were devoted to athletic training.

Demerits were handed out for every infraction, large and small, of school regulations, and I piled them up. I was chronically late for class. I kept my room in a near permanent state of disorder and filth. I mocked the dress code by wearing a ratty old jacket and tie with a pair of infrequently laundered Levi’s. And I despised and resisted the caste system that first-year students were obliged to endure with good humor.

EHS was not a military academy, but it borrowed a few traditions from Southern service academies. Like the Virginia Military Institute and the Citadel, Episcopal imposed on first-year students the designation “rats.” Rats were expected to submit to a comparatively mild form of hazing. Mild or not, I resented the hell out of it. And my resentment, along with my affected disregard for rules and school authorities, soon earned me the distinction of “worst rat.”

My hazing increased to correspond to the disrespect with which I treated school customs, and my ever-lengthening catalog of demerits was addressed with ever-longer punishments. But neither my offenses nor their consequences were so serious that they caused a permanent estrangement to develop between me and the staid society that I imposed upon.

My initial entry into EHS society was rough. I was one of the smaller boys in my class, a fact that upperclassmen, annoyed by my obdurate refusal to show a rat’s humility, took to be further evidence of arrogance on my part, or arrogance that was all the more insufferable to them because neither social connections nor physical stature justified it. Despite my Confederate ancestors and my family’s Southern origins, my heritage was perceived as rootless and not particularly distinguished—a perception confirmed by my conspicuous lack of a Southern accent.

These circumstances might have made for a lonely three years, but I managed to make friends and find a place for myself without pretending to share in the culture from which EHS students were drawn. I was good at sports, and athletics were my passage through my difficult first weeks at the school. I played football in the fall. I wrestled in the winter. I played tennis in the spring. I wasn’t an exceptional athlete, but I was good enough to earn the respect of my teammates and coaches.

Eventually, I would use my reputation both as a credible athlete and as a troublemaker to earn a modest distinction as a leader of sorts at Episcopal—a leader of a few troublemakers, but a leader nonetheless. I was part of a small cadre of students who satisfied our juvenile sense of adventure by frequently sneaking off-campus at night to catch a bus for downtown Washington, and the bars and burlesque houses on 9th Street.

Our exploits there were tame compared to my more reckless conduct at the Naval Academy. But because we exaggerated them for the benefit of our rule-abiding classmates we were granted some prestige for our daring, and for the welcome fallacy that our excursions were somehow leading us to romantic opportunities that were only imagined in our all-male society.

The school hosted two dances a year, and for most students these were the only opportunities during the school year to enjoy the company of girls. To give the impression that you were regularly pursuing liaisons outside the school’s walls with women you were unlikely to meet at a school dance was a sure route to notoriety on campus. That the impression was, for the most part, contrived did not overly concern us. We deluded ourselves into believing the most salacious rumors about our behavior.

I had good friends at Episcopal. Memory often accords our high school years the distinction of being among the happiest, most relaxed of our lives. I remember Episcopal in that light, and the friendships I formed there make up the better parts of my remembrance. But there was one unexpected friendship that enriched my life at EHS beyond measure.

Were William B. Ravenel the only person I remember from high school, I would credit those days as among the best of my life. His influence over my life, while perhaps not apparent to most who have observed its progress, was more important and more benevolent than that of any other person save members of my family.

Mr. Ravenel headed the English department at EHS, and he coached the junior varsity football team, on which I played. He had been a star running back at Davidson College and had a master’s degree in English from Duke University. Stocky and compact, he still had the appearance and manner of an athlete but without the callowness that often marks men who live in the shadow of their long-ago successes on the playing field.

Like most men of his generation, Mr. Ravenel had known far greater danger than that posed by a tough defensive line. He had served in Patton’s tank corps during the Third Army’s aggressive advance across Europe and had survived its hard encounters with Hitler’s panzer divisions. He was a lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserve, the only master at the school who still served in the military.

With his craggy face and athlete’s build, he was a rugged-looking man. He seemed to his students to be as wise and capable as any man could expect to be. He loved English literature, and he taught us to love it as well. He had a way of communicating with his students that was uniquely effective and personal. He made us appreciate how profound were the emotions that animated the characters of Shakespeare’s tragedies. Macbeth and Hamlet, in his care, were as compelling and revealing to boys as they are to the most learned and insightful scholar. He wasn’t Mr. Chips, but he was as close to that ideal teacher as anyone is ever likely to find. No other master had half as much of our respect and affection. My class dedicated our senior yearbook to him. He was, simply, the best man at the school; one of the best men I have ever known.

Demerits required the offender to march ceaselessly around the long circle drive in the front of the school or to tend the yard of a master’s house. It was my good fortune to have received for my many transgressions assignment to work in Mr. Ravenel’s yard. Perhaps the school authorities knew they were doing me a favor—knew that Mr. Ravenel was best able to repair the all too evident flaws in my character.

I don’t know if it was their benevolence or providence that brought me to his attention. Neither do I understand why it was that Mr. Ravenel took such an interest in me, seeing in me something that few others did. But that he did take an interest in me was apparent to all. And as he personified the ideal of every student, Mr. Ravenel’s regard for me signaled my classmates that I had some merit despite the fact that they and I had to strain to see it.

I discussed all manner of subjects with him, from sports to the stories of Somerset Maugham, from his combat experiences to my future. He was one of the few people at school to whom I confided that I was bound for the Academy and a Navy career, and to whom I confessed my reservations about my destiny.

In the fall of my senior year, a member of the junior varsity football team had broken training and been found out. I cannot recall the exact nature of the offense, but it was serious enough to merit his expulsion from the team. Mr. Ravenel called a team meeting, and most of the players argued that the accused be dropped from the team. I stood and offered the only argument for a less severe punishment.

The student in question had, in fact, broken training. But unlike the rest of us, he had chosen at the start of the year not to sign a pledge promising to abide by the training rules faithfully. Had he signed the pledge, he would have been expelled from school, because violating the pledge constituted an honor offense. Had he signed it, I wouldn’t have defended him. But he had not. Moreover, he had not been caught breaking training, but had confessed the offense and expressed his remorse freely, without fear of discovery. I thought his behavior was no less honorable than that of a student who signed the pledge and adhered to its provisions.

So did Mr. Ravenel. But he kept his own counsel for most of our discussion, preferring, as was his way, to let his boys reason the thing out for ourselves.

At the start, most of my teammates wanted to hang the guy. But I argued that he had made a mistake that he sincerely regretted, and, uncoerced, had admitted the infraction. His behavior warranted no further disciplinary action. As I talked, I noticed Mr. Ravenel nodding his head. When some of the other guys started to come around to my point of view, Mr. Ravenel closed the discussion by voicing support for my judgment. The team then voted to drop the matter.

After the meeting broke up, Mr. Ravenel approached me and shook my hand. With relief evident in his voice, he told me we had done the right thing, and thanked me for my efforts. He allowed that before the meeting he had been anxious about its outcome. He had hoped the matter would be resolved as it had been, but was uncertain it would. Still, he had not wanted to be the one who argued for exoneration; he wanted the decision to be ours and not his. He said he was proud of me.

I have never forgotten the confidence his praise gave me. Nor have I ever forgotten the man who praised me. Many years later, when I came home from Vietnam, Mr. Ravenel was the only person outside of my family whom I wanted to see. I felt he was someone to whom I could explain what had happened to me, and who would understand. That is a high tribute to Mr. Ravenel. For I have never met a prisoner of war who felt he could explain the experience to anyone who had not shared it.

I regret that I was never able to pay him that tribute. Mr. Ravenel had died of a heart attack two years before my release. He lived for only fifty-three years. His early death was a great loss to his family, friends, and students, and to everyone who had been blessed with his company; a loss I found difficult to accept.

I was often accused of being an indifferent student, and given some of my grades, I can appreciate the charity in that remark. But I was not so much indifferent as selective. I liked English and history, and I usually did well in those classes. I was less interested and less successful in math and science. My grades at Episcopal were divided along those lines. Overall, my academic record there could be fairly described as undistinguished, but acceptable. I graduated a member in adequate if not good standing of the Class of 1954. One of my closest friends at the school, Rives Richey, said later, “If they’d rated everybody in the class for likely to succeed, I guarantee you he’d have been in the bottom ten, without any question.”

A few months prior to graduation, I had taken the Naval Academy entrance exams. I had applied myself, after having been enrolled by my father in a course at an Academy preparatory school, and did surprisingly well, even on the math exam. At graduation there was no longer even the slightest doubt that I would follow my father and grandfather to Annapolis. And on June 28, after a short vacation with some friends at Virginia Beach, my father drove me to the Academy to begin my plebe summer.

In those days an officer escorting his son to the Naval Academy was thought to be an event charged with symbolic importance, a solemn rite of passage. Yet I don’t remember it so. I had so long expected the day, so often envisioned the drive, that the actual event seemed more familiar than remarkable. I remember being nervous, and my father offering me typical words of encouragement. But nothing occurred in that one-hour trip that affected my long-held paradoxical image of the Academy, a place I belonged at but dreaded.

–– CHAPTER 10 –– Plebe

To my surprise, I liked it at first. I liked almost every minute of it until that time when my education at the Naval Academy began in earnest. I liked it until plebe summer concluded with the return of the upperclassmen from their vacations, eager to commence their campaign to humiliate, degrade, and make miserable me and every other plebe they encountered.

During plebe summer, Academy life had been sort of a highly organized camp: sports, pleasant company, and, compared to what awaited us after Labor Day, rather benign leadership from the few upperclassmen and junior officers who supervised us. I made friends easily. I boxed, wrestled, ran the obstacle course, and marched in formation. I did well enough in all of these activities that I briefly showed an enthusiasm for the place that my superiors mistook for an indication that I was an emerging class leader. They made me a company commander that summer. It was one of the very few occasions when I distinguished myself in a positive way at the Academy.

Coming out of plebe summer, I had, in Academy parlance, good grease, which meant I showed a natural aptitude for the service and possessed embryonic leadership qualities. The grease would last about a week past summer’s end. For a short time in my last year at the Academy, I would again possess good grease. But that was to be an anomaly in a long history of transgressions and improprieties.

The Academy that welcomed the Class of ’58 was essentially unchanged from the days of my father’s and grandfather’s classes. The Academy prided itself on the continuity of its traditions, linking tomorrow’s officers with the heroes of an honored past. It wasn’t until the 1970s that the Academy, at the prodding of the influential Admiral Rickover, agreed to substantive changes in its core curriculum and even some of its more venerable customs.

When I arrived there, the Reina Mercedes, where my father had been obliged to reside his last year, was still visible in the Yard. The curriculum was the same. There were no electives. Everyone took the same courses, which included a good number of rather outdated offerings such as a stupefyingly dull class in Navy boilers, the purpose of which was lost on midshipmen living in the nuclear age.

Every plebe was issued a copy of Reef Points, a book of Navy legends and maxims that plebes were expected to quickly memorize. The first passage I was expected to commit to memory, as it had been expected of my father and grandfather, was John Paul Jones’s “Qualifications of the Naval Officer”:

In this well-ordered, timeless world, with its lofty aspirations and grim determination to make leaders and gentlemen of schoolboys, plebes who possessed minor eccentricities might be tolerated somewhat, but arrogant nonconformists encountered open hostility. Recognized as belonging in the latter category, I soon found myself in conflict with the Academy’s authorities and traditions. Instead of beginning a crash course in self-improvement so that I could find a respectable place in the ranks, I reverted to form and embarked on a four-year course of insubordination and rebellion.

Once the second and first classes returned, the unexpected happiness I had experienced in my first weeks at Annapolis rapidly disappeared in the strain of surviving the organized torment that is plebe year. From that moment on, I hated the place, and, in fairness, the place wasn’t all that fond of me, either.

Now, more than forty years after my graduation from the Naval Academy, I understand the premise that supported the harsh treatment of plebes. I may have even grasped it at the time I experienced it, but was simply reluctant to accept its consequences personally. Service academies are not just colleges with a uniform dress code. Their purpose is to prepare you for one profession alone, and that profession’s ultimate aspiration is a combat command. The Academy experience is intended to determine whether you are fit for such work, and if you are, to mold your natural ability into the attributes of a capable officer. If you aren’t, the Academy wants to discover your inaptitude as quickly as possible. The period of discovery is your plebe year, when you are subjected to as much stress as the law and a civilized society will allow. The agents of the Academy’s will are the upperclassmen, most of whom relish the assignment.

One-quarter of the plebes who entered the Academy with me had decided or were told to find another line of work by the time our class graduated. Most of them left during our plebe year, unable to cope with the pressures, having failed to lose their individuality in the corporate identity. Upperclassmen had driven them out.

Of course, nothing in peacetime can replicate the dire experiences of war. But the Academy gives it a hell of a try. The workload imposed on you by instructors is daunting but by itself is probably not enough to break all but the least determined plebe. It is the physical and mental hazing by upperclassmen that makes the strain of plebe year so excruciating. It seems mindless and unrelenting.

We were expected to brace up, sit or stand at rigid attention with our chins tucked into our neck, whenever upperclassmen came into view. Our physical appearance was expected to conform to a code with rules so numerous, esoteric, and pointless that I thought them absurd. We were commanded to perform dozens of menial tasks a day, each one intended to be more demeaning than the last, and made all the more so by the heap of verbal abuse that would accompany it. We were ordered to supply encyclopedias of obscure information to any silly son of a bitch who asked a question. When we did not know an answer, which, of course, our interrogators hoped would be the case, we were made to suffer some further humiliation as punishment for our ignorance.

As bad as my plebe year seemed, it was a considerably more civilized experience than it had been for my grandfather and father. My father, who was two years younger and much smaller than I when he entered the Academy, had been hazed cruelly and suffered much worse treatment than that which awaited me twenty-seven years later. But he accepted his trial with better humor and more courage than would I. Even as a boy, my father exhibited a fierce resolve to prove himself the equal of any man.

Rear Admiral Kemp Tolley, who was an upperclassman at the Academy when my father was a plebe, described the merciless treatment accorded my father by Tolley’s roommate. He explained the “preferred method” used by “sadistically inclined” midshipmen to punish plebes—a broom with its bristles cut to just below its stitching. “A man pulled that thing back as hard as he could, like a baseball bat, and whacked you with it when you were bent over. The first time it hit you, you just couldn’t believe that a broom could do that. It jolted your backside right through the top of your head.”

Kemp had a roommate, “one of these sadists,” who delighted in using the broom on my father whenever my father was unable to recite one or another of the “utterly useless things” a plebe was supposed to have memorized, things like the day’s lunch menu or the names of various British battleships. As pictured in Kemp’s account, my father was a pathetic physical specimen, a “little runt” who “looked like a wretched little animal that had just got out of the water with its fur still wet.” But he compensated for his lack of stature with extraordinary courage. “In order to protect himself,” Kemp said, “he was tougher than hell.

“[O]ld Jack would bend over, and my roommate would hit him—three or four or five times. Then he would say, ‘Do you want another one? Are you going to learn it the next time?’

“And Jack would say, ‘Hit me again, sir. I can take it.’ And he would tell him that until my roommate would give up, even though tears were coming out of his eyes. That was the kind of guy he was. Jack McCain was not, in my personal opinion, one of the brightest naval officers that ever lived, but he certainly was one of the guttiest.”

The practices of plebe year described in Admiral Tolley’s account of my father’s ordeal exceed the severity of my experience, but I despised my upperclass tormentors nonetheless. And although I lacked my father’s courage, I tried in my own way not to yield my dignity to their abuse.

It was a trying time. That was the point, of course. Though I may now understand the purpose of that punishing year, even grant the necessity of learning to tolerate the barely tolerable, I nevertheless hated every minute of it. And I resented everyone who inflicted it on me. I dislike even the memory of it. But, like most graduates of the Academy, my hate for the experience does not constitute regret. It rests in memory, paradoxically, with my appreciation, gratitude really, for the privilege of surviving it, and for the honor of that accomplishment.

At moments of great stress, your senses are at their most acute; your mind works at a greatly accelerated pace. That’s the purpose, I take it, of plebe year—not simply to test your endurance, but to show that you can function exceptionally well, as a leader must function, in concentrated misery. I began to glimpse this truth about midway through my plebe year when added to contempt for imperious upperclassmen was my burgeoning pride in not succumbing to their design to see me bilge out.

I resisted not by refusing the hazing but by letting my resentment show, and by failing to conform fully to the convention of a squared-away midshipman. I tried to balance my insolence on just the other side of intolerable, but I worked hard to expose a trace of my resistance. I wanted the lords of the first and second class to know my compliance was grudging and in no way implied my respect for them. I did not accept that they were entitled to my deference, as Academy custom held, for the minor accomplishment of having lived for a year or two longer than I had. Nor did I accept that the abuse they had suffered in their plebe year now gave them the moral authority to abuse me. The Academy granted them that authority, and I wanted to remain at the Academy. I did not want to break. So I suffered their tyranny to the extent necessary to avoid bilging out. But no more than that.

A civilian observer might have judged my appearance to be as neat as that of any other midshipman, but by the exacting standards of the Academy I was a slob. My roommates and I kept our personal quarters in less than acceptable order. My ritual obedience to an upperclassman’s commands was perfunctory, or, at least, I hoped there was something in my manner that gave the impression that I lacked proper enthusiasm for the task. These are small rebellions, to be sure. But they were noted, and I was pleased that they were.

One second classman in particular tested my self-control, and I had a hard time suppressing the urge to respond to his assaults on my dignity in a way that would have hastened my departure from the Academy.

Henry Witt (false name) was the son of a chief petty officer. I was a captain’s son. Witt never tired of reminding me that our respective stations at the Academy reversed the order of our fathers’ relationship in the Navy. “My father is a chief, and yours is a captain. Isn’t that strange, McCain,” he observed as I discharged the commission he had given me at the start of the year. He had instructed me to enter his room every morning at five-thirty, close the window he left open at night, turn up his radiator, and perform various other small tasks to make comfortable the advent of his day.

There was in Witt’s edgy hostility resentment not evident in the affected disdain upperclassmen typically held for plebes. He had a bitterness about him that apparently stemmed from an imagined injustice. Perhaps he admired his father very much, and resented the officers whom his father was obliged to obey, thinking them lesser men, and perceiving in the exercise of their authority a self-importance that demeaned his father’s dignity. Maybe he had felt ill at ease his plebe year among so many officers’ sons, and his insecurity had embittered him. Or he might have just been a jerk who enjoyed humiliating people.

I never learned what experience lay at the heart of Witt’s contempt for me, but whatever it was, I hated its expression like hell, because I believed it implied an assumption that my grandfather and father were the kind of shallow officers who let rank determine their regard for sailors. They were not that kind of officer. They took great care with their men. They often put more faith in the judgment of their chiefs than in that of their fellow officers. They were fair judges of character, good commanders who measured their respect for a man according to his merit and not his station. And had they ever seen me locate my self-regard in class distinctions, they would have quickly expressed their disappointment in me.

Witt did not know my father or grandfather, and he should not have assumed anything about their character. Nor, for that matter, should he have assumed anything about mine. Also implicit in his scorn was an assumption that he had merited his appointment to the Academy, while I was merely the Navy’s version of a fraternity legacy. Had my father and grandfather been accountants, it is unlikely I would have sought appointment to the Academy. But it was their example, and my father’s expectation, that led me there, not their influence in the Navy. I had passed the same exams as Witt had.

I disliked him intensely, as did my friends. “Shitty Witty the Middy,” we called him, and behind his back we ridiculed his pretensions, which was, he probably assumed, exactly how we would have reacted had he treated us decently.

The following year, Witt’s last at the Academy, my friends and I, still resentful of his mistreatment of us during plebe year, seized opportunities to avenge our injured pride. The reprisals amounted to nothing serious, small inconveniences really. But we felt they balanced the book with Witt, and recovered whatever degree of our self-respect had been a casualty in the previous year’s encounters with him.

After graduation, the second most anticipated event of a midshipman’s last year at the Academy was the first class’s training cruise. In June, eager midshipmen would embark, sometimes in barely seaworthy ships, for a six-week cruise to exotic ports. During the cruise, it was presumed, they would learn the essentials of life at sea, though often they only acquired a taste for the excesses of leave in foreign ports.

Every midshipman was assigned a cruise box to stow his gear in during the summer cruise. At graduation, the box was sent to his first duty station. My friends and I got hold of Witt’s cruise box and changed the address to a fraternity at an Ivy League school, where it arrived some days later, never to be recovered by its puzzled owner.

It’s hard to credit our trivial revenge on Witt as anything more than the sort of puerile mischief that kids often aggrandize as acts of justice. We took the pranks more seriously than their effects warranted, just as I accorded far more gravity to Witt’s assaults on my dignity than they warranted. Had I really possessed the sturdy sense of honor I prided myself on, I would have suffered his harassment with equanimity.

I made this observation only a few years after my first encounter with Witt, when I learned he had been killed. He was serving as a flight instructor at a naval air station in the South and had flown his T-28 to the town where his father had retired from the Navy. As he flew in front of his parents’ house and unwisely attempted a dangerous maneuver, he lost control of his plane and crashed while his parents watched.

Considering all the adversity that a human being confronts in a lifetime, what had passed between Witt and me was nothing. I was embarrassed that I had taken his abuse so seriously. My animosity dissolved into regret after I learned of his death. I assumed his death had been caused by an impulse to impress his father. It was an impulse a great many other midshipmen and I understood.

–– CHAPTER 11 –– Low Grease

Although my friends and I seethed at the treatment we received from upperclassmen, our main nemesis was our company officer, Captain Ben Hart (false name), a red-faced, muscular, bullnecked Marine who had played on the Academy football team some years earlier. His father was a Marine colonel, and Captain Hart had been raised to revere the protocols of command.

He was probably in his late twenties when we knew him, although he seemed much older to us. He was tightly wound, the kind of guy who never appeared relaxed. I don’t think he possessed even an anemic sense of humor. It was hard to imagine him out of uniform. He was a stickler for rules and regulations and exhibited the overeagerness of a junior officer trying too hard to allay his own insecurities. Every day when his wife dropped him off at work, he bade her goodbye with a crisp salute while standing at attention.

Hart wasn’t highly regarded by the other officers at the Academy, but he was fiercely determined to command respect from his subordinates. He intended to bring any miscreant in his company quickly to heel. I was one of the miscreants he had in mind.

A group of midshipmen who shared a common conceit that we were rebels against the established order had formed a small club and anointed ourselves the Bad Bunch. My roommates Frank Gamboa, Jack Dittrick, and I were the chief instigators of the group’s mischief, but membership often included a few conspicuously squared-away midshipmen. Chuck Larson, one of my best friends at the Academy, was a member who joined in many of our misadventures. In the fall semester of our last year, he was selected brigade commander, the top leadership post for midshipmen, and president of our class. He went on to a spectacularly successful career in the Navy, wearing four stars as Commander in Chief, Pacific (my father’s last command), and as Superintendent of the Naval Academy.

Our exploits were well known to most midshipmen, as well as to Academy authorities. We were hardly as daring as we regarded ourselves, but we managed to defy most of the rules without committing any breach of the honor code. We were in search of a good time, which led us over the Academy walls on many an evening.

Nothing serious ever occurred in our nightly revels outside the Yard. Mainly we drank a lot of beer, occasionally we got in fights, and once in a while we found girls willing to give us the time of day. However, most of our activities were proscribed by the Academy, and the fact that we were never caught in the act only intensified the anger of our superiors. It drove Captain Hart crazy.

Failing to apprehend us in the commission of a serious offense, but aware of the notoriety we enjoyed in our class, Captain Hart scrupulously called us to account for smaller infractions of Academy regulations and punished us more severely than required. By so doing, he hoped to prove to the rest of our company that we had not escaped justice for our more egregious threats to the brigade’s good order and discipline. I spent the bulk of my free time being made an example of, marching many miles of extra duty for poor grades, tardiness, messy quarters, slovenly appearance, sarcasm, and multiple other violations of Academy standards.

My reputation as a rowdy and impetuous young man was not, I am embarrassed to confess, confined to Academy circles. Many upstanding residents of lovely Annapolis, witnesses to some of our more extravagant acts of insubordination, disapproved of me as thoroughly as did many Academy officials. Neither did I often find more appreciative audiences on the road.

During my second year at the Academy, I met and began dating a girl from a Main Line suburb of Philadelphia. The following summer, she called me at my parents’ house on Capitol Hill, where I was spending my leave, and invited me to visit her family for a few days. I instantly accepted the invitation, grateful for a little relief from what had been a pretty monotonous leave.

On the agreed-upon day, I bade good-bye to my parents for the weekend and departed Washington’s Union Station on the train to Philadelphia. Some hours later, I arrived at Philadelphia’s 30th Street Station, where I was supposed to catch the next commuter train for her town. I had a few minutes to kill before my train left, so I decided to have a quick beer in the station’s bar.

As I settled on a bar stool, dressed in my white midshipman’s uniform, I drew the attention of several friendly, inebriated commuters, who graciously offered to buy me a beer. I welcomed the offer and their company. We chatted amiably as I, eager to be on my way, quickly drained my glass. Not wishing to appear discourteous, however, I cheerfully consented when they pressed me to accept another drink, and several others after that.

I missed the first train, and then two others, before I politely refused my new friends’ entreaties to continue drinking and made my way unsteadily through the station to catch the last train of the evening that would carry me to my girlfriend’s hometown. After arriving there, I hailed a cab, and finally I arrived, several hours behind schedule, at my destination.

As I ascended the long staircase that led to the front door of her house I was aware that I was probably not in ideal condition to be introduced for the first time to her family. Nevertheless, I believed I could manage the task without betraying the extent of my insobriety.

At the top of the stairs, I noticed that the front door was open. Knocking on the screen door, I was beckoned inside as my girlfriend and her mother and father rose from their chairs to greet me. When I reached for the door handle, I lost my balance and fell through the screen and into a heap on the floor of the entry hall. My startled hosts helped me to my feet, and after I spent a few moments dusting myself off and clumsily straightening my uniform, they led me into the living room.

My unorthodox entry must have aroused her father’s suspicions that I was perhaps not the suitable escort for their daughter they had expected the United States Naval Academy to provide. I cannot recall much of the conversation that ensued in their warm and brightly lighted living room. Whatever I said, and the manner in which I said it, apparently confirmed my host’s suspicions. After little more than a quarter hour of their hospitality, he abruptly thanked me for paying them a visit and wished me a safe journey home.

I took this gesture as an indication that my weekend visit was to be substantially abbreviated. Politely, I asked if someone would be kind enough to call me a cab, and a few minutes later I was on my way back to Philadelphia to catch a late train for Washington.

When I arrived in the early morning of the next day, my surprised mother greeted me with: “What happened? I thought you were going away for the weekend.”

“Mother, I don’t want to talk about it,” I replied sullenly, and headed for my room, and a few hours’ sleep.

I never saw the girl or her family again.

A combination of academic performance and grease grade determined a midshipman’s class standing. The company officer assigned your grease grade. Hart considered my aptitude for the service to be the poorest in the company. In fact, by Hart’s reckoning I possessed no aptitude at all. He never failed to give me the low grease, which, combined with my spotty academic record, always kept me somewhere near the very bottom of the class standings.

I must take most of the responsibility for my poor relationship with my company officer. We were a poor match from the start: Hart was a meticulous, by-the-book junior officer who was unfailingly deferential to his superiors, and I was an arrogant, undisciplined, insolent midshipman who felt it necessary to prove my mettle by challenging his authority. In short, I acted like a jerk, and gave Hart good cause to despise me.

The encounter that set the stage for our four years of discord occurred early in my plebe year. My roommates and I had returned to our room late one morning to find my bed (or “rack,” in Academy jargon) unmade, the sheets and cover balled up in the center of the mattress. That was not the condition I had left it in when earlier that morning I had gone to my first class. I might not have been scrupulous about obeying many Academy regulations, but I usually managed to make my bed in the morning. Apparently, Captain Hart considered the manner in which I performed this morning ritual to be below Academy standards, and had stripped my bed to show his dissatisfaction.

I don’t recall which disturbed me more, the fact that he had stripped my bed or simply the idea of Hart prowling around in my room when I was not there. Whatever the cause, I instantly lost my temper and what little self-restraint I possessed in those days. Disregarding my roommates’ pleas to forget the insult, I marched immediately to Hart’s office to confront him. I knocked on his door, and entered before he gave me leave to do so. Without any prefatory remark, and with only the sloppiest of salutes, I declared my indignation:

“Captain, please don’t do that again. I am too busy to make my bed twice a day.”

My honor avenged, I turned on my heel and left his office before I had been dismissed or reprimanded by my shocked company officer. My behavior was inexcusable. Such impertinence was not tolerated at the Academy, least of all when the offender was nothing more than a troublemaking plebe. I should have paid a terrible price for my outburst. But Hart took no action and never said a word to me about it. I am sure it intensified his contempt for me and steeled his determination to purge me from his company. Today, when I remember this incident, I am ashamed of myself, but at the time, Hart’s failure to respond immediately and forcefully to my insubordination caused me to respect him even less.

It is fair to say that Hart hated us. He had acute tunnel vision as he focused, often to the exclusion of all else, on our flawed characters. He knew what we were doing, and he was consumed by an intense desire to apprehend us in midcrime. With any luck, he would rid the Academy of our odious presence. He couldn’t stand the sight of us, and believed me to be the worst of a very bad lot. At times, his loathing was comical.

Every company officer was obliged to host the members of his company in their last year, inviting them in small groups to dine at his quarters. The implicit purpose of the custom was to provide us with a little practical training in the social graces before we began our careers as officers who would be expected to know our salad fork from our soup spoon.

No doubt Hart had by this time wearied somewhat of chasing us, but his contempt for Frank, Jack, and me was still palpable. Nevertheless, he couldn’t contrive a legitimate reason to refuse us our moment at the Hart dinner table. Accordingly, the three of us and our other, more respectable roommate, Keith Bunting, were invited to join Captain and Mrs. Hart for dinner on a pleasant spring evening in 1958. We anticipated the experience with a mixture of amusement and dread. We did not find very appealing the prospect of spending several hours awkwardly pretending to enjoy the company of a man who clearly despised us. But on the other hand we expected the evening to have enough entertainment value to provide material for a few jokes when it was over.

Before the event we laughed while conjuring up the image of our earnest company officer temporarily suspending his blind hatred of us to help us grasp the rudiments of gentlemanly deportment; watchfully presiding over the table; fussing over deficiencies in our table manners; noting whether we navigated the cutlery correctly and whether we paid the lady of the house the proper amount of formal deference; weakly attempting clever repartee; raising his glass aloft and booming, “Gentlemen, the Academy,” or “the Corps.” As it turned out, the captain had planned a considerably less ostentatious affair than we had imagined.

At the appointed hour, Captain Hart picked us up at Bancroft Hall, and drove us in silence to his home, where we presumed Mrs. Hart awaited our presence at her table. When we arrived at his quarters, we naturally headed toward the front door. Hart commanded us to stop. “No, gentleman, come around here,” he ordered. He led us around the house to the backyard, where a picnic table had been set for dinner. The grill had been lighted. Hart entered his kitchen through the back door. He returned a moment later with hot dogs, beans, and a few bottles of Coca-Cola. We ate the meal in silence, quickly. No formalities were observed. No toasts to the Academy or the Corps. No strained attempts at witty dinner conversation. No Mrs. Hart. A half hour after we arrived, he loaded us back into his car and returned us to Bancroft. Quite an etiquette lesson.

To Hart’s severe disappointment, I managed to remain at the Academy despite what he perceived as my seditious intentions. For all my antics, I avoided accumulating the number of demerits required to discharge a midshipman from further service. My grades were usually poor, but, as I had at Episcopal, I showed greater aptitude for English and history, subjects I enjoyed.

The eminent naval historian E. B. Potter was one of my professors, and I liked him and his classes very much. For my term paper in one of Professor Potter’s classes, I chose to write about my grandfather. In preparing the research for the paper, I had written Admiral Nimitz to ask for his impressions of him.

I received a very prompt and generous response from the then elderly national hero. He wrote me that my grandfather had been a great man who had contributed significantly to our victory in the Pacific, but he devoted most his letter to a detailed account of the days he and my grandfather had sailed around the Philippines on the Panay as very young men at the beginning of their long and distinguished careers.

I recall the term paper only with embarrassment for its clumsy prose and poor scholarship. But I still feel pride when I remember the kind and generous regard that the old admiral lavished on my grandfather’s memory, and that I faithfully recorded for Professor Potter, who had written extensively about both men and knew more about my grandfather’s career than I did.

Unfortunately, the curriculum at the Academy was weighted preponderantly toward math and the sciences. Indeed, in those days, all midshipmen were obliged to major in electrical engineering. I struggled with it, possessing no special calling to the trade. Nevertheless, as I was adept at cramming for exams, and blessed with friends who did not seem to mind too much my requests for urgent tutorials, I managed to avoid complete disaster. I got by, just barely at times, but I got by.

–– CHAPTER 12 –– Fifth from the Bottom

I am sure my disdainful contemporaries and disapproving instructors believed I would become a thoroughly disreputable upperclassman were I somehow to escape expulsion during my plebe year. Most of the time, my behavior only confirmed their low regard for me. For a moment, though, I came close to confounding their expectations. That moment began when I boarded the USS Hunt to begin my first-class cruise to Rio de Janeiro in June of 1957.

The Hunt was an old destroyer. It had seen better days. It seemed to me a barely floating rust bucket that should have been scrapped years before, unfit even for mothballing. But I was ignorant, a sailor’s son though I was, and I overlooked the old ship’s grace and seaworthiness. I assumed the Hunt was suitable only for the mean task of giving lowly midshipmen a rustic experience of life at sea. I was wrong.

We lived in cramped quarters in the aft of the ship. We kept the hatch open to cool our quarters with the breeze blowing off the Chesapeake Bay. Once the Hunt left the bay and entered the Atlantic, the seas grew heavier and seawater washed in through the hatch. We lived in the pooled water for several days. The rough seas sent a good number of us running for the lee side to vomit. We had restricted water hours on the cruise, which meant there was only enough water to allow us to drink from the ship’s water fountains during a three-hour period every day. We took saltwater showers.

We spent a third of the cruise in the engineering plant, a grim place that seemed, to the untrained eye, a disgrace. The boilers blew scorching hot air on us while we spent long hours in misery learning the mysteries of the ship’s mechanics. That the ship sailed at all seemed to us a great testament to the mechanic’s mates’ mastery of improvisation. It was a hell of a vessel to go to sea in for the first time.

We spent another third of the cruise learning ship’s navigation, and the last third on the bridge learning how to command a ship at sea.

The skipper was Lieutenant Commander Eugene Ferrell. He seemed to accord the Hunt affection far out of proportion to her virtues. More surprisingly, he seemed to have some affection for me. He expressed it in eccentric ways, but I sensed his respect for me was greater than I had lately been accustomed to receiving from officers. I appreciated it, and I liked him a lot.

I spent much of the cruise on the bridge, where the skipper would order me to take the conn. There is a real mental challenge to running a ship of that size, and I had little practical experience in the job. But I truly enjoyed it. I made more than a few mistakes, and every time I screwed up, the skipper would explode, letting loose an impressive blast of profane derision.

“Dammit, McCain, you useless bastard. Give up the conn right now. Get the hell off my bridge. I mean it, goddammit. I won’t have a worthless s.o.b. at the helm of my ship. You’ve really screwed up this time, McCain. Get the hell out of here!”

As I began to skulk off the bridge, he would call me back. “Hold on a second. Come on back here, mister. Get over here and take the conn.” And then he would begin, more calmly, to explain what I had done wrong and how the task was done properly. We would go along pleasantly until I committed my next unpardonable error, when he would unleash another string of salty oaths in despair over my unfitness for the service, only to beckon me back for a last chance to prove myself worthy of his fine ship.

It was a wonderful time. I enjoyed the whole experience. As I detected in Ferrell’s outbursts his sense that I showed some promise, I worked hard not to disappoint him, and I learned the job passably well. I was rarely off his bridge for much of the cruise. No other midshipman on the Hunt was so privileged.

Inspired by the experience, I began to consider becoming an officer in the surface Navy, with the goal of someday commanding a destroyer, instead of following my grandfather into naval aviation. I told Ferrell of my intentions, and he seemed pleased. Fine gentleman that he is, he never rebuked me after I abandoned my briefly held aspirations for a destroyer command and returned to my original plan to become an aviator. Many years later, he wrote me, and recalled a chance encounter we had sometime in the early sixties. “I was surprised but pleased to see that you were wearing two stripes and a pair of gold wings. Your grandfather would have been very proud of you.”

Years later, while serving as a flight instructor in Meridian, Mississippi, I realized that I had adopted, unintentionally, Lieutenant Commander Ferrell’s idiosyncratic instruction technique. I took pride in the fact.

When a Navy ship at sea needs to refuel or take on supplies and mail, it must come alongside and tie up to a refueling or replenishing ship while both vessels are under way. The maneuver is difficult to execute even in the calmest seas. Most skippers attempt it cautiously, bringing their ship alongside the approaching vessel very slowly.

But the most experienced ship handlers are bolder, and pride themselves on their more daring form. They come alongside at two-thirds or full speed, much faster than the other ship. At precisely the right moment they throw the engines in reverse, and then ahead again at one-third speed. It’s a spectacular thing to see when it’s done right. An approximate image of the maneuver is a car traveling at sixty miles an hour as it approaches a parallel parking space; the driver slams on the brakes and pulls cleanly, without an inch to spare, into the spot.

Eugene Ferrell was a gifted ship handler, and he never considered coming alongside another ship in any other fashion, unless, of course, a green midshipman had the conn. I had watched him perform the task several times, and had admired his serene composure as he confidently gave the orders that brought the rushing Hunt abruptly but gracefully into place, moving at exactly the same speed as her sister ship. A seaman would fire a gun that shot a line to our bow. Soon the two ships, several lines now holding them in harness, would sail the ocean together for a time, never touching, but in perfect unison. It was a grand sight to behold.

One beautiful afternoon, the flagship of the destroyer division to which the Hunt was attached, flying the ensign of the commanding admiral, approached us for the purpose of replenishing the Hunt’s depleted stores. Lieutenant Commander Ferrell gave me the conn, and without a trace of apprehension, bade me bring her alongside the admiral’s flagship.

Ferrell told me to bring her up slowly, but offered no rebuke when I gave the order “All engines ahead two-thirds.” At precisely the right moment, I ordered, “All engines back full.” A few moments later, again well timed, I ordered, “All engines ahead one-third.” Thrillingly and to my great relief, the Hunt slipped into place so gracefully that any observer would have thought the skipper himself, master ship handler that he was, had the conn.

Ferrell was proud of me, and I was much indebted to him. He had given me his trust, and I had had the good fortune to avoid letting him down. After the two ships were tied up, he sent a message to the admiral. “Midshipman McCain has the conn.” The impressed admiral sent a message to the Superintendent of the Naval Academy, informing him of my accomplishment.

Many years later I learned that Ferrell had been a student and admirer of my father’s. Perhaps that explains his kindness toward me. Whatever the reason for the care he took with me, I was grateful for it. His confidence in me gave me more confidence in myself, and greater assurance that I belonged at sea than I had ever experienced in the rigid, disapproving world of the Academy. Eugene Ferrell was the man who taught me the craft of my father and grandfather. He gave me cause to love the work that they had loved. Debts such as that you incur for life. I sailed for Rio de Janeiro a more contented young man than I had ever been before.

Liberty in Rio. My imagination could not have embellished the good time we made of our nine days in port, indulging in the vices sailors are infamous for, as if we had been at sea for months instead of weeks. After some excessive drinking, nightclubbing, and little or no sleep, I had exhausted my appetite for the joys of liberty and intended to return to ship. Chuck Larson persuaded me to accompany him to a party at a grand house on Sugarloaf Mountain. There I met and began a romance with a Brazilian fashion model, and gloried in the envy of my friends.

We danced on the terrace overlooking the bay until one o’clock in the morning, when I felt her cheek was moist.

“What’s the matter?” I asked.

“I’ll never see you again,” she replied.

I told her that we would remain in town for eight more days, and that I would gladly spend as much time in her company as she would grant me. But she rebutted my every assurance with “No, I can never see you again.”

“Are you engaged?”

“No.”

“Look, I’m going to be down at the gate of the shipyard at one o’clock tomorrow afternoon. I’ll be there, and I want you to be there, too.”

She said nothing in reply, and an hour later she left the party with her aunt, who served as her constant companion and chaperone.

The next afternoon, I left the ship at about twelve-thirty and waited for her at the place I had designated. An hour passed, and she had not arrived. Another hour and still she had not appeared. An hour after that, I forlornly prepared to abandon all hope. Just as I was preparing to return to the ship in a state of deep despondency, she pulled up in a Mercedes with gull-wing doors. She honked the horn, and I jumped in, ecstatic.

I spent every free moment with her for the rest of my stay in Rio. She was very beautiful, stylish, and gracious—common attributes in her wealthy and socially prominent family. She took me to dinners and receptions where I toasted my extraordinary good fortune in the company of cabinet members, generals and admirals, wealthy aristocrats, and, on one occasion, the president of Brazil.

We spent my last evening on liberty together. She drove me to my ship the next morning. I emerged from under the open gull-wing door and kissed her to a chorus of rowdy cheers from my shipmates. I accepted their approval with an affected sheepish humility.

When we returned to Annapolis, I had a few weeks’ leave, which I used to fly right back to Rio to continue my storybook romance. By the following Christmas, the distance between us, and our youthful impatience and short attention spans, brought an end to our affair. But it resides in my memory, embellished with age, of course, among the happier experiences of my life.

On the return cruise we made port in the Virgin Islands and at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where we received further instruction in the rituals of shore leave. Guantanamo in those pre-Castro days was a wild place. Everyone went ashore and headed immediately for huge tents that had been set up on the base as temporary bars, where great quantities of strong Cuban beer and an even more potent rum punch were served to anyone who professed a thirst and could afford a nickel a drink.

The officers’ club boasted the same menu in slightly more comfortable surroundings. We drank there for a good while, serenaded by a Pat Boone record. A music lover had evidently come ashore and filled the O club’s jukebox with as many nickels as he could scrounge, choosing but one selection, “Love Letters in the Sand,” which played over and over again. Returning to the ship, my friends and I were delighted to discover that the throng of sailors and Marines crowding the landing had taken a dislike to one another and had begun fighting. The shore patrol arrived and waded into the riot of whites and khaki vainly trying to separate the opposing forces. It was bedlam. We loved it.

On the cruise back to Annapolis I returned to my place on the bridge and happily resumed my one-on-one tutorial in the elements of expert ship handling. Two officers who were attached to the Academy but were not officers in my company had been assigned to the cruise to evaluate our performance. They gave me the best marks, reporting that I had shown a very high aptitude for the service. I had the high grease.

Captain Hart was astonished. He was convinced there had been a terrible error, perhaps a case of mistaken identity. First-class cruise had turned out to be the best time of my young life.

Inspired by my success on the USS Hunt, I resolved to make something of myself in my last year at the Academy. I studied hard and maintained a respectful attitude toward my superiors. I set up a tutoring system for plebes who were struggling academically. I managed the battalion boxing team, which won the brigade championship. My grades were improving, and I stayed well out of trouble. I had become, for a brief time, a squared-away midshipman whom any company officer could be proud of—any company officer save mine.

In January, I went to Captain Hart’s office to receive my grease grade, which I was confident would elevate me for the first time from the bottom regions of the class standings where I had dwelled in infamy for three years. Hart began by noting my improved behavior. “Keep this up, son, and you’ll have something to be proud of.” When I asked where he had placed me in the company, he mumbled an answer that I couldn’t make out.

“Where, sir?”

“At the bottom,” he whispered.

“Where?”

“At the bottom.”

Rising from my chair, I glared at Hart, who remained seated. “You can expect nothing more from me, Captain,” I said as I left his office, slamming the door so hard behind me that I thought its opaque glass window would break.

Any other officer would have shouted at me, “Get back in here and sit down, mister! Where do you get off barking at me like that?” Not Captain Hart. He never spoke of the interview. He knew he had wronged me. For the first time, I had wanted something from him, had felt I’d earned it. And he, dogged to the end, had gotten his revenge.

True to my word, I returned to the habits of my first three years, accumulating demerits by the dozen, waiting out, indifferently, my last few months at the Academy.

A month after my interview with Hart, my room was chosen for a surprise inspection. It didn’t pass. Only one roommate is responsible for keeping the room in some semblance of order, the job rotating among four roommates on a monthly basis. The surprise inspection occurred on my watch.

“Room in gross disorder” was the charge. The customary punishment for such an offense was fifteen demerits and three hours of extra duty. I received seventy-five demerits. A midshipman was allowed only 125 demerits his last year. Any more and he bilged out. I was already carrying forty demerits when the inspector arrived. It was a practical impossibility to last more than three months without collecting another ten. The slightest mistake, the most insignificant oversight, would get me kicked out in the last few weeks before graduation. My fate, I thought, was sealed.

I telephoned my parents. My father was at sea, so I informed my mother that I was coming home. I explained the circumstances, and that my expulsion was imminent. I might as well come home now, I argued, and not waste a few days or weeks waiting for the ax to fall.

My mother wisely cautioned me not to make an irrevocable decision until I had an opportunity to talk to my father. In the meantime, she advised me to talk things over with my wrestling coach, Ray Schwartz, a friend of my parents and a good man. Mr. Schwartz commiserated with me about my difficult predicament, and agreed that I had been punished excessively for a minor infraction. But he, too, advised me to withhold any decision until I had discussed the situation with my father. A day or two later, I received a summons from the Commandant of the Naval Academy, Captain Shin. My mother had called him.

“What’s this I hear about you leaving?” he asked.

“I have too many demerits, sir,” I replied.

“Why?”

“Because I have been punished unfairly, sir.”

I then explained how the sentence had far exceeded the prescribed penalty, and that I thought the action was unjust. My complaint seemed only to irritate him. He said I was spoiled, a charge that I greatly resented.

“Whatever you say, sir, but it’s still not fair.”

He leveled a scornful gaze at me and told me to leave.

The commandant was neither the first nor the last person to accuse me of being spoiled, implying that my parents had greased my way in the world. Witt had been the first to do so when he derided me for being a captain’s son. Later in my career, as I rose through the ranks, some would attribute my advance to my admiral father’s benefaction. I suppose it is an accusation that many children of successful parents learn to ignore. I never did, however. I grew red-faced and angry every time some know-it-all told me how easy a life my father had made for me. The life my father led me to has been a richly rewarding one, and I am grateful to him for it. But “easy” is not the first adjective that comes to mind when describing it.

My father was only a captain when I was at the Naval Academy, a rank that surely didn’t grant him the influence to compensate for my shortcomings. Later in my life, when my father wore stars on his shoulder, he would, indeed, influence my career, but in ways my detractors did not appreciate. He had met the standard his father had set. It was my obligation and my privilege to try to uphold it.

A week or two after Captain Shin instructed me to leave his presence, I was informed that the punishment for my disordered room had been reduced to thirty demerits and seven days of confinement. I was relieved to comply with the order.

A month or so after the room inspection incident, I had yet another close brush with disaster. The ever vigilant Captain Hart believed he had at last discovered a violation that would result in my swift expulsion from the Academy.

In September of my last year, my roommates and I, along with four roommates in the room next to ours and two other midshipmen on our floor, chipped in to buy a television set. In those days, Academy regulations enjoined midshipmen from keeping electrical appliances of any kind in their rooms. Even hot plates were considered contraband. I remember a few midshipmen would take back to their rooms bread and cheese from the mess hall after the evening meal, and sell cheese sandwiches to the rest of us. It was a thriving industry, much appreciated by me and every other hungry midshipman who was denied the convenience of devices to store or prepare food.

Mindful of but undeterred by the regulation, our small syndicate had decided we would risk the wrath of our superiors for the pleasure of watching the Friday-night fights on our own television. We each pitched in ten dollars and bought a used black-and-white television with a twelve-inch screen. We kept the set hidden in a crawl space in our room, located behind a wooden panel. The panel could be easily removed by hand, and we would bring the set out to watch the fights on Friday, Maverick on Sunday, and other popular television programs of the time.

We lived in Bancroft Hall, the Academy’s only dormitory, which at the time had not been changed in any of its particulars since the turn of the century. The floors in Bancroft Hall were referred to, in ship nomenclature, as decks. We lived on the top deck, the fourth. We soon drew considerable numbers of top-deck residents to our room to join our forbidden television viewing. On Friday nights, it was standing room only.

In every hall of every deck, a third-year midshipman served as the mate of the deck. The mate’s job was to receive and deliver messages to the midshipmen in residence there and, generally, to stand as a sentinel for his part of the deck to ensure that nothing untoward happened on his watch. The mate on our hall stood at a podium directly across the hall from my room. We pressed him into service as our lookout on evenings when we were crowded around our television set. He kept an eye out for company officers who would have loved to discover our blatant disobedience and rapped a warning on my door when one approached.

As upperclassmen, we no longer had to worry about being disciplined or harassed by other midshipmen as we had been during our plebe year. We also took comfort in knowing that our indiscretions would be kept confidential within the brigade and not reported to unsuspecting officers. The most sacrosanct principle governing a midshipman’s behavior was the unwritten rule “Never bilge a classmate,” which required midshipmen to overlook any violation of the rules by a fellow midshipman short of honor code violations.

Brigade discipline was supervised by four authorities, the most senior being the officer of the watch, an office that was rotated monthly among company officers. Those midshipmen with the highest grease in the brigade rotated daily as the midshipman of the watch, while a group of the more promising plebes served as their assistants.

My pal Chuck Larson, whose exemplary scholastic record and obvious aptitude for command had won him the highest office a plebe could hold, brigade commander, was serving as the midshipman of the watch. Academy officials would have been disappointed to discover their prized midshipman among those gathered around the television in my room to watch a boxing match, shirking the duties of his office to enjoy a few minutes of illicit fun with some of the more disreputable midshipmen at the Academy.

In the middle of our viewing, the mate of the deck rapped on my door to warn us that the officer of the watch was approaching. We quickly returned the television set to its hiding place and stuffed the midshipman of the watch, dressed in his formal blue uniform and wearing his sword, along with his startled plebe, into my closet. The rest of us opened up textbooks and earnestly affected the appearance of dutiful midshipmen gathered together in a study group. Fortunately, the officer never bothered to enter our room. Had he done so, our atypical studiousness surely would have aroused his suspicion.

A few days later, when I returned to my room after classes had ended for the day, I found a message on my desk ordering me to report to Captain Hart. Hart’s office was five doors down from my room. Responding to my summons, I knocked on his door, entered, stood at attention, and announced myself: “Midshipman McCain, First Class, sir.”

Sitting there with a look of considerable satisfaction, Hart allowed himself a rare smile as he threw a Form 2 across his desk to me and inquired, “Do you want to sign this now?” A Form 2 was the standard notification that a midshipman had been put on report. A midshipman was required to sign the form acknowledging his offense.

I picked up the form and read the line where the offense was reported: “electrical equipment, unauthorized use of,” and on the line below, “television set.”

While all the midshipmen on the fourth deck were at class, Hart had taken the opportunity to closely inspect our quarters. So thorough was the inspection that Hart had entered the rooms’ crawl spaces, which adjoined each other. When he reached our room and discovered the contraband hidden in our crawl space, he must have silently exulted in his good fortune, believing that the day of judgment was finally at hand for the sorriest midshipman in his company.

The penalty for the offense was thirty demerits and seven days’ confinement. The demerits I had already accumulated took me perilously close to the limit, and again I faced certain expulsion. I thought over my situation for a moment while Hart waited contentedly for my response.

“Sir, this isn’t necessarily mine,” I finally replied.

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“The television, it isn’t necessarily mine.”

“Whose is it?” the now less content and incredulous Captain Hart responded.

“I’ll let you know in a very short time.”

A puzzled look overtook the captain’s smile, and he dismissed me with an order to report back quickly with an answer.

I returned to my room and called the television’s ten owners together. I explained the situation, and that I had to bring Hart an answer right away. “Only one of us is going to get the demerits,” I said, “and we have to choose who, right now.” We settled the question as we always settled things in those days, with a “shake around.” Over my objection, my friends, aware of my perilous situation at the Academy, excused me from participating.

In unison, each man hit his right fist three times into the palm of his other hand. On the third strike, each stuck out some of the fingers of his right hand. We then counted off the sum of the nine men’s extended fingers, one number per man, with the last number falling on the man who would confess ownership of the television. As luck and fate would have it, the man turned out to be Henry Vargo.

Henry Vargo was a model midshipman. Studious, disciplined, respectful, Henry hardly ever bothered to watch the television. He had joined in its purchase only to help us out, to be one of the guys. Henry did not possess very many demerits, so the punishment he was about to receive wouldn’t pose much of a problem for him. As added compensation, we magnanimously said that Hart would have to give the television back at the end of the year and Henry could keep it.

Smiling with satisfaction and relief, I returned to Hart’s office to reveal the culprit.

“Midshipman McCain, First Class, sir.”

“Well?”

“Sir, the television set belongs to Midshipman Vargo.”

“Midshipman Vargo!” he bellowed in disbelief.

“Yes, sir, Midshipman Vargo.”

Fighting to stop from smiling, I watched Hart’s face flush red with anger. Finally, he dismissed me—“Get out of here, McCain.”

I left him and walked back to my room, much relieved to have evaded, for the last time, Hart’s wrath and his four-year quest to bring me to justice.

A few months later I sat amid a sea of navy whites, fifth from the bottom of my class, listening to President Eisenhower confer our degrees, exhort us to noble service on behalf of the Republic, and commission me an ensign in the United States Navy.

Eisenhower’s remarks were not particularly memorable, owing to a combination of his flat delivery and our impatience to begin celebrating our liberation. Although he wasn’t much of a speaker, we all admired the President. I remember wishing at one point during commencement that my dismal performance at the Academy had earned me an even lower place in the class standings.

In those days, only the first one hundred graduates in the class were called to the dais to receive their diplomas from the President. Graduation was conferred on the rest of us by company. John Poindexter graduated first in our class, an honor he had well earned. He walked proudly to the podium to receive his diploma and a handshake from the President of the United States, which the President bestowed on him with a brief “Well done and congratulations.”

The midshipman who graduates last in his class is affectionately called the anchorman. When the anchorman’s company was called, he was cheered by the whole brigade and hoisted onto the shoulders of his friends. Eisenhower motioned him up to the dais, and to the crowd’s loud approval personally handed him his diploma; both President and anchorman smiling broadly as the President patted him on the back and chatted with him for a few minutes. I thought it a fine gesture from a man who understood our traditions.

I was proud to graduate from the Naval Academy. But at that moment, relief was the emotion I felt most keenly. I had already been accepted for flight training in Pensacola. In those days, all you had to do was pass the physical to qualify for flight training, and I was eager to embark on the life of a carefree naval aviator.

My orders left me enough time to take an extended holiday in Europe with Jack, Frank, and another classmate, Jim Higgins. We bummed a ride to Spain on a military aircraft from Dover Air Force Base in Delaware. We spent several enjoyable days in Madrid, then boarded a train for Paris. Four days after we arrived, my friends left Paris for Copenhagen and the World’s Fair. I remained behind, waiting to meet my new girlfriend, the daughter of a tobacco magnate from Winston-Salem, North Carolina. We were in Paris during the summer of de Gaulle.

At the time, France was fighting a war to hold on to its Algerian colony, and its conspicuous lack of military success had caused the collapse of the French Fourth Republic. Terrorist bombings and other unpleasantness associated with the war had driven many Parisians out of the city to seek refuge in the French countryside. We had the city to ourselves, and we enjoyed it immensely.

Near the end of our stay, we stood in a throng of cheering Parisians along the Champs Elysées as two long, noisy lines of motorcycle policemen led the way to the Arc de Triomphe for de Gaulle’s motorcade. The general and now president of the infant Fifth Republic stood erect in the backseat of his convertible limousine nodding at the overwrought crowds as they chanted, “Algerie Française, Algerie Française.”

Four years after returning to power, and despite his solemn promise that Algeria would be forever French, de Gaulle granted the colony’s independence. Nevertheless, he cut a hell of a figure that day, standing there so impassive and noble-looking while his nation’s adoration washed over him. I was a kid at the time, and the general’s grandeur made a great impression on me. In truth, I remain just as impressed four decades later.

I suppose to most people who knew me at Annapolis, my entire career at the Naval Academy is aptly summarized by the anecdotes I have recorded here. Most of my reminiscences feature the frivolous escapades with which I once established my reputation as a rash and prideful nonconformist.

In truth, I was less exceptional than I had imagined myself to be. Every class has its members who aspire to prominence by unconventional means. My father and grandfather had enjoyed only slightly less tarnished reputations at the Academy. My father, perhaps mindful of his own performance, rarely chastised me for falling well short of an exemplary midshipman’s standards. In fact, I don’t recall the subject of my record at the Academy ever being extensively discussed by either of my parents.

There was one occasion when my father registered his disapproval over my conduct at the Academy. One evening in our second year, my roommates and I were in the middle of a water balloon fight, adding to our room’s usual disarray. We suspended our activity when someone knocked on the door. Frank opened the door to find an officer facing him with a disdainful look on his face as he appraised our room’s unacceptable condition and the four of us standing in our skivvies soaking wet. My roommates greeted our unexpected guest by briskly standing at attention. I greeted him by saying, somewhat quizzically, “Dad?”

After an awkward second or two, he ordered, “As you were, gentlemen,” and as my roommates began to exhale, he added, “This room is in gross disorder. John, meet me downstairs in five minutes.” With that, he turned on his heels and left. I met him less than five minutes later, and he proceeded to lecture me, observing, “You’re in too much trouble here, Johnny, to be asking for any more.” That single incident is the only time I can remember my father upbraiding me for my dismal performance as a midshipman.

My behavior was not something that particularly worried my father. I believe he assumed that, like him, I would be absorbed into the traditions of the place whether I wished to or not, and that when the time arrived for me to face a real test of character, I would not disappoint him. He had seen many an officer who enjoyed the reputation of a rake—indeed, he had been one himself—rise to the occasion in the most dire situations, and exhibit courage and resourcefulness that confounded earlier detractors. He expected no less from me.

Even as I spent my years as a junior officer in the same profligate manner I had spent my Academy years, I cannot recall his severely rebuking me. America had fought two wars during his career, and he was certain there would soon be another one. He knew I would fight, and I think he trusted me to do my duty when my moment arrived. I don’t know if I deserved his trust, but I am proud to have had it.

If I had ignored the less important conventions of the Academy, I was careful not to defame its more compelling traditions: the veneration of courage and resilience; the honor code that simply assumed your fidelity to its principles; the homage paid to men who had sacrificed greatly for their country; the expectation that you, too, would prove worthy of your country’s trust.

Appearances to the contrary, it was never my intention to mock a revered culture that expected better of me. Like any other midshipman, I had wanted to prove my mettle to my contemporaries, and to the institution that figured so prominently in my family history. My idiosyncratic methods, if you can call them that, amounted to little more than imaginative expressions of the truculence I had used at other schools and in other circumstances to fend off what I had identified, often wrongly, as attacks upon my dignity.

The Academy, despite the irritating customs of plebe year and the encumbrances it placed on the individualist, was not interested in degrading my dignity. On the contrary, it had a more expansive conception of human dignity than I possessed when I arrived at its gates. The most important lesson I learned there was that to sustain my self-respect for a lifetime it would be necessary for me to have the honor of serving something greater than my self-interest.

When I left the Academy, I was not even aware I had learned that lesson. In a later crisis, I would suffer a genuine and ruthless attack on my dignity, an attack that, unlike the affronts I had exaggerated as a boy, left me desperate and uncertain. It was then I would recall, awakened by the example of men who shared my circumstances, the lesson that the Naval Academy in its antique way had labored to impress upon me. It changed my life forever.

–– CHAPTER 13 –– Navy Flyer

My early years as a naval officer were an even more colorful extension of my rowdy days at the Academy. At flight school in Pensacola, and then at advanced flight training with my pal Chuck Larson in Corpus Christi, Texas, I did not enjoy the reputation of a serious pilot or an up-and-coming junior officer.

I liked to fly, but not much more than I liked to have a good time. In fact, I enjoyed the off-duty life of a Navy flyer more than I enjoyed the actual flying. I drove a Corvette, dated a lot, spent all my free hours at bars and beach parties, and generally misused my good health and youth.

At Pensacola, I spent much of my off-duty time at the legendary bar Trader John’s. On Friday and Saturday nights, after happy hour at the officers’ club had ended, almost every unmarried aviator in Pensacola headed for Trader John’s. It was a vast, cavernous place that was packed shoulder to shoulder on the weekends, as was the back room where local girls, trained as exotic dancers, entertained rowdy crowds of aviators. Pensacola has since designated the place a historic landmark in recognition of its former infamy when it was the scene of some of the wildest revelry the state of Florida had ever experienced.

After graduation from the Academy, our class was divided between those newly commissioned ensigns who intended to extend their carefree bachelorhood and those who had left the commencement ceremony to immediately enter the blessed state of matrimony. A good number of my classmates, including several of my closest friends, had married their girlfriends before taking up their first duty assignment, and this difference in our married status unfortunately created a social division between us.

At Pensacola, married ensigns and their wives mostly socialized together. Married couples had to rent homes off base and had less disposable income than their unmarried friends. I and the other residents of the base’s bachelor officers’ quarters, with more money to waste and mindful that the amusements we sought were likely to offend the sensibilities of our married friends’ respectable young wives, kept largely to ourselves.

Walt Ryan was one of my closest friends from the Academy, a charter member of the Bad Bunch. He, too, had been accepted into pilot training at Pensacola, but because he had married after graduation, I saw less of him than I would have preferred. His wife, Sarah, was a lovely, well-mannered girl whom I liked very much. I saw them both occasionally, and always enjoyed their company, but on most weekends I kept less civilized company.

At some point during my time at flight school, I had begun dating a local girl whom I had met at Trader John’s. She made her living there, under the name Marie, the Flame of Florida. She was a remarkably attractive girl with a great sense of humor, and I was quite taken with her. Since her work kept her busy on Friday and Saturday nights, our dates occurred on Sunday evenings when the bar was closed.

Most Sundays we went to the movies and had a nice dinner afterward. One Sunday, however, on our way downtown we passed Walt Ryan’s house, where I recognized the cars of several other married friends. I impulsively decided to pull over and join the party uninvited, telling Marie that I wanted to introduce her to some of my friends. Always a good sport, Marie agreed to my suggestion.

Most of my friends’ wives were from privileged families and had been educated at distinguished Eastern schools. Marie, the Flame of Florida, had a more interesting biography, more in the “graduated from the school of hard knocks” genre. The young wives she was about to meet would be decorously attired and unfailingly genteel. Marie was dressed somewhat flamboyantly that evening, as was her custom.

Walt and Sarah greeted our surprise visit with their usual graciousness, inviting us in without too much hesitation, offering us drinks, and introducing us to the six or so other couples gathered in their home. After the introductions and a few inane pleasantries were exchanged, the conversation seemed to become a little awkward, at times lapsing into long silences.

Marie sensed that the young wives, while certainly not rude to her, were less than entirely at ease in her presence. So she sat silent, not wishing to impose on anyone or intrude in the conversations going on around her. After a while, she must have become a little bored. So, quietly, she reached into her purse, withdrew a switchblade, popped open the blade, and, with a look of complete indifference, began to clean her fingernails.

My startled hosts and their guests stared at her with looks that ranged between disbelief and alarm. Marie seemed not to notice, and concentrated on her task. A short time later, recognizing that our presence had perhaps subdued the party, I thanked our hosts for their hospitality, bid good-bye to the others, and took my worldly, lovely Flame of Florida to dinner.

I crashed a plane in Corpus Christi Bay one Saturday morning. The engine quit while I was practicing landings. Knocked unconscious when my plane hit the water, I came to as the plane settled on the bottom of the bay. I barely managed to get the canopy open and swim to the surface. After X rays and a brief examination determined I had not suffered any serious injury, I returned to the quarters Larson and I shared. I took a few painkillers and hit the sack to rest my aching back for a few hours.

My father learned of the accident immediately and asked a friend, the admiral in charge of advanced flight training, to check on me. Chuck Larson and I had adjoining rooms in the bachelor officers’ quarters. We had moved both our beds into the same room and used the second room to entertain in. The room was, of course, in a constant state of “gross disorder.”

When the admiral contacted by my father arrived, I was asleep and Chuck was shaving. He pounded on the door while Chuck, unaware that a distinguished visitor was at our door, shouted at him to “hold his horses.” He opened the door to our guest, snapped a salute, and stood nervously while the admiral surveyed the wreckage that was our quarters. Groggily, I thanked the admiral for his concern. Neither he nor my father needed to have bothered. I was out carousing, injured back and all, later that evening.

I began to worry a little about my career during my deployments on several Mediterranean cruises in the early sixties. I flew A-1 Skyraiders in two different squadrons on carriers based in Norfolk, Virginia: on the USS Intrepid for two and a half cruises in the Mediterranean; and on the nuclear-powered USS Enterprise for one short and one long Mediterranean cruise.

The A-1 was an old, propeller-driven plane; it was a very reliable aircraft and a lot of fun to fly. We would sometimes take them on twelve-hour flights that were quite enjoyable, flying low, and admiring the changes of scenery over the long distances we flew.

The pilots in the squadrons were a close-knit group. We enjoyed flying together, as well as one another’s company while on shore leave in Europe. I found plenty of time to revel in the fun that European ports offered a young, single flyer; spending holidays on Capri, risking my wages in the casinos of Monte Carlo. However, by my second cruise on the Intrepid, I had begun to aspire to a reputation for more commendable achievements than long nights of drinking and gambling. I had started to feel a need to move on, a natural impulse for me, born of the migrant’s life I had led since birth.

Like my grandfather and father, I loved life at sea, and I loved flying off carriers. No other experience in my life so closely approximated the exploits of the brash, daring heroes who had captivated my schoolboy’s imagination during those long afternoons in my grandmother’s house. Ever since reading about the storied world of men at arms, I had longed for such a life. The Navy, especially with a war on, offered the quickest route to adventure if I could manage to avoid committing some career-ending mistake.

Once, when I thought I was about to flunk out of the Academy, I had contemplated joining the French Foreign Legion. I wrote to an address in New Orleans for information about how to join the legendary force. I received a nice brochure. While reading it, I discovered that the Legion required nine years of obligated service. I decided to try to stick it out in the Navy. Now I accepted that any adventure that might come my way would almost surely be found while I wore a Navy uniform. The Navy was stuck with me, and I with it, and I decided to make the best of my circumstances.

Remembering the satisfaction of my days on Commander Ferrell’s bridge, I volunteered for bridge watches and qualified as an “officer of the deck under way,” proving capable of commanding a carrier at sea. Already enjoying a reputation for large living as colorful as that of my legendary forebears, I began to give my superiors some reason to think I might eventually prove myself, if not as gifted an officer as my father and grandfather, perhaps competent enough not to squander my legacy.

As I was one of the few bachelors in my squadron, I volunteered on three occasions to spend my leave attending escape and evasion school to prepare myself for the possibility of being shot down in combat. I also volunteered because I found the course to be a pretty good time.

One course took place during a large Army exercise in Bavaria, Germany. A number of other pilots and I were released at night in the middle of the Black Forest. We wore our flight suits and were allowed only those belongings that a pilot would normally possess when he ejected during a combat mission, which amounted to a few C rations.

We were given a map and instructed to find our way, undetected, to a designated safe area. Soldiers participating in the exercise were ordered to hunt us down. The Army also broadcast over the radio a reward offer to any German civilians who found us and reported our whereabouts to the authorities. An Air Force pilot and I teamed up and began a careful trek through woods filled with eager soldiers.

It took five days to reach the safe area. There was plenty of water around, and although we were hungry, we enjoyed ourselves. The forest was beautiful, and the summer weather was pleasant. Several mornings we awoke under the shelter of a large fir tree to the sound of German families out for an early-morning stroll through the woods (Germans are great walkers). We hustled quickly and quietly away lest some lucky, unsuspecting German seize the opportunity to add to the family’s wealth.

My Air Force friend and I were the only pilots to avoid capture and reach our designation. When we arrived, Special Forces soldiers picked us up and took us to a lovely inn on a lake in a small German village called Unterdeisen, where we remained until the exercise was completed two days later. The inn was run by a former Luftwaffe pilot, who took us flying in glider planes. We whiled away the rest of the time drinking beer, admiring the scenery, and watching deer come down to the lake to drink.

As we had not been captured (nor was I captured during two other similar exercises I participated in), we were not subjected to simulated interrogations or any other unpleasantness associated with being captured in war. When the exercise was over, we were taken to Special Forces headquarters in Bad Tolz, where we were debriefed and attended lectures and films about what we might expect were we ever to have the bad luck to be prisoners of war.

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.

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.

He began with his combat patrol in the Atlantic, when the Gunnel had reconnoitered the North African coast. He told me about losing power in all his ship’s engines, save the auxiliary engine, and how nerve-racking was the Gunnel’s slow progress to Scotland and safety. He described bleak Midway Island, and how ironic it seemed that men were sent to such a desolate, inhospitable place to recover from the hardships of war. He recounted the terrifying hours he had spent submerged as exploding depth charges unrelentingly shook his submarine. He talked about his narrow escape after sinking the destroyer, how they had been hunted relentlessly by its sister ships. He described how badly his crew had been affected by the experience, and the measures he had taken to prevent them from wasting oxygen and losing their minds. He talked warmly about the friendships he had formed during the war, and how important they were to enduring the strain and deprivations that war imposes on a commanding officer.

He told me all about his war, letting the facts speak for themselves. My father respected the facts of war. He felt no need to embellish them to make a point or to make any obvious pronouncements like “Let this be a lesson to you, boy.” He assumed his story, briefly but honestly told, would answer my curiosity, and that I would derive from it what lessons I should.

Implicit in his assumption was his respect for me, and I was grateful to have it. I was not a member of the audience attending his seapower lectures. I was the son and grandson of Navy officers, and I had his trust that I would prepare myself for my turn at war.

I had known less of my father’s attention than had many of my friends whose fathers were not as deeply involved in their work or absent as often as my father was. My father could often be a distant, inscrutable patriarch. But I always had a sense that he was special, a man who had set his mind to accomplishing great things, and had ransomed his life to the task. I admired him, and wanted badly to be admired by him, yet indications of his regard for me were more often found in the things he didn’t say than in the things he did.

He wasn’t purposely sparing with praise or encouragement, but neither did he lavish such generous attention on his children. He set an example for us, an example that took all his strength and courage to live. That, I believe, is how he expressed his devotion to us, as his father had expressed his devotion to him.

He assumed that I had the qualities necessary to live a life like his; that I would be drawn by some inherited proclivity to a life of adventure. He trusted that when I met with adversity, I would use the example he had set for me just as he had relied all his life on his father’s example.

The sanctity of personal honor was the only lesson my father felt necessary to impart to me, and he faithfully saw to my instruction, frequently using my grandfather as his model. All my life, he had implored me not to lie, cheat, or steal; to be fair with friend and stranger alike; to respect my superiors and my subordinates; to know my duty and devote myself to its accomplishment without hesitation or complaint. All else, he reasoned, would be satisfactorily managed were I to accept, gratefully, the demands of honor. His father had taught him that, and the lesson had served him well.

“There is a term which has slipped somewhat into disuse,” he remarked late in his life, “which I always used till the moment I retired, and that is the term ‘an officer and a gentleman.’ And those two imply everything that the highest sense of personal honor implies.”

For nine months after leaving my squadron on the Enterprise, I served on the staff of the Chief of Air Basic Training in Pensacola. A job on an admiral’s staff is considered a plumb assignment for an ambitious junior officer, and I was lucky to have it. But I was more eager to build my reputation as a combat pilot, and I looked for any opportunity to hurry the day when I would deploy to Vietnam.

One day, I got word that Paul Fay, Undersecretary of the Navy at the time, was coming to visit. After a round of meetings, Fay wanted to play a little tennis to relax. I was asked to play with him. After tennis, we went swimming at the officers’ club. I took the opportunity to ask the undersecretary if he could help get me a combat tour in Vietnam.

Navy pilots rotate tours of sea and shore duty. I had left my squadron immediately after my last deployment in the Mediterranean. Fay knew that I had just begun my rotation on shore duty, but he promised to see what he could do. A few weeks after Fay returned to Washington, I got a call from one of his aides informing me that I would be sent to Vietnam, but not before I had finished my current rotation. I decided to put in for a transfer to Meridian, Mississippi, where, as a flight instructor at McCain Field, I could fly more in preparation for my combat tour.

Because Meridian was a remote, isolated location that offered few obvious attractions for pilots at play, I was reasonably serious about my work, and I became a better pilot. My fitness reports began to reflect these first signs of maturity. My superiors began to notice in me faint traces of qualities associated with capable officers. They once selected me as instructor of the month.

We worked long hours at Meridian, twelve or more hours a day. Every day began with the morning briefing at five-thirty, followed by the first of three training flights. After our third flight, we ended the long day with a debriefing. Meridian was a dry town at the time, and besides the officers’ club, the only place where alcohol could be found was at an old roadhouse located outside the city limits. The county sheriff had come to the base one day, announcing at the gate that he had come to demand that alcohol no longer be served at the O club. He was refused entry. It was, as one pilot put it, “a hard town to have any fun in.”

Given the challenge that our colorless circumstances posed to our imaginations, however, my fellow officers and I expended considerable energy devising entertainments to make time pass quickly and pleasantly. We organized a number of legendary bacchanals that abide, fondly, in the memory of many middle-aged, retired, and nearly retired Navy and Marine officers under the name of the legendary Key Fess Yacht Club.

Early in my time at McCain Field, a base beautification project had been launched by our well-intentioned commanding officer, at the behest of his wife and the wives of other senior officers. The plan to improve our plain surroundings included the construction of several man-made lakes. Bulldozers dug large holes in the base’s clay soil, which stood empty until enough rainfall filled them with water to give them, it was hoped, a natural appearance. Sadly, they looked more like swamps than lakes, and they stank like a swamp as well.

One particularly unattractive and malodorous lagoon, called Lake Helen in honor of the CO’s wife, lay just off the back of the BOQ, a prospect most of us regarded with bemusement as we walked along the outdoor corridors along which the doors to our rooms were located. Living among us at the time was a Marine captain who worked in an administrative capacity at the base. He was a man with a great thirst, which he attempted to slake virtually around the clock. He set up a bar on a card table in his room, and day and night we would hear him beckon any passerby, from young ensigns to room stewards, into his quarters for “a drink before din-din.”

Late in the evening, we would often find him outside his room, leaning precariously on the balcony railing, cursing the eyesore that was Lake Helen. He had taken an intense dislike to the offending lagoon and would rage at it profanely for hours. Refusing to acknowledge its given name, he called it Lake Fester. Planted in the middle of the lake was a small island, nothing more than a little mound of dirt with a few spindly trees perched there pathetically. Our hard-drinking Marine neighbor called it Key Fess. And soon most of the residents of the BOQ referred derisively to the lake and its ridiculous island by those names.

One evening, several of us were bemoaning the sorry condition of our social life when someone came up with the brilliant idea of forming the Key Fess Yacht Club. The next weekend, attired in yachting dress of blue jackets and white trousers, we commissioned the club. We had strung lights on the trees of Key Fess and draped banners and flags over the BOQ’s railings. We elected the club’s officers, choosing Lake Fester’s chief critic, the Marine captain, as the club’s first commodore. I was elected vice commodore. We christened an old aluminum dinghy the Fighting Lady, and as “Victory at Sea” blasted over loudspeakers, we launched her ceremoniously on her maiden voyage to Key Fess, with the new commodore standing comically amidships, hand tucked inside his jacket like Washington crossing the Delaware.

Over the next several months, the weekend revels of the Key Fess Yacht Club became famous in Meridian and throughout the world of naval aviation. Huge throngs of people could now be found every Saturday night on the shores of Lake Fester, throwing themselves wholeheartedly into the evening’s festivities. We held a toga party in the officers’ club one night, replacing all its furniture with the mattresses from our rooms, which I still remember as one of the most exhausting experiences of my life. We often paid bands to come in from Memphis and entertain us.

Some of the club’s members dated local girls, who spread the word in sleepy Meridian about our riotous activities, and soon a fair share of the town’s single women were regular guests at our parties. One Sunday morning, BOQ residents were awakened by cries of help coming from Key Fess. Someone had rowed a few young ladies out to Key Fess the night before and stranded them there. We rowed the Fighting Lady out to rescue them. Despite their weariness, they still managed to give full vent to their anger, complaining bitterly about the mosquito bites that covered them.

Aviators from both east and west coasts began showing up for the fun. An admiral even flew in from Pensacola one Saturday to see for himself what all the fuss was about. Eventually, our commodore received orders to transfer to another base. I was elected the new commodore. Aviators flew in from everywhere to attend the huge party celebrating the change of command. We had put Naval Air Station, Meridian, on the Navy’s map.

Despite the demands of my office as commodore of the Key Fess Yacht Club, I managed to devote at least as much energy to my job as I did to my extracurricular activities. Correspondingly, my reputation in the Navy improved. Anticipating my forthcoming tour in Vietnam, and confident that I could perform credibly in combat, I had begun to believe that I would someday have command of a carrier or squadron. I finally felt that I had settled into the family business and was on my way to a successful career as a naval officer.

I was also in the middle of a serious romance with Carol Shepp of Philadelphia, a relationship that added to my creeping sense that I might have been put on earth for some other purpose than my own constant amusement.

I had known and admired Carol since Academy days, when she was engaged to one of my classmates. She was a divorced mother of two young sons when we renewed our acquaintance shortly before I left for Meridian. She was attractive, clever, and kind, and I was instantly attracted to her, and delighted to discover that she was attracted to me.

Carol would occasionally visit me at Meridian and good-naturedly join in the weekend’s festivities. But most weekends during our brief courtship, I abjured the social activities at Meridian, preferring Carol’s company to the usual revelry at the Key Fess Yacht Club. On Friday afternoons, I would take a student pilot on a four-hour training flight to Philadelphia, refueling at Norfolk on the way. I would arrive at seven or eight o’clock in the evening. Carol would be waiting at the airfield to pick me up, and we would go out to dinner.

Connie Bookbinder, whose family owned Bookbinder’s Restaurant, had been Carol’s college roommate, so every evening we dined there on lobster and drank with friends. On Saturdays we would go to a football game at Memorial Stadium or a college basketball game at the Pallestra. We would enjoy some other entertainment on Sunday before I flew back to Meridian on Sunday night.

We had been dating for less than a year when I realized I wanted to marry Carol. The carefree life of an unattached naval aviator no longer held the allure for me that it once had. Nor had I ever been as happy in a relationship as I was now. I was elated when Carol instantly consented to my proposal.

We married on July 3, 1965. My marriage required that I relinquish my office as commodore of the yacht club, which I did without regret. The party held to celebrate my retirement was a memorable one.

Carol’s two sons, Doug and Andy, were great kids, and I quickly formed a strong affection for them. I adopted them a year after our marriage, and I have been a proud father ever since. A few months later, Carol gave birth to our beautiful daughter, Sidney.

That December, I flew to Philadelphia to join my parents at the Army-Navy football game. My mother had brought Christmas presents for Carol and the kids, and I stowed them in the baggage compartment of my airplane on the return flight to Meridian. Somewhere between the Eastern Shore of Maryland and Norfolk, Virginia, as I was preparing to come in to refuel, my engine flamed out, and I had to eject at a thousand feet. The Christmas gifts were lost with my airplane.

This latest unexpected glimpse of mortality added even greater urgency to my recent existential inquiries and made me all the more anxious to get to Vietnam before some new unforeseen accident prevented me from ever taking my turn in war.

So it was with some relief that I received my orders at the end of 1966 to report to Jacksonville, Florida, where I would join a squadron on the USS Forrestal and complete Replacement Air Group (RAG) training. I trained exclusively in the A-4 Skyhawk, the small bomber that I would soon fly in combat missions. Later that year, we sailed through the Suez Canal, on a course for Yankee Station in the Tonkin Gulf and war.