I Once Called It Home

I was fortunate not so long ago to visit a place I'd lived for a few years. It weighed 42,000 tons, was over 800 feet long, and had airplanes on its roof; the aircraft carrier, U.S.S. Intrepid. I lived aboard for about three years.  When Mark asked if I wanted to go aboard again I jumped at the chance.  This famous ship is now the Intrepid Air and Space Museum in New York City.

The drive into the city was uneventful. We parked the car in a parking garage  a few blocks from the ship, which is at the 42nd Street pier.  We bought our tickets and went aboard.

I was really looking forward to seeing the old "Fighting I" again and to be able to show my grandson around it.  The first place we went was the flight deck where there are over twenty aircraft. Perhaps half of them weren't carrier planes, and indeed several weren't American planes.  But I did see one I recognized immediately.

"Hey, Nathan, look at this," I said as I walked toward a Chance-Voight F-8 Crusader with a shark's mouth on the nose. "It's Tony Nargi's plane!"

"Who?" Nathan said.

"Lt. Anthony Nargi. See it says so right under the cockpit.  Nargi's call sign was Stiletto, and he shot down a MiG over North Viet Nam while I was aboard the Intrepid."

"There sure are a lot of planes here."  "We carried about one hundred in 1968 and about one thousand men. I watched a lot of planes take-off and land here, and it's were I became a Shellback."

"A what?"

"A Shellback is  a sailor who has sailed across the equator. There's a big initiation with a lot of noise and activities. As a matter of fact I crawled half the length of this flight deck as part of my initiation. I'll put the video in this blog post and you can see what it was like. Right back there where that MiG 21  with the tiger on it is, we shaved the heads of two Phantom pilots."

"What was that all about?"

"It's another one of those Navy traditions.  When a plane other that one assigned to your ship lands on it you give the driver and the guy in the back seat a haircut.  We shaved their heads and painted stuff on their plane with spray paint!"

"It sounds like you had a lot of fun."

"I did, but I also had to work too.  I was an electronics technician, you know," I told him as we walked  toward the island structure.  "Let's go up on the bridge where the captain sat."

"No, our most common meat was roast beef which we called Intrepid steak! You could always tell when the bakers got weevils in the flour.  They would always bake a lot of raisin bread.  You couldn't tell the difference between a raisin and a weevil!  We did have some great meals though. I stood in line for over two hours for Thanksgiving Dinner once, and it was fabulous!"

We looked around the ship some more before leaving and going to the submarine and supersonic airliner.

On the way down the gangway Nathan asked me, "What did you think, Grandpa?"

"Well," I said, "I'm really glad we came, and I liked coming back, but it's not exactly like I remember it.  Everything is very clean, and it is easier to get around.  There's one other thing too."

"What's that?"

"It doesn't smell right!  I didn't smell any JP-5 jet fuel or diesel oil or hundreds of unwashed sailors!"