Funny how impressions you get from listening to someone talk about his past sometimes don’t sync up with the paper record… based on the paper records, he did his minimum active duty needed to fulfill his service requirement and wasn’t transferred to the reserves until his active duty requirement was fulfilled. He may have not re-enlisted because he wanted to go home to take care of his sick mother, but he didn’t get out of his active duty commitment early in order to do so. And apparently whatever they had on file for him was positive enough for them to call him back up for the Gary Powers crisis… hardly the fuck-up that I had assumed.
]]>Yes, it is hard to keep track of things when you move a lot.
It occurs to me that your Dad’s rating may have been different than what he actually did. He may have become a cook on his ship but the Navy may have had a different job entered in his records. It is also possible that like the Marines concept that all Marines are riflemen, the Navy may consider all of its personnel able seamen.
]]>I also found a photo of my father that appears to be from Stars & Stripes showing him opening cans of food while standing over a large pot. Alas the photo that my mother once had of my father standing over a large vat of spuds appears to have gone missing over the years, along with his duffel bag with his Navy uniform. Sigh. The disadvantages of a migratory life.
]]>Bob Dole is still around, but he looks terrible, and Kirk Douglas just had his 102nd birthday, but people from that era are few and far between. It was cold down here so even if there were survivors still in the area, they wouldn’t have been at the service held next to the Gulf aboard NAS Pensacola, usually in an open hangar.
It is unfortunate that there are so few of us who still remember what it was like living under the nuclear threat, especially the Cuban missile crisis. People who have never been in a war zone can’t appreciate how bad things can be.
]]>People with an institutional memory of total war are all pretty much gone, George H.W. Bush being the most recent famous person to leave. What that says about the future… I dunno.
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