Reunions...After Words

I just got back from a reunion. No, it wasn’t the type that first comes to mind, a high school reunion. It was a reunion of my ship’s crew from when I was on active duty in the Navy on the USS Atakapa in 1969 and 1970. I had not seen any of these guys for over 35 years and I discovered a couple of things that did not occur to me beforehand. I was fully prepared to take a lot of pictures for example, having lugged three still cameras, a video camera, the associated chargers and accessories as well as a tripod through airport security at Dulles Airport when I flew out to Nashville TN for the gathering. What I wasn’t prepared for was not recognizing but one or two people at first glance. It’s a funny thing about visual memory. I had plenty of them but they had gotten a little foggy around the edges after 35 years. All those guys had gotten a lot older!

Navy reunions are different from high school reunions in that all the stories we tell to one another are officially known as “sea stories”. You can immediately recognize a looming sea story because it is always prefaced by the phrase “Now this ain’t no shit!” It must a law or something that we have to do that. The teller of the story most times turns out to be a peripheral player in the scenario or perhaps just an observer/reporter of the event. For example I had nothing to do with the time when we sent a green sailor (not from sea sickness although God knows there were plenty of them around) out onto the bow of the ship while at sea off the coast of Norway near the Arctic Circle and told him that he was assigned to the mail buoy watch yet I can tell that story with the best of them and what detail memory neglects can easily be filled in by imagination.

What I found most perplexing about this reunion as well as high school reunions I have been to is the difficulty in mentally processing the event afterwards. There never seems to be time for that while actually at a reunion because of the activities and the desire to not miss a moment of the experience. So it is not until I get home that I begin to mull things over, trying to sort it all out, to make some sense of the resultant thoughts and emotions.  It was  a little easier for me to work through it with a high school gathering than with this military reunion. In high school you have a more complete context and more in common with the other people from that portion of your life. In the military you are suddenly thrust into an entirely new environment with a lot of people you don’t know and the sole reason for the existence of this new environment you find yourself in is to get a job done that is in no way a personal goal. The rules you went by on the outside no longer apply and there are new rules, written and unwritten, to learn.  

More on this later maybe after I’ve had a chance to let this fester between my ears for a while.

Comments

[William B. Adams HM2(DV)]

Hello All.........Very nice site thank you for all the work....I just wanted to pop in and say hi.........My duty aboard to ole tug was short
but I have many fond memories.....Too bad there was not a billet for a Medical Diver...hence I served aboard from sometime in Sept 1963..to maybe after the first of the year 1964 before transfering to the USS Opportune............I would like to hear from any one who remembers the Ole Doc Adams
HMC(DV) Ret.