Atakapa

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.

Any new info?

One of the things I would hope will happen here is an exchange of information that might have some clues as to how to track down other shipmates that we have yet to locate. For example I would love to find QMC Gerald Bell but his name is not unique enough for a Google Search to be of much help. Same thing for RM1 Paul WIlliams who was my first leading RM on the ship. Anything would be helpful with names that are fairly common like this. I f you have any info on these two just post it as a comment and we can go from there.

Two good comments...

...so far about identifying the guys in the pictures. I'm afraid that there aren't all that many that I can put names with. With the flood of memories that the reunion brought back and the fact that we all have added quite a few pages to our log (gotten older) it was hard to put names with faces while we were there. Yeah, everyone had name tags but running around and writing those names down while taking pictures just didn't happen. I'll go back and try to label the ones I can recall but I'll need help with this. If you see someone you do recognize or if you were there and remember names please help me out here. Sorry about that but that's my sorry story on that issue. Check back in the days to come for a better report on this.

Welcome to the Atakapa Blog

This blog is a new effort which will hopefully help us to keep up to date with one another and make Ron's excellent work a little bit easier on him. Everyone is welcome to send info for this blog. If you are not familiar with blogs, they are a kind of specialized web page that are ideally suited as a meeting place and information exchange. No special skills are needed beyond what you already know about using your computer.

You can send in sea stories, questions, pictures, reminders, names and addresses...in short send in most anything that pertains to our ship and our shipmates and their families. I would remind you that this is a public forum so items posted should be appropriate for a forum like this.

On here you will also see links to other web sites that I think you may find interesting and I'll be happy to add appropriate links that you suggest. Also you'll find photo albums of pictures you might like to see. I'll try not to duplicate photos posted by others. So, that said, lets jump in and get busy.   

If you want to send me an article of whatever length or photos for the blog, send it to jim.brodhead@verizon.net. It was great seeing all of you in Nashville for the reunion and for those that weren't there, please know that you were missed.