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Earlier this summer, I received an e-mail from my Naval Academy class regarding my approaching 25^th reunion.  Cheryl and I attended our 20^th and it was a blast.  Whether we were going to make it to the 25^th was another story since we were already going back east to see my father.  At the end of the e-mail was a plea from Donna Esposito Sengelaub for help with the memorial service that we have some time during the weekend.   I remembered the service in 2002 and it was well done. 

Looking through the list, I saw that my company mate, Bill Hughes had been left off.  Bill was killed in June 2005 when an ATV he was using to work on his farm rolled over onto him in freak accident.  I sent Donna an e-mail so she could up date her list.  The list of names really struck me.  Here were my classmates that are gone forever.  I saw my friend Rich Dempsey who was killed in an F-14 accident.  Rick and I were on Youngster Cruise together.  I remember going to his parents’ house on a weekend away from the ship.  His father was the commander of the submarine there in San Diego and he took Rick and me down to Tijuana for an afternoon. 

Then there was Jeff Ohl.  Jeff was this big jolly guy who I got to know during flight school.  He was buds with John Foley, Tim McDonnell and Pat Greene who I shared a house with in Pensacola, therefore, I was his friend as well.  I remember his method of greeting you. “Mmmmmuuuuuuuuuuugggggggggg!!!”   He always referred to everyone as “mug” as well.  It wasn’t “Hey Tom,” or “Hey Tim.”  It was always “Mmmmuuuuggggg!” in this deep resonant voice.  Jeff contracted cancer not long after we started flight school and he passed away in September 1983. 

Thanks for reading my blog.

I have three pieces I’m presently working on: A Christmas song,  “For Those We’ve Left Behind”, and a song of comfort loosely based on the events surrounding my father’s death.  Unfortunately, I don’t like where any of them are going at the moment.  So I pulled out a piece I wrote last summer. 

When they first announced the calendar for my 25^th class reunion, one of the items was music by my good friend Ward Carroll.  I offered to sit in with him and to provide some original music.  He didn’t like the idea of pulling a band together from across the country and then playing music no one would be familiar with.  Between the time I made the suggestion and the time Ward came back vetoing the idea, I came up with three pieces: “Vous Shoes”, “The Class that Jack Built”, and this one.

It is loosely based off a piece I came up with when I was deployed to the Persian Gulf during the summer of 1992.  I was in Independence (CV-62) and I was the V-2 Division Officer and a Catapult and Arresting Gear Officer.  I had it easy compared to a lot of my shipmates, but it was pretty difficult.  We regularly worked 16 -18 hour days, stood 5-minute alerts, and would have non-stop cycles for 12 hours in a row.  The worst was the 5 minute alerts.  We had to be able to launch a pair of fighters in five minutes or less.  In order to accomplish that, the catapult and the fighter had to be manned and ready at all times.  The pilots would rotate in the cockpit every half hour or so, it wasn’t so easy for the catapult crews.  Most of the time you could find them sprawled in the catwalks that surrounded the flight deck trying to get any kind of sleep they could.  If you could sleep, then you had time to think.  For those of us with family, your thoughts often turned to them. 

The air temperature was regularly above 100 degrees.  Add on the radiant heat that came off the flight deck and some jet engine exhaust and you had the making of heat stoke.  It was hands down the hardest job I ever had in the Navy, but it was also the most rewarding.  The other thing that I had to deal with as an officer, is that I had to constantly present a positive attitude. Which was pretty tough when faced with all the things we had to do. If you didn’t, you could guarantee that you would have a morale issue - that last thing you wanted.

After a lot of consideration, I decided to add a blog page to our website.  Any of the band members will be able to post blogs here.  I am going to use my blog to write about various musical pieces I am writing.  I am setting a personal goal to create at least one new piece of music every two weeks.  During May it was more like a new piece of music every day.   Scott was quite sick of it I can tell you. 

“Scott, check out this new song I just came up with.”

“But I didn’t even get to look at the one you wrote yesterday.”

 I will try and post a simple mp3 of each new piece and I will invite comment and criticism.  Some times I may take an older piece and rework it.  Some times I may create something that is secular in nature.  Often times it is something completely out of the blue that strikes me as I am on my daily walk. It will all depend on how the Spirit moves me. 

God bless,

Tom Whalen