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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.