Not Just a Job

The navy was and maybe still is advertising that joining the service was not just a job, it was an adventure. Whenever I see that ad, it does look like an adventure. I look back on my time in the navy and as I remember, it was an adventure for me.

There was paid travel to places I would never go to outside the navy. I got to go from Georgia to Singapore and everywhere in between. There was flight crew duty and flight deck duty on an aircraft carrier and shore patrol duty (that was a trip in itself). There were Pacific islands that I would never have otherwise seen. But thinking about that, I cannot imagine what some other guy’s time may have been in the navy. For instance, how would a yeoman’s duty seem adventurous? What about a cook, or an engineman spending untold hours deep in the bowels of a ship and not seeing the light of day? Those and many other occupational specialties would not seem adventurous to me.

Yesterday when I posted my cloud pictures, an old navy buddy saw them and replied. He asked if I had ever taken any pictures when we were flying into typhoons (what we call hurricanes in the U.S.) to take meteorological measurements? He said he was never nervous until he went up into the cockpit with the pilot on one typhoon penetration and actually saw the wall of clouds he was flying through. I replied back saying I never gave it a thought back then. It was what the young people now call extreme adventure. Then it was just a regular adventure. I also replied that at my age and thinking process today I would not dream of doing that again. One plane failure or mistake and we would have crashed in the Pacific, in the middle of nowhere, and died where no one would ever find us.

We were risking our lives for an extra $60 a month. Of course when we were only making about $80 a month regular pay, an extra $60 was most desirable.