Bare with me friends. I really get effed up during the holidays. Well, not always but the last couple years I've been a wreck. Writing for me no matter how silly or trivial or self absorbed a subject it might be. It helps. I guess I'm really missing some stuff in life. I'm not telling you that cause I want sympathy.
I like to tell stories, good or bad I'll bore you with them. In the Navy we called them Sea Stories and everybody has some.
Here's one of mine.. ( I got more, not so depressing
)
Fire on the Flightdeck! Fire on the Flightdeck! -were the words coming across the ships 1MC, the shipwide PA system.
It was in the fall of 1984, aboard the USS Midway on a beautiful sunny day, calm seas, and my first cruise. We had left our homeport of Yokosuka, Japan 7 days earlier.
When I heard the announcement I didnt really know what to do. Id pretty much been in the Navy since breakfast and was working on an F-4S Phantom in hangar bay two. A First Class PO from my squadron happened to walk by and said, Go back to your shop Danny! so I did.
It was a sad, tragic day. An A-7 landing gone bad. The pilot was way below his flight path and the Landing Signal Officer waved him off but the guy didnt abort, he never got enough altitude to clear the round down of the ship. Instead he plowed into it about mid center of the aircraft, right on the centerline external fuel tank. There really was nothing much left of the airplane, it exploded into a fireball and momentum carried the wreckage forward off the deck. We did a very long FOD walkdown afterwards, but there just was not much of anything to pick up. I didnt see the crash happen live, I was down in the hangar bay but it was replayed numerous times on the ships CCTV for a few hours before somebody had the good sensed to remove it.
Sad story really, the pilot was a young guy, probably 24-25 years old, his brother was stationed aboard the ship, a pilot too if I remember correctly.
