USS MULLINNIX DD-944

Panama Canal
23 October

I'd made it. Memories for a lifetime, stories for longer than that, and a bit of growing up. We'll be in Norfolk in 3 days and a wake up! With the infectious thrill of sighting home port again, with the waving hands of welcome from family and friends waiting pier-side. There won't be anyone there for me, just a cold beer in a bar on The Strip.

Us younger sailors were changing the Navy - not worse, not better, just different. The technology was changing. And so were the ships and the standards of the men aboard them. I still had 480 days and wake up before my discharge. Wouldn't I be better out of it? But where would I go to? For me there had become no world elsewhere, no yearning to return to family. Yes, I still have memories as a small boy, with my romantic dreams, my naive ambitions, my desire to see the world. Well, I'd done that. Now what? What had happened to those years? Where had they gone, the almost two decades since I'd walked with my grandfather in Nebraska.

I knew I didn't want to stay in the Navy. That relationship of dependency could be the beginning of a dangerous conspiracy. The ship, which had seemed so large in the fall of 1970, had narrowed to the width of a cell. Would I miss the sunlit expanse of the Atlantic and Pacific? Yeah, probably.

I'm a WAR Combat Veteran now, nobody can take that from me. Suddenly, surprisingly, my eyes stung and a desperate fear swept over me that I would weep, and that if I did so I would be crying not for the dead but in terrible self-pity that things I'd enjoyed had been taken away by time and nautical miles. I lifted my head to the oncoming wind, glad that my smarting eyes were hidden from my shipmates...



















Next stop? Norfolk, Virginia!!!

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