USS MULLINNIX DD-944

7-13 October 1972
Still a long way from home...

From leaving Pearl Harbor on 7 October, Mullinnix steamed towards San Diego, CA, arriving on Friday, 13 October - a long time at sea. Steady steaming, no stopping, just heading east - headed home. A different kind of feeling came over the crew compared to heading to Vietnam in April / May. It already seemed such a long time ago...

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I drank too much in Pearl. If you play with the owls at night, you have to fly with the eagles in the morning. My intestines were like a straight pipe filled with gaseous, sulfuric flames. I'd farted and was worried it would eat through the mess deck chair. No one seemed inclined to stand behind me, and I couldn't feel my lips. I felt like I needed to wipe my butt with a snow cone.

You could have put a grenade in my mouth, pulled the pin, and I wouldn't have felt a thing. I'd lost sight in one eye, and the world sounded like it was made of rushing water. My shirt was covered with breakfast, which had slid unnoticed out of my mouth. My pants felt like they were full of lava. At least during the autopsy, they'd know what killed me. I'd decided to stop breathing as it was too painful. Screw it, I wasn't getting any oxygen anyway. If I needed air, I'd just suck it in through the 4-inch hole in my stomach.

I'd briefly hooked up with a titless Navy Wave at the EM club on base. She was knock-kneed and I was slightly bull-legged. When we stood together we spelled O-X! I danced with her and every time I'd spin her she’d grow 2”. I asked why? She said, “You’re unscrewing my wooden leg!”

She was an Italian from Philadelphia with a mouth like a saltwater crocodile – one that would make a 2nd class lifer-BT blush. Her eyes were too close together like headlights on a jeep. I called her “AC” – “Almost Cyclops”. Anything for a laugh, right?

She didn't think it was funny. She raised her middle finger. “This is what we call the finger. Go fuck yourself.”

Yes, it was that kind of night. As it turned out, my last one in the "Far East".

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I missed my resolute father, my always affectionate mother, the hum and whirr of the City of Lincoln, Nebraska, but these people and this place that had circumscribe my world for all but the last 179 days of my life had already begun to soften at the edges, like a childhood dream so vivid in the dreaming that I could no longer separate it from the memory of real experience. And the realization that they were slipping away so swiftly made me bleak. The letters addressed to me in a familiar hand filled me with the kind of dread that most people who are unaccustomed to receiving letters feel when the postman rings their doorbell.

I was trucking around the outside of the ship, absent mindedly heading to the fantail - hypnotized by the perfect, pulsating orange circles of cigarette ends. Walking up to the nearest, illuminating at its brightest a few filaments of blue smoke, but nothing else. Orange circles swell and recede, swell and recede as they are inhaled. Then I saw it. A miniature orange rocket-like spark shot out of the orange circle on the right. Then another. I had found Birdman, Stash, Gus and Doyle.

The Navy was a good place to grow up and a good place to grow old. It’s the years in between that are a challenge.




























Finally, Friday the 13th, we sighted San Diego. The sea is a symphony of color and texture – both always changing. Today it chose lapis lazuli. You can hear sounds at sea. You can’t hear sounds in port, only noise. As the wind and sun-burned faces of the crew watched the Southern California coast creep closer, we yearned for the noise.

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