Memorial Day 2022

Memorial Day is for those who paid the ultimate price for the freedoms we enjoy, and often take for granted today.

Memorial Day is for those who died in the service of our country. It is those souls who we are to think about on this day. Each year I realize with deeper appreciation.

We lost Rick Baker this year (pictured on the sailboat with the Marine ball cap). Rick was a Marine Corps RIO and then an F4 Pilot who served in Nam. Rick and I went to Hoover High together. He went into the Corps and I went to USNA. Rick came to see me a few times at the Academy.

I was with Rick when I passed my first Kidney Stone during the summer of 1970. I was a Second Class Midshipman and Rick a newly commissioned Second Lt while we were visiting Rick's Grand Parents in Queens, New York. RIP Ri.....ck!!!!

When I think of Memorial Day, I think of it in a very general, and also some very specific and personal ways.

Respecting and honoring the dead who served, those I never met, was how we were raised as the sons and daughters of a Pearl Harbor Survivor and a Submarine Combat Veteran of WWII, who had lost many shipmates and friends to the war effort.

We lived our early years growing up outside the gates of Pearl Harbor, surrounded by survivors and fresh memories and stories of the war. There were bomb shelters in the back yards of our post WWII Navy Housing. Our school rooms were Quonset huts.

For the parents of my generation, war was real, everyone was part of the effort, and everyone knew people who had been lost in the effort. Not just some of the population, but everyone was greatly affected. Even professional athletes and movie stars had their careers interrupted to go to war to protect our freedoms.

For me, the thought of war, and fighting and dying for our country were close, but still "second hand," until 1965 and Vietnam.

The first person I knew to die in Vietnam was Arnie. I didn't know him well. He lived across the street from my grandparents when our family moved to San Diego from Norfolk in 1964. I remember when I learned that he had been killed. I was 16 years old. Arnie was the first person I knew who was killed in war, and today I think of young Arnie...and then their was Pat Roark's older brother. I began to wonder if the war in Vietnam would still be in conflict when I turned draft age. It was.

At the Naval Academy we passed through Memorial Hall often. If you ever visit the Academy, be sure to visit Memorial Hall in the Rotunda of Bancroft Hall. All USNA Grads who die in the service of the country are memorialized in this Hall. Members of the classes before us were sending graduates into combat, and new additions to Mem Hall were not uncommon.

And most personally for me...

I think of Mike Cogan, who I roomed with for a semester at USNA and who left us prior to graduation (Pictured at the Tiller of a knock about, with Rick Baker and another Marine friend up from Quantico).

And I think of my good friend, classmate, and company mate...(I sold him his first house), Billy Blanton, who had a rendezvous with a mountain side in the Philippines on a routine training mission in an S-3 around 1976.

And then my most personal experience, the closest I was to the death of a shipmate, the death of GMGC Holm, the safety observer in the Aft 5" Gun Mount on the USS Elliot (DD967) in January of 1977 on the Pacific side of the Panama Canal and Elliot's first post commissioning gun shoot. My Battle Station was on the bridge, as Navigator.

And of course, my Dad...a Pearl Harbor Survivor and Submarine Combat Veteran of WWII, and my role model and hero. We lost Pop in 2005. This photo was taken in Saipan, probably around 1944. Pop was constructing a "rest camp" for submariners. I was blessed to be raised by and in the company of United States Combat Veterans. The only road for me was to follow in their footsteps.

Happy Memorial Day, 2022.