My last active-duty day on Midway was May 26, 1964, the day we pulled into Midway’s home port at Alameda, California, back from the 1963-64 West-Pac cruise. Although I had my orders to radar school at nearby Treasure Island and my seabag was packed, I was in no hurry to leave the ship, I remember. I was having a hard time coming to terms with the fact that I had to say goodbye to the life of adventure I had experienced on Midway, to the new friends I had made on the cruise, and to Midway herself.

I hung around CIC on that last day for as long as I dared, experiencing what I could for the last time, soaking it all in. Finally, it was time to leave, and, reluctantly, I made my way down the gangplank. Looking back at the ship from the pier, my feelings were mixed, somewhere between sadness and awe. But I knew I had to get on with the next chapter in my life, I suppose, and I found a taxi to take me to T.I.

Fast forward a few months to the fall of 1964. I was halfway through radar school, and several of us were sitting around the barracks, too broke to go into the City By the Bay, listening on the radio to the number-one pop hit in the country “Sugar Shack,” when the song was suddenly interrupted by a news bulletin. In a distant country called

Vietnam, the announcer said, in a place called the Gulf of Tonkin, North Vietnamese torpedo boats had attacked the destroyers USS Maddox and USS Turner Joy, and our destroyers had sunk two of the torpedo boats in retaliation. "They better not mess with us," I remember one of the men saying, breaking the silence that had fallen over us as we digested the news (which eventually was revealed to be false, or at best, inaccurate). The rest of us nodded in agreement, pondering what this incident, which became known as the “Gulf of Tonkin Incident,” might mean to us down the road. We had no clue, and put it out of our minds. We were struggling to unravel the complex theory of Ohm’s Law, after all.

A year later, the impact of that radio broadcast really hit home for me. For by then, I was in Vietnam, in the Gulf of Tonkin, a radarman on the USS Wilhoite, DE/DER-397, a radar picket ship converted from a WWII DE. We were at war with North Vietnam, and, patrolling the coastal waters off South Vietnam, our job was to stop weapon’s smuggling by sea. They called it Operation Market Time. We carried out this mission with few complaints, and a whole lot of Navy Pride. There was no “Hell no, we won’t go.” We were already there.

In 1965, the Midway was operating in the Gulf of Tonkin, waging war on North Vietnam from Yankee Station, a couple hundred miles off the coast, at the same time I was there on the Wilhoite. I remember from my duty station in Wilhoite’s CIC, listening to her exchanging radio messages with the other U.S. ships in her Task Group. “School Boy” was her radio call sign. Wilhoite’s was “Smokey Hill.”

That ’65 Vietnam patrol was the last time I crossed paths with Midway in Vietnam, for she “retired” from the active fleet for the next several years to undergo decommissioning/recommissioning at the San Francisco Bay Naval Shipyard, Hunter’s Point, California.

Although I returned to Vietnam waters in ’66 and ’67 on Wilhoite (we were home ported out of Pearl Harbor), I took great comfort in Midway’s presence there in 1965.

Now, all these years later, I still take great comfort in her presence as she serves her country as a world class ship museum in San Diego.