The "Old Salt" gets me thinking...

Capt. Erickson and your correspondent
Christmas shopping for our wives in NYC. I sure hope they like the cigars we've picked out.




My longtime pal, The Skipper, is always a font of information on almost anything you care to talk about. Mention some obscure TV show from the 50's and he'll give you the list of cast members and some inside skinny on the network that ran it. The sludge that rises to the surface of his brain never ceases to amuse and amaze me. He spent years as a captain of tanker ships on the high seas, is an avid outdoors man and even flies his own plane. As long as you don't get him started on the falling dollar and what it means to the price of gold, you're usually in for some stimulating conversation when he's in the mood.

We've been pals since we were fourteen and we talk frequently.
The other day he asked me, "What kind of planes did your dad fly in WW II?" We had both been spending time watching the Ken Burns PBS series "The War" and were comparing notes.
The question took me by surprise. I didn't know the answer. Since dad never talked about the war, all I knew was that he was a member of VF 29 aboard the USS Cabot. I did know that as the war progressed my father was promoted to "flight officer" or something like that and was mostly ordering other men to fly missions.
Like I said, he didn't talk about it. My mother mentioned once that when he got promoted he had a hard time dealing with the fact that he was sending others into battle instead of getting in the plane himself. I can't imagine how tough that must have been.After our conversation I started doing some research and found a couple of books on the Cabot and its crew. It was a carrier in Bull Halsey's fleet and saw action in all the major campaigns in the South Pacific.

The next day I got an e-mail from the Skipper with a website dedicated to the USS Cabot. The pictures on the site were fascinating to me and I found myself wishing that dad were still around to fill me in on what I was looking at.
Where were his quarters? Do you remember this galley? How tough was it to land on a deck this small?
Who were these guys?
Why didn't you want to talk about it?

The USS Cabot

Dad has been gone for almost thirteen years now. We are losing the veterans of WW II at a rate somewhere near 1500 per day. The U.S. lost more than 400,000 good men and women in that conflict and we were the lucky ones. I kick myself for never sitting down with a tape recorder and insisting that he tell me his "war story". He may not have obliged me, but I should have tried.

If you still have a parent or relative who served in WW II don't let another day go by without getting their story. If nothing else we owe it to our kids and grand kids to preserve the memory of the sacrifice of what truly was "The Greatest Generation".

The Cabot was scrapped a few years ago and is now part of a reef somewhere in the Gulf of Mexico, but it lives on the freedoms we enjoy in what is still the best damn country in the world.