Posted on 02/01/2017 10:49:59 AM PST by TermLimitsforAll
The sun is setting on one of the most famous warships to ever serve in the U.S. Naval Fleet.
On Feb. 3, the USS Enterprise (CVN 65) will be officially decommissioned at the Newport News Shipyard, the same place where the ship was built decades ago.
On December 1, 2012, the USS Enterprise was inactivated at Naval Station Norfolk less than a month after returning from her final deployment, marking her 25th and final homecoming after 51 years of service.
In June 2013, the USS Enterprise made her final voyage, transiting from Naval Station Norfolk to the Newport News Shipyard where the ship has spent the past several years having nuclear fuel removed from its eight nuclear reactors.
(Excerpt) Read more at wtkr.com ...
I’m with ya!
A couple decades ago, there was a plan to bring the cruiser Des Moines to the Duluth-Superior lakefront as tourism draw. The Des Moines had been retired at Philadelphia for several years and was still in very good shape.
A fund drive up north was canceled after Minnesota Lefties marched in opposition.
The Des Moines was eventually scrapped.
The scrapping or losing of a ship is a hard thing.
It is interesting...most guys serving in the Navy on a single tour are ready to get out. By the end, you hate being at sea and living under military discipline, and just want to go home. I think that is pretty universal across most branches, too.
But...nearly every person I know who has served on a ship has some different attitude about the ship. Sure, it is no more than a floating barracks that you live in for weeks at a time without setting foot on land, and it is a big, inanimate hunk of metal, usually with derogatory names in many cases. (On the USS John F. Kennedy, it was known both affectionately and negatively/scatalogically as “The Big John”)
But, nearly every man I have ever known who served on a vessel did retain some semblance as time went by, of the sense of a ship as a living thing. A home. They DID seem to have a “personality” if that is the right word. And many men came to see their ship in that way.
In WWII, the USS Atlanta was christened by Margaret Mitchell, author of the then wildly popular book “Gone With The Wind”, because she was an Atlanta gal. She was very much caught up in the romanticism of the ship as an animate object with a personality, as were many of the crew and their families. But the way the ship was sunk in The Naval Battle of Guadalcanal (a confused night surface action) and the circumstances around it (it was determined that most of her damage was caused by 8” shells from the USS San Francisco in the heat of the battle) caused a degree of bitterness amongst her survivors and their family members, especially when the heavily damaged USS San Francisco came into port being hailed as a heroic vessel, when she was responsible for the death of Admiral Scott and the entire bridge crew of the Atlanta, and was mostly a survivor of the battle, having Admiral Callahan and her own Captain killed on her bridge by Japanese cruisers. Two Admirals killed in a single engagement was unusual, to say the least. Anyway, when the truth became known, there was much bitterness and anger, and many of the families (and Margaret Mitchell) stopped seeing the ship itself in the romantic and sentimental way as a entity deserving of recognition as some kind of living, breathing, family member thing, and saw it thereafter as an inanimate hunk of metal meant to kill people. Which, of course, it was.
But the thing is, sailors still see naval ships (especially their own) in a sentimental way, and always have, which is why they refer to them as “she” and “her”. I know many aviators have felt that way about an airplane that brought them home...or didn’t.
And the stories of men, nearly having lost their lives, wounded and burned, treading water in shark infested waters after abandoning ship, crying hot tears of anguish and grief at the sight of their own ship sinking beneath the waves, anguish and grief that felt as real to some as that felt for any of their shipmates. Seems hard to believe, but I do believe it. Anyone who spent time on a ship can probably understand it to some degree, even if much of it is sentimentality for your youth as you grow older, but...it is still there nonetheless.
And those of you who served on the “Big E” know exactly what I mean when you read this news of her scrapping.
Thanks for your perspective. It is war that is the heinous thing.
Thanks for your perspective. It is war that is the heinous thing.
What a lovely and thoughtful post! Thank you so much for sharing this with me! I am honored and I am also most grateful for however you served our country.
- Megan
I am an Army Brat. My folks were stationed in Sagamihara and later, Yokohama 1951-1961. I was 13 years old on the last trip home on MSTS (the Army’s Navy.)
In the ten years for various reasons, My mom and I made six back and forth trips on five different ships. Each was Seattle-Yokohama or Yokohama-Seattle, except for the last final trip into Oakland. This was aboard the General W. A. Mann.
East trip took two weeks.
You are right on that, Lopeover. If only human nature was not what it is...
Wow! That must have been something as a kid! By the time my family did its globetrotting when I was a Navy Brat, we went on MAC flights. (I lived in Yokosuka for a few years...)
Thank you for saying so, MeganC!
I will most likely have passed when CVN-80 is christened. Arrangements have been made for my ashes to be there. I was not in the Navy and have never been on board the Enterprise, but I think it is important that there is always an Enterprise in the US Navy.
I agree...
Us kids from Yokohama would catch the bus to Yokosuka to go roller skating on the base. On the second floor of a big white (everything painted white in the Navy) building there was a massive skate place, complete with roller skate rentals for $.25. Great fun, but I never could master skating backwards...
But...nearly every person I know who has served on a ship has some different attitude about the ship.
= = = = = = = = = = = = = = =
OLD NAVY SAYING
The Two best ships I ever served on are
the one I just left
and
the one I am being transferred to....
LOL! I went to that place many, many times! During the Special Services summer programs for kids, I always made sure to sign up for roller skating!
Boy, trip down memory lane there!
Ain’t that the truth, xrmusn!
As you WELL know, that is affectionately, whether you served on 2 ships or 20.
When I went from an APA to an LST, you ‘vow’ to keep in touch forever, well at least till the next time you are in the same port but even that sort of passes as you no longer live ‘in the old neighborhood’- new school, new friends, new bars to hang out in.
Must really be ‘hard’ going from a Gator to a Bird Farm as you have to find a whole new area of ‘town’ to hang out.
In 1961 Yokosuka I took to hanging around ‘Submarine Town’ as I had orders to New London for school. Kind of strange with a ‘USS Terrell County’ rocker on right shoulder while hanging around a bunch of ‘fish’.
Ran into the ‘Archer-Fish’ during that period - they were on the ‘round the world’ cruise with a Single, all volunteer crew. That week in DEC 1961 convinced me I had made the right career move....
BUT some 40 or 50 years later after 10 or so minutes it is more than likely that it seems you have ‘known’ each other forever....
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