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.