As Dickens said much more famously, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times." And it was. A time of adventure. A time of worry for our very future. Musta' been some time in 1991. The buildup for Desert Storm was in full majesty.

My wife Kate and I were both Viet Nam vets. And, quite suddenly, 20-odd years later, it looked for all the world to us that history was sliding its way over that same old crumbling cliff. I was still on active duty in the navy, and she was still showing up for reserve drill weekends. Without so much as a "Standby for heavy rolls," she was called up for mobilization. She's a corps wave. And, all the medical personnel in just about the whole navy had been given similar orders to move out. Kate's outfit was supposed to be replacement troops for the mobile Fleet Hospital units that were manning up the real-live "M*A*S*H" units. The inside dope was that the first-line folks had about no chance of survival when the shootin' started. The second-line didn't have a much better prospect.

I had a different gig going. About a year before, I had sort of on a dare started up a shipboard training unit on an air station. An odd duck, at very least. Despite the apparent wishes of my higher ups, my project had grown significantly and prospered. Which leads me early in this tale, to the real moral of the story: If not enough people in high places can claim credit for something of high visibility; then the project is doomed at birth. Something about as unavoidable as the law of gravity. Anyhow.

I had a bit of a far flung "empire" going with shop spaces, classrooms, a boat repair yard facility with several boats in overhaul, and a brought-back-from-dead ancient 40 foot steel patrol boat in the water in my own designated pier space in a navy harbor. You can probably see why the senior officers that I sort of reported to on this venture would be less than enthusiastic. At that point, I had "only" had one accident that resulted in a fatality. And, that was when one of my troopers on a motorcycle collided with a car in my parking lot. A real tragedy, but not exactly anything I could control for.

No reportable oil spills, no fires or explosions, no collisions or groundings, not even any docking incidents or industrial accidents. And, you could say that I had my hands full keeping it that way.

The mission in question was a night training op. I was supposed to rendezvous with an H-60-like the army birds that didn't fare so well in "Black Hawk Down!" The mission profile was pretty straightforward. The helo guys were supposed to find me in the dark, hover over a spot in the ocean of their liking, push a bunch of survival swimmer trainees out, and leave 'em bobbing around for a while. My job was to make sure there were the same number of swimmers riding the hoist back up that jumped out. Like I said, pretty straightforward.

I already mentioned that my equipment was, shall I be humble?, several levels below what the guys on McHale's Navy would expect from their own supply chain. In fact, my operation was on a similar level of out-of- sight-out-of-mind management ethos. I had set this mission up with the nearby helo squadron CO on a pretty much hand shake basis. He was at that point in the food chain where everybody had to stop what they were doing and salute. I was a rather lowly chief petty officer. But, I had my own "command" like any skipper when he/she leaves the pier. And, I had a habit of being on time, on station, and ready for what ever came next. It was on the OPSKED, and nobody in my parent organization seemed to pay much attention. Yet.

One of my favorite bumper stickers goes something like, "If we didn't fly by night, we wouldn't fly at all." My then-operational boat was a Coast Guard cast-off 40 foot steel-hulled patrol boat built about the time 'Bess Truman packed up her suitcase and moved back to Missouri. Much of what I accomplished during this episode reminds one of another Dickens story character, Artful Dodger. One of the reasons those officers I was telling you about were a teensey weensey bit nervous had to do with how I was pretty much forced to acquire things.

The army calls it "Midnight Requisition," and the navy calls it "Cumshaw." The basic idea is that everything stays in the family; but if you have something you don't appear to be using at the moment, you probably won't mind if I borrow it. Sort of. Sometimes there's a trade involved. Sometimes, not so much.

The navy doesn't make a habit of giving names and conducting commissioning ceremonies for small craft. And, as far as the navy inventory goes, a 40 footer is below chump change. No problem. "Old Salt Zero One" might sound a bit pretentious when there was probably little chance of there ever being a "zero two." But, everybody gotta' have a name. Right? And, once the holes in the hull were patched (I learned to form complex hull plate repairs with the tips of a fork lift while a "borrowed" welder tacked 'em on), and the engines brought back from being seized up and partially disassembled (I learned how to rebuild injectors and a few of the darker secrets of WWII-vintage marine diesels), she was hornswaggled a legitimate hull registry number and painted haze gray for her rather elaborate commissioning ceremony.

Festivities over, I needed a generally accepted raison de etre. That's where things like swimmer guard came into play. Sure, I used her to teach officers the dark arts of shiphandling, enlisted troops everything from damage control to coastal pilotage, and so on. But, when you want to stay in business in an otherwise hostile bureaucracy, you gotta' have a bit of glamour going for you. And, like I was saying, this creation sprang forth initially on an AIR station.

Back to my twisted tale. Navy helicopters have pretty sophisticated communications gear. They can probably call the president out of the shower if they want to. But, my comm gear was pretty basic. I had an "acquired" HF voice radio that sounded more like the villain's voice from a modern animated feature movie. It had a rather huge antenna sticking up above Old Salt. All the better to catch unwary seagulls, I suppose. And, I had actually figured a way to transform a small portion of an admin office's copier paper budget into a store-bought VHF marine band radio. Through the wonders of creative reapportionment.

Part of the problems with using the rather restricted channels on marine band is that it is such a "party line." Everybody and their uncle is on the same freq. Most of us brought up before the advent of texting and the dark arts of cellphonery, grew to accept that as a cost of doing business at sea. But, the little marine antennae are only omni-directional in the HORIZONTAL. Not, so very useful when you are trying to have a detailed conversation with a guy clattering away up there over your head. Kind of a big problem, that I for one hadn't exactly accounted for. There were a few other basic needs that seemed to intrude, like how to "buy" fuel for free, for example.

I have no idea what time we shoved off that night. But, it was probably after everybody's bed time, at least. Dark as the inside of the proverbial cow out there. GPS for other than the properly-annointed was sort of like the early days of color TV. Kind of a curiosity, with pretty interesting potential. But, I was pretty grateful to have my almost-new LORAN-charlie set, with its own antenna whip up there at the masthead menacing the sea gulls, too. Everything had to be transposed with a pencil and red flashlight clenched under your chin from the linear interpolator graph to the paper chart. People who wear those cute little LED headlamps seen just about everywhere these days, just may not know how truly wonderful an invention they have strapped to their crania. And, in the process, something of the prestidigitator's art is now lost.

To actually plot your position, inside the rather Spartan cabin of a really Spartan steel hulled boat rolling and lurching her way across the ocean, while managing chart, pencil, dividers, parallels, bearing compass, radio mic, and a few other esoteric appliances is a whole lot more art than science. Especially, if you might have a propensity to go searching for the ubiquitous Ralph Roark on occasion. Not me, of course. I never get si.

So, some of this mission depended upon my quartermaster down there in the dungeon doing his best to not only figure out where we were at any given moment, but moreover, to extrapolate that into useful information. Like where we should be heading, and when we might get there. Stuff like that.

We did in fact arrive at the appointed x-marks-the-spot, er, spot. On time, and quite all alone. In the dark. You know how it is when you take a galvanized water pail and put it over your head, and have somebody bang on it with a wooden spoon while trying not to tip over on your bicycle, gets? You do? Great.

That's sort of what it's like, rolling around in a steel boat. A steel boat with two GM 6-71 screamers behind your butt, each with an un-muffled megaphone the size of a small sewer pipe spewing smoke and noise out the square end. It's not the only reason I have a significant hearing loss. But, I think there's a pretty direct correlation, all the same.

I remember watching a college theatre production of Waiting for Godot, once. The whole agonizing wait punctuated with angst and expectation is a metaphor for any skipper who has already arrived on station, on time; and his awaited-more important-opposite has yet to do the same. Try calling an air control tower on a puny marine band radio some time. It takes a while for them to take you seriously about your question, when it essentially boils down to, "Hey you guys seen a gray helo that might look lost?" Some of these things that some people take pretty much for granted, can take up a fair degree of perseverance.

Finally, there came the unmistakable din and roar and chatter of a helicopter ratcheting over the water. They probably didn't even hear me when I went through the "agreed upon" protocol of identifying my station and location and all that "six-twelve-and-even-roger-wilco" stuff that is always portrayed in the movies as if the other guy is sitting across the table from you in a perfectly quiet room. Actual carrier waves squoze through a frequency modulator thingie don't exactly come out that well. Especially with all the ambient pollution that just can't be helped.

As I recall there was supposed to be something like seven guys that were supposed to plunk out of that snorting dragon fly-looking contraption. I was supposed to account for each of their earthly existences until the guy in the left seat up there decided to come back and reclaim 'em. As you may gather, there are some jobs in the military that offer more responsibility, than joy. Pretty soon, the first frog-suited figure dangled his legs out of the door, popped on that pathetic little cyaloom light stick pinned to his hood, and did the proverbial "Geronimo" leap. A couple more went through the same drill. Then, not much activity from the passenger compartment.

You might already have tried riding your bike with the bucket over your head. Most of us have, right? But, you just might never have tried to keep track of an indefinite number of people bobbing around in the pitch black ocean with nothing but these sickly green tubes of photo luminescence to mark their current place in the cosmos. These's a bit more to that.

A helicopter is a real noisy beast. When they get close to the water, they kick up spray on the order of magnitude of one of those ornamental fountain arrays at the opening ceremony of the Olympics, or something like that. It's loud, and jerky, and rolly, and throwing water all over the place. Oh yeah. And, the guy up there with the collective and that other lever in his hand really doesn't really know where your sea gull-frying antennas are. And, the noise levels onboard Old Salt were pretty impressive as well.

So, "One, two, three. that makes four to go-standby. hey, where are they going?!?..." And, whoosh, clatter, splash, the helo made a bingo turn and headed for dry land. OK. There I was, with a small crew of 3 or 4 sailors to watch the bobbing heads and help me keep track of them. Just us, them, and the sharks. After a while, I considered inviting the guys out paddling around over for dinner and cocktails. Bummer, though. My galley was closed, and all the good china had been polished and stowed away down there in the Chiefs' Mess. Real hospitality can be a thorny issue, sometimes.

After a while, the helo reappeared, and plunked the rest of the swimmers overboard. And, then they hovered right over my head. Spray. Noise, vertigo, and spatial contusions abounding. I had these guys in a sort of ring around me. The damn eggbeater perched directly over my head. And, about the only thing that was coming out of my toy radio was the scratchy and metallic staccato bursts practiced by every airdale since Chuck Yeager wrote the prescription for the Right Stuff. "Roger.. break... tower, hotel niner five. fuel state.... garble.. garble.. screetch... out." Stuff like that.

That's when my entire life, and career, flashed past my eyes.

Old Salt had those two really loud diesels to do a bit more than just make noise and vibration. They each swung a substantial bronze prop. Something like 200 continuous shaft horses spinning these really nasty meat cleavers around just ahead of the rudders.

I was counting heads, and keeping the boat sort of under the belly of that spray- and JP-5 spewing monster overhead. Backing and filling. Twisting. Idling. Running slowly astern. Standard stuff like that. When, my entire crew ran down aft, and were pointing at something right under the counter-as I was just kicking the screws ahead to stop a backward drift.

Something right under the counter! Noise. Spray. Strobe lights. Pitch and roll. Something. Right. Under. The. Boat.

I forced myself to count heads and light tubes. But for one perpetually agonizing moment, there was absolutely no doubt what had happened. Astounding, just how clear your vision gets when you can't other wise see a damn thing. The guys were eerily silhouetted by my stern light. One of them reached down through the exhaust plume. I expected, maybe an arm. A leg? Maybe there would be two of them?

Training doesn't really prepare you for this. And, in my case, I became a vessel commander pretty much OJT. Nope, nobody told me this could happen. I'd been so careful. I had kept each and every one of those guys' heads firmly on my mental radar set. I had watched them like they were little kids on the playground. I'd been so careful.

And, my guy finally clambered back into the cockpit with HIS very soggy, but still serviceable ball cap. I've never been so happy. I've never been so pissed off.

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