MLK DB DC & DD

Annual holiday today, MLK birthday and I remember when he was assassinated. Stationed in Washington, DC and living in a rented house on Wakefield Chapel Road just off Route 236 outside the Beltway, we had bought a small travel trailer and were at a campsite up in the BlueRidge. I can’t visualize that we would have had a TV up there, so must have been following the news on radio. Would it have been Walter Cronkite? I don’t remember.

My duty station was in the Navy Annex looking east over at the Pentagon and north across the Potomac to the District, and what I do remember in following days is a skyline of flames as enraged mobs torched parts of the city, and heavy smoke both rising into the sky and hovering over the city. It doesn’t “all come back to me now,” what it does is remind me of my Navy days from start to finish, mainly as always destroyer duty which was the best part of my twenty years, and the two shore duty tours in Washington, nearly ten years apart and leaving me with totally different memories.

Seems to me Dr. King was the same age as Dietrich Bonhoeffer, both of them 39 when murdered, I was thinking of Bonhoeffer yesterday as we read Call Stories in the Bible. Students all over America will be reading transcripts or listening to recordings of MLK's “I have a dream” speech on the Mall in Washington, I remember listening to it in class with my middle school students at Holy Nativity Episcopal School eight or ten years ago. The mind wanders, and one of many memories is Resurrection City, the enormous tent city that went up on the Mall by the old Main Navy Building, that was during our first tour in Washington. The second tour is more or less a blur, mostly less.

Earlier this morning I was clearing my desktop of seldom used icons. Came across and read again a destroyer story by a retired Navy captain whose destroyer experience was different from but contemporary with my own, and bringing all that back. http://www.navyhistory.org/2013/10/fletcher-class-destroyers-my-experience-1950s/ His was west coast, mine east coast. What pops into mind at the moment is my first day at sea in a Navy destroyer. It was in 1958 for sea trials after the ship finished overhaul at Portsmouth (VA) Naval Shipyard. How the pier moved back and forth as I walked down it dizzily at the end of the day and marvelled that now I had my sea legs I had lost my land legs. Stepping on a heavy cable as I made my way off the pier, because the old Chief Petty Officer who had taught our engineering class at OCS had told us always to step on a cable, never over a cable because if the cable suddenly goes taut it’s better to be thrown thirty feet into the air than to be cut in two.

My Navy experience anymore is watching that small craft making its morning way from the Navy base across the Bay out the channel in front of me and through the pass for a busy day at sea, then back into port late afternoon. Green going out to play. Red Right Returning.