It was 1971. There was a terrible war raging in Viet Nam. I knew it was wrong, strategically, tactically, morally and every other way I could imagine. I was a college graduate and married, but marriage and graduate school deferments from the draft had evaporated in the heat of the war's endless appetite for blood and bodies.
On December 1, 1969, while I was still in college, the Selective Service System conducted a lottery drawing for all American men born between 1944 and 1950. Every birth date was assigned a number in the drawing.
The highest lottery number called for this group was 195; all men assigned that lottery number or any lower number, and who were classified 1-A or 1-A-O (available for military service), were called to report for possible induction.
My lottery number was 74. Once my undergraduate deferment ran out, unless I found some way around the situation, I had every reason to expect that I would be drafted and sent to fight in Viet Nam. So I came up with a plan.
Follow me out into the tall grass if you would like to know how that turned out.
My plan was based upon a simple premise: In case of an unavoidable military service obligation during a land war in Asia, seek sea duty in Europe. Most people don't like being shot at, and I was no different, but that isn't what this was all about. I believed then and still believe today that my country's involvement and actions in Viet Nam were, simply, criminal, and I wished to not add to those crimes.
So I talked to a Navy recruiter before I graduated. I learned that as a college graduate, I stood a chance of assignment to Navy Officer Candidate School, so I took the exams for that. The recruiter told me that my scores were high enough to give me a high probability of appointment to OCS, but that there were no current openings in that program and being on the waiting list did nothing to shield me from the draft.
However, the recruiter assured me, an opening was bound to occur within six months, and the Navy had just the program to help me with that, something called the "cache" enlistment plan. I could enlist in the regular Navy, but not report for boot camp until six months after my May college graduation. My enlistment would protect me from the draft and when my slot came up for OCS, I would go there and become an officer instead. Perfect.
So, how did that work out? Like this:
For those who don't know, that is the uniform of an enlisted Seaman First Class, not an officer. After six months, when my induction date rolled around, I hadn't heard a peep from OCS. So, it was off to Navy boot camp for me. I had a plan for that, too, though.
The Navy operated two large recruit training commands back then, one at Great Lakes, Illinois, North of Chicago, and one in San Diego. Since I would be training from November to January, San Diego sounded much more congenial. My recruiter assured me that where they sent me for boot camp depended upon where I was inducted, so I arranged induction in the Southwestern state where I had gone to college, where they had always sent their recruits to San Diego, instead of the Midwestern state where I lived, where they sent their recruits to Great Lakes.
So, how did that work out? In November, 1971, I had the honor of being in the first group of inductees the Navy ever sent from that Southwestern state to Great Lakes, Illinois, for boot camp. I also found out, for the first time in my life, what it is like to have pneumonia.
As soon as I finished 12 weeks of boot camp, the Navy gave orders to report to Newport, Rhode Island for 19 weeks of OCS, which is boot camp for officer trainees. Then I stayed in Newport another two months to become certified as an Anti-Submarine Warfare (ASW) specialist on Navy destroyers.
I spent most of the next three years as the ASW officer on three different vessels, much of it at sea in various parts of the World, but nowhere near Viet Nam. It wasn't hazard free. All service on any warship is inherently dangerous. I was living inside a giant machine throbbing with high voltage, high pressure steam, flammable liquids, high explosives and nuclear warheads. Once, we almost capsized during a winter storm because of ice built up on the superstructure. Another time we were nearly rammed by another vessel when all ship's power failed.
But I was never ordered into combat, except one time, almost.
I was serving on the USS Tattnall, DDG-19, a guided missile destroyer. She was very yar.
We were attached to the U.S. Sixth Fleet, operating in the Mediterranean Sea. It was 1974. The previous year, the Libyan dictator,
Muammar al-Gaddafi had
claimed a huge expanse of the Mediterranean as Libyan national territory:
In 1973, Libya claimed the Gulf of Sidra to be within Libyan territorial waters by drawing a straight line between a point near Benghazi and the western headland of the gulf at Misratah This claim was not generally accepted, although only the United States presented a direct challenge by declaring that its ships would continue to regard all areas beyond a distance of 12 nautical miles from the coast as international waters.
By huge expanse, I mean a heck of a lot of ocean:
In December, 1974, the Tattnall was assigned to a Carrier Task Group consisting of one aircraft carrier and a group of excorts including other destroyers and cruisers. We set course for the Gulf of Sidra, with orders to approach the 12 mile sea frontier and operate carrier aircraft up and down the Libyan coastline just outside the limit. Mr. Gaddafi's air force was equipped with attack aircraft obtained from the Soviet Union. The guided missiles on the Tattnall were designed to attack aircraft. If the Libyan aircraft took flight, our orders were to shoot them down.
This was not the volunteer military of today. Almost all of the officers and men on the Tattnall had either been drafted or, like me, enlisted under threat of the draft. Nevertheless, the crew was a highly trained and extremely professional lot and the receipt of a combat assignment seemed to electrify nearly everyone involved. My own men and I were basically spectators. Libya didn't have any submarines, so there wasn't much for us to do with our sonars and torpedoes and rocket thrown depth charges. Still, it was a unique experience waiting for zero hour as we steamed toward the demarcation line.
But we never got there. Maybe they never intended that we would. Maybe it was all nothing more than an exercise. Maybe someone in Washington with a less belligerent streak intervened and called it off. Gerald Ford was President after taking over for the disgraced Richard Nixon the previous year. President Ford was trying to wind down the Viet Nam War and foster detente with the Soviet Union. Perhaps he wasn't prepared for a military confrontation with another Soviet client state. I'll never know.
But I wasn't surprised a few years later when Ronald Reagan, in 1981, pulled off exactly the same operation I had almost been part of seven years earlier.
The Gulf of Sidra incident was a naval engagement in which two Libyan Sukhoi Su-22 Fitter attack aircraft were shot down by two American F-14 Tomcats from the USS Nimitz. The first Gulf of Sidra incident took place off the Libyan coast on August 19, 1981, during the Cold War. At the time, Republican President Ronald Reagan was in Office, and Omar Kadafi was ruling Lybia.
Libya had claimed a 12 mile extension zone of its territorial waters in the Gulf of Sidra, declaring the territorial waters of the gulf as their own. This prompted US naval forces to conduct Freedom of Navigation operations in the area, the so-called "line of death". These operations intensified when Ronald Reagan came to office on January 20, 1981. In August 1981, he authorized the deployment of a large naval force, led by USS Forrestal and Nimitz, off the Libyan coast.
With Congressman Issa and the GOP screaming about Benghazi endlessly these days, my thoughts have been often pulled back lately to the Gulf of Sidra and the events of 1974. Today seemed like a good time to share them.