A New Odyssey

 

April 1964, the young man at seventeen years

of age from St. Louis, Missouri, stood at attention

in a military formation on a Brooklyn Naval Yard

pier in New York.

Several months before, he had joined the Army

with his reluctant mother’s permission for he

was below the age of eighteen when he would

have been allowed to enlist on his own. He

had dropped out of high school. His mom and

dad had divorced two years earlier, and he had

no place else to go.

Army basic and advanced training successfully

completed, he and two-thousand other G.I.s

were to be shipped overseas to Germany and

then onto their newly assigned permanent

duty stations.

The War in Vietnam was on the verge of kicking

into high gear. Little did he and his fellow comrades

in arms know then how lucky they were to be

headed for Europe rather than the killing fields

of Southeast Asia. Most of these boys had never

been more than a few miles away from the familiar

and secure surroundings of their homes. They were

on the doorstep of a whole new lifetime experience.

Indeed, our young man had his hopes and dreams,

but realistically he could not imagine a future of

more than one day at a time. Perhaps one day after

his service, a job with decent wages, a car, marriage,

raise a family with a cozy home in the suburbs.

But now, he could barely imagine what something

that would even look like? Only better, he hoped,

than the broken and dysfunctional home from which

he had come. It was that tumultuous and unsettling

place which led him to this, dressed in Army green

fatigues, standing at attention in formation listening

to the lead sergeant barking his commands,

“Company, left face! Forward march! Left, left,

left, right left.” Boot heels clapping in synchronous

military unison. Then forward up the ship’s gangplank.

Up and onward they went through the harbor, past

the Statue of Liberty, sailing underneath the

Verrazzano Narrows Bridge, and out into the North

Atlantic.

And away, far away from the homeland, and

familiarity into the deep unknown, on to a new

and uncertain lifetime Odyssey.

Their ship, the “USNS Patch,” a World War II

troop carrier had a name which in choppy, April,

high seas did not exude assurances of safe passage

to the vomiting, sea-sick landlubbers aboard.

As he recalled history, wasn’t the mighty Titanic

supposed to be invincible in these same waters?

The Patch tossed up and down, rolling side to side

in the fearsome and mighty waves. “Oh good Lord...”

he prayed.

                                 -30-

Chris Hanch 5-3-2023