The USS Shangri-La - my father's ship.

I'm not sure what the trigger was that made me think of my father's naval service today, but something did. Could have been Memorial Day, or our troops in Iraq and elsewhere. I'm a sentimentalist so it doesn't take much for me to think about such things.

My dad was in the navy from 1957-1961 (he was a fireman technician - fired the guns), and he served in the reserves for a couple years before and after that time period. I can't tell you how many times my brother and I paged through his naval yearbook, and my father - though we had to pry stuff out of him - always told us cool stories, like how when they buried servicemen at sea they'd jam their dog tags into the row of upper teeth as a way to identify the body. My dad always says the reason he doesn't like to travel is because he's seen the world from the USS Shangri-La...which he did. Did you know that he climbed Mt. Fuji in Japan? Took 3 days to get to the top and 2 hours to slide down the other side (it was volcanic shale and they slid down on these rug-like thingys). He also said that their ship patrolled the coast of Cuba during the Cuban Missile Crisis. We've got pictures and movies my grandfather took - oh, they're having a crew reunion in June in Branson, MO...that's what the trigger was.

A bit of interesting history on the ship. The USS Shangri-La (CV-38) (also CVA-38, CVS-38) was an Essex-class aircraft carrier, which constituted the 20th century's largest class of heavy warships, with 24 ships built - many of which served during WWII. 13 of the 24 members of the "long-hull" Ticonderoga variant/subclass, which many consider a separate class in their own right. Such was my father's ship. The color picture is the Shangri-La in 1970. That black and white is from August 1960. My dad is standing on the ship somewhere. Got this one off the internet.

The name, unique among US carriers, was a reference to the recently lost Hornet (CV-8) at the Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands in the Pacific in 1942. After the Doolittle Raid on Tokyo which was launched from the Hornet, President Roosevelt answered a reporter's question by saying that the raid had come from "Shangri-La", the faraway land of the James Hilton novel, Lost Horizon.
Until 1960, the USS Shangri-La alternated western Pacific cruises with operations out of San Diego. On March 16,1960 she put to sea from San Diego en route to her new home port, Mayport, Florida. She entered Mayport after visits to Callao, Peru, Valparaíso, Chile, Port of Spain, Trinidad, Bayonne, New Jersey, and Norfolk, Virginia. After six weeks of underway training in the local operating area around Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, she embarked upon her first Atlantic deployment, a NATO exercise followed by liberty in Southampton, England. Almost immediately after her return to Mayport, Shangri-La was ordered back to sea—this time to the Caribbean in response to trouble in Guatemala and Nicaragua. She returned to Mayport on November 25, 1960 and remained in port for more than two months. Between 1961 and 1970, Shangri-La alternated between deployments to the Mediterranean and operations in the western Atlantic, out of Mayport. She sailed east for her first tour of duty with the 6th Fleet on February 2, 1961. The history after that - well, that's past my dad's time, so...

Anyway, I could go on. Colonel Moore, who was the main character in the movie, We Were Soldiers, said in an interview with a very smug Dan Rather, 'Hate war, but love the American soldier. Got it?'. My dad will be 70 on July 3rd - big party in Greendale every year as the 4th is the next day - and I love him and I love him for the service he gave to his country.