My seafaring dad loved to quote John Masefield’s poem, “Sea Fever.” Like all sailors, he felt the romance that whistled with the wind in the rigging. “I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky / And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by / And the wheel’s kick and the wind’s song and the white sail’s shaking / And a grey mist on the sea’s face, and a grey dawn breaking.”
We crossed the brow of the U.S. Coast Guard barque Eagle at Baltimore’s Inner Harbor last month. My wife, a retired Navy captain, and her cousin, a retired nuclear submarine officer, accompanied me as we toured this 1936 vessel.
I was surprised to see a photo of a buoyant Harry Truman, his hat back on his head like a cowboy’s, as he manned the helm of this captured German sail training ship in 1946. He had the year before announced V-E Day in Europe, his own 61st birthday.
For nautical FDR to be shown steering a sailing vessel would not have been a surprise. But for mule-driving Harry, the Missouri National Guard artillery captain of World War I, it was unexpected
The Eagle was seized from the Germans in 1946, as part of war reparations. Her sister ships were seized, too. The great tall ships of the world include Tovarisch (Russia) and Dar Pomorza (Poland). All three were built under the Nazis in Hamburg’s great shipyard, Blom and Voss.
On board, we were greeted by another surprise — not Coast Guard Academy cadets, but officer candidates from the Coast Guard’s OCS program. When I went through OCS, we never got to sail on the Eagle.
Our first guide met us on the forecastle. He was a gunner’s mate, enlisted, before he went to OCS. He talked about his wife and two children, with one on the way. How hard it was to say to his 4-year old daughter that Daddy isn’t coming home tonight. His 2-year-old son really cannot understand.
This OCS class is slated to graduate Dec. 7, 2011, the 70th anniversary of Pearl Harbor, and our young OC was fully aware that it is “a date that will live in infamy.”
We moved aft. A pert young lady OC took up the duty of telling us the story of the Eagle’s travels. She has never lived with her Marine husband, she said. She hopes to be stationed in San Diego, near Camp Pendleton.
Detailers are the ones responsible for assignments. They told this young woman that if she and her husband are stationed within two hundred miles of one another, they can count themselves lucky.
Not surprisingly, she said, her Marine husband is planning to get out. We ask so much of these young people. On this Veterans Day, we pay tribute to all those who served.
There was another unexpected meeting on the deck of the Eagle. I read previously unknown words from a great friend. He had saluted Eagle and all the tall ships in 1986:
“These vessels embody our conception of liberty itself; to have no impediments, only open spaces to chart one’s own course, to take adventure as it comes, to be as free as the wind, as free as the tall ships themselves.”
Eloquent, grand and true. Those words by Ronald Reagan speak to my heart — and to the country we love this Veterans Day.
Robert Morrison, a Coast Guard veteran, is a senior fellow at the Family Research Council.
