Spoiled

I know that some of my readers are young officers and midshipmen, and because nothing ever really changes in the service but the faces and the names, you are by now, or very shortly will be, very likely tired to death of senior officers telling you how envious they are of what you have in front of you. I know that I was, back in the way-back. It was always some grizzled and graying captain – maybe at a winging ceremony, maybe at a “tie cutting” after the first solo, who’d look out into all the fresh faces and say, “I’d give it all up and trade with you in a minute.”

To the extent that I took them seriously at all, I guess I always thought that they missed the flying, maybe were jealous of the new technology we were going to get our hands on. But looking back on it now from a different perspective, I think I may have misread them entirely.

I may have mentioned a few weeks back that I‚Äôd been to one of those career ‚Äútransition seminars.‚Äù The command I work at is gracious enough to provide the most superannuated and enfeebled of us the opportunity to attend these workshops, which are designed partly to help us translate ‚Äúblowing stuff up from 30,000 feet,‚Äù ‚Äúlanding on an ice-coated carrier deck moving crabwise through the sea while pitching up and down twenty or more feet in a forty-knot gale‚Äù and ‚Äúpartying like rock stars in foreign ports‚Äù into hard-hitting, high impact, hire-this-guy-yesterday bullets on a corporate r?©sum?©. Over the course of three days you also learn how to negotiate for compensation packages with people who smile at you while secretly regarding you as a line item cost to be minimized, whether to wear cuff-links to the interview (don‚Äôt), and are encouraged to ‚ÄúCheer up there, big buckaroo ‚Äì it‚Äôll all work out. Somehow. Promise.‚Äù

It’s a good training evolution, designed by guys who’ve been through the process and it all pretty much works. You learn a lot along the way – hint: One of the major things to have in your hip pocket is a 30 second, carefully prepared, casually delivered speech to deliver each time someone asks you, “What do you hope to do when you retire?” And networking. Lots and lots of networking.

At the end of the week you get your own personal one-on-one with the instructor, who takes the “you’ve got no idea how valuable you are on the outside” spiel that everyone gets and personalizes it for you. I was already pretty sure of what I wanted to do, and so we mostly talked about golf, which it turned out both of us enjoy. At one point he did feel compelled to tell me, “Look, this is important for you to understand: Whatever it is you end up doing in your next career, you’ll be well compensated for doing it, and hopefully you’ll enjoy the work, and like the people you work with. You’ll probably even get to live where you want to. But you will never again have a job that is as exciting as flying fighter jets off carrier decks. There aren’t any other jobs quite like that, not for middle-aged men with families.”

I know, I told him. I’ve come to terms with that, although at first it was hard. It’s a young man’s game; we all have to slow down. After a while, you stop noticing that the world is painted in more faded hues than it used to be.

But he put me to thinking – last week the Kat, my youngest asked me, “Who’s your best friend, Dad?” probably because although I have coworkers whom I like we don’t spend much social time together, and we have neighbors who are nice enough in their own way, but she knows that it’s different than it used to be, and friends are so important to a girl.

I knew the answer to her question right away of course, and gave her the name. He’s a guy on the East Coast that I hardly ever see any more, someone with whom I rarely even correspond, but also someone I absolutely know would be there for me if I needed him, and who absolutely knows that I’d be there for him too. There are at least another half a dozen or so exactly like him, people I could count on, people I’d want by my side in a bad spot. Men I know through and through, to the very core.

We served together on distant shores, cruised the ocean sea in pursuit of excellence and our country’s enemies, fought together in combat, howled at the moon on liberty in ports so strange and foreign as to almost deny description. We were roommates on the ship, shared that at-first forced intimacy of naval life in a space so small that it would be illegal to house federal prisoners within it. We spent many a long night with the lights out after taps, spinning down from the last night trap, staring into the darkness while the never-ending noise of the ship’s mechanical and biological life bumped and wheezed around us. Talked about everything; God, family, country, hopes, fears, dreams. You get to know a man like that. Really know him, better maybe than his children. Maybe better than his wife.

I don’t know if you’ve ever seen the movie, “Stand By Me.” It’s a Rob Reiner adaptation of a Steven King story, four 12-year old boys who set off to find another kid’s corpse by a railroad track, where he was rumored to have landed after being struck by a train. They hope to both satisfy their curiosity and claim the credit for finding him, while beating their thuggish elder brothers to the site. It’s the kind of thing that makes a perfect, if morbid kind sense to boys of all ages, a classic of adventure story meets coming of age cast in a good-versus-evil narrative structure. At the end, the narrator, played by Richard Dreyfuss taps at his keyboard and says, “We were twelve years old. I never had friends like that again. Jesus, does anyone?”

Yes, some people do, for a while.

It can spoil them.