Maybe it’s the Navy life, constantly moving from place to place, leaving old friends behind, making new ones, starting again. Or maybe it’s just a part of who I am, I don’t know. But I’ve never been particularly good about keeping up with old friends. I’ll see men I’ve known for twenty years or more at Tailhook for example, and embrace them like brothers. We’ll catch up, move on, see you next year. Never an email or a phone call in between, but nothing fundamental will have changed – we’ll pick right up where we left off, another year older.
I was surprised to receive an email from my academy class secretary saying that Jim Hogan had gone missing on Curacao, having been employed in consular duties since 2005.
Jim had been one of my closer friends at the Boat School. A gregarious son of Ireland, he should have been an English major. He had an encyclopedic knowledge of Shakespeare and Yeats and enjoyed palavering over a pint of stout on the weekends more than the run-of-the-mill bookish/engineering types that surrounded us. Unless I’m mistaken, it was he who discovered a little known regulation in the midshipman instructions authorizing second class mids – ordinarily restricted to the Yard apart from weekends – off-campus liberty from the conclusion of our Wednesday afternoon formal parades until evening meal formation. The parades generally concluded around 1645, so it was a mad dash back up the ladders to our rooms in order to rip off our monkey jackets, throw on a shirt, tie and our service dress blue blouses over our high-waisted parade trousers and race to a little pub outside Bilger’s Gate. Moving as quickly as possible without quite seeming to be running. While anyone was looking. Because that would have been considered undignified.
Somewhat fortified in spirits, but red-faced from our exertions, we’d race back again to be in formation by 1830, a trickle of perspiration going down our collars, but with laughter in our hearts. Feeling like we’d stolen something from Mother B.
Who had it coming.
Jim played rugby, which cost him his knees and almost cost him an ear in one particularly brutal scrum. He was tenacious – some might say stubborn – and stayed in the engineering track long after it had become clear that it wasn’t a good fit for him. As a result, he wore a thin midshipman’s stripe in the sword arch at my marriage, rather than the fat gold ensign’s stripe that the rest of us wore. He was the only guy I’d ever heard of that the school let graduate late.
We kept in touch from time to time in our early years after he was commissioned and went through flight school. He got helicopters in Sandy Eggo while I was up in Lemoore flying Hornets. Our contacts grew less frequent over the intervening years, and the last I had heard of him was when we were both commanders, he was serving in a diversity billet on the BUPERS staff, the irony of which – knowing Jim as I did – was by no means lost on me. He’d looked me up in the database and cold-called me. We promised to keep in touch.
I didn’t know when he retired, had no idea that he’d joined the foreign service and now it appears that something dreadful has befallen him.
I’m past the age now of losing friends in airplane crashes. Not quite to the stage where I’m accustomed to losing them from natural causes.
I guess I thought we all had more time.
It’s always disconcerting to lose folks you know, and have it attributable to some non-military action.
Good friend passed away two years ago from a massive heart attack. Guy was a picture of health, had had a physical not 6 months prior. His secretary found him collapsed upon his desk in his office. Younger than me by a couple years.
Same thing happened to a woman I know from our soup kitchen. She also volunteers there. Her husband came home from work, plopped down in his easy chair and turned on the radio. She got up to answer the phone, and when she came back he was dead.
You just never know, and, to my mind, that’s a good thing.
Sorry to hear of your friends loss, Lex. Sad to say, it’s part of our aging that you get to hear of friends who pass before you. Hogan is surely in the right Hands now, Lex.
Brother, I feel your pain and no, losing them to this kind of incident is no less painful than an a/c mishap. 7 friends lost in 22 years of flying and when retirement beckoned I assumed the new found friends would be enduring. They still pass as AW1 Tim refers. Nine years of retirement and been to 3 funerals – same sense of loss. The only up-side: they don’t play the Navy Hymn verses 1&4. My prayers are with his family.
That’s a pretty thin upside, I would note. There are other songs that can be just as depressing under the circumstances.
The Dutch colonies look like a place to stay away from. Or, at least, keep away from certain places after dark.
Those “Dutch colonies” are awful close to “Hugo Chavez”-land, which used to be known as Venezuela. I sincerely hope not, but could it be possible that Hugo’s agents had something to do with your buddy’s disappearance?
For the Absent.
O GOD, whose fatherly care reacheth to the uttermost parts of the earth; We humbly beseech thee graciously to behold and bless those whom we love, now absent from us. Defend them from all dangers of soul and body; and grant that both they and we, drawing nearer to thee, may be bound together by thy love in the communion of thy Holy Spirit, and in the fellowship of thy saints; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
–1928 Book of Common Prayer, page 596-597.
Amen indeed. Thank you Phil.
I am so sorry for your loss, Lex. Having a friend murdered… there is nothing to make right with that in your head. You can rationalize as we age and die, you can at least understand when it happens in the line of duty… it doesn’t make it better, but in one’s brain you understand it can happen, but murder, that is a whole other animal to try to wrap one’s mind around. Murder has with it its own set of emotions. It’s not something anyone should ever experience, the loss of someone they care about that way.
My condolences.
Thank you Phil. I am so sorry for Mr. Hogan’s family and friends.
Commenting on the loss, try to remember funerals aren’t for the dead, they’re a ceremony for the living. No matter how great our grief and empty that void within us, lives go on. It is for the living to pick up and move on, the dead shall rest and earn their reward beyond reach of our selfish wish for their return.
Friendship, though, is the subject we should be exploring. It’s been said that men talk and women communicate, indicating a different level of maintenance needed in the upkeep of personal ties. I do not think your experience is unique to the Navy life, I think it is part and parcel of how men behave and think of their friendships. Unless something actively happens to dissolve a friendship, we assume it remains the same as we left it, and likewise personal details are for sharing later if they do not directly affect the friend in question.
Twenty years ago my best friend of high school, I’ll call him Karl, married and left for a new job down near Kansas City, and I was at his wedding and helped him move. I’d met with a cousin I was very close with through childhood that same week, he was taking a new job in North Carolina. I helped him move too, but upon meeting him I didn’t particularly like what I saw.
Twenty years later I’ve known all this time where my cousin was to be found, how his life has gone, the additions to his family and the trials of his life. I’ve no more desire to meet him than I do any other stranger on this planet — if it happens we’ll pick up where we left off, with my not really liking what he had become.
With Karl, I met up with him two years ago. He was getting married for the second time, first wife having died under tragic circumstances. I drove some 12 hours to be at his wedding, arriving a day late because I’d written down the wrong date.
Didn’t matter. We caught up on personal history in a few minutes, and 20 years of elapsed time evaporated — we picked up where we left off.
He’s only 3 hours away now. I’d like to go see him again, when I’ve free time and the weather permits, and our schedules allow. I’m sure he’s thinking the same.
Somehow neither of us will find the free time, the weather never will seem right, and if we never share our schedules we’ll never find those common days we can have together.
For the next 20 years, or 30, or 50 should we live that long, Karl will still be my best friend. I know he shares that sentiment. And should our paths cross we’ll pick up again, right at the point we left off shaking hands and saying goodbye for now, best friends forever.
I’m thinking it’s a guy thing.
– Max
Max,
I believe you have hit the target square in the black. I have similar relationships. There are fellows whose last name I do not know, but with whom I share a drink from time to time. I know about their kids, about what they do for work, and we all know each other’s first names. They are a great bunch of fellows, but I haven’t a clue where they live or what their last names are, etc. Funny, that.
As to close friends, I have a couple that live a few states away. We see each other maybe once or twice a year, and it’s like we never were apart. Like you said, we just pick up where we left off, fill in any new details, etc, and enjoy our fellowship.
That’s just horrible news Lex. Just horrible.
Lex, I am so sorry. Loss is always hard to bear, but most especially so sudden and from what it sounds like at the hands of others.
Very sorry to hear of your loss; and frustrated knowing, from both personal experience and from more widely publicized cases, that the authorities in that neck of the woods are unlikely to pursue leads too closely–seem to be too much in the back pocket of different drug cartels to risk uncovering something that would be unflattering to the country’s image. I hope the case proves the exception for his family. So horrible.
Lex, just wanted to thank you for your story. I’m one of Jim’s younger brothers, and a West Point ‘84 grad. He was a great man that will be sorely missed by his enormous Irish family. We’ll pass your note on to his wife Abby, and their five children; it will be important to them. I can tell them a few stories from our academy days, but I only caught a few glimpses, being caged in USMA most of the time. But Jim still managed to bail me out of many dicey situations. If anyone else has any personal stories of him you want to share, please send them to me at phogan@us.loreal.com. You had him pegged right as a would be English major- you may have not known his back-up to USNA was the Great Books program at St. John’s University in Annapolis. God bless you all and our country, Paul.
Very sorry for your family’s troubles, Paul. Jim was a great friend.
If anyone has stories about my husband, my love of 24 years, I would love to hear them. This note was not passed along to us. I found this blog by chance. Old pix, stories, anything would be welcome, since I didn’t meet him until he was a LT and I was an ENS at HSL33. Jim is a great man, a devout Catholic, a devoted husband and father. I’ve never known another man like him.
Dear Abby:
I am the USNA Class of 1982 Corresponding Secretary. I write our class column for the Shipmate alumni magazine. I am so very saddened with Jim’s loss and my prayers are with you and your family. Would you like me to pass along to our classmates any particular words about Jim’s life and his passing? Please email me at rett@rasmussen.biz.
My deepest condolences, Rett Rasmussen
Unfortunately, Abby is mistaken. She was incommunicado at the time, and very distraught, and the story was sent to two of her adult children with her on Curacoa that same day I posted. If they were unable to pass it on, I’m sure there were many more important issues to deal with at the time. We appreciate all the thoughts and prayers from the Class of 1982. Best wishes, Paul
Unfortunately Paul, you are mistaken. If you or any of the Hogan’s had made any effort to contact my mom, myself, or my younger siblings, you would have found my mom was very much in communication with everyone. However, seeing as none of you saw fit to offer any support, love, or help to my family, you missed that fact. And now we find out through the grapevine that you are holding a memorial service for my dad, something you neglected to inform my mom of. Having never been in this situation before, I can only speculate that the actions of you and the rest of the Hogan’s are completely opposite of how I would expect a “family” to behave in a time like this. I would expect that the Hogan’s would want to reach out to their son’s/brother’s/nephew’s/cousin’s wife, who was and is the closest person to him, and to his children, who know him better than the rest of you due to your estrangement of our family. I would think that you would consider my mom’s wishes for a memorial, and either conform to her wishes, or include her and her children in any plans for a memorial. However, I guess I’m mistaken in my beliefs, and true to Hogan form, none of this has happened, and in the meantime my mom and my siblings and myself are left wondering why not a single Hogan has contacted us to offer sympathy, support, help, and to include us in any future plans concerning my Dad.