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Saturday, February 16, 2013

Pattaya Beach Port Call I have gotten around to writing up another story from my Navy experiences. An upgrading of a paragraph I wrote 14 years ago. This is on the old Atomized site. At that time I dispatched the whole year of overseas deployment inside a single paragraph. This current story was only a sentence there. It was part of a whimsical and brief biography. I never felt I gave those days and people their due, but it's the sort of thing its hard to track back to after you've given it a nod. Those days reverberate strongly for me because I left the Navy after my initial enlistment and had transfered to a shore duty station halfway through. I never made it back out to sea after that one Western Pacific deployment on the USS Ranger (CV 61) and I never get far from the fact that I was still a teenager through the course of that year. This entry which is over on the Stories page deals with the Liberty Port Call in Pattaya Beach Thailand, now longer and with assorted pictures. A view along the beach looking south towards Pattaya hill/Lookout point These were four or five days of disorienting bliss. Unlike after I wrote the Great Subic Bay Sex Riot piece a year or so ago, when I never had any idea whether anyone ever read that or not. This time around I will extend this sites web meter to the stories page. Somehow I didn't think through to solving the problem by placing the HTML snippet, that drives the meter, on that page as well. A post I wrote about the day our ship, the USS Ranger, collided with an oil tanker has gotten a fair share of hits. Knowing that something is being read always makes me want to go back and completely rewrite it, but it's generally better to simply write with care and suitable completion on other adjacent things. By strange coincidence around the point where I had this about half pulled together, one of the people populating this story, Bruce Behers, contacted me and I joined a Facebook sub-page he had set up explicitly for the CVIC unit (OZ Division) from the USS Ranger's 1979 "WestPac". Which he had already gathered around three-quarters of us into. In the long run this will be fine, there may be an actual reunion in the offing. In the short run it was like someone dropping off an energetic puppy as a gift while you are trying to finish a jigsaw puzzle set up on a rickety card table. These reminisces are partially premised on their obscurity of subject. The people who move through these posts like ghosts are suddenly real people, with names and faces correctly defined and spelled, chatting and posting pictures on the most social of networks. Further, they are exhibiting recollections of the day equaling and exceeding my own motheaten memories. I suppose I could step back quietly take notes and write a more exhaustive pan-perspective version of this in a while. No story is ever truly complete; though, and this one for the moment restrains itself to a simple snap-shot of the demi-monde. Pattaya Beach Port Call 9:42:59 AM    ;;

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License. 2013 P. Bushmiller. Last update: 3/13/13; 1:06:03 AM.