The USS Abraham Lincoln and the USS Midway: 70 Years Apart, but still treating our defenders poorly

The recent news stories about the stressed sailors on the aircraft carrier (“USS Abraham Lincoln”) in the Straits of Hormuz reminded me of my father’s aircraft carrier service during the 1955 “Taiwan Strait Crisis”. Dad spent over 150 days traveling from Norfolk, Virginia to Japan, ending when he requested to be shipped home for mental health care. I feel for the men and women on the USS Abraham Lincoln, and for their mental health after a deployment of more than 266 days! I don’t know how much of Dad’s mental health and subsequent military discharge was impacted by his 150 day-deployment in 1955, but it adds to my worry for the sailors today. Dad’s deployment brought trauma and emotional harm to him and our family, just as the deployment of those on the USS Abraham Lincoln is doing today.

Dad’s Story: Dad served very successfully for over ten years in the US Navy Medical Corps before his first deployment. His assignment was the aircraft carrier USS Midway, departing from Virginia in December 1954, arriving in the Taiwan Straits in February and scheduled to return to Washington State in late June 1955.  The USS Midway would join the 7^th Fleet of over 70 warships to help prevent a potential war with China.  Nearly 30,000 Chinese Nationalist troops, civilians and their weapons needed to be evacuated from the Tachen Islands, just off the coast of China, during the First Taiwan Strait Crisis. The USS Midway and 7 other aircraft carriers would provide critical air coverage for the 5-day operation in February of 1955.

 Dad was a physician assistant aboard the aircraft carrier, typically caring for ill and injured pilots. He wrote long, descriptive handwritten letters describing his travels and sent along the movies he took with his film camera. The movies are lost now, but I recall that they showed rowdy ship celebrations as the equator was crossed, ship-to-ship food delivery (“the strawberries were always on top, and always fell into the ocean”, he wrote sadly) and endless ocean views.

Dad wrote and sent movies from Capetown, South Africa where a local family invited him to dinner. Living under apartheid, they anxiously queried him about America’s enviable-to-them peaceful racial integration. My father explained despairingly that our country’s racial relations were far from peaceful or integrated; he could offer this lovely family little hope. I believe this event sparked his lifelong passion for civil rights.

While Dad spent months traveling from Virginia to the Taiwan Strait, my brother, mother and I waited in Kuna Idaho. Kuna was the home of my mother’s adoptive parents and Dad very much wanted us to be “home” during his deployment. Idaho was always home to him. Mom found us a rental house across the street from the Kuna school—the same one from which she had graduated and at which my dad had taught. At that time, Kuna’s population was 205; it was an old, rural town. Long ago, it had been the end of the train. Groceries and medical care were 50 miles away at the Mountain Home Air Force base.  

It was difficult for my brother and me in Kuna; we were very much alone together. Although the school was literally across the road from us, it had no kindergarten for him. When I was at school, he forlornly watched children at recess just out of reach. All of my classmates left the school on buses; their farms and ranches were much too far to walk. At home, we negotiated playtime: we two (aged 9 and 5) alternated playing trucks and dolls. Alone together, we trekked to 15cent movies at the local theater on Saturdays, waded in our yard every Tuesday during weekly irrigation, and watched the Friday night local rodeo where young cowboys practiced their roping and riding. My brother and I traced Dad’s path with fingernail polish on a cheap metal globe. Each letter added a bit more nail polish.

In January, 1955, the USS Midway sailors visited Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). My memories from  Dad’s movies testify to stops at Hong Kong, Corregidor and Japan. He bought business suits in Hong Kong, tailored and sewn just for him. Mom later had to replace all of the stitching, as the thread was of such poor quality. He sent me dolls from the Philippines, China and Japan and bought silk and brocade for mother to sew. He filmed the ruins left by our country’s bombs just ten years earlier and marveled at how gracious the Japanese people were to those in American uniforms. I still have the tiny (maybe it’s ivory) Buddha which graced my parent’s dresser upon his return. We wrote to him regularly, and I recall begging him to reply just to me. His gentle response was that only our mother would receive private letters; all others were to share.

Sometime in the spring of 1955 we received word that Dad had been taken from the ship to a psychiatric hospital in Oakland, CA. The psychiatrist communicated to mother that Dad’s mental health was fragile, and he might be unable to continue his marriage and family responsibilities. The psychiatrist requested information about Dad’s family and their relationship to him and suggested that Mother visit in Oakland with both Dad’s family history and divorce papers. From my childish vantage, it was a tragic and scary time.

Dad did decide to rejoin his family, arriving home via bus late one summer night. We three sat in the car, waiting nervously for the father we had last seen months ago. Would he be the man we remembered? Would he still love us? The answer would not be revealed that night, as he quietly took the steering wheel from our mother without a greeting to we anxious children in the backseat. That memory still makes me cry.

In less than a week, we would leave Kuna. My brother and I arrived home for lunch on the first day of school to be told that we were moving to Pocatello, Idaho right now. So much for my brother’s first day of school! Our mother would remain behind as usual to pack and settle. After ten years of a military marriage, my mother had learned that her domestic role included packing and unpacking our household at the drop of a hat.

In Pocatello, Dad’s joy at reuniting with his parents and sisters re-confirmed his commitment to family. He used much of his military retirement stipend to fund the first family reunion, making 8 copies of all the family pictures he could find—one for each of his siblings and hiring a photographer for the event. He eagerly engaged in a slew of new hobbies, including self-taught oil painting, accordion playing, and gardening.

Today’s Tragedy: Stories from the USS Abraham Lincoln are a reminder that the lack of respect and support for the morale and mental health needs of our servicepeople are similar to those from 70 years ago.  Soldiers and sailors are shipped abroad with little cultural preparation to be representatives of this powerful and complex country. Each bears witness to the brutality of our wars when they come face to face with the ruins and deaths of our creation.

Military servicepeople are regularly re-assigned and deployed. Their families become vagabonds, skilled in moving and adapting but perhaps less skilled in how to maintain longterm stable and loving environments.  Families in drama and trauma cannot provide caring respite or perspective to their military member.  The childhood trauma of separation and loss is rampant and unaddressed.  Seventy years after my father’s military service and its negative impact on his mental health, the problems continue and may be even worse. Shame on us for thoughtless lengthy deployments and the lack of minimal respect of our military.

Quick epilogue: Dad was unable to locate a job in his beloved Idaho home. For the next 10 years, he worked in a high-pressure Ohio government job, using hobbies to ease the stress. Ultimately, the hobbies and regular trips to Idaho weren’t enough, and his mental health declined. In an effort to recover, he ran away to a job (and a sailboat) in the Virgin Islands, where he and my mother lived and worked for 10 years. He died of colon cancer in an Idaho Veterans Hospital in 1976 at the age of 59 and is buried in Kuna, Idaho.