Occasionally, walking along the Edmonds waterfront, I'll see a super aircraft carrier heading out to sea or returning to the massive naval base at Everett.

It never fails to drag me back to my days on the flight deck of the USS Kearsarge, CVA-33, (the "A" stood for "attack," a naughty word in the modern, politically correct world) during the Korean War.  I have to admit that there are things about it that I miss... kinda like missing the house in which I was brought up, in Tumwater, that no longer exists.  Once a home, always a home.  A ship becomes home to sailors. 

Working on the flight deck in my time, aircraft carriers didn't have a "canted deck."  With a canted deck (somewhat V-shaped with one short leg) the incoming flights land kinda "kitty wampus" to the main deck. 

They don't even have any of the heavily webbed nylon "barriers," for planes that missed the arresting cables, once in place to protect the boneheads loading bombs and rockets on the forward part of the deck for the next "hop" while planes were landing toward us. 

I was one of those "red shirts" who didn't have any more sense (who does at 18?) than to work with bombs, rockets and fuses while relying upon the barriers to keep landing aircraft from crashing into the planes that we were loading forward.  The barriers didn't always work and the planes we had been working on were sometimes damaged. 

When we heard the "bee bop" (that's what we called it) go off (it was a whistle that made a kind of a whee whoo whee whoo sound) we ran like bandits for the catwalk at the edge of the flight deck. 

Yes... I remember vividly those days and kinda miss 'em.  My squadron was VA-115, (again... the "A" stood for attack) based at Miramar in California, and our pilots were largely WWII re-treads and I guess you'd have to call them cowboys. 

When the jets (F9F cougars and panthers) returned from a hop they would come in at a few thousand feet, circle around the carrier before relying upon the landing signal officer and his flags to guide them to a safe, albeit abrupt, landing.  The jet pilots were pretty much in their mid twenties.  

When our AD-1 Skyraiders (piston engines) came back they would hug the water so we never heard them coming.  We first became aware of their arrival when they roared over the bow with a noise that would rattle our bones.  We loved our cowboys. 

And, just for your information, it wasn't the jets that took out the "Bridges at Toko-Ri" as portrayed in James Michener's novel (a story roughly based upon a real attack on some bridges of a different name), it was the ADs that did the major damage.  They came in so low and slow they sometimes returned with their bellies scratched up by their own bombs, 

Yup, I miss those days and the squadron team spirit.  Too bad the Navy doesn't have a need for 75-year-old one-eyed fat guys.  I'd volunteer to go again.  It's also too bad that the old Kearsarge has been converted into razor blades. 

In some small ways, it's hell gettin' old.