Yankee Station

In the silence that over­came me as I refixed my gaze upon the stark panorama, which had unfolded before my eyes, I recalled some vague pas­sage from the Gospel of Luke (12:54–57): “When you see a cloud ris­ing in the west, you say imme­di­ately that rain is coming—and so it does. When the wind blows up from the south, you say it’s going to be hot—and so it is. You hyp­ocrites! If you can inter­pret the por­tents of earth and sky, why can’t you inter­pret the present time? Tell me, why don’t you judge for your­selves what is just?“

“So this’s Yan­kee Sta­tion,“ I mut­tered to myself as we all laughed to assuage our fear of the dread­ful truth this silence had stirred up from the depths of our beings.

Yan­kee Sta­tion essen­tially con­sisted of patrolling the coastal waters of Viet­nam, in a semi-​​alert, battle-​​station mode in which we remained con­stantly on the look­out for enemy ves­sels both above and below the sur­face of the water. Our task was, of course, greatly sim­pli­fied, since the North had a vir­tu­ally nonex­is­tent naval fleet. As we maneu­vered up and down the coast, at vary­ing dis­tances from land, our great­est threat came from kamikaze sam­pans, loaded with explo­sives, or from artillery set up in the jun­gles along the coast to keep our ships with their big guns at bay. For the most part, we remained far enough out at sea, that I sel­dom saw land.