A NAVY VETERAN’S VISIT TO ASTORIA'S AMERICAN LEGION - by Charlie Becker

The American Legion is a place I’ve always avoided, having no desire to visit or check it out.

I’m an old Navy Sailor from the late sixties and I was a Navigator on Navy ships, and we were old school Navigators using a sextant to Navigate by the stars, aboard a tired old Navy Destroyer. I was aboard this ship on its last cruise, and I navigated this vessel to war, underway out of Pearl Harbor Hawaii, bound for the China Seas, steaming across the Pacific through the East China Sea, the South China Sea, and the coast of Vietnam. We visited ports in Taiwan, Vietnam, the Philippines, Hong Kong, and Nagasaki Japan.

My brief experience serving off the coast of Vietnam, in the Vietnam waters, aboard this tired old Navy Ship, qualifies me as a Vietnam veteran. In the war zone the Navy paid us extra hazardous duty pay … an extra $60 a month.

I have always greeted with skepticism my minuscule participation in the ill-advised Vietnam War, or any war for that matter. The experience as a Sailor in America's war-making machine, helped make me the cynical man I am today. The anti-war man I am today.

Having served in the American Military Juggernaut as a sailor aboard a tired old Navy ship acquainted me with institutional hierarchies, with all their attendant hypocrisies, with all their group think, with all their blind rigid classism and boundaries. I never liked boundaries and I never liked institutional hierarchies. I don’t like war, it has uncertain outcomes, where some profit and some are sent to die…

My experience in the American War Making Machine has fostered in me a profound cynicism regarding institutions of all sorts. I mean all of them.

I generally avoid places that honor veterans, finding that honoring veterans is used often as rationalization for past ill-conceived American wars, and justification to pursue yet more war.

So … it was with this mindset that I set out to visit and write my impressions of Astoria’s American Legion.

Now let me say …

The American Legion promotes the interest of Veterans that all of us Veterans have indeed benefited from …

So What did I find at Astoria’s American Legion.

First of all the American Legion is a huge bar serving beer and hard liquor, seemingly morning noon and night. It is completely devoid of natural light. The air is remarkably fresh, the lighting adequate, barely, but missing the ambiance of natural light. Comfortable environments need an abundance of natural light. The American Legion has none.

Rifles line the walls of Astoria’s American Legion with military pictures and posters honoring Veterans. Flags of the Army and Marine Corps and Navy, line the walls, with photos of Sailors in their dress blue uniforms and pea coats. You might say the American Legion is a patriotic place.

I buzz the front door to gain entrance to Astoria’s American Legion. I’m not a member but I am a Navy Veteran and folks greet me kindly, inviting me to sit at their table where friendly regulars meet and share their stories much like folks do in Astoria’s coffee shops and wine bars I frequent. The American Legion seems a friendly place where folks like to gather, and they probably drink too much like folks do in most places. We are social animals, we like to mix it up and alcohol greases the social wheel.

I grease the social wheel with caffeine in the coffee shop, enjoying a shot of espresso in the dark roast early each morning, and damn if it doesn’t get the lips flapping. Folks like to gather and share stories and tall tales, with little lies, just little ones, in the interest of a good story. It’s in the telling, don’t you think? Juicy tidbits of gossip ... well sure ... passing the  word of what it was like in the old days. So I say good on them. It’s about hearing stories and telling stories. And so it is in Astoria's American Legion.

It was early afternoon and I sat at the bar in the American Legion and talked to a gent about my age, he is a former Vietnam Marine. He had kind eyes…Marines had some of the worst of it in Vietnam. We chatted for awhile, he has coffee in the morning and once a week has a beer at the Legion in the afternoon. A kind friendly gentle man. A Marine Veteran who survived Vietnam, saying he’d never fired his weapon in Vietnam. Some are the lucky ones, some are not so lucky. Such are the random fortunes of war.

I’m always hesitant to look for garlands, or rewards for my minuscule participation in war. Never expected or wanted a parade. I mostly wanted to forget it really.

I have no desire to wear the heavy cloak of the word Veteran. It’s too much to bear. I’m a veteran … OK … well who isn’t…Everyone who watched the Vietnam War on the 5 O’clock news, heard the body count, saw the faces of American youth in their bright military Uniforms, festooned with ribbons, so full of hope and vitality and cut down in the bloom of their youth.

I salute the American Legion for the work they do in the interest of American’s Veterans. I know the American Legion has healed real human tragedies, too many to count, to many to bear, experienced by young Americans sacrificed to the fire and madness of America’s Wars.

To serve aboard an American War Ship on the open ocean in wartime is to be immersed in the psychic meanness of war. Ship on the open ocean in wartime, is to be immersed in the psychic meanness of war. It grinds on you and makes you numb. There is no color, all is black and white, day after dreary haze grey day. A Sailor falls overboard and we never see him again. And there is an empty rack in the berthing compartment where the Sailor once slept.

And life aboard a Navy ship goes on the same way … day after dreary day.

You're not really a soldier. You're not really a Sailor. You keep your head low and out of the way. And you survive the war and the institution that sent you to war.

I crossed the ocean, navigating an American War Vessel, making celestial observations, shooting stars by sextant, for lines of position, tracking our course on our charts. We were guided by the stars, the sun the moon and Polaris, the remarkable North Star, guiding seafarers and desert wanderers through the ages. Navigation by the heavenly bodies is an ancient art. I was immersed in the natural world and the endless, timeless beauty of the open ocean.

The open ocean presents its vast awesome beauty and we were surrounded by a horizon that always beckons us to approach. We blue water sailors look at the water differently. We look at the water for what is not there. We look at the water for warmth and kindness and home. We are on the cold dark ocean, and all we have to hold is the rolling ocean and the beauty of the stars in the heavens above. And that is quite a lot indeed. And always the horizon beckons us with a tempting forlorn hope for what is beyond. But we will never reach the beyond, we will never reach the horizon.

My service in the Navy in wartime is full of the psychic meanness of war. And it is full of the beauty of the stars and moon as seen from a little vessel on the vast ocean. My Navy experience is full of contradiction.

In my heart I will always be a Navigator Sailor guided by the stars. And it’s here where we commune with the ancients who crossed oceans guided by the same stars guiding us Navy Sailors. And the old Sailor’s adage is true: “All Sailors are Brothers Under the Sun.”

It was a powerful life experience serving in the Navy, one that I remember so vividly. Being a young Navy Sailor was an experience I once had disdain for. I’m just an old Sailor now, looking back on the long arc of my life, and I have grown to treasure my Navy experience. After visiting Astoria’s American Legion, I am a little bit prouder to have served as a Sailor in the United States Navy.