Lately, I've been so preoccupied with getting back to San Diego, that I forgot to beat off last night! Perhaps that's why I woke up a bit frustrated (hmm, could be; don't know).
Well we're still sailing along with San Diego as our destination and things are going pretty smooth. It's always a treat for sailors when there are civilians onboard ship as guests. On this fine warship of mine, the accommodations have been quite noteworthy! The food is better than it's ever been and the officers and members of the crew have really been keeping up an appearance that everything is fantastic. Then there are those such as This Man who sees this as an opportunity to slack off on work and cash in on days spent doing absolutely nothing.
See, it's a good thing that I didn't start my leave in Hawaii, don't you think?
Moving onward, today was kicked off to a running start when my division was informed that we had a mandatory meeting the Chaplain from Staff, who was flown over from the carrier. Reluctantly, we gathered in the classroom and allowed ourselved to be humored by Ol' Chaps. He was a nice man, who tried with little success to get us to open up and talk about pent up feelings, us anticipating our return to San Diego and our reactions to our brief tour in Banda Aceh, Indonesia. It was almost as if we were being forced to go to therapy without the hope of getting a prescription for Zoloft in the end! Well, my division wasn't having it. We all listened as he attempted to humor us with his stories of having briefly served in Kuwait and in Iraq while stationed with a Marine Battalion. No matter how he prompted and prodded, we weren't talking.
So when he finally admitted defeat and resigned, knowing that he hadn't suceeded in obtaining any knowledge from the 11 of us, he let us go.
And that's when we began to talk--about him.

As we were all leaving, most of us going for a smoke and the others heading for their racks, we openly discussed the nerve of not the Chaplain, but the carrier strike group for sending this poor man over to attempt to console us all while attempting to gather what we were all thinking. A couple of us concluded that he was sent here, merely as a precaution in the event that some poor sailor got home to his family and decided to have a nervous breakdown as a result of this cruise.
It was, This Man gathered, something else for our upper chain of command to strike a check near on the pre-arrival checkoff list.
Crew in tip top shape mentally...CHECK!
And that was it. We'd bonded as a group for once and managed to cut a designated 45 minute discussion down to about 15 minutes and Chaps never knew what hit him.

Mahalo