Page 6
MANLEY NOTES
REACH OUT AND FEEL THE PRIDE
Dear Mother, Dad, and
******
,
Well we are back on the gunline.
We really had a welcome back too.
Three other destroyers and the
Newport News (cruiser) were firing
like mad at Cap Lay. (Cap Lay is
the point just north of the DMZ.
The VC have gun emplacements
there.) We waded right in and
opened up. We fired 923 rounds in
one night. We couldn’t even see
the shore because of the smoke.
Now, tonight we are all going to be
probably about 18 hours without
sleep, re-arming. We are on our
way to meet the AE (ammo ship)
now.
Other than that not much has hap-
pened since Kaohsiung. The
weather is rough and rainy. The
temperature is 62
o.
We passed the
USS Coral Sea in the mist today.
At first I thought is was
*******
’s ship,
the Kitty Hawk. The Coral Sea is
No. 43. The Kitty Hawk is No. 63.
The first day out from Kaohsiung
about half the crew had diarrhea. I
had it too. After that one day,
though, everyone is fine. I guess it
was getting our insides cleaned out
again.
I just wrote to
*******.
I bet it is cold up
there in Chicago now. I guess they
won’t do as much drilling outside as
we did.
I have also written to most of those
colleges, so I’m waiting to hear from
them.
*****
is in his second year of
junior college in Daytona Beach.
Next year he will go to the U. of
Florida. I had originally eliminated
the south because I thought those
colleges would specialize in the
southern forests, and I like the north
woods better.
However, I wrote to the ones you
added anyway. Love,
Letters From The Front is a series
of letters written by a young sailor
to his parents back home while he
served on board during the 1967 -
1968 WestPac cruise. The letters
are unedited except for spelling cor-
rections and the names of individu-
als have been omitted to protect the
innocent.
LETTER FROM THE FRONT
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gradually, my changing as a person and the world’s change have overtaken
it. On a small scale, Morton’s while better than ever, no longer attracts as
many stars as it used to. It still brings in the rich people in droves and defi-
nitely some stars. I saw Samuel L. Jackson there a few days ago, and we
had a nice visit, and right before that, I saw and had a splendid talk with
Warren Beatty in an elevator, in which we agreed that Splendor in the Grass
was a super movie. But Morton’s is not the star galaxy it once was, though it
probably will be again.
(Continued from page 2)
Beyond that, a bigger change has happened. I no longer think Hollywood
stars are terribly important. They are uniformly pleasant, friendly people,
and they treat me better than I deserve to be treated. But a man or woman
who makes a huge wage for memorizing lines and reciting them in front of a
camera is no longer my idea of a shining star we should all look up to.
How can a man or woman who makes an eight-figure wage and lives in in-
sane luxury really be a star in today’s world, if by a “star” we mean someone
bright and powerful and attractive as a role model? Real stars are not riding
around in the backs of limousines or in Porsches or getting trained in yoga or
Pilates and eating only raw fruit while they have Vietnamese girls do their
nails.
They can be interesting, nice people, but they are not heroes to me any
longer. A real star is the soldier of the 4th Infantry Division who poked his
head into a hole on a farm near Tikrit, Iraq. He could have been met by a
bomb or a hail of AK-47 bullets. Instead, he faced an abject Saddam Hus-
sein and the gratitude of all of the decent people of the world.
A real star is the U.S. soldier who was sent to disarm a bomb next to a road
north of Baghdad. He approached it, and the bomb went off and killed him.
A real star, the kind who haunts my memory night and day, is the U.S. sol-
dier in Baghdad who saw a little girl playing with a piece of unexploded ord-
nance on a street near where he was guarding a station. He pushed her
aside and threw himself on it just as it exploded. He left a family desolate in
California and a little girl alive in Baghdad.
The stars who deserve media attention are not the ones who have lavish
weddings on TV but the ones who patrol the streets of Mosul even after two
of their buddies were murdered and their bodies battered and stripped for
the sin of trying to protect Iraqis from terrorists.
We put couples with incomes of $100 million a year on the covers of our
magazines. The noncoms and officers who barely scrape by on military pay
but stand on guard in Afghanistan and Iraq and on ships and in submarines
and near the Arctic Circle are anonymous as they live and die.
(Continued on page 7)
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