Reflections on the USS Hornet

This week my wife and I took our two daughters and a friend to tour the USS Hornet, the decommissioned aircraft carrier, now a floating museum in Alameda.

The USS Hornet began its service at the start of World War Two and ended its service picking up the Apollo astronauts after their return from the moon. The ship held thirty-five hundred men, eighty aircraft and was attacked fifty-nine times, but managed to get through the war without having been hit by a bomb, torpedo, or kamikaze plane. Aircraft from the Hornet shot down more enemy airplanes and sank more enemy tonnage than any other carrier in World War Two. On board the ship is a plaque honoring the men of a torpedo bomber squadron from the Hornet of whom all but one died in the battle of Midway. A typhoon with winds over 135 miles an hour damaged the forward hull of the ship in the waning days of the war, much to the relief of the crew who welcomed the trip home to California.

I stood with my daughter and her friend on the flight deck of the Hornet. We were at the stern, looking down five stories to the green water of the estuary. I turned them around and pointed to the bow of the ship, marking the center of the runway. I suggested they follow the line and they took off, not running as I expected, but skipping, hand in hand. I wondered what those who had served on the Hornet would have thought of the sight of two eight year old girls, ponytails swinging, skipping along the path where once fighter planes and torpedo bombers had precariously taken to the sky, never certain of their return.

Our tour finished we returned to our car. We decided to explore the now closed Alameda Naval Air Station. Its vast runways are choked with weeds with flocks of ducks and geese performing the only takeoffs and landings. There are acres and acres of empty aircraft hangers, administrative buildings and warehouses. A few are rented out; an electric car company occupies one, a movie studio another. As we drove we imagined what it must have been like in 1943, choked with sailors, dock workers, trucks and jeeps, the air filled with the sound of aircraft and ships' horns. We drove past block after block of empty living quarters, modest cottages, and stately houses where the senior officers once lived.

As we made our way out of the base my mind played a trick on me and I thought I could hear
bagpipes playing faintly on the wind. We turned a corner and found the main street leading toward town. My wife said that it was funny, but she could have sworn she heard bagpipes a moment before. We turned the car around and with windows down drove slowly back the way we came. It was bagpipes we had heard. We followed their sound through empty streets until we found its source, a man next to a car parked between two empty warehouses, practicing the pipes in solitude.

It was a fitting end to the day.

Published in The Argus newspaper  February 23,1999

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