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Wooing Wives in the Fleet
As the Z-grams generate waves throughout the Navy, the main impact among the some 40 ships of the Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean has been to push all commanders into a new concern for the dependents of their seagoing officers and men. When the U.S.S. Springfield recently put into Malta, more than 20 petty officers' wives from the ship's home port of Gaeta awaited the ship's arrival, because for the first time their husbands were permitted to spend nights ashore at a transient stop. Some 450 men from the carrier John F. Kennedy are flying home for Christmas thanks to the new regulations.
The concern also shows up in the new dialogue that has developed among skippers, the men they command and Navy wives. Aboard the Springfield, Fleet Commander Vice Admiral Isaac Kidd holds forth in ombudsmen meetings at the same polished table where he and his senior commanders conferred in September with President Nixon. At a recent session, one wife complained that U.S. naval families based in Italy knew too little Italian. Kidd ordered a three-month trial of voluntary lessons. On another complaint, Kidd said he would order Navy doctors and dentists in Naples to visit Gaeta more regularly to treat dependents' ills.
The same kind of chatter, ranging from the highly practical to the merely cathartic, is occurring regularly at Stateside naval bases. At South Carolina's Charleston Naval Station, Captain Edward P. Flynn Jr. guides such meetings sympathetically but briskly. "My group doesn't like the way Playboy is displayed at the base exchange," complained Mary Vaughn of the Marine Wives' Club. "You can see as much in a women's magazine," countered Flynn. "I bought three T shirts last month at the Navy Exchange and there were holes in the seams of the shoulders," groused a submariner's wife. "Bring them back and we'll return them to the supplier," said Flynn. Are such nigglings a waste of a captain's time? Navy Wife Gwen Lanoux does not think so. "We feel like somebody is listening," she says.
Rear Admiral Herman J. Kossler, commandant of the Sixth Naval District headquartered in Charleston, has ordered Seabee units, whose training often consists of building bridges and docks only to knock them down again, to undertake permanent projects. In line with Z-grams, he had them build a shed so that men with motorcycles could park their vehicles, construct a marina, outfit an automobile hobby shop and panel the walls of living quarters.
Now the base enlisted men's club, which used to be an edgy center of booze-and boredom-bred friction, is a joyful and jumping place, with dim lights, rock music and girls. Every Wednesday night is "soul night," on which some 500 sailors, 80% of them black, dance to the music of the Exquisite Diatonics and treat their dates to 40ยข drinks. Bachelor officers don psychedelic sports shirts and casual sweaters to meet local girls at their own club and shake to such groups as the Swingers or the Sounds of Time.
Somewhat envious of all the excitement Zumwalt's Navy has created, the Army is marching double time to catch up. Last week General William Westmoreland, the Army's more restrained and traditional Chief of Staff, moved to make life in the Army a bit more like home. Clarifying earlier