(USS Coral Sea, anchored, St. Thomas, V.I.)
In his summer white uniform Jim Wilson, Commanding Officer of the VFA-16 Firebirds, walked briskly through the hangar bay to the fantail. He carried a small overnight bag and was happy to be getting off the ship.
St. Thomas! How many years had it been? Fourteen, he figured. The view of the island through the El 4 opening brought back the excitement he had experienced as a JO at this, his first “foreign” port. The island jutted out of the blue Caribbean, lush and green. The mountaintops were dotted with homes, and brilliantly lit soft cumulus clouds hovered above them in the late afternoon sky.
Join the Navy and see the world. Exotic and tropical, St. Thomas was one of the nicer ports the Navy visited.
Navy ships, however, rarely called on St. Thomas or any of the Virgin Islands. And since the late 90s, when Wilson was here as a new-guy — a “nugget”—it had become rarer still for a carrier to “drop the hook” in the roadstead. During that time, the demise of the Atlantic Fleet Weapons Training Facility had been precipitated by a fatal live-fire training accident — one that involved a civilian target range worker on the nearby island of Vieques. The lives of the naval aviators who crashed in these waters during their training over the years were seldom given a second thought by the press or by the people of the United States, the stories typically buried on page six as events involving a “routine training mission,” the aircrew “not identified pending notification of next of kin.” Yet, public pressure about this one civilian death had caused the Navy to withdraw, and with the inability to use Vieques for training, the Navy had stopped coming to the region. The result was a second-order effect that dawned on the local populace too late: the Navy also closed the massive training base of Roosevelt Roads, Puerto Rico.