Interview with Chris Wildenhain conducted by Tara Lokke on March 7th, 2016.
TL-Okay so thank you again for participating in Beat Your Gums. Please State that you understand the details about my project and knowing that you give your consent to participate under the circumstances signed and upon agreed upon agreed upon in the consent and release form.
CW-I understand
TL-Okay so the first question is just basic details so your name the branch of government- I keep saying that- of service that you were in your company division unit squad and just a little bit of background about your military
CW-Okay I was in the Navy for 20 years a lot of people in other forces with the Army and the Air Force and different services have battalions and squadrons and things that they're part of but we have commands so for us a I belong to the Atlantic Fleet most of my 20 years that meant that we govern the sixth fleet which was the Mediterranean in parts of the Adriatic and the Mediterranean Sea the Dead Sea the Persian Gulf different parts like that so the Pacific Fleet would govern like the Far East and Thailand Japan the Philippines Vietnam Korea all different areas like that so I had served the board two aircraft carriers USS Dwight D Eisenhower CVN 69 CVN stands for conventional vessel nuclear and USS John F. Kennedy CV sixty seven which is conventional vessel 67 was a whole number conventional vessel nuclear means that it's a nuclear has a reactor and it's powered by a reactor and diesel fuel whereas on it just as regular conventional carrier or CV like the Kennedy it's doesn't have a reactor it's just a conventional boat I served gosh the during the Kosovo campaign in operation Desert Storm operation enduring freedom operation Iraqi freedom a they do they often say it's not a war but actually President Reagan did declare war one day back in 1985 to flush Noriega out of Panama and when Pres. Noriega came into Florida we apprehended them and then the war was called off against Panama that was still a war so but we I served as a cook so I was on board the USS Vela Gulf I was on a guided missile cruiser as well and I'm there I had about seven or eight cooks and I was in charge of the division also I was there was a point in time I wasn’t in charge of the division I just I got advanced to that part I was the captain's cook on board that ship my captain Was a great guy you may not be but he was a great guy promoted me to E six which is first-class petty officer and that's what solidified my retirement because up to certain ranks you can't retire so in the Navy will make E six at least now if you don’t make E six by a certain time frame you’re not eligible for retirement so if you don't make E six within say you have 15 years in as and E five which is the second class petty officer you have to be discharged you lose out on your retirement benefit so which is incentive to make rank so but the Eisenhower was a great tour we had about 4000 ships company a thousand were for the Marine Corps then about another thousand for air so we had 6000 underway I would I worked in S2 division which was the enlisted mess so I cooked for all of the people that are E9 and below well actually E seven and below no I correct I'm sorry E six or below because there’s a chief’s mess which was S-11 so in an S stands for supply, supply department division 2 which was the enlisted mess and in the back galley which was the kitchen we cooked for figure you have a meal fry chicken meal you’d Fry about 650 pounds of chicken for about 4000 people you know and you had that division had 110 cooks in it to cook for 6000 people and the Eisenhower was 1092 feet long by 252 feet wide it's called the Nimitz class carriers so anything with CV’s and 69 I mean 68 and up is a Nimitz class carrier all duplicates of the USS Nimitz but now there’s a Bush class which is a different one which is 100 feet longer so the displaced tonnage on those are thousands of pounds and they cost billions of dollars to make so yeah it's kind of my, my different, different toys I've had I did a I had a 9575 NEC which Navy enlisted classification code for correction specialist so I was a prison guard for three years so I came out of rate as a cook to be a prison guard and I did my tour at the Norfolk Naval Station Braig successfully and then went on to actually went on to the guided missile cruise of the Ville of Gulf from there.
TL-Cool. Okay so next I wanted to know some details about your family. So any family history and with that what kind of got you interested in joining the Navy.
CW-I have four brothers one sister and my mother and father of course. I got interested to want to be a cook is my mother father one day I made them a BLT and a coffee they thought I was good cook so they sent me to a vocational school to be a cook I didn't know what I want to be a just knew I had to go to school so I went. I actually did very well in it and I competed in the statewide competition at Johnson and Whales in my junior year and won second place in the state of Rhode Island for baking and high preparations and cake decorating and things like that and then I was sitting at the table in my house about a week after my niece was born and I was sitting there with a bottle of Jack Daniels and I was getting drunk and one of my siblings threw me the keys to his car and said go get diapers for your niece kind of looked at him like you know I’m getting drunk, your car is brand-new his reasoning was it was only a couple of blocks so I went a couple of blocks realized that a 1984 Cutler supreme is a really nice ride and ended up going a little further then crashed his car so instead of listening to the for the rest of my life on how I ruined his car I decided to flee so I joined the Navy and off I went. I had a grandfather that served in World War II and he would never discuss it so there was he was actually at Pearl Harbor the day that they attacked Pearl Harbor the Japanese he was coming out of church that’s the most I know of the story but that he was that he took fire ended up you know completing his tour in Pearl Harbor with him coming home, meeting my grandmother, got married to her he's actually my step grandfather. My, my paternal side of the family my, my dad I never really knew his parents my grandfather died before I was born and my grandmother died when I was like six years old so I didn’t know too much about them. I know my dad was very, very loyal to his family very much a family man very active in his community which I guess it allowed me to be in the service sector that I was and as for as a service position if you will because being a cook is a service position it’s not really a tactical you know nuclear whatever position you know so but the accident is what sparked me to join the military. I ended up going in and doing my first two years I got in trouble all the time I got busted twice so I was very good at making rank I got 81 82 then I’m eighty one again then I’m 82 again because I kept getting promotions and then stripes taken away. So it took me four years to make a promotion that should only have taken two. I finally decided to play ball, I said would do my shore duty he get out but then I met my wife and then we got married and I had one year left on shore duty we were going to have a kid and decided to stay for another tour when that was over there was 11 years and there was no reason to turn around and go backwards so I wasn’t going to invest 11 years and not the other nine for the pension. So yeah my, my family background is not too. We weren’t very close to me my, my family is one of the ones one more ones like the way they say I love you so much you need when do I get it back there is no sit down and tell anybody how you feel about them or share your feelings and thoughts or anything like that. My wife is a lot like that I learned that from her more than I did from my family.
TL-Right. So where is your hometown? You said Rhode Island?
CW-I’m from Pawtucket, Rhode Island which is right on the Massachusetts border and I attended a vocational school in Lincoln Rhode Island while I was in vocational school I worked in a program where once every two months because it was a vocational school we went to the city capital building and cook for the Rhode Island legislature. So I gained experience from certified culinary educators people that were part of Chef’s Association they were very, very known well known in their community. These were also guys that had already done their tours as, as chefs in the industry and decided that they were going to go teach kids and dwindle off into the sunset. Most were dead now.
TL-Um, do you have any stories about during your deployment that you’d like to share?
CW-Although a lot of it was when, when you have a bunch of guys out in the middle of the ocean there’s not there’s only two morale factors there’s sleep and eat. That’s it. So I used to discount being a cook that you know so what you cook you know but it was more than that you control 50% of the morale so it was a pretty when I finally I took that notice of that you know also we had a lot of friends people befriended the cook which was just smart business and we, we had a lot of guys a lot of a lot of rough housing and hazing but not hazing in the sense that we did anything illegal there was one time when we a fight broke out in the borough they were there all wrestling and I tried to get them to stop. And called down to engineering where they were living and a guy came up and, and then I won’t say his name but if I told him there was a fight going on he would come up and get undressed and jump in the middle of the pile and the fight would immediately stop because they didn’t want a naked man in the middle of the pile. So but those are those are like one of the guys used to do that he was funny a lot of great friends were made out there we had a lot of times were we’d go out and we’d have what we’d call choir practice so that’s when you go out and you’d drink until you're all singing you know so you’re smashed and just do things you would normally do. We had one guy my friend F**** was he was about the size of an eight-year-old average eight-year-old in the United States and F***** had these little tiny hands and when he got drunk and got into a fight he was just hitting the guy and the guys was just looking at him the whole time he was getting hit because it was like a little kid hitting you but he wanted to assert his manhood I think the guy just fell down to accommodate him but, but we, we also just was a lot of great guys a lot of great port visits my gosh we went to uh to Turkey and I've been in about 19-20 different countries but about 40 different ports so like I had I've been just in Italy I've been to Livorno Italy I've been to Sicily I've been to Trieste I've been to Maples I've been to Venice I've been to Livorno I've been to like six or seven different cities just within- Brindisi- just within Italy and then France I've been to Marseille, Conn, Tulane, and to line entire turkey inner turkey Oslo Norway Kiel Germany Rostock Germany Cole Ireland gosh Israel about seven or eight times I've been to Puerto Rico San Juan St. John's US Virgin Islands Jamaica Barbados Venezuela Cuba all over all over the, the world so to speak I’ve just never been to the far East but in every one of those ports to let off steam just great to be off the boat because when you go on the ship and you if you're you work they have the rotation on the boat it’s called day on stay on which means as long as the boat is at sea you don't have a day off the last appointment I was over at sea for right around 110 days so we worked 110 days straight at least 16 hours a day sometimes up to 20 so I mean it definitely takes youth and vigor to be able to something like that but I mean it also there were guys that were in their 40s had done it for years so food underway was always good and we had really good cooks really good feedback from the crew I mean we used to have every Friday night they would do a pizza night for the guys they always look forward to, to that they would do a movie night on the mess decks and the mess decks are the dining hall and they would also sometimes do an ice cream social or a bingo thing or something like that they tried to mix it up because it was important to keep people’s moral up cuz you have a guy that’s sitting at a missile control panel if he’s having a bad day then it could be or you know if he gets screwed up mentally then he presses a button he shouldn’t press then yeah so were very, very interesting in making sure everyone was taken care of. Let’s see.
TL-Did you have a favorite place that you got to see while you were in?
CW-I really enjoyed Sicily I love Italy, period. And the best part of Italy is northern Italy to me because it’s old country it's untainted architecture and buildings from the Renaissance Period. And the trust of the people like they had paintings inside churches that were a couple hundred years old that the churches didn’t get locked at night because no one would steal or think to steal something like that so I really, really enjoyed Italy I really enjoyed Sicily within Sicily was a land within its own you here a lot of stories about the mafia and all that different stuff like as far as Sicilians and what not but it's just a beautiful, beautiful land and people very, very connected community wise if their criminal I don't know it didn't really display anything like that there and then I, I really it’s funny you think okay well what would well where was the best pizza well it was actually in Israel.
TL-Really?
CW-Yeah it wasn’t in Italy because in Italy they take this it looks like if you had a pita pocket a big one and it has sauce on it and a little glob of cheese in the middle and that was their rendition of pizza and you know there is ongoing debate as to who created pizza was the Greeks was it the Italians I submit as the Greeks because the Italians don’t do pizza well at all in that respect anyway.
TL-So coming home, what, well, in the most broad sense, what was it like to come home?
CW-Coming home was always exciting because it was a lot of anticipation when you're coming through Chesapeake Bay and you go past the Chesapeake lighthouse and you know that the port’s only the pier is only an hour away but then it’s going to take an hour to tie up so you sinking your self up for like three hours ahead of something right there and you’re going to get to see family again and it’s going to be great and when you get home I mean it’s weird you’re sitting in the car and there's this silence and no one is talking because you just overwhelmed with everything like you know I got home for my first deployment as a married man and my son was walking he was only two months when I left so when I come home he's walking and it’s like what you think about wow that's awesome but that sucks I didn’t get to see him roll over and I didn’t get to hear his first word and I didn't get to see him walk and all those different things but those are sacrifices that that we make but you know but my wife did her very best which was really good that is to make sure I got pictures and videos of things that happened while I was gone that were you know milestones so but moreover when we got when we got back there was always a pre-deployment brief like what it’s gonna be like with you gone and that was for the dependents and then there was a post-deployment brief that was what it was going to be like for you because normally as a service member we think to ourselves as it was the man of the house that we take care of the house the family and now that we’re home move away woman I got this now you know and we had to learn that we have to do things together it's not always we are in charge so there was a lot of having to learn to let the, the checkbook go and let her continue paying the bills and doing different things like that and trusting that she knew what she was doing because for a soldier or sailor you live in the now you know oh gee six months you’ve been doing it and you did a great job it’s like right now why are you doing it that way you know and it’s we’re, we’re in a constant mode of troubleshooting but, but getting home was also you know it was also very surreal too like Wow yesterday I was off you know at Cape Hope now here at home and I'm having dinner with my wife and I don’t have to eat you know stuff that’s going to make you sick from some other country but and it was but it also was a fairly easy too to transition back in the house I always give my kids my kids were very, very excited when I came home my one son I did my oldest my, my youngest didn't do well with me gone he internalized a lot and he got he was only two but he got mad at his mom for different stuff and blamed her for me being gone so my wife took a lot of crap and even today was is now I’m retired and I have we have our pension you know even now my wife will go well that’s your pension and I’m like no, no it’s our pension that’s something that we did together I couldn’t do that unless she was there to do what she did and there's an old Navy T-shirt that says you know “Navy wife: the toughest job in the military” that definitely is the case so my wife was- pardon me I have a little cold- was a, a champ she was awesome she still is awesome yeah that’s what coming home was like it was always very exciting it was always very like you’re in a honeymoon phase for a week or two but then afterwards you're right back to the way it was before you left was pretty quick the transition
TL-So what made you decide to come back to school?
CW-Well when I ended up getting out I was on retirement leave and I applied for a job with Wal-Mart as an assistant manager and Wal-Mart hired me while I was on retirement leave from the Navy to be the assistant manager so I was working for a Wal-Mart in Lisbon and I was running I was assistant manager to a grocery side then I got put on third shift and my father-in-law was in hospice and he was dying so I was one of the primary caregivers my father-in-law was a big man and I could move him and so he only lived up the street from the, the job so I explained to my boss that pardon me that I could not work third shift anymore and she's like I don’t know what to tell you I said because I was the care giver of my father-in-law I says you know I said unfortunately I know what to tell you my family took a back burner for a long time I definitely was not going to do so for Wal-Mart so I put in my two week notice and one week into my two-week notice I got a call from BJ's Wholesale Club asking if I want to come and be a senior merchandise manager for them and I went on to be a senior merchandise manager for BJ's and I was driving my forklift on the sales floor and brought down some freight for customer put it back everything was safe I didn’t have a safety walker and ended up that it upset the customer and she called the home office and two days later I didn’t have a job. Some people are just not happy unless they are getting other people in trouble and what that lady did and she probably didn't realize is that she put me on to work with, with two kids and a wife at home but God is good and I've definitely been blessed my boss used to tell me if you don’t get back to work I’m going to fire you and it was one of my good friends and I would always joke with him I’m like if you’re going to fire me do it because what's gonna happen is I’m going to get unemployment from you then I'm going to collect my Navy pension my disability pension I'll go enroll for school I’ll get my GI. Bill and will make about a couple grand more than I do now working for you so if you're my friend pull the trigger and he would always just give up and say get back to work but when I lost my job I didn't realize it was a self fulfilling prophecy when I did say those things and I ended up getting losing my job January 2 of all days and then when I lost my job my boss was firing me and I had and he was crying while he was firing me because he let me down and I had to calm him down this sounds weird but my why my trying to calm you down when I don't have a job tomorrow you know I’m like I'm telling you I’m going to be fine within two weeks I had talked to my Veteran service officer and had been set up with my GI. Bill which if you understand the GI. Bill is for the GI. Bill is to cover expenses for us while we’re in school so that were not struggling so for the last five years I've been in college I don't live on poverty level or anything like that I've been well taken care of by, by what like my friend says his tax dollars I also worked for 30 years before I even took any of his because it was my tax dollars too so I'm okay with that I'm okay with taking it not feel guilty about it but so I enrolled in three Rivers community College in Norwich Connecticut did my time down there for year and a half then came up Storrs where my son was a junior here when I started here as a as a sophomore and then my son graduated in 2013 December and for his last semester he used to come to school with me everyday so it was kind of weird go to college with your kid and I was like wow this is gonna be great we’re gonna sit back hangout and when we did do that but I ended up paying for his lunch every day and those things never change and I was like do your friends your lunch no well why am I so anyway yeah so anyway I have I am in my fifth year of college now I had a year of remedial classes just because I had to learn APA MLA Algebra Statistics all those things all over again so for you guys its pretty fresh in your head for me I was detached for 25 years so I had to relearn it and then I once I caught up I’ll have my degree in human development family studies in may and I’ve just been accepted to UConn school of social where I’ll go on to be a social worker and I'll be focusing on PTSD veterans and sexual trauma case victims of the military because I worked in a veterans outreach Center in Norwich I keyed in to that specific community and I love those people that’s kinda why I went back to college because I didn’t have a job it was to make myself more marketable for the job that I want
TL-So what, what do you plan on doing with, you know, what’s your dream goal to accomplish with your
CW-My goal is, is to get my degree in social work and practice group counseling for that this community of PTSD and sexual trauma victims or even drug dependency but my dream isn’t to be in any one place but a little picket fence in the house or anything like that I like to be mobile and now that my kids out of the house my wife and I can apply to different jobs at the VA do a few years there it would be ideal for me just work the next 20-25 years and just be
TL-So do you have any advise for future generations of either civilians or soldiers or just in general?
CW- well for soldiers I mean it's important I mean never, never ever doubt your gut when you walk by somebody there was a guy on the ship that and I’ll tell the story kinda related to your answer where he was on board the boat and I was sitting on the back on the fantail of the carrier and I was just relaxing and he looked like all quiet and down he worked in the chief’s mess and, and then he said he was fine I went back inside and then a couple of minutes later they called man overboard so he jumped overboard and instead of just sitting there knowing that the have a feeling something was wrong to stay with a few more minutes could have maybe changed his mind I don't know that’s something I think about a lot but you know I, I think if you see anyone that's in trouble or anyone that you speculate that’s in trouble even if you're not a mental health expert look out for your shipmate and your comrade and take care them in respect to just making sure that they're okay I mean I learned a lot with having with being a cook that you know morale and mental health things like that state of mind are important for getting the mission accomplished and that we have a contribution to making sure that happens within each other and that everyone gets home safely statistic for PTSD is in the last 10 years one of my professors I learned last semester that there have been 5000 people killed in Afghanistan and Iraq in the last 10 years people killed in the line of duty but 48,000 have come back to kill themselves from PTSD so I mean to me if we’re looking out for each other on the battlefield we’re gonna come home a lot stronger so I think it's important to look out for each other important to ask questions and it's important to you know take the time especially if you have anything pressing or special to get to you know. That’d be my one big one.
TL-So what is one thing about yourself that you hope people remember about you?
CW-About me I’m the center of attention so I am a showman I put on a show I’m the class clown I’m the goof ball whatever I say what I want when I want and I live through the consequences of some of those actions but I think I would just want to be remembered as someone who helped somebody now my dad was a very much a servant to his community as a City Councilman and he’ll always be remembered as someone who helped local businessmen and whatnot helped to you know just better their, their businesses within communities being lucrative and what not provided services to people who needed help that’s about it
TL-Is there anything else or any other stories that you’d like to tell me? They could be from any time in your life.
CW-Naw. No I think that's good.
TL-Okay! Well if there’s nothing else that you’d like to share for now which doesn’t mean we can’t meet again, then I will conclude our interview with just thank you because that was extraordinarily fun.
CW-Alright. You’re welcome.
TL-Okay so thank you again for participating in Beat Your Gums. Please State that you understand the details about my project and knowing that you give your consent to participate under the circumstances signed and upon agreed upon agreed upon in the consent and release form.
CW-I understand
TL-Okay so the first question is just basic details so your name the branch of government- I keep saying that- of service that you were in your company division unit squad and just a little bit of background about your military
CW-Okay I was in the Navy for 20 years a lot of people in other forces with the Army and the Air Force and different services have battalions and squadrons and things that they're part of but we have commands so for us a I belong to the Atlantic Fleet most of my 20 years that meant that we govern the sixth fleet which was the Mediterranean in parts of the Adriatic and the Mediterranean Sea the Dead Sea the Persian Gulf different parts like that so the Pacific Fleet would govern like the Far East and Thailand Japan the Philippines Vietnam Korea all different areas like that so I had served the board two aircraft carriers USS Dwight D Eisenhower CVN 69 CVN stands for conventional vessel nuclear and USS John F. Kennedy CV sixty seven which is conventional vessel 67 was a whole number conventional vessel nuclear means that it's a nuclear has a reactor and it's powered by a reactor and diesel fuel whereas on it just as regular conventional carrier or CV like the Kennedy it's doesn't have a reactor it's just a conventional boat I served gosh the during the Kosovo campaign in operation Desert Storm operation enduring freedom operation Iraqi freedom a they do they often say it's not a war but actually President Reagan did declare war one day back in 1985 to flush Noriega out of Panama and when Pres. Noriega came into Florida we apprehended them and then the war was called off against Panama that was still a war so but we I served as a cook so I was on board the USS Vela Gulf I was on a guided missile cruiser as well and I'm there I had about seven or eight cooks and I was in charge of the division also I was there was a point in time I wasn’t in charge of the division I just I got advanced to that part I was the captain's cook on board that ship my captain Was a great guy you may not be but he was a great guy promoted me to E six which is first-class petty officer and that's what solidified my retirement because up to certain ranks you can't retire so in the Navy will make E six at least now if you don’t make E six by a certain time frame you’re not eligible for retirement so if you don't make E six within say you have 15 years in as and E five which is the second class petty officer you have to be discharged you lose out on your retirement benefit so which is incentive to make rank so but the Eisenhower was a great tour we had about 4000 ships company a thousand were for the Marine Corps then about another thousand for air so we had 6000 underway I would I worked in S2 division which was the enlisted mess so I cooked for all of the people that are E9 and below well actually E seven and below no I correct I'm sorry E six or below because there’s a chief’s mess which was S-11 so in an S stands for supply, supply department division 2 which was the enlisted mess and in the back galley which was the kitchen we cooked for figure you have a meal fry chicken meal you’d Fry about 650 pounds of chicken for about 4000 people you know and you had that division had 110 cooks in it to cook for 6000 people and the Eisenhower was 1092 feet long by 252 feet wide it's called the Nimitz class carriers so anything with CV’s and 69 I mean 68 and up is a Nimitz class carrier all duplicates of the USS Nimitz but now there’s a Bush class which is a different one which is 100 feet longer so the displaced tonnage on those are thousands of pounds and they cost billions of dollars to make so yeah it's kind of my, my different, different toys I've had I did a I had a 9575 NEC which Navy enlisted classification code for correction specialist so I was a prison guard for three years so I came out of rate as a cook to be a prison guard and I did my tour at the Norfolk Naval Station Braig successfully and then went on to actually went on to the guided missile cruise of the Ville of Gulf from there.
TL-Cool. Okay so next I wanted to know some details about your family. So any family history and with that what kind of got you interested in joining the Navy.
CW-I have four brothers one sister and my mother and father of course. I got interested to want to be a cook is my mother father one day I made them a BLT and a coffee they thought I was good cook so they sent me to a vocational school to be a cook I didn't know what I want to be a just knew I had to go to school so I went. I actually did very well in it and I competed in the statewide competition at Johnson and Whales in my junior year and won second place in the state of Rhode Island for baking and high preparations and cake decorating and things like that and then I was sitting at the table in my house about a week after my niece was born and I was sitting there with a bottle of Jack Daniels and I was getting drunk and one of my siblings threw me the keys to his car and said go get diapers for your niece kind of looked at him like you know I’m getting drunk, your car is brand-new his reasoning was it was only a couple of blocks so I went a couple of blocks realized that a 1984 Cutler supreme is a really nice ride and ended up going a little further then crashed his car so instead of listening to the for the rest of my life on how I ruined his car I decided to flee so I joined the Navy and off I went. I had a grandfather that served in World War II and he would never discuss it so there was he was actually at Pearl Harbor the day that they attacked Pearl Harbor the Japanese he was coming out of church that’s the most I know of the story but that he was that he took fire ended up you know completing his tour in Pearl Harbor with him coming home, meeting my grandmother, got married to her he's actually my step grandfather. My, my paternal side of the family my, my dad I never really knew his parents my grandfather died before I was born and my grandmother died when I was like six years old so I didn’t know too much about them. I know my dad was very, very loyal to his family very much a family man very active in his community which I guess it allowed me to be in the service sector that I was and as for as a service position if you will because being a cook is a service position it’s not really a tactical you know nuclear whatever position you know so but the accident is what sparked me to join the military. I ended up going in and doing my first two years I got in trouble all the time I got busted twice so I was very good at making rank I got 81 82 then I’m eighty one again then I’m 82 again because I kept getting promotions and then stripes taken away. So it took me four years to make a promotion that should only have taken two. I finally decided to play ball, I said would do my shore duty he get out but then I met my wife and then we got married and I had one year left on shore duty we were going to have a kid and decided to stay for another tour when that was over there was 11 years and there was no reason to turn around and go backwards so I wasn’t going to invest 11 years and not the other nine for the pension. So yeah my, my family background is not too. We weren’t very close to me my, my family is one of the ones one more ones like the way they say I love you so much you need when do I get it back there is no sit down and tell anybody how you feel about them or share your feelings and thoughts or anything like that. My wife is a lot like that I learned that from her more than I did from my family.
TL-Right. So where is your hometown? You said Rhode Island?
CW-I’m from Pawtucket, Rhode Island which is right on the Massachusetts border and I attended a vocational school in Lincoln Rhode Island while I was in vocational school I worked in a program where once every two months because it was a vocational school we went to the city capital building and cook for the Rhode Island legislature. So I gained experience from certified culinary educators people that were part of Chef’s Association they were very, very known well known in their community. These were also guys that had already done their tours as, as chefs in the industry and decided that they were going to go teach kids and dwindle off into the sunset. Most were dead now.
TL-Um, do you have any stories about during your deployment that you’d like to share?
CW-Although a lot of it was when, when you have a bunch of guys out in the middle of the ocean there’s not there’s only two morale factors there’s sleep and eat. That’s it. So I used to discount being a cook that you know so what you cook you know but it was more than that you control 50% of the morale so it was a pretty when I finally I took that notice of that you know also we had a lot of friends people befriended the cook which was just smart business and we, we had a lot of guys a lot of a lot of rough housing and hazing but not hazing in the sense that we did anything illegal there was one time when we a fight broke out in the borough they were there all wrestling and I tried to get them to stop. And called down to engineering where they were living and a guy came up and, and then I won’t say his name but if I told him there was a fight going on he would come up and get undressed and jump in the middle of the pile and the fight would immediately stop because they didn’t want a naked man in the middle of the pile. So but those are those are like one of the guys used to do that he was funny a lot of great friends were made out there we had a lot of times were we’d go out and we’d have what we’d call choir practice so that’s when you go out and you’d drink until you're all singing you know so you’re smashed and just do things you would normally do. We had one guy my friend F**** was he was about the size of an eight-year-old average eight-year-old in the United States and F***** had these little tiny hands and when he got drunk and got into a fight he was just hitting the guy and the guys was just looking at him the whole time he was getting hit because it was like a little kid hitting you but he wanted to assert his manhood I think the guy just fell down to accommodate him but, but we, we also just was a lot of great guys a lot of great port visits my gosh we went to uh to Turkey and I've been in about 19-20 different countries but about 40 different ports so like I had I've been just in Italy I've been to Livorno Italy I've been to Sicily I've been to Trieste I've been to Maples I've been to Venice I've been to Livorno I've been to like six or seven different cities just within- Brindisi- just within Italy and then France I've been to Marseille, Conn, Tulane, and to line entire turkey inner turkey Oslo Norway Kiel Germany Rostock Germany Cole Ireland gosh Israel about seven or eight times I've been to Puerto Rico San Juan St. John's US Virgin Islands Jamaica Barbados Venezuela Cuba all over all over the, the world so to speak I’ve just never been to the far East but in every one of those ports to let off steam just great to be off the boat because when you go on the ship and you if you're you work they have the rotation on the boat it’s called day on stay on which means as long as the boat is at sea you don't have a day off the last appointment I was over at sea for right around 110 days so we worked 110 days straight at least 16 hours a day sometimes up to 20 so I mean it definitely takes youth and vigor to be able to something like that but I mean it also there were guys that were in their 40s had done it for years so food underway was always good and we had really good cooks really good feedback from the crew I mean we used to have every Friday night they would do a pizza night for the guys they always look forward to, to that they would do a movie night on the mess decks and the mess decks are the dining hall and they would also sometimes do an ice cream social or a bingo thing or something like that they tried to mix it up because it was important to keep people’s moral up cuz you have a guy that’s sitting at a missile control panel if he’s having a bad day then it could be or you know if he gets screwed up mentally then he presses a button he shouldn’t press then yeah so were very, very interesting in making sure everyone was taken care of. Let’s see.
TL-Did you have a favorite place that you got to see while you were in?
CW-I really enjoyed Sicily I love Italy, period. And the best part of Italy is northern Italy to me because it’s old country it's untainted architecture and buildings from the Renaissance Period. And the trust of the people like they had paintings inside churches that were a couple hundred years old that the churches didn’t get locked at night because no one would steal or think to steal something like that so I really, really enjoyed Italy I really enjoyed Sicily within Sicily was a land within its own you here a lot of stories about the mafia and all that different stuff like as far as Sicilians and what not but it's just a beautiful, beautiful land and people very, very connected community wise if their criminal I don't know it didn't really display anything like that there and then I, I really it’s funny you think okay well what would well where was the best pizza well it was actually in Israel.
TL-Really?
CW-Yeah it wasn’t in Italy because in Italy they take this it looks like if you had a pita pocket a big one and it has sauce on it and a little glob of cheese in the middle and that was their rendition of pizza and you know there is ongoing debate as to who created pizza was the Greeks was it the Italians I submit as the Greeks because the Italians don’t do pizza well at all in that respect anyway.
TL-So coming home, what, well, in the most broad sense, what was it like to come home?
CW-Coming home was always exciting because it was a lot of anticipation when you're coming through Chesapeake Bay and you go past the Chesapeake lighthouse and you know that the port’s only the pier is only an hour away but then it’s going to take an hour to tie up so you sinking your self up for like three hours ahead of something right there and you’re going to get to see family again and it’s going to be great and when you get home I mean it’s weird you’re sitting in the car and there's this silence and no one is talking because you just overwhelmed with everything like you know I got home for my first deployment as a married man and my son was walking he was only two months when I left so when I come home he's walking and it’s like what you think about wow that's awesome but that sucks I didn’t get to see him roll over and I didn’t get to hear his first word and I didn't get to see him walk and all those different things but those are sacrifices that that we make but you know but my wife did her very best which was really good that is to make sure I got pictures and videos of things that happened while I was gone that were you know milestones so but moreover when we got when we got back there was always a pre-deployment brief like what it’s gonna be like with you gone and that was for the dependents and then there was a post-deployment brief that was what it was going to be like for you because normally as a service member we think to ourselves as it was the man of the house that we take care of the house the family and now that we’re home move away woman I got this now you know and we had to learn that we have to do things together it's not always we are in charge so there was a lot of having to learn to let the, the checkbook go and let her continue paying the bills and doing different things like that and trusting that she knew what she was doing because for a soldier or sailor you live in the now you know oh gee six months you’ve been doing it and you did a great job it’s like right now why are you doing it that way you know and it’s we’re, we’re in a constant mode of troubleshooting but, but getting home was also you know it was also very surreal too like Wow yesterday I was off you know at Cape Hope now here at home and I'm having dinner with my wife and I don’t have to eat you know stuff that’s going to make you sick from some other country but and it was but it also was a fairly easy too to transition back in the house I always give my kids my kids were very, very excited when I came home my one son I did my oldest my, my youngest didn't do well with me gone he internalized a lot and he got he was only two but he got mad at his mom for different stuff and blamed her for me being gone so my wife took a lot of crap and even today was is now I’m retired and I have we have our pension you know even now my wife will go well that’s your pension and I’m like no, no it’s our pension that’s something that we did together I couldn’t do that unless she was there to do what she did and there's an old Navy T-shirt that says you know “Navy wife: the toughest job in the military” that definitely is the case so my wife was- pardon me I have a little cold- was a, a champ she was awesome she still is awesome yeah that’s what coming home was like it was always very exciting it was always very like you’re in a honeymoon phase for a week or two but then afterwards you're right back to the way it was before you left was pretty quick the transition
TL-So what made you decide to come back to school?
CW-Well when I ended up getting out I was on retirement leave and I applied for a job with Wal-Mart as an assistant manager and Wal-Mart hired me while I was on retirement leave from the Navy to be the assistant manager so I was working for a Wal-Mart in Lisbon and I was running I was assistant manager to a grocery side then I got put on third shift and my father-in-law was in hospice and he was dying so I was one of the primary caregivers my father-in-law was a big man and I could move him and so he only lived up the street from the, the job so I explained to my boss that pardon me that I could not work third shift anymore and she's like I don’t know what to tell you I said because I was the care giver of my father-in-law I says you know I said unfortunately I know what to tell you my family took a back burner for a long time I definitely was not going to do so for Wal-Mart so I put in my two week notice and one week into my two-week notice I got a call from BJ's Wholesale Club asking if I want to come and be a senior merchandise manager for them and I went on to be a senior merchandise manager for BJ's and I was driving my forklift on the sales floor and brought down some freight for customer put it back everything was safe I didn’t have a safety walker and ended up that it upset the customer and she called the home office and two days later I didn’t have a job. Some people are just not happy unless they are getting other people in trouble and what that lady did and she probably didn't realize is that she put me on to work with, with two kids and a wife at home but God is good and I've definitely been blessed my boss used to tell me if you don’t get back to work I’m going to fire you and it was one of my good friends and I would always joke with him I’m like if you’re going to fire me do it because what's gonna happen is I’m going to get unemployment from you then I'm going to collect my Navy pension my disability pension I'll go enroll for school I’ll get my GI. Bill and will make about a couple grand more than I do now working for you so if you're my friend pull the trigger and he would always just give up and say get back to work but when I lost my job I didn't realize it was a self fulfilling prophecy when I did say those things and I ended up getting losing my job January 2 of all days and then when I lost my job my boss was firing me and I had and he was crying while he was firing me because he let me down and I had to calm him down this sounds weird but my why my trying to calm you down when I don't have a job tomorrow you know I’m like I'm telling you I’m going to be fine within two weeks I had talked to my Veteran service officer and had been set up with my GI. Bill which if you understand the GI. Bill is for the GI. Bill is to cover expenses for us while we’re in school so that were not struggling so for the last five years I've been in college I don't live on poverty level or anything like that I've been well taken care of by, by what like my friend says his tax dollars I also worked for 30 years before I even took any of his because it was my tax dollars too so I'm okay with that I'm okay with taking it not feel guilty about it but so I enrolled in three Rivers community College in Norwich Connecticut did my time down there for year and a half then came up Storrs where my son was a junior here when I started here as a as a sophomore and then my son graduated in 2013 December and for his last semester he used to come to school with me everyday so it was kind of weird go to college with your kid and I was like wow this is gonna be great we’re gonna sit back hangout and when we did do that but I ended up paying for his lunch every day and those things never change and I was like do your friends your lunch no well why am I so anyway yeah so anyway I have I am in my fifth year of college now I had a year of remedial classes just because I had to learn APA MLA Algebra Statistics all those things all over again so for you guys its pretty fresh in your head for me I was detached for 25 years so I had to relearn it and then I once I caught up I’ll have my degree in human development family studies in may and I’ve just been accepted to UConn school of social where I’ll go on to be a social worker and I'll be focusing on PTSD veterans and sexual trauma case victims of the military because I worked in a veterans outreach Center in Norwich I keyed in to that specific community and I love those people that’s kinda why I went back to college because I didn’t have a job it was to make myself more marketable for the job that I want
TL-So what, what do you plan on doing with, you know, what’s your dream goal to accomplish with your
CW-My goal is, is to get my degree in social work and practice group counseling for that this community of PTSD and sexual trauma victims or even drug dependency but my dream isn’t to be in any one place but a little picket fence in the house or anything like that I like to be mobile and now that my kids out of the house my wife and I can apply to different jobs at the VA do a few years there it would be ideal for me just work the next 20-25 years and just be
TL-So do you have any advise for future generations of either civilians or soldiers or just in general?
CW- well for soldiers I mean it's important I mean never, never ever doubt your gut when you walk by somebody there was a guy on the ship that and I’ll tell the story kinda related to your answer where he was on board the boat and I was sitting on the back on the fantail of the carrier and I was just relaxing and he looked like all quiet and down he worked in the chief’s mess and, and then he said he was fine I went back inside and then a couple of minutes later they called man overboard so he jumped overboard and instead of just sitting there knowing that the have a feeling something was wrong to stay with a few more minutes could have maybe changed his mind I don't know that’s something I think about a lot but you know I, I think if you see anyone that's in trouble or anyone that you speculate that’s in trouble even if you're not a mental health expert look out for your shipmate and your comrade and take care them in respect to just making sure that they're okay I mean I learned a lot with having with being a cook that you know morale and mental health things like that state of mind are important for getting the mission accomplished and that we have a contribution to making sure that happens within each other and that everyone gets home safely statistic for PTSD is in the last 10 years one of my professors I learned last semester that there have been 5000 people killed in Afghanistan and Iraq in the last 10 years people killed in the line of duty but 48,000 have come back to kill themselves from PTSD so I mean to me if we’re looking out for each other on the battlefield we’re gonna come home a lot stronger so I think it's important to look out for each other important to ask questions and it's important to you know take the time especially if you have anything pressing or special to get to you know. That’d be my one big one.
TL-So what is one thing about yourself that you hope people remember about you?
CW-About me I’m the center of attention so I am a showman I put on a show I’m the class clown I’m the goof ball whatever I say what I want when I want and I live through the consequences of some of those actions but I think I would just want to be remembered as someone who helped somebody now my dad was a very much a servant to his community as a City Councilman and he’ll always be remembered as someone who helped local businessmen and whatnot helped to you know just better their, their businesses within communities being lucrative and what not provided services to people who needed help that’s about it
TL-Is there anything else or any other stories that you’d like to tell me? They could be from any time in your life.
CW-Naw. No I think that's good.
TL-Okay! Well if there’s nothing else that you’d like to share for now which doesn’t mean we can’t meet again, then I will conclude our interview with just thank you because that was extraordinarily fun.
CW-Alright. You’re welcome.