Yesterday was Father’s Day, so I spent some time on the phone catching up with my dad, who lives in South Carolina. We usually talk about sports, work, the weather, or whatever it is two people who live 2,500 miles apart might talk about. But yesterday we got off the beaten path and onto the subject of his years in the Navy, and he started regaling me with some hilarious stories I’d never heard before. One good punch line came from a Marine recruiter, who set my dad straight with “SON, I WOULDN’T GIVE YOU A DROP OF SWEAT OFF MY BALLS ON A HOT JULY AFTERNOON!” He was in the Navy from 1970 to 1973, and was deployed on the USS Reasoner from March to September of ‘73, for a six-month tour of the Far East.
I was just three years old when he was discharged, so it was pretty cool to hear about some of his adventures and get a timeline of our various moves across the country and back. It definitely made for memorable father’s day conversation – we had some good laughs, and I got to see a side of my dad that I don’t know much about.
A few hours after we hung up, I was chuckling over some of his stories, and decided to do a little Google research on the USS Reasoner. The ship was decommissioned in August of 1993 and she now flies under the Turkish flag. But because everything in my life seems to come down to a song, the biggest and best tidbit I found was that the USS Reasoner was the ship used by the Village People in their video for the 1977 song ‘In The Navy’.
I kid you not, check it out:
Tags: dad, Father's Day, In The Navy, Navy, The Village People
