There, we saw a body floating by, which was quite a shock. As we arrived in South Vietnam’s coastal waters in early April, we steamed slowly towards our assigned patrolling location off of Vung Tau, which is a resort town near the mouth of the Saigon River. We had been operating in the Western Pacific and Indian Ocean since November 1974, and in the early months of 1975 we still didn’t know what would happen, other than we knew that South Vietnam’s fall was imminent. What happened when you reached Vietnamese waters in early April? It was only at the end of that duty that I became a specialist in the environmental sciences. But instead of going into those fields right away, I had my first tour of duty on the guided missile destroyer the USS Benjamin Stoddert. So I was cross trained in the ocean and atmospheric sciences. And I was very lucky to be accepted into a graduate program in meteorology the Navy has at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterrey, California. When I headed off to the Naval Academy, I was pleased that I could major in oceanography. I grew up on the north shore of Massachusetts so the ocean was a big part of my life growing up. In his new book, War in Our Wake, Malay describes the dramatic days surrounding the end of American involvement in the Vietnam conflict, the subject of this interview. Navy vessel to leave South Vietnamese waters after the fall of Saigon in April 1975, Malay was an eyewitness to history and a participant in a heroic rescue of 158 refugees. On his first tour of duty on the Stoddert, the last U.S. Naval Academy in 1973 and spent a year at the Naval Postgraduate School, he was assigned to the USS Benjamin Stoddert (named for the first Secretary of the Navy), a guided-missile armed destroyer in the Pacific Fleet. All this lay ahead of Malay in 1974, when as a newly minted Navy ensign who had graduated from the U.S. He’s also served as the president of both the American Astronautical Society and the American Meteorological Society and co-authored the National Geographic Encyclopedia of Space. A naval oceanographer and meteorologist who became a specialist in space programs, he’s helped to advance NASA’s and NOAA’s space exploration and research programs through his work at Ball Aerospace and Lockheed Martin. Jonathan Malay is one of the most respected people in the aerospace and meteorology community.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |