A Goodbye in New London: Memorial Day Poem

I first wrote about the submariner that I knew as Dennis, who was like a big brother to me, many years before I ever wrote a Memorial Day Tribute. It was, possibly, the first time I ever wrote a poem, for my creative writing class in college.

Just because I grew up in The Salvation Army, I had an unusual childhood–as it were. In the first nine years of my life, I lived in Utica, NY; New Bedford, MA; Buffalo, NY; and Cleveland, OH. But then, for one year, when I was ten years old, my father, Major Walter Hooper, (ordained ministers in The Salvation Army are officers) was the director of the Red Shield Club for Service Men on the top of a street in New London, Connecticut that ended at the ocean. 

That was a year I never forgot. I can still picture the Red Shield Club in every detail: through its glass store front windows that provided a welcoming view to sailors, Coast Guards, and others who were opting for something other than the usual bars.

There was a reception desk on the front and a cozy nook on the right. There were desks for writing letters home and big red leather chairs in the narrow but long room with a big (for that time!) television. Color! Something we didn’t have at home for many years after that. And all along the walls were bookcases. I think I read every volume of Reader’s Digest Condensed Books that year.

Downstairs were the billiard and ping-pong tables, shuffleboard, and dart boards. There were tables for Sunday dinner and a lunch counter for the rest of the meals and snacks. It was there I learned to play ping-pong — my dad was quite good, putting his “English” spin on the ball.

Dennis — the subject of my poem — and some of the others also taught me how to play pool. This is a game about which my somewhat legalistic father could have done his best Professor Harold Hill impression (if he had been to a cinema and seen The Music Man.

Dennis was lost on the U.S.S. Scorpion, the submarine that went down May 22, 1968, with 99 men on board. After years of middle school, junior high, and high school — once again in diverse cities and states — when I got to college the memories of New London suddenly came back to me. I think it started when I was told the story of the horrible end of the U.S.S. Scorpion. It came out in this poem, “A Goodbye in New London,” which I wrote in a black and white composition notebook on November 15, 1977.

A GOODBYE IN NEW LONDON
We understood each other well:
You, moving from base to base and
me, moving from PS#84 to Lomond to Nameaug.
We both knew the anxiety of picking up
and starting over in some strange place.
We both knew the sadness of leaving the last
starting over, that was no longer strange, now familiar.
Silently, we both knew the
finality of a goodbye,
although we never said it.
Your last deployment ever came a few months before I left,
although neither of us knew it.
To you, it meant a routine operation.
To me, not yet comprehending war,
it meant a week or two – a month at most – of playing eight ball
by myself, practicing so I could finally win a game without you letting me
when you came back
in your funny, long, shroud of a coat.
But it was 1967
and you had games other than billiards you had to play –
you and the hundreds of others
who came to talk to my father, and get a hug from my mother,
when you were at liberty to do so.
You even let him pray with you because,
well, because it was 1967, and your submarine
was a teardrop.
When the smell of smoke and death got to be too much for my father,
we left New London.
Wish to God we had left before you left.
Then I might never have found out how
You were stung by a Scorpion, how
the cruel, black ocean swallowed you.

(For Dennis and all those of USS Scorpion, lost May 22, 1968)