Raising A Soul Surfer by Rick Bundschuh, Cheri Hamilton Read Free Book Online Page B

while he got nothing. The officer couldn’t understand it; his wife wrote him regularly, even numbering the letters.
    Tom could see the suspicion and frustration building. The guy knew something was up, but he couldn’t prove anything. Four mail calls later, Tom handed the officer a huge packet of numbered mail wrapped in rubber bands. Tom never gloated or threatened, but from that moment on the harassment ended.
    For a while, Tom and the
USS Hanson
patrolled on standby along the California coast. The crew was kept busy with menial tasks of sanding, painting and scrubbing. While the Vietnam War raged on, and the nation fractured over it, it looked like they wouldn’t be deployed. When the call came down, they had only three days’ notice before getting underway for the Gulf of Tonkin and war.
    But war was still distant in Tom’s mind. He enjoyed being out on the open ocean and would often escape the sights, sounds and smells of seasick crewmen below deck by climbing the signalman’s bridge to stand in the open air and watch waves bowl over the bow of the ship during storms.
    Love of the ocean kept him up there even when it meant getting thoroughly soaked. And the deep, rolling Pacific, miles from shore, fed his soul. He would look out across the expanse of never-ending blue and think of perfect waves peeling along some hidden coast.

    Tom had already figured out who the surfers were aboard the
Hanson
because of the surf magazines coming to them through the mail. One of them was a young body surfer named Rob, whohailed from Oahu. Rob was always talking about the brutal shore break at Makapu’u, or about how much better the waves were in Hawaii than anywhere else.
    “You should surf some
real
waves!” he would kid Tom, “Not those itty-bitty-kiddie waves they have in California or the East Coast.” Instead of being goaded to defend his home breaks, Tom recalled the pictures splashed across every other page in the surfing magazines, showing Hawaii as a surf Mecca, a tropical feast of nonstop perfect waves.
    You can imagine how excited Tom was in knowing that the first port of call was Pearl Harbor. At last he’d made it to Hawaii, though arriving by Navy destroyer was not the way he’d imagined. Tom couldn’t wait to get off the ship. It was only a short stop, but Tom and some of the others managed to surf Waikiki. It was Tom’s first experience with the warm Hawaiian waves.
    “And just think, if you moved to Hawaii you would never have to wear a wetsuit again!” Rob told him with a grin.
    He had no idea just how appealing this was to Tom.
    But the day drew to a close and they had to report back to the ship. In the morning, they sailed out of the peaceful fiftieth state and toward war.
    There were a few other ports of call, and though Tom had never been out of the country, unlike a lot of the men on his ship, he was not particularly enchanted with the seedy rows of flesh dens, grimy bars and alleys full of con artists aggressively trying to hustle any sailor they could. In particular, he remembers Subic Bay in the Philippines as inciting both pity and revulsion for the desperation with which people hounded the sailors—offering everything, including themselves, for money or cigarettes or trinkets.
    Not to mention that Tom recalls that sick bay was always full after the more infamous ports.
    From Subic Bay, Tom’s ship escorted the aircraft carrier
Kitty Hawk
to Vietnam, where they anchored a mile offshore, providing fire support for the marines and army onshore.
    The blast of the huge guns spewing explosive shells deep into the jungle was exhilarating at first, but when Tom started to listen in on the accuracy reports, he was faced with war in a way that conflicted and disturbed him. Over the headset, he heard artillery spotters report that the shells had missed their mark and landed on a village of “friendlies.” Tom sat in silence, trying not to imagine the innocent men, women and children snuffed out by