It was a wonderfully clear morning, the breeze as soft as a kiss on the cheek, and the sky an impossible indigo. With the sun full on my face, and the taste of salt in my mouth, I stood at the mast and calmly raised a communist flag up the mast of the USS Taylor, a U.S. Navy frigate. 

     I am no instigator, and this was no protest. I’m no commie. No way. I submit: I was merely following the rules. Yes, I hoisted a communist flag up the mast of a United States Navy warship because the rules dictated that I should hoist this flag. In fact, some might say I was just following orders, and I bear no responsibility.  I’ve heard that excuse used before, and quite frankly I’ve never bought it, always considered it a cop out, cowardly. But in my case I think the defense is apt, I really don’t think I should have gotten the flack I got, just because I ran up a commie flag underneath the good ol’ red, white, and blue.  

     The thing is, I didn’t even notice it was an outdated flag. Why would I even have thought about this? Communism had been over in Romania for almost 6 years. How was I supposed to know that the Romanian flag on the ship hadn’t been updated?

     A little background may be in order here. It was the summer of 1997. The USS Taylor was in the midst of a six month NATO deployment. One month of the six was spent in the Black Sea. After sailing into the Sea of Marmora and sightseeing in Istanbul, we were off to the strange Eastern European countries of Romania and Bulgaria. Apparently, and I found this out only later, we were one of the first U.S. warships in Romania. It was a good-will trip, America flexing its muscles in the former iron curtain. Looking back now I can appreciate just what a strange and interesting time it must have been to be in Eastern Europe; they loved America, and America loved their newly opened markets.

     Of course, I wasn’t thinking about any of that as we prepared to enter port that lovely summer morning. I wasn’t thinking about free markets, or NATO, or the downfall of communism. No, my thoughts turned, as I climbed the ladder to the signal bridge, toward imagined pints of beer, college age Romanian girls with erotic accents who dug American sailors in uniform, and an MWR trip scheduled to a castle in the Carpathians that once housed Vlad Dracula. There were definitely high hopes for Romania. So you’ll excuse me if I didn’t notice the red star in the middle of the flag. You’ll see that there was no way I could have noticed the word Socialista blazed across the right side of the bunting. How could anyone hold this against me, given the extenuating circumstances?

      It was just past dawn, when we were called to Sea and Anchor detail for our approach to Constanta, Romania. Sea and Anchor is the process of getting a ship in or out of a port. Typically, every port has a harbor pilot. The harbor pilot will take charge of the ship as it navigates the port. So when entering a port the pilot will arrive by boat or tug, and hop on to the ship, take charge and drive her home. The only job I had during sea and anchor, my only responsibility was to mark the arrival of the harbor pilot with the flags “Code Hotel.” If we were entering another country, an additional duty was to hoist the host country’s flag underneath the American flag (small digression: nation-state designators are called ensigns in the navy, not flags, but anyway). This is a naval rule stipulated in Naval Telecommunications Procedures (NTP) 24. So with the pilot aboard I snapped the Romanian flag up the mast. Leaning back against the rail of the signal bridge, I closed my eyes and raised my head back, lifting my face into the warm caress of the sun, my mind drifting toward fantasies of the endless pints of cold beer, the Romanian girls, the vague mystery of Transylvania…

     “Uh, Petty Officer Ramirez,” Seaman Recruit Duffin said quizzically from below the signal bridge.

     “What is it Duffin?” I asked, my eyes still closed.

     “The Captain and some of the other officers are looking back here.” He said as he quickly dismissed himself.

     I opened my eyes. Indeed, the Captain, the Navigation Officer, and the Operation Officer were standing on the bridge wing pointing in my direction. And they were pointing at the flag. I looked at the flag. Against a piercing blue sky and the salt and the wind, the errant Romanian flag flapped hard against the American flag. And I looked at the officers.  

“I wonder if they’ll let me go on liberty tonight,” I wondered aloud as I watched the Operations Officer head toward me at a dead run.

Post Script: The Operations Officer, the Navigation Officer, and the Communications Officer chewed me out a bit (something about embarrassment etc, etc). On a worse note, the beer was low quality pisswater, the girls were no where near as fun as the vacationing European girls I met on Majorca (oh, sweet Majorca...but alas, that is another tale!), and Vlad Dracula’s castle was a frigging tourist trap.

But I had high hopes for Bulgaria…