Francis J. Partel, Jr., is seen here as a Ltjg in the fall of 1967 before deploying to the SE Asia theater of operations. He served as a junior naval officer in aircraft carriers during the Vietnam War after receiving his commission at US Naval Officer's Candidate School in Newport, RI. He prepared for college at Northfield Mount Hermon School and holds a BA and an MBA from Columbia University. He was a senior executive in very large financial institutions, and taught for five years as an adjunct associate professor in the MBA program at Stern School, New York University. He is married and lives on the East Coast and sails and races an auxiliary sloop from Martha’s Vineyard.
Mr. Partel is currently writing his second novel, the prequel to Wound, Black, with a Pinch of Salt, a love story during the year 1967 in the US Navy's Cold War.
About the Author
I was a rather unspectacular student as an English major at Columbia College, but I was fortunate to take spectacularly good teachers who believed that literature was about presenting ideas. These included Charles Everett, Fred DuPee, Jeff Hart, Quentin Anderson, Eric Bentley, and Lionel Trilling. In retrospect I would have done better as a history major, and I had the good fortune to take American History in secondary school with E.W. Kenworthy, Jr. who later became a professor at Cornell, and the very popular James P. Shenton at Columbia College. So it seems that the synthesis of these two tendencies should be reconciled in the naval historical genre.I was a carrier sailor in Essex and Ticonderoga from 1966 to 1968. In 1967 Essex was an anti-submarine carrier, and we tracked Soviet submarines from Murmansk to the Mediterranean as a result of movements by the two great Cold War powers after the Six-Day, Arab-Israeli War. In January 1968, I joined USS Ticonderoga, Attack Carrier 14 in the Gulf of Tonkin just before the the Tet Offensive. When Pueblo was captured, Ticonderoga was ordered to the Sea of Japan to join Enterprise and strike seven MIG airfields with 200 MIGs. The strike was on until an hour before launch when we received a JCOS message canceling the mission. Relief was the emotion of the day. We returned to Yankee Station and launched over 4,000 sorties defending the marines in Khe Sanh and over 13,000 sorties before returning to San Diego.The carrier navy is hard-working navy. Ticonderoga left for the Western Pacific on Monday after Thanksgiving in 1967, returned home to North Island ten and a half months later on September 19, 1968, and prepared to return to WestPac in March 1969. On Yankee Station the "little decks" like Ticonderoga conducted flight operations for 12 to 13 hours a day, and then conducted two underway replenishments in the dark for 30 to 40 days without taking a stand-down. We took on bombs and ordnance every night and alternately fuel or stores. The latter were generally not fully struck below in store rooms and magazines until the early hours of the morning. A great share of the flying and the replenishing occurred in monsoonal conditions. It was war--a terrible, organized activity to kill other men--and it was also a magnificent effort by men.I was privileged to have served in the United States Naval Reserve and specifically with Airwings 54 and 19 and the officers and men of Essex and Ticonderoga respectively. 
A Wound in the Mind
The Court-Martial of Lance Corporal Cachora, USMC
