(Excerpted from War Stories for My Grandchildren-Seadragon)

The gate, when I bounded over, did not seem quite so tall, nor the night so cold.

Electronic blarings from the bars were tinny and distant. A more persuasive sound still reached me from the demonstration. It was not nearly so loud anymore, but still rhythmic, disciplined and captivating.

Through a scud-flecked break in the overcast the moon showed me one of her horns. A dragon's horn? Dragons. Had I met some of them? I was back on the ground. It was odd, foreign ground, a land of seething and promise. Now I was part of it. A bit of my ignorance had been pealed away and none of it seemed quite so alien. Or perhaps I had become less alien. Is there any real difference?

The rest was anti-climactic. We got our railings repaired and a new cover for the torpedo tubes, but the main deck hatch on the fantail was too warped. A whole section of decking would have to be replaced some other time, some other place. We drank a lot of good beer, bought some trinkets and patches featuring dragons and sampans and a motto - Tonkin Gulf Yacht Club.

Two weeks later we were back in the South China Sea chasing Shangri-la, swearing at pilots, who, returning from strikes, had a penchant for dumping their excess fuel as they passed overhead. Some of us wished this or that jet jockey would go into the drink so we could rescue, then beat hell out of him - a sort of reciprocal Christmas present.

Just before the New Year we were ordered back to coastal waters to act as a floating artillery support platform again, this time west of Tiger Island, just north of the DMZ.

We lay to a mile or two offshore and waited. Some sort of holiday cease-fire was in effect, but rumor-mill speculations were that we making ourselves a tempting target yet again, in hopes that they might break the pact. That probably wasn't true , since we were not at General Quarters, or even cautioned to keep the decks clear.

In fact, the main deck was crowded with off-duty sailors, especially Snipes, the engine-room crews which seldom got a chance to relax topside. There was a restless, expectant air, but short of traditional New Year celebrations - more like a company picnic.

The sky was brightly sunlit on a flat cerulean sea swarming with paddle-tailed sea snakes. Someone was shooting at them with a .38 caliber revolver - fireworks.

Seaman Marks was out there, looking dismayed. He held a new kite, a boxy affair with a long tail that dragged along the hot steel deck. "Where's the wind?" he squawked. "Can't fly in this." Good naturedly, he nudged a telephone talker. "Tell the OOD to get us underway. About ten knots ought to do it."

We laughed. Marks could make light of anything. A few weeks before, while Craig was awaiting the fleet commander's permission to bombard a Buddhist temple, Marks had been flying a yellow kite off the fantail. A lot of us were back there, watching, skylarking.

Suddenly the 1MC announced a warning, "All hands stand clear ..."

We never heard the rest because gunners in Mount 52 immediately swung the 5"/38s to bear on the target and fired. All we heard was hydraulic whines, a simultaneous 'beep-beep' warning and the deafening blast of both guns.

One of the rounds, a premature air-burst, exploded just fifty yards from the ship, and the whole mob of us bolted forward, passing right through the fiery donut rings. Bits of our own shrapnel bit the superstructure and the shoreline was obscured by smoke close aboard.

Marks came through last, in the teeth of a second salvo. He was laughing, howling really, dragging his kite behind. It was afire, smoldering. "Yi! Yi!" he yelled, grinning from ear to ear.

Remarkably, except for a few singed beards, including mine, no one was hurt.

Later, when we could hear again, Marks explained. "Yi is China's legendary Excellent Archer. He shot down seven false suns in one day."

These suns, according to Marks, were really huge box kites put aloft by Yi's enemies, to spy upon his troop movements and fortifications.

"Kites? Big enough to carry a man? Bullshit." I hadn't made the remark, but I certainly disbelieved enough. Marks could tell a story, a joke or a lie with equal ease.

"Sure! Some carried several people and it took hundreds hauling the lines to get the kites up and safely down. Sometimes enemy kites would meet in the air, do dogfights. Dragon fights, they called them."

"Yeh, when did this happen, in your dreams?"

"Jeez," Marks said seriously. "Don't know, exactly. Maybe two thousand years ago. Chinese got lots of stories about it. Indians, too ... Hindus, not Americans. Anyway, this Yi character was an ace in anybody's book ... flamed seven in one day!" A mischievous look crinkled his eyes. "I'm gonna ask the skipper if we can paint a silhouette of my kite on the bridge, right next to that red junk."

Marks, I thought, would try to fly his kite in any sea state, but this day, with no breeze at all, he just sat down with the rest of us.

Someone pointed inland. "Look!"

The most prominent feature on the northern side of the DMZ was a single hill surrounded by dark jungle. The hill was entirely bare, not a tree remaining to mar its barren, breast-like curves.

Over it, like lethargic flies, circled two prop-driven aircraft. "Spads," someone knew. "South Vietnamese Air Force."

"Thought there was a truce on," someone muttered.

"Only in the South, I guess."

We gathered on the port side to watch, some through personal binoculars. The planes circled several times, then the leader went into a steep, silent dive. The air around it began to shimmer and smear with AAA bursts. An angry looking, oily explosion blossomed on the hill's nipple, then a smaller flash of fire flared in the jungle at the base of the barren mound.

The second Spad followed and exactly the same thing happened.

Then the air above the DMZ was clear, except for three columns of smoke.

It had been a strange sequence, a technicolor but silent film. As close as we were, we should have been able to hear it all, but racing engines, flak guns and exploding bombs had made not a murmur. So surrealistic a loss of two friendlies was a shocking moment. Craig's festive mood evaporated.

I stood my watch and, just before midnight, returned to the fantail. Many of my shipmates were there in the pitch darkness. I could see cigarette ends and hear hushed voices. I wondered what sort of celebration they had planned, perhaps "Auld Lang Syne' to Uncle Ho. Would our voices carry ashore? Probably, since the afternoon sounds had been so thoroughly swept away inland.

I felt my way to a deck vent and pulled myself up on its flat cover. It was set with salty dew. The ocean was still quite calm, as it had been earlier, but now clouds covered much of the sky.

Below me, a group was huddled together. "Up there, in the north, near Polaris, that's Draco." I recognized the voice of the Senior Chief Quartermaster, Durson. He was probably pointing, but who could tell. "Once the North Star was in that constellation. It will be again, in a hundred thousand years. Down South, below the equator, is another dragon, Hydra. Since long before the last Ice Age, people have been using those dragons, and a couple of others. Seamen, nomads, whole tribes and great migrations used them to travel east to west, north to south and back again."

After a respectful pause a voice said, "How do you know that, Senior Chief?"

Durson laughed. "I know by stories, myths, legends and scripture. Everywhere in the Northern Hemisphere people have known dragons. Egyptians, the Queens of Sheba, every Chinese and Japanese sailor, Russian herdsman, Anatolian merchant, Greek warrior, Cherokee Indian, Irishmen ... Those tenacious little people over there on the shore, too."

"Is that why early map-makers wrote 'beyond this point there be dragons?'"

"Yep. That's right. We'll make a navigator out of you yet. But it wasn't a warning, as Columbus and other Europeans thought. Charts simply told mariners to steer by the dragons. You'll be okay if you follow the stars. Most of the world had no fear of the process. Just our forefathers. Nobody else had any reason to be afraid of dragons. Arabs, Orientals, Hindus, South Sea Islanders, the Incas all knew them as friends, lucky guardians. They were signposts in the sky."

"Oh, come on, Chief. Europeans were good sailors, no different than us."

"Sure, nowadays. But five hundred years ago they all thought like Galilean fishermen, believed they could not sail out of sight of land, that a red sky in the mornin' was an evil omen. Can you imagine a modern vessel staying in port just because it got cloudy overnight?"

"Hell, no. But we've got modern ships, radar, Loran, weather stations and such ..."

"So what? We act as if Columbus discovered the ocean just yesterday. Hell, talk about modern ships, when Julius Caesar invaded Britain his triremes got their asses kicked by barbarians in huge ocean-going ships. They towered above his three deckers, he wrote, and carried far more warriors. That was more than two thousand years ago. What do you suppose those proto-Britons were doing with ships like that, sailing the Thames on Sundays? Fifteen hundred years later, Drake didn't have ships that good when he sailed to meet the Spanish Armada.

"Noah, and half-a-dozen other heroes of the Great Flood, knew how to build ships much longer than this ole 'can, much greater abeam, too. And I promise you, they weren't made of timbers. The biggest ship we ever made of wood was a clipper, only 310 feet ... and she wouldn't sail. Kept breaking up because wood is too weak, even in calm seas.

"What I'm sayin' is this ... for every Bly, DaGama or Cook there were ten Sinbads, and Jasons, and Noahs, back in the old days. And you better believe they knew the dragons - loved 'em, too."

"Midnight comin' up," someone farther aft announced.

"Where's the champaign?" Groans and chuckles.

The black sea sighed and memories of other holidays surfaced in us - loud parties, countdowns, flushed, grinning faces under spangled paper hats, loved ones. Sentimentality.

Something brilliant lit up the inland sky. Lightning? No, not bright or extensive enough, wrong color, too straight and regular. It was startling, impossible.

I saw it again. We all did, a bolt of raw liquid crimson, flickering like a defective neon tube against a Coalsack night.

"Jesus!" a trembling voice whispered.

The bolt struck again, from a slightly different angle. It was sci-fi, war-of-the-worlds stuff. Over and over the fire lanced downward, each shaft focused upon the same point but from a new position on an ovoid track. Some sort of aircraft was stalking the NVA, devastating the night-hidden hillside.

Unbidden came a thought of my little sister dressed as a first-grade angel. The wire which held her halo, painted flat black, did not show and her glitter hoop stayed magically cocked atop her curly head. The audience had loved it.

Precisely opposite, this warrior angel kept its path hidden but boasted and gloried in the fiery cable which connected it, intermittently, to the earth. It showed it off with soundless fury.

"I read about this!" Excited, the voice of kite-man Marks seemed very loud. "Its a Gooney-bird outfitted with Gatling guns. Every twentieth round is a tracer. She's called Puff-the-Magic-Dragon."

And so we relaxed and watched the fireworks. It was no alien thing after all, just another machine, a fire-breathing angel, a Sheban cherub, another dragon in the sky.

Spontaneously, as 1967 began, we sang - not to memories and old companions, but to a new one. We sang about Puff, who lives by the sea. And surely our awed voices carried, if not ashore, then back down all the centuries, across an endless span of oceans and sailors and great wonders.

We sang off-key but loudly, to distant lands and dragons, and especially to not-so-little-boys.

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The prequel to this story is entitled New Year's Eve, the prequel
and is available exclusively on Author's Den