Susan Wagoner
They sat in various stages of comfortable. The easiness that they displayed with each other came from a history shared.
Friends, perhaps? Brothers? Closer than that if you asked these three men. They’re shipmates.
War introduced them. Memories have kept them in each other’s thoughts. And fate has reunited them, forever.
Drexel Holt, Mike Fanning and Bob “Levi” Crosswhite are clearly happy to be together. The Navy men served together in Vietnam, shipmates on the USS Joseph Strauss.
Their 40-year journey to Salina began in February 1968. Within the last decade, they’ve changed their lives and relocated with their wives to Salina to retire.
“I reported aboard the USS Joseph Strauss in May of 1968,” Fanning said. “Drexel was already on board. He got there a month earlier.”
The men were assigned to the Repair Division, Fanning as a damage
controller; Holt doing electrical work.
“The repair crew was basically the mechanics,” Fanning said. “We fixed everything from frayed cords to big engines.”
The two men served one tour in Vietnam before Bob joined the crew in July 1969. Like Holt, he was assigned to the electrical crew in the repair division. The three men were fast friends, along with a fourth man, Ron “Waldo” Emery, and they served two more tours in Vietnam together.
Fanning was the odd man out,
working on a different crew than the two electricians.
“He was the odd ball,” Holt said.
“Still is,” Crosswhite added with a laugh. They reminisced, sharing thoughts of “Waldo.”
“You remember that?” Fanning said to Holt. “He walked up to Ron and looked at him for a moment, then said, ‘Waldo.’ Ron said, ‘Are you talking to me?’ Drexel said, ‘You just look like a Waldo.” He was known as Waldo from then on.
“We lost him in ‘07,” Fanning said as all three men drifted away in memories of their own. A silent tribute. Then Fanning looked up.
“He died of a heart attack, or we would have had him with us here by now.”
The men spent around 30 days at a time onboard, working 18-plus hours a day with their crew, or on watch. The destroyer had fuel constraints as it was made for speed and firepower, making time at sea limited.
“We had one of our own planes bomb us one night,” Fanning said. The three chuckled. “He thought we were a truck convoy. Drexel was keeping watch that time.”
“He dropped a 6,500 pounder on us,” Holt added.
“We looked for him on leave
didn’t we?” Fanning said to Crosswhite.
“Yeah, we did,” he answered.
“We went looking for that pilot,” Fanning said. “We were going to give him a Joseph Strauss welcome.”
They laughed at the thought of how the story would have ended had they run into the man.
One time the men spent 55 days out to sea.
“That was a long time,” Fanning said, smiling. “We had one pop machine. It’d tip over in rough seas, so it was always broken.”
“I had fungus that thick (measuring with his fingers) all over my body,” Holt said. The men laughed. “Well, 55 days in 110 degree heat.”
“Yeah, we had to scrape him when we docked,” Fanning offered. More laughter. “We used to have grunge contests. How long you could go without a bath.”
“You always won,” Holt countered.
Giving a hard time is as natural as breathing for these guys.
“The Navy is just different,” Fanning said. “You know, when you hit port, you got all of your pay at once. We’d tear the place up in a week. We made the most of every minute.”
“Yeah, we sure did,” Holt said.
Both look to Crosswhite, “Levi” to them. He sits silently.
“You’re awfully quiet over there,” one said.
Laughing softly he replied, “I’m just counting the minutes.”
After their service ended, the men went their separate ways, Fanning returning to his native Tulsa, Holt to Flower Mound, Texas, and Crosswhite to Melissa, Texas.
“When I got back, they told me I had an adjustment disorder,” Fanning said to laughter. “I used to come over here to the Salina area to get away.”
He’d camp in the state parks and just leave the world behind.
“There’s just different folks here,” he said. “It was quiet. I felt comfortable here, accepted.”
After he retired, Fanning and his wife decided to move away from the city.
“I wanted to come to Salina,” he said. “That’s the only place that I felt really comfortable.” They moved in 2003.
Fanning had lost touch with his shipmates over the years, but asked about them from time to time.
“Last thing I heard about Drexel, I heard he was in the insane asylum,” Fanning said to bursts of laughter. “That turned out NOT to be true.”
Fanning posted a message on the ship’s Internet message board about events on the USS Joseph Strauss. A message that Holt saw. Holt posted a message as well, seeking Fanning.
“We started emailing,” Fanning said. “As time went on, my wife and I drove to Sherman, Texas and he drove up from Flower Mound. I remember he called me to ask what motel room we were in. I was so excited to see him. I’m bouncing around and then there’s a knock on the door. I opened the door and there’s Drexel and he said ‘You’re old.’”
Their occasional visits led to an invitation for the Holts to travel to Salina to visit the Fannings in their home.
“He’d been talking about Salina and we wanted to see what it was like,” Holt said. “We fell in love with it. In fact, on the way home, we talked about selling our house and moving up here. So we did.”
In late 2003, the Holts joined the Fannings in Salina. They bought homes near each other in Craig’s Cove. Their frequent conversations inevitably included Crosswhite, with whom neither had any contact. Then came the newsletter.
The USS Joseph Strauss still sends a ship newsletter to former residents. Crosswhite is among its recipients. In one newsletter, there featured a photo of Fanning and Holt, complete with costumes during a holiday event that included Santa and his elves.
His next opportunity, Crosswhite hopped on board his motorcycle and made the trek to Mayes County in search of his friends.
He stopped at the VFW and was given instructions on how to find Fanning, who works at Orscheln’s in Pryor.
“He showed up at Orscheln’s,” Fanning recalled with a smile. “He had a head of hair the last time I saw him, but there was no mistaking that grin.”
“I liked the area here,” Crosswhite said. “Dallas had already moved up to my area. The people up here are like the people I grew up with.”
So on Jan. 1 of this year, Crosswhite and his wife made the journey and moved to Salina. Now the three men are together once again.
This time for good, it seems. Not long ago, the discussion turned to mortality and the recently named Veteran’s section in the Ross-Mayes cemetery.
“Drexel said, ‘How cool would it be if we all got plots here together,’” Crosswhite’s wife, Sue said. “So they did.”
“I was worried that they were going to put us in a mass grave or something,” Fanning said, getting the bunch laughing again as he lifts his hands to measure. “My rack was about this close to his. I’ve been close enough already.”
As for the future, it’s filling up with many things for the three amigos.
Crosswhite, who is retired, relaxed in his chair and looked at the two men.
“I’m just hanging around waiting on these guys to retire,” he said.
“We have a lot of plans that include crappie, catfish and B.S.,” Fanning said. And each other.
“You know, we all suffer from stress related to the war,” Fanning said. “These guys help me cope.”
“Same here,” Holt and Crosswhite say, almost in
unison.
“I can talk about my darkest stuff and it may not be so bad,” Fanning said. “They keep me on the ground.”
For these naval men, after so much time spent together on the water, finding ground in each other’s support has provided an anchor that has stood the test of time.
