Rick Jones belongs to long line of military veterans

There have been veterans in Rick Jones’ family dating back to the 1700s.

In more recent history, his father earned six battle stars while serving aboard the USS Colorado, a massive battleship that saw action in many major naval battles in the Pacific Theater of World War II.

His great grandfather was a major supplier of horses to the U.S. Army in the early 1900s. With the Vietnam War raging following the 1968 Tet Offensive, Jones answered the call.

Born in Paradise, Montana and raised in Plains, Jones enlisted in the Navy after being drafted to the Army that year. His ambition was to be a structural aviation mechanic and the Navy offered the best opportunity to pursue that goal.

“I wanted to be an aviation mechanic, to get to work on the planes,” Jones said. “I wound up being an aviation storekeeper on an aircraft carrier, the USS Kitty Hawk.”

In early 1969, Jones was sent to San Diego for basic training, then on to aviation storekeeper school in Tennessee, where he spent nine weeks learning what

would be a vital function in keeping Navy aircraft flying and combat ready.

“After the school I got orders right away to report to the Kitty Hawk for deployment,” he said.

That deployment took him to the waters off the coast of North Vietnam, where daily flight operations involved launching numerous attack aircraft. But as a newcomer to the ship, he did not work right away in storekeeping, instead being part of the kitchen crew on a ship that housed and fed 6,200 sailors and airmen.

“I went on board thinking I’d be a storekeeper and found myself on mess duty,” Jones said. “I was doing it all, cooking, washing dishes and serving chow.”

One day there was a peculiar request from a sailor in the mess line. The sailor had been dared to eat five of the cockroaches that were prevalent aboard the Kitty Hawk, with $100 at stake if he ate them.

Jones complied with his request on the condition the sailor show him the $100 bill, which he did after eating the cockroaches. That was part, he said, of living on a crowded ship.

While aboard the Kitty Hawk, Jones was also caught in the middle of infamous racial tensions, which at one point erupted into a black versus white riot. Details of those riots were outlined in the Gregory A. Freeman book, “Troubled Waters”.

Eventually Jones was placed in the job for which he was trained, and soon found himself in a position of significant importance. The ship’s in-port base was Subic Bay, The Phillipines.

“My job was to order parts,” Jones said. “Mine was the only desk on the ship whose main job was to order aviation parts. I could get parts from anywhere in

the world in two weeks or less to keep the planes in the air.”

That was a daunting challenge given the wide array of planes onboard and the combat conditions they flew into, including F4s, A-7s, A-6s and other surveillance and tracking aircraft.

“The Kitty Hawk truly was a floating city,” he said. “There were stores on board where you could by a CD, shops to purchase a bag of chips, even a barbershop.”

That barbershop, he said, was staffed with regular Navy barbers and there was one basic kind of haircut…short.

“If you were standing in line for chow and an officer didn’t like the length of your hair, they would take your ID and you couldn’t eat until you got a haircut,” he said, laughing at the memory.

After his time in Vietnam ended, Jones sailed back to the San Francisco area where the Kitty Hawk was put in drydock for alterations and repairs. It was there

that Jones said he fully realized the massive size of the ship he had been on.

“When the ship is in the water, it’s 90 feet from the flight deck to the water,” he said. “When it’s up out of the water in drydock you can see another 200 feet that is below the water when she’s at sea.”

Jones spent the remainder of his enlistment on shore in San Francisco and was discharged in November of 1973.

After working as a civilian supply clerk at a Naval facility in San Diego where his girlfriend at the time lived, Jones made it back to Plains in 1974.

He has long been a skilled carpenter and handyman in the area.

Asked if he had any regrets about his service, Jones replied emphatically, “No regrets at all. I’m a boy from Paradise and I got to travel and see a lot of this world.”