Sailors

President Reagan says that "the government is spending money like a drunken sailor." That's an insult to the integrity of drunken sailors. Drunken sailors have earned the money they spend--and they stop spending when they run out of money! ARMIN MOTHS El Cajon

Martin Poll, 89, a veteran producer best known for "The Lion in Winter," the Oscar-winning 1968 film that starred Katharine Hepburn and Peter O'Toole, died Saturday in New York. He had pneumonia and kidney failure, according to his son, Jon. Hepburn won a best actress Oscar for her portrayal of Eleanor of Aquitaine. The film was also honored for best musical score and best adapted screenplay. Poll produced a remake for television in 2003 with Glenn Close in the Hepburn role. During a five-decade career, Poll produced a dozen films with stars such as Elizabeth Taylor and Woody Allen.

This is really a cold case. Nearly 150 years after the Civil War ironclad the Monitor sank, an effort was launched Tuesday to identify the remains of two of its sailors. Officials in Washington unveiled forensic reconstructions of the faces of the two crew members, whose skeletal remains were discovered inside the Union warship's gun turret after it was raised from the ocean floor off the North Carolina coast in 2002.   "Our hope is that someone seeing the sculptures may recognize the face as an ancestor," Mary H. Manhein, director of Louisiana State University's Forensic Anthropology and Computer Enhancement Services lab, said at the Navy Memorial in Washington.

SAN FRANCISCO — The winds gusted above 25 knots and the swells topped 12 feet. In short, sailors participating in this year's race around the craggy Farallon Islands, 27 miles west of the Golden Gate, faced typically grueling conditions. Then something went terribly wrong. A rogue wave pummeled the 38-foot Low Speed Chase as it rounded the islands Saturday, knocking five crew members overboard. As the captain sought to rescue them from the 50-degree water, the boat capsized and was hurled onto the rocks.

Now that Abby Sunderland is safe and sound and the major part of the hullabaloo about her distress and rescue has died down, I would like to weigh in with some thoughts from the perspective of 36 years at sea, with 18 of them spent as captain and chief mate of a number of container ships. I am not going to speak to the question of Mr. and Mrs. Sunderland's parental wisdom — or lack thereof — in encouraging, allowing, and facilitating Abby's ill-conceived voyage. I'll leave that to the psychologists and social workers.

Two Australian sailors will stand trial on assault charges after an argument over the relative merits of Australian versus American football turned into a sidewalk brawl. Philip Graeme Ferres, 27, and Kolis Barba, 25, pleaded not guilty to felony charges in the beating of a man they met at a bar Nov. 22. They had been on a six-day shore leave. Barba is a professional Australian rules football player. Jeffrey Wilkinson, 28, testified at a pretrial hearing Thursday that he joined the sailors at a party in a nearby apartment after meeting them at Moose McGillycuddy's.

Navy medical personnel are giving tuberculosis tests to more than 400 sailors and three dozen civilians after a sailor aboard the aircraft carrier Ronald Reagan was hospitalized here with active TB, officials said Tuesday. The infected 32-year-old petty officer first class was aboard the carrier when it returned July 6 after a six-month deployment, along with 4,800 military personnel and 1,200 family members and others who joined the ship in Hawaii for a "tiger cruise."

As I watched the memorial service (April 24) for the sailors of the battleship Iowa, I cried along with our President for the loss of those lives to all of us. I recalled the Soviet sailors who also perished just weeks ago in their submarine, and I cried for them. My tears were both for the men and their families and the futility of their deaths, for where is the enemy? For these deaths, there is no enemy, only our thinking. War and the projection of an enemy has been with us for thousands of years but we are slowly learning that it just doesn't work.

Eighteen Ukrainian sailors were trapped in their capsized tugboat after it collided with a cargo ship in Hong Kong waters, a marine official said. Hong Kong Marine Department Director Roger Tupper said the sailors could be alive if they had found an air pocket. But he said divers knocked on the boat and did not hear the sailors signal back. Divers were hindered by strong currents and poor visibility, the Hong Kong government said in a statement.

The Eagle, the U.S. Coast Guard's three-masted training ship, sailed into Leningrad on Thursday, bringing 300 American sailors to the former imperial Russian capital on a good-will visit. The Eagle has a crew of 55 and 250 Coast Guard Academy cadets--would-be officers learning their seamanship skills on an annual summer training cruise.

Sailor A Novel Tom Epperson Forge: 352 pp., $24.99

If I were a damsel in distress fleeing a past and people who wanted me dead, like Gina Cicala in the modern noir thriller "Sailor" by Tom Epperson, I'd want to meet a guy like Gray too. And if I were Gray, a mysterious stranger with a tortured past, the kind of guy who rescues dogs from their abusive owners, meeting an on-the-lam beautiful woman with a preternaturally bright son would just make perfect sense. And meet they do when Gina rolls into King Beach, a fictionalized coastal town in Southern California whose location beneath the LAX takeoff route is a thinly disguised Playa Del Rey. She and her son Luke are on the run after an attempt on her life - which results in considerable collateral damage - in a small town in Oklahoma, where mother and son had been placed in witness protection.

This is really a cold case. Nearly 150 years after the Civil War ironclad the Monitor sank, an effort was launched Tuesday to identify the remains of two of its sailors. Officials in Washington unveiled forensic reconstructions of the faces of the two crew members, whose skeletal remains were discovered inside the Union warship's gun turret after it was raised from the ocean floor off the North Carolina coast in 2002.   "Our hope is that someone seeing the sculptures may recognize the face as an ancestor," Mary H. Manhein, director of Louisiana State University's Forensic Anthropology and Computer Enhancement Services lab, said at the Navy Memorial in Washington.

Chad Regelin surprised his parents at dinner one night in 2006 by announcing that he was joining the Navy. Regelin, of the small Northern California community of Anderson, had been employed by a construction company since he graduated from high school a few months earlier. Working with a road crew, he had become interested in explosives, he told his parents. He planned to enroll in the Navy's explosive ordnance disposal school and learn how to dismantle bombs. "We were like, 'what?

At dawn on the dock, a few sailors kiss spouses and dogs goodbye. Then we muster on the quarterdeck: 17 crew (nine volunteers and eight professional sailors) ranging from a 19-year-old South Carolina college student to a 76-year-old Michigan farmer. I have cruised the South Pacific, the Atlantic and the Mediterranean on the most luxurious ships afloat and have been crew on sailing and racing sailboats for decades in inland lakes, the Great Lakes and the Caribbean. As a volunteer on a tall ship, however, I knew I'd have a rare chance to learn classic skills and be part of a genuine adventure.

A Navy destroyer rescued 13 Iranian fishermen held hostage by Somali pirates in the Arabian Sea only days after Tehran warned the United States to keep its ships out of the nearby Persian Gulf. Sailors from the guided-missile destroyer Kidd boarded the Iranian dhow Thursday and detained 15 Somalis after one of the fishermen was able to reveal in a radio communication that his vessel's crew was being held captive. Seeing a publicity windfall at a time of growing tension with Iran, Pentagon public affairs officers quickly swung into action, setting up a conference call for reporters with Navy commanders in the region.

Even as the United States and its Western allies participate in a modern war in Libya, a small city in New Jersey and a congressmen are battling to bring home the remains of 13 American sailors who died there in another war more than 200 years ago. The remains couldn't be brought home until the current war ends. Eight of them lie in an unmarked mass grave under Tripoli's Green Square, where supporters of Libyan leader Moammar Kadafi frequently hold anti-American protests. But even when hostilities cease, the movement to bring the sailors home faces stiff opposition at home.

The sailor linked to an investigation of the explosion aboard the battleship Iowa denied any wrongdoing Friday and charged that the Navy was seeking a scapegoat. Gunner's Mate 3rd Class Kendall L. Truitt, 21, retained Miami attorney Ellis Rubin to represent him. Rubin warned that continued allegations against Truitt, from a charge that he is a homosexual to one that he intentionally caused the explosion that killed 47 sailors on April 19, would be "answered in court." Truitt and Gunner's Mate 2nd Class Clayton Michael Hartwig, 24, who died in the gun turret blast, were friends and took out $100,000 life insurance policies naming each other as the beneficiaries.

When the USS Oak Hill pulled into its Virginia port this week after a three-month deployment, the sailor who stepped off and bestowed the customary first homecoming kiss on a waiting loved one made history. Petty Officer 2nd Class Marissa Gaeta greeted her girlfriend, Citlalic Snell, on the pier with a kiss and embrace, making them the first same-sex couple to be chosen by the Navy for this very public moment. The crowd cheered. It was a small but significant sign of progress in the U.S. military.

Twenty-eight sailors assigned to the aircraft carrier Ronald Reagan have been implicated in an investigation into the alleged use and distribution of the designer drug "spice," the Navy said Monday in San Diego. Any sailor found guilty of using the drug will be booted out of the Navy, officials said. Monday's news follows the Navy's announcement last month that 64 other sailors, including 49 assigned to the aircraft carrier Carl Vinson, had been caught using or distributing spice.