Chuck Bledsoe Jr. counted.
As an aviation ordnanceman in the Navy from 1988 to 1996, he counted thousands of bombs, missiles and munitions carried by jets taking off and landing on his aircraft carriers. He even won a medal for it after the Gulf War.
“Probably why I joined the Navy is because I remembered my uncle was in the Navy,” Bledsoe says. “He used to come home on leave and he would just show up. We’d open the door and he’d be standing there in his uniform and he’d stay for a week. I think that stuck in my head.”
Before all that, Bledsoe was a kid who played baseball in Fishers, Indiana.
From the age 5 until he graduated from Hamilton Southeastern High School as part of its most successful team ever, he loved the sport. He played on a travel team for a while afterward, trying to figure out what he was going to do with his life, when he remembered the stories his uncle told him about places he’d visited in the Navy.
Bledsoe enlisted and shipped off to Naval Air Station Oceana in Virginia Beach, Virginia, to learn his trade. He’d work 12-hour shifts on the flight decks of aircraft carriers, keeping inventory of the jets’ weapons.
He served aboard the USS. Theodore Roosevelt on the Mediterranean Sea during his first tour of duty. As the aircraft carrier sailed from port to port, he was able to see places such as France, Spain, Morocco, Trinidad and Tobago, and Egypt.
“I’ve got pictures of me sitting on the pyramids,” he says. “That’s something a lot of people don’t get a chance to do.”
He visited Paris and Cairo and hit the bars near the port when his ship came in to blow off steam. Traveling helped him appreciate the similarities between people, no matter what part of the world they inhabited.
Bledsoe did shore duty in Virginia Beach for a year and a half, then moved to the USS. George Washington.
He was on that ship when things changed, when the war came.
His ship left port and set sail for the Persian Gulf, where it would remain the closest aircraft carrier to Iraq for the next four months.
The 12-hour shifts turned into 18-hour shifts. Bledsoe worked nights. When he arrived, he met with the previous shift to get the paperwork, inspected the jets himself to double-check, then a mission would run and all the jets would leave. When they left, another set would land, and he’d go around and count again.
“They’d launch 15 planes, they’d land them, then they’d load a bunch more back up, launch more planes, land them. It went on 24 hours,” he says.
During his time on the George Washington, Bledsoe had made friends with some of the pilots. They sold stuff – patches and the like – and he’d go talk to them. He had a ritual with a few. As the pilots went to their planes, they’d take their patches off their uniforms and hand them to him. When they returned, he’d give them back.
One day, one of the pilots didn’t come back.
“At first, I didn’t know what was going on, then I heard all the people talking, ‘we lost a plane. We lost a plane,'” he says.
The pilot had been shot down. He wasn’t going to come back for his patch.
A few weeks later, another pilot was killed on a mission.
“When that first pilot didn’t come back, that was the first time it clicked in me that, ‘Oh, this is real,'” Bledsoe says.
The war was different from his vantage point than it was from theirs.
“It’s different when you’re on a ship out at sea,” he explains. “You don’t actually see the bombs hitting. The plane comes back and they’re gone, so you’re like, ‘I don’t know what they hit.’ It’s a different mentality than being on the ground being shot at. It’s a whole different mentality.”
Bledsoe still has those patches and takes them out sometimes.
After the war was over, Bledsoe spent another two months at sea. Part of his job as an ordnanceman was to serve on the Security Reaction Team, which was charged with protecting the ship in case it was boarded and inspecting other vessels coming out of Iraq for evidence of smuggling.
When called upon, members of the team armed themselves with AR-15 rifles and .45 caliber pistols, boarded a helicopter, then rappelled onto the other ship. Bledsoe’s time on the team passed without incident.
For his service, the Navy honored Bledsoe with several awards, including the Navy and Marine Corps Achievement Medal, which he received for keeping inventory without error during the war.
“We dropped thousands of bombs and, basically, I kept track of every one of them,” Bledsoe says. “When the war was over, they did an inventory of the ship and they said it was spot on.”
He also received a National Defense Service Medal, expert pistol and rifle shot recognition, two good conduct commendations and honorary medals from Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.
Today, Bledsoe lives with his wife, Lisa, of 17 years in Morgantown, Indiana, and works as a roof inspector for the Indianapolis-based firm Moisture Management. They have one adult son, Brandon, who works in Castleton, Indiana.
Originally written for Southside Times, 2018, but unpublished. Placed here for archival and portfolio purposes.