The Corridor
My father used to take me to the docks on Saturday mornings before the heat came up. I was six years old and he was thirty one, a chief petty officer in the United States Navy, a compact man with an economy of movement that I thought was just his personality and later understood was something trained into him across years of service. We would walk to the waterfront in Norfolk, and he would show me the ships, the grey hulls and the high bows and the long rows of portholes like closed eyes, and he would explain what each one did in the kind of plain language that makes complicated things feel possible.
He crouched to my height once near a destroyer’s waterline and told me that everything worth protecting, the sea already knew about. I was six. I didn’t understand it.
But I filed it away the way children file things that feel important before they know why. His name was Robert Navaro. He was born in 1960, the son of a Mexican American family from Corpus Christi, Texas.
He enlisted at eighteen and spent a decade going from seaman recruit to chief petty officer through a combination of intelligence and persistence that his commanding officers noted in every fitness report he received. He was not someone who needed applause. He got up early, did the work, and came home.
He made pancakes with strawberries on Sunday mornings. He read at the kitchen table in the evenings with the focused quiet of a person who treats time as something not to be wasted. He told me once, when I was seven and asking why he liked the Navy when it made him go away so much, that the military teaches you what you are made of and that whatever that turns out to be, it is yours, and no one can take the knowing of it away from you.
I thought it was the kind of thing adults say to fill the space between harder things. I think about it now at midnight in classified briefings when the work is long and the results are things that will never carry my name in public, and I think, yes, he was exactly right. He knew before I did.
He died in 1991. I was eight. A cable failure during deck operations aboard the USS Saratoga.
A man overboard who could not be recovered in the dark water in time. The Navy sent a casualty assistance officer to our house at seven thirty on a Wednesday morning. He was young and very formal and stood in our doorway holding his cover in both hands.
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