Don Gay’s 20-year stint in the U.S. Navy — spanning from the Vietnam Era to Desert Storm — took him to all four corners of the globe, and then some.
He’s lived in northern Iceland, where snow was so deep you had to tunnel through it to get from one building to another. He later spent time on Diego Garcia, an island in the middle of the Indian Ocean so small, you could easily walk from one end to the other within an hour or two.
“I wouldn’t trade my 20 years for anything,” Gay said this week, at his home in LaHarpe.
Now retired, Gay spends his time helping renovate a rental home he owns near the LaHarpe City Park.
If all goes well, the work will be done by the end of December.
“I guess I’m retired, if you call it that,” he laughed. “I’ve got enough to keep me busy.”
GAY, 69, was growing up in Arizona at the height of the Vietnam War.
As he neared his 18th birthday, and eligible to for the draft, Gay figured he’d beat Uncle Sam to the punch and enlist in the Navy. “I figured it was the safest,” he noted.
It also led him to wife Jackie, who he met through her brother while in boot camp.
“After camp, he was going back home to Leavenworth,” he recalled. “That was the first time I’d met her.”
Turns out his instant infatuation was mutual.
“We met on the 11th of August and were married on the 23rd of August,” Jackie noted.
Don was days from shipping out, headed to the Far East for a nine-month deployment. But he didn’t want to go without a commitment.
“I asked her to marry me,” he chuckled. “She said, ‘What, are you crazy?’”
He was not.
“I flew out on Monday, called her on Tuesday, and told her there’d be a plane ticket for her on Thursday,” he said. “She took it.”
The Gays were in Long Beach, Calif., where Don joined the crew of the USS Prairie 8015, a destroyer tender — essentially a floating repair ship. Gay served as a yeoman, handling paperwork and administrative duties.
