My husband was in the Navy when he was in his 20s.  He stayed in for four years, with the express goals of getting enough GI Bill money to go to college and to learn everything he could about mechanical engineering while he was on active duty.  He turned 47 today, so it’s been quite a while since he’s been in, but we have so many photos of his adventures in the Navy.

We weren’t married back then, since we’ve only been married for about 6 years.  He had a great time, getting to travel to the North Atlantic, Norway, Oman, Cuba, Monaco, Gibraltar, and spending nearly a full summer in the south of France along the Mediterranean coast.  It was a good time to be a guy in the Navy.

One of the funniest pictures we have of him show him wearing his “BC” glasses – a la birth control glasses.  Everybody apparently got them in the 80s, and we still have his from way back then.  We don’t have much else, other than the photos, some awards and plaques, his tour certificates, his dogtags, and a jacket with patches from the various locales he was fortunate enough to visit.  The BC glasses are the one item that I laugh at every time I see them.

He isn’t wearing them here, but this is another of my favorite pictures of him.  He looks all 80s aviator Navy famous in his dress whites.  What a cutie!  What’s most funny about this photo is that he doesn’t have a beard, and ever since I’ve known him (10 years now) he’s had one.  It’s hard to imagine what he’d look like without one, now!