John Lindsey

The booming chorus of thousands of high-pitched “kreek-eecks” from a gathering of small but tenacious Pacific tree frogs has filled the entire Avila Valley over the last few nights.

For more than 120 days, the USS Estocin, the frigate I was stationed on in the early 1980s, was haze gray and underway, sailing back and forth between the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Sea without a port of call.