Weekend Warriors : Navy Reservists Return From Tour in Persian Gulf

“I’d never really thought it would happen,” Eric Ray said Friday.

“But one day, they called, and asked me if I’d like to go on a cruise. I told them, ‘Sure.’ Then they told me where we’d be going. I said, ‘OK,’ ‘cause I wanted to see it for myself.”

Ray, 22, is a Buena Park student and printer who signed up a while back for a hitch in the Navy Reserve as a “weekend warrior.”

And the “it” that he’d wanted to see is the Persian Gulf, where Ray and about 40 other reservists have just completed a hazardous, volunteer tour of duty aboard the guided missile frigate John A. Moore.

The weekend was a long one--six months long, in fact--much of it spent providing escort for the immense petroleum tankers threatened by the Iran-Iraq conflict.

The cruise ended Friday morning at the Long Beach Navy Yard’s Pier 16, where family, girlfriends, a table full of cookies and a band from Killingberg Junior High School in Hawaiian Gardens were all on hand to welcome the ship on its return from the gulf.

Ray, who serves as a petty officer in the reserves, wouldn’t talk much about the activities of the 445-foot ship in the war-torn Strait of Hormuz; in fact, none of the 200 or so men aboard the ship was supposed to discuss that.

Steven Specht, 33, a fellow petty officer in the reserves who works for a local bottled-water company, did say that the ship “fired a few shots while we were over there.”

And Hector Maldonado, a 28-year-old reservist who spends most of his stateside time as a student at the University of Texas, El Paso, admitted that “it was a little tense at times.”

“You never knew what was going to happen,” he explained.

But if any shots were fired back at the John A. Moore, none of the reservists interviewed were aware of it, and all of them said that, by and large, the cruise was an interesting and rewarding experience.

And the families and girlfriends were generally in agreement that while they missed their sailors, they supported the decision to volunteer for a long and dangerous tour of duty.

“I’m proud of him,” Cathy Parker, 27, of Bellflower, said as she gave Specht a squeeze.

Specht said that he is “going to take a couple of weeks off, then go back to work.”

“But now I’ll have a different attitude,” he said. “I’m more open to things now.

“We stopped at a lot of different places--the Philippines, Thailand, Hong Kong, Singapore, Bahrain--and I saw that they don’t have all the things that we have,” Specht said. “It made me proud to be an American.

“We accomplished our mission, saw a lot of things, had a great time and got home safe.

“I’m glad that I went, and I’m glad to be back.”