For Sailor, a (New) Life After War

Petty Officer 3rd Class Mike Davis and his wife, Sharon, will have plenty of time to talk about her pregnancy and his brush with death now that Davis has returned from the war, perhaps the first of Orange County’s military contingent to come home since last week’s cease-fire.

The 21-year-old Davis visited Sunday with his parents at their Fullerton home and recounted the dramatic turn their lives took two weeks ago while they were half a world apart.

On Feb. 17, in the final days of the Persian Gulf War, Davis’ ship, the Aegis guided missile cruiser Princeton, was rocked by two mines. The next day his wife learned that she is pregnant.

Sharon Davis learned within hours of the explosion that her husband was not one of the three sailors injured. But communications being what they are during war, it was nearly a week before her husband spoke to her by telephone when his ship was taken to Bahrain for repairs.

“He called me to tell me he was OK,” Sharon Davis said. “To hear his voice, I can never explain to you how good it was.”

The allied forces’ swift military victory, coupled with the Princeton being taken out of service for repairs, enabled Davis to return home on schedule for his March 20 release date from active duty. He and his wife had expected his tour to be extended well into the summer if the war dragged on.

“We know things are getting back to normal because his laundry is here,” said his father, Robert Davis, whose Fullerton home sports huge U.S. and Navy flags on the front lawn.

Home only three days, the younger Davis already finds himself facing the more mundane, if no less formidable, concerns of civilian life and fatherhood. For one thing, he must find a job. In the Navy, Davis was a storekeeper, responsible for restocking the ship’s equipment and supplies. He says since being home he has scanned the classified ads to find a civilian vocation.

“I’m just trying to get started in the real world,” he said. “I’d like to wear a suit instead of dungarees.”

Sharon Davis, a physical therapy major at Cal State Long Beach, met her husband last Friday afternoon in San Diego, where he arrived after nearly three days on military airplanes. They drove to their Long Beach home, then the next morning to his parents’ home.

“I was always worried,” she said. “But it’s his job. I was very worried on the 18th--that was my birthday. It was quite a weekend.”

The 1987 Sunny Hills High graduate and former prep football player was listening to the Princeton’s captain describe over the loudspeaker how another U.S. warship had been damaged by a mine when the explosion of one, then a second, mine jolted his own ship.

“It was ironic, in a bad way,” he recalled. “I was lying down in a storeroom on a cot. I was scared to sleep where I was supposed to be sleeping.”

Normally Davis would have slept in the front of the ship in an area just above a fuel tank.

“All the intelligence told us that’s where we’d be hit,” he said.

As it was, the explosion damaged the rear of the ship.

The blast threw some crew members 4 feet off the deck, he said.

“It was like an earthquake,” Davis recalled.