Former Catoosa commissioner recalls military service in book
Fifty-five years ago, before he was a retired Naval commander, a local engineering drawing teacher or a Catoosa County commissioner, Ronald Alsberry Gracy piloted a P-2 Neptune up the East Coast, heading back to Brunswick, Maine. An air traffic controller came on line.
“We have just gone to DEFCON 2,” the man said.
The U.S. Strategic Air Command was one step from “maximum force readiness,” the highest level of alert for a national emergency. To some military leaders, nuclear war felt imminent. Hours earlier, President John F. Kennedy announced a U-2 spy plane photographed nuclear missile sites built in Cuba by the Soviet Union.
He called for the Navy to block any ships carrying military supplies to the island, and for the Soviets to cease their operation.
“Our goal is not the victory of might,” Kennedy said, “but the vindication of right.”
Back in Brunswick, Gracy received his mission. He would co-pilot a plane to the Azores, an archipelago in the Atlantic Ocean where the U.S. had an Air Force base. Then, his squadron would fly 250 miles northeast over the Atlantic with no land in sight, looking for Soviet cargo ships.
While the pilot steered, Gracy
kept a log of everything they saw as a navigator back at base fed him the plane’s coordinates. Gracy’s job was to create a historical record, allowing strategists to track where the Soviets sat — and where they were going. A man in the back of the plane, meanwhile, held a heavy camera the width of his shoulders, ready to capture any pictures of evidence he could.
Navy ordinance men strapped three rockets under each wing of Gracy’s plane, just in case the squadron needed protection. He was a lieutenant junior grade, but he didn’t feel nervous.
“It just didn’t bother me,” Gracy, now 81, told the Times Free Press last week. “I don’t know. Maybe I should have been bothered. You’re just so well-trained. You have a mindset: ‘I’m going to do this. I’m going to get it done.’”
Gracy recalled the Cuban missile crisis and other events from his 23-year Naval career in “Against the Odds,” an autobiography he just finished. It is an unassuming publication: 120 pages long, dotted with personal photos, bound with a plastic spiral. Gracy is selling them for $25 each from his house, with a profit margin of about $2. Whatever money overflows, he said, he wants to give to Burning Bush Baptist Church to support missionaries.
He wrote the book to preserve his stories — “the sands of time” and all that, he said. “Against the Odds” will serve as his permanent testimony, and on the back he wrote a tribute to the importance of faith — in himself, in his fellow officers, in the leaders of the U.S. government and in God.
“You don’t step into the Navy and say, ‘I’ve got four faiths,’” he wrote. “You kind of build on that as your Navy career goes.”
Gracy was born in 1936 and grew up in Ringgold, Ga., off Alabama Highway. His father farmed vegetables and sold rabbits for 35 cents each. When he was a teenager, World War II veterans returned home and flew their personal Piper Cub planes over his home. Gracy began to study an aviation book. He wanted to move away and build a career in the air.
To pay for college, he sold tomatoes at a market with his father. He saved $1,000 over five years and went to Georgia Tech. Twenty days after graduating, he enlisted.
“I suppose I’m just a guy that needed a little bit of excitement,” he said. “The Navy gave me more than I needed.”
Four years into his career, in October 1962, Gracy was 200 feet above the Atlantic, looking for the Kransograd, a Soviet cargo ship. He didn’t know at the time that Kennedy and Premier Nikolai Khrushchev were frantically negotiating through letters. The world leaders argued about the U.S. ships now ringing Cuba, blocking Soviets from reaching the island.
“I ask you to recognize clearly, Mr. Chairman, that it was not I who issued the first challenge in this case,” Kennedy wrote on Oct. 25.
“I assure you that on those ships, which are bound for Cuba, there are no weapons at all,” Khrushchev wrote on Oct. 26. “The weapons which were necessary for the defense of Cuba are already there. I do not want to say that there were not any shipments of weapons at all. No, there were such shipments. But now Cuba has already received the necessary means of defense.”
Over the ocean, Gracy’s squadron spotted a cargo ship. His pilot dipped the plane and crossed the ship’s right side. In the back, an officer snapped photos. Gracy rolled the plane right and looped around the back of the ship. The tip of the wing was about 10 feet above the cargo, giving the photographer a close enough view to spot the details on a Soviet sailor’s shirt.
Gracy said a canvas covered something on the ship, bound for Cuba. But they could still make out what appeared to be a disassembled Soviet bomber.
Back at the Azores, the team rushed the film into the cockpit of a B-66 Destroyer, and another pilot took off for Washington, D.C. The photos would be a small piece of an intelligence puzzle, at a time when information didn’t always flow fast or freely.
For example: The end of a crisis. Gracy said his squadron captured the photos of the ship on Oct. 28. That same day, Kennedy and Khrushchev ended the standoff. Khrushchev agreed to dismantle the nuclear sites in Cuba. Kennedy, in turn, pledged not to invade the island and removed U.S. missiles in Turkey.
“We had no idea,” Gracy said.