Yes, that's a great story. Just about every school across the country wrote letters to the ships. We would have a big bucket outside the sick bay with the letters in it. We encouraged every sailor to pick one and write back, and that's what they did. It was remarkable.
My son was at university, and he said, “Dad, they have a stress room for us, because everybody is watching those missiles going into Baghdad.” The capability to fire one into the third storey and the third window of the Iraqi headquarters was what was happening. People were stressed by that. Right across the country—high schools, elementary schools—they wrote to the sailors, so we had this system aboard every ship to share all those thousands of letters.
We responded to every single one. I must have written about 10-15 myself, going by the sick bay, picking out a letter and writing back, saying, “Yes, war is not fun; it's terrible. You should be thankful that you're lucky in your lovely city where there aren't tanks rolling in to destroy your houses.” That's what happened in Kuwait when the Iraqis invaded, and they started a war. No question, it was a war.