Veteran took on large responsibility in U.S. Navy

DELMAR -- When Tom Longo was a little boy growing up in Boston, his father would drive past Harvard University and tell him, "Tommy, that's the greatest school in the world and you're going to go there someday."
The former Ocean Pines resident was accepted into Harvard's ROTC program in 1959. His father would have been brokenhearted if he hadn't been accepted, he said, smiling.
"I wanted to go into the Navy. When I was growing up, I knew I wanted to serve. I wanted to go into the Air Force, but my eyes weren't good enough, so my second choice was to drive ships," he said.
"It was a different time back then. The Cold War was going on. And we had a president named Kennedy who had a formula that said to ask not what your country could do for you, but to ask what you could do for your country, and that meant something in those days," Longo said, sitting at the kitchen table in his Delmar home across from Linda Lee Eberling, whom he calls his significant other, looking through photographs of the U.S.S. Capricornus, the ship he was aboard for nearly two years and whose association he now chairs.
He was never in battle in Vietnam or injured, but the Capricornus shadowed Soviet subs.
When he spoke at a memorial plaque dedication for the ship, he explained its mission was to "support amphibious landings with the numerous assault boats she carried to land cargo and people from both herself and other ships onto hostile shores."
During his remarks at the plaque dedication, he explained the ship carried eight 30-ton Landing Craft Mechanized boats "and up to 14 smaller Landing Craft Vehicle-Personnel LCVP Higgins boats."
"The LCMs were so heavy that when they were swung out for lowering into the water, the entire ship would heel several degrees. During loading and unloading operations alongside the ship's cliff-like side, LCMs and the smaller LCVPs would lurch up and down on the waves many feet, complicating efforts of troops trying to board them and operations of their crews handling heavy cargo.
"Everyone had to look out for life, limb and safety to display near-acrobatic ability to avoid being crushed or maimed. When the boats backed off a beach to return for more troops and cargo, incoming waves would erupt and explode against their square sterns like fireworks, as with engines roaring they powered aft over sandbars and into more incoming surf. They and their crews were tough."
Originally launched as the S.S. Spitfire in 1943, the ship was commissioned as the U.S.S. Capricornus in 1944. She is known as a lucky ship.
"Despite begin strafed and bombed, she brought all her WWII crew members home safely," Longo's history states. The ship was in service from 1944-1948 and again from 1950-1970.
Once, in 1965, when Longo was aboard, general quarters -- battle stations -- was called, but it wasn't a drill like it had been previously. There were ships in San Domingo, part of the Dominican Navy.
"God bless them, all three of the ships they had went out and when they saw us they turned and went back, but it was electric when we went to general quarters in earnest," Longo said.
His assigned work was deep in the ship, well below the water line, where it smelled of fuel and oil and was hot near the boilers, up to 130 degrees.
"Even in peacetime, it was not a picnic being watch officer in charge of the engine room crew. I made sure the crew was on the job," he said.
He was also officer of the deck on a watch rotation, in charge of the whole ship and as many as 400 men because Marines also sometimes sailed with them.
"It was an awesome responsibility. All those mothers' sons were depending on me to keep their sons out of trouble," he said.
Longo attended graduate school in Italy for a while and graduated in June 1969 from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. He was employed by U.S. Foreign Services as a diplomat for 25 years, retiring in 1990.
His military experience, he said, was positive.
"Oh, yes. I'd do it all over again. It grew me up, matured me considerably. I was a classically arrogant boy and it made me humble," he said. "It was a big responsibility. I'm very happy I had naval service."