The piece received recognition in the National Veterans Creative Arts Festival.
The memory of my service that serves as the muse in creating this piece is from my first Navy deployment to the Persian Gulf, as a Boatswain's Mate Seaman. I often had to hold 6-hour watches and one role was as the aft-lookout, essentially the last person who could hear someone call for help if they fell overboard. My favorite time to hold these watches was from midnight to 6AM, as the pitch black that enveloped the darkened ship at night offered many spectacles to observe: Dolphins disturbing the bio-luminescence to make the ocean glow to flying fish landing on the deck all around me. One of those spectacular anomalies was a distant lightening storm that offered a
show that will rival any fireworks display. The lightening traveled from cloud to the ocean and cloud to cloud with colors ranging from white to green, to blue and were so bright that when I closed my eyes, the images burned behind my eyelids as gold.