Where I was 30 years ago

I was thinking today about where I have been and what I've done and realized that it's been 30 years since Iran over ran our embassy in Tehran.
At that time I had been in the Navy about 8 years. I was stationed with VA 93 attached to CVW-9 aboard The USS Midway permanently assigned to Yokosuka Japan. It was 1979 and Midway was on a training mission in the Indian Ocean.
As I remember we had just left Perth Australia and were traveling north to Kenya when we got word that our embassy had been overran.
For reasons I don't know we continued to Kenya and pulled in to Mombasa for 5 days for Liberty before continuing north to the Persian gulf where we stayed for about 90 days.
Those ninety plus days were the most stressful of my Naval career.
I was supervising a crew of four people, we were responsible for the maintenance of the navigation and weapon systems of 9 A7 E aircraft operating 12 hours a day off of a Aircraft carrier about half the size of a modern one.
I was 28 years old and my crew averaged 20 to 22.
During that time I worked what was called day shift. It was a 12 hour shift or 7 AM to 7PM .
Because there were only 5 of us day shift was me and the airman and night shift was the 3 2nd classes.
My day started at 6:00 AM when I woke and hurriedly dressed and rushed to the morning Maintenance meeting. Flight quarters started soon after and lasted till after 7PM.
As soon as the last launch went out, I got my chance to eat my only meal of the day, and went to bed to start over the next day. This schedule went on for 93 days with some breaks, on Christmas day I got a few hours to relax but we had to catch up on the aircraft maintenance so it wasn't much of a rest. Basically it was a no fly day and we used it to catch up as much as possible.
After so many days of work in a row we lost track of what day it was and didn't really care, as long as the aircraft left the pointy end and returned in one piece we were content.
There was some excitement occasionally, during that period one of the F4 outfits had a mainmount wheel come off during the launch, and the pilot had to ditch he was instructed by the airboss to fly along side the ship and eject and he was picked up by the plane guard.
This period finaly ended and we left Gonzo station to head for home port, Yoksuka, Japan.
It was a fairly uneventful trip until we got close to Japan. Of course we had to off load munitions. It's considered bad manners to pull into port with weapons aboard. Then there was the flyoff, we had to get the flyable aircraft to Atsugi so we could fly and do scheduled maintenance while in port. The flyoff was a little dicey because we had ice on the flight deck and the aircraft tended to slide around while taxeing, which got everyones adrenalin going.
After entering port we had to offload our maintenance equipment and move to Atsugi for the inport period which was never long enough.