Navy held allure for teen
Butler County native Charles Deer returned to the area from his longtime home in Fairbanks, Alaska, to host a book signing at the Butler Public Library for his 2011 book, “A True Story about Submarines and Airplanes and a Good Life in Alaska.”
Deer, raised on Mercer Road and later in Herman, spent 20 years in the U.S. Navy, serving in the Korean War and the Vietnam War after realizing that farm-life and milking cows forever may not be his calling.
“I wanted to do something a little more exciting than milking cows,” Deer, now 79, said. “The trouble with cows: they won't stay milked. Five o'clock in the morning, five o'clock at night, seven days a week. That's not a good thing for teenagers, gives you a lot of time to think about what you'd rather be doing ... I just wanted to go someplace and I did.”
Deer joined the Navy at 17 in 1954: “The Korean conflict was winding down when I was 17,” he said. “I thought, 'Nothing exciting is going to happen in my life, so I wanted to join the Navy and go someplace.”
Deer went through the Fleet Training Group in Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. His unit operated in the Caribbean, with his first foreign port being Santiago, Cuba. By 1955, Deer was on a seven-month cruise in the Mediterranean and northern Europe.
In his book, he wrote, “For me, this seven-month cruise was the most exciting and educational thing I could imagine.” But that didn't come without its fair share of stories. During that time, Deer's ship had to weather a three-day hurricane.
“It was pretty intense,” he said. “I had never seen a hurricane. I'd heard of hurricanes, but I had no idea you could survive in one. It was pretty violent, and we had a lot of damage done to the ship.”
When the hurricane ended, the ship docked in Plymouth, England, for repairs, what Deer considered an eye-opening experience.
“England — it looked like (World War II) had just ended,” he said. “England did not recover as fast as a lot of the other countries after the war.”
By the end of those seven months, Deer had been to a number of places, including Greece, Morocco, France, Germany and Holland. When he returned to the United States in 1956, he volunteered to go to submarine school.
Using that experience, Deer ended up going to Pearl Harbor to man a World War II era diesel submarine, he said, heading to the West Pacific and crossing off new locales like Australia, Singapore, Bangkok, the Philippines and Japan of his travel list.
“What we did then was collect information, and a lot of people had no idea,” he said. “Not everybody in the Navy knew what we were doing, and the public certainly didn't know what we were doing. We would go on patrols where we would be submerged for 60 days at a time. We'd operate along the coast of China and Siberia.”Among Deer's tasks was monitoring the Soviet Union's radar stations, what he calls “stories that would surprise people.” Of course, Deer had to wait until after the fall of the Soviet Union to write the book, he said.“You couldn't talk about that stuff,” he said. “Other people started writing about it so I put a couple stories in the book.”Two of those stories document one time that Deer's submarine collided with a Chinese submarine and another time the submarine was caught in too shallow water.Through Deer's 20-year Navy career, he also spent time in helicopters during the Vietnam War — although not flying them. Later, Deer received enough certificates and qualifications to become a commercial pilot, allowing him to get his first job as a flight instructor at Alaska Airco, a “compromise” home for him and his wife, Jo.“I retired in May of 1974,” he wrote in his book. “Since Jo would not live in Idaho and I had promised myself I would not live east of the Mississippi on purpose, we compromised and moved to ... Fairbanks, Alaska.”Deer started a window company and even taught classes at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks.He also helped found two organizations: the Alaska Craftsman Home Program and the Alaska Building Science Network, which is now a state-funded program, he said.
