I feel quite humble listening to these tales of derring -do. A bit of a theme for my whole career really.
Just before it all kicked off I was sat in a war canoe about 200 miles out in the Atlantic, as part of our final operational workup, waiting to get bounced by a whole stack of Buccaneers. When they all got cancelled, I thought "well, I know where they are all going". We carried on our workup and were in our final briefing at a secret base somewhere in England, when someone came in and said, "its all over!". One ship went east and we went west. A month or two later, we were the only Grey Funnel line in the West Atlantic, so we were ordered to go to New York for the Victory parade.
As we sailed up the Hudson River, the commentator was telling everyone that we had not actually been to the Gulf and every sailor onboard was moaning and saying 'Shhhhhh!'.
In the best traditions of Service banter, we sent lots of postcards to colleagues, with the words 'Cheers easy' to those ships who were there, including the team on Gloucester who shot down the C-201 that was thrown at the Missouri.
We found ourselves in Kuwait in 1992, looking at all the damage and speaking with many of the locals about their experiences and those of the unfortunate Palestinians and Phillipinos. They were very grateful for all of your brave efforts.