Auburn veteran’s military story started in high school

Published 7:00 am Saturday, November 15, 2025

Natale Stella’s 77-year-old legs aren’t what they were, he says, and just wouldn’t put up with walking the route.

So for last weekend’s Veterans Parade and Observance in Auburn, those legs of his compelled him to ride in one of the many cars passing along Main Street, where he waved at the people on the sidewalks.

“Whenever I saw someone in a military hat, I saluted,” said Stella, referring to the gesture communicating the incommunicable experience that binds U.S. military members into a “band of brothers.”

Stella, for four years a U.S. Navy aircraft mechanic at the height of the Vietnam War, never heard a shot fired in anger. Instead, he was one of the guys who busted his knuckles on a wrench, keeping the planes in the air and fixing them when they returned, often bullet-pocked.

His military story started even before he graduated from Auburn High School in 1966.

“When I was a senior back in high school, and this applied to the class before me and the class after me, the only thing us guys had to look at was military service. The Vietnam War was just heating up at that time, and unless you were well to do, or your dad owned a business or was a political figure, that was about it. You were gonna get drafted. So I enlisted, in fact, while I was still in high school, and they gave me 120 days to report.”

Early in the morning of March 1, 1967, the 18-year-old made his way to Seattle, where he met up with 18 other young men from Washington state, all of them headed that day for basic training in San Diego.

Boot camp was not a problem for Stella.

“I was pretty well aware that it required a lot of discipline, and not to talk back to them and stuff, so the three months went by fairly fast. There was a lot of classroom, a lot of drilling, but they treated me with respect, and I treated them with respect,” he said.

After boot camp, Stella got his orders to report to Attack Squadron EA-56 out of Lemoore Naval Air Base near Fresno. His squadron was already out at sea and on its way back from Vietnam at the time, and when it returned, he was immediately transferred to the base.

“Being at that time an E-2, which is what you are when you come out of basic training, you learned what you have to do to go up in rank if you wanted to go any place, do anything. So I made E-3 within six months, and six months later took the E-4 exam, and did that as an ADJ, a jet-engine mechanic,” Stella said.

Within his squadron, Stella was part of a line division, which maintained an aircraft as far as presenting it to the pilot, making sure the windshield was on, the canopy was clean, and everything else was in tip-top shape. As his aptitude test showed when he went in the navy that he had mechanical abilities, he pursued that.

His first cruise was to Vietnam with stops in Hawaii and Japan.

“I had never been on an aircraft carrier before, and being on that particular carrier, the Enterprise, which was the biggest in the world at that time and the first nuclear-powered one, it was rather interesting.

“We caught a cyclone along the way, which took three days to get through, mainly because of our destroyer escorts. I could watch the bow come out of the water and when it went down again, I could see the propellers coming out, and we did a little rocking and rolling with big waves coming over the bow,” he said.

Then the Enterprise docked in Sasebo, Japan, as the first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier that had been to that nation since the Second World War ended. After three days came an urgent call to return to the ship.

“As we were headed out, I noticed that the sun was setting on the left-hand side, and as we were supposed to be headed north, I wondered, where are we going? Turned out we were responding to the USS Pueblo.”

“North Korea had boarded the Pueblo, captured its crew and held and tortured them as spies.”

“I had never experienced that much cold in my life,” Stella recalled. “So miserable, and we spent three weeks up there before we were relieved by what I believe was the aircraft carrier Ranger. Then we turned around and went to the Philippines, where we prepared to go to Vietnam.

“That was my first experience working on the flight deck of an aircraft carrier. The planes were held by chains, and when the planes took off, you packed the chains in a bag, put them on your back, and waited for your plane to come back.”

From there, things settled into a routine. Every 37 days, the carrier returned for a week to the Philippines and then headed back out again.

“Ship life wasn’t too bad. There was much more to do to fill your time, and time went fast, it went really fast,” Stella said.

When he returned stateside, he headed for additional training on the Corsair, a new plane at the time. And when the time came to decide whether he wanted to stay in the Navy or go, he chose to go.

After attending Green River College, Stella went to work for Burlington Northern Railroad. He was with BNR years before his retirement in 2007. Today, he lives happily on Lake Tapps and busies himself, working alongside his wife, Anne, on their home garden.

Stella is a member of VFW local 1571, and of the Sons of Italy.

Looking back, he said, he has no regrets.

“When I look back on my military years, I would do it all over again, if that was possible,” Stella said. “All I know is that military veterans, no matter what branch of the service they were in, they have a bond, so that even if you don’t know the person, you can trust them. I lived that experience.”