The Long Underway

We were operating out of Yokoska, Japan during most of the first Gulf War. What we really ended up doing was bouncing back and forth between there and Guam. Guam was like Japan, only there were no women. Japan was like Guam, only five times as expensive. Remember, it's not *just* a job.

This is the story of one transit from Guam to Yokoska. It was supposed to take around a week; in reality it stretched into six. Most of us aboard were savvy to last minute schedule changes and usually brought lots of extra supplies, but by the time we finally pulled in we were running out of just about everything.

Hardest hit were the smokers. I ended up paying $150 for a carton of smokes after I ran out, in an era when cigarettes were $4 per carton at the exchange and $2 a carton (tax free) when the boat ordered them in bulk. However, even that ran out and I was just lucky I also brought a few sleeves of dip every underway (in case the smoking lamp went out and, more importantly, the Engineer was a rabid dipper and thus easily bribed). Back then, everyone on the boat smoked, and a nicotine shortage made for some "lively" training sessions and drills. I watched a mechanic beat a 1MC speaker into submission with a crescent hammer after the CO played "Under the Sea" (from Disney's the Little Mermaid) as a joke during field day.

Why did the underway take so long? We were the only fast attack in the area, and there were a million high-ranking military types who stopped in Japan on their way to the Gulf. Every one of them wanted to ride on a sub, so any time we got anywhere near port we'd end up pers-trans'ing on some admiral and his staff of flunkies for an overnight joyride. We never even pulled all the way in - they just transferred them via tugboat in the harbor. Sometimes they brought our mail, but most of the time they just brought more work for the scrubbers.

What really made the trip unbearable was the lack of water. Our evaporator had trouble that whole WestPac, and was always crapping out at the worst possible time. In this case, it decided to go down about four days after we unhitched from the Proteus. Now, in the past this had led to us actually running out of potable water (A-gang tagged out every faucet and drinking fountain) so we planned ahead and loaded a ton of bottled water while we were in Guam. We might not be able to bathe (or field day!), but at least there'd be coffee.

Or so we thought.

Almost all of the bottled water was gone when we went looking for it after it became apparent that god himself wanted the evaporator to stay tagged out. You see, the day after we left, one of the cooks thought it would add a touch of class to have an ice sculpture as the centerpiece during meals in the wardroom. They'd taught him in his Ice Sculpture "C" school (again, it's not *just* a job, folks) that he could only use bottled water to make them, and each foot-tall sculpture apparently took five cubic feet of ice. The wardroom got ice sculptures for breakfast, lunch, and dinner; we got to drink V-8 and peach juice the rest of the trip.

Towards the end of the run, the #1 source of water was from the condensate drains on the spot coolers. So much water, in fact, that the COB was more than willing to keep up the Field Day routine, even though the water we were using was far dirtier than that the stuff we were supposedly cleaning. No one had to shave, but no one was bathing, either, and everything inside felt slimy. Some tried to sponge bathe with simple green, but this usually resulted in a sticky, itchy mess.

So all these factors (no water, no cigarettes, no hope of ever actually pulling in) may explain why I spent $600 for a day off. The CO announced that he'd got permission for ten guys to spend 24 hours in Yokoska the next time we pers-trans'd on some general and his roadies. To keep it fair, they were going to raffle off the ten slots at $5 per ticket, with the proceeds going towards our boat party in Subic Bay. Since I was single, and had lots of cash saved up, I started buying tickets. LOTS of tickets. $600 worth of tickets. I wanted a shower, I wanted smokes, and I wanted OFF.

And I almost didn't win. Lots of guys were thinking like I was (even the married guys, who normally didn't buy a soda in port without clearing it with wifey first), and they raised an ungodly amount of money auctioning off our freedom. Do you know how much San Miguel beer you can buy for $400? We do - it's measured in pallets. Many, many pallets.

When the day of the great raffle came, crew's mess was packed to the rafters. They had the chop pulling the ticket numbers. I don't want to cast aspersions, but roughly a third of the guys who won were either SK's or MS's. None of my 120 tickets were in the first ten he picked; the only reason I still won was that one of the other guys won twice, and they had to draw again. An SK, no less. I'm not saying it was rigged, far from it. But the guy bought two tickets, and he won on both of them.

Anyhow, my day off was glorious. I bought a lawn chair, a cooler of beer, and just sat in the shower for two hours straight. Normally, it's been my experience you couldn't smoke and shower at the same time, but the showers in Yokoska were both huge (large enough for a lawn chair) and very low pressure (more of a pathetic drizzle, but it felt SOOO good). Where there's a will, there's a way.

When we had to go back the next day, we ended up sitting on a tug in the middle of the harbor for two extra hours because the boat was late. We didn't mind.