Maid for the Barracks

You know, I love giving the zeros crap over all the little perks they get to emphasize how much better they are than us, but in reality the one time we got them ourselves we hated it. Of course, the Navy didn’t set out to reward us or try to make our lives better; it was just one Navy organization gouging another, with us in the middle.

Towards the end of 1991 we had to go in the yards for an extended availability. It was supposed to last 6 months; in reality it took 18. No Ka Oi! Anyhow, back then everyone from my boat who wasn’t smart enough to get married had to live in the oldest, nastiest, most run-down cinderblock uglies this side of a Bangkok prison. Ours were so bad, in fact, that they were going to be condemned and knocked down as soon as we went in the yards.

You see, when a boat goes in the yards, the shipyard becomes the “parent” command for the boat, and the Navy actually pays them to take care of us. Part of that is supplying quarters for the single guys, something the Navy pays out the ass for. Since the shipyard doesn't have barracks of its own, the shipyard would normally just put us up in hotel rooms for the duration, but that meant actually spending the money the Navy gave them for us ON us. No profit in that, brudda.

In our case, the shipyard originally wanted to move us to some abandoned barracks on Ford Island, left over from back when they thought they were going to home port a battleship there (what’s Ford Island without a battleship, folks?). But this was not the Ford Island we know and love today, easily accessible by bridge and relatively modern; Ford Island in ’91 was a run-down ghost town with nothing in the way of amenities and only accessible by boat.

It was that last fact that got the command into it on our side. Not that they were particularly worried about our well-being, only our recall-ability. For years the traditional response to any problem in the middle of the night was to send someone from the duty section up to the barracks to round up help; this wouldn’t have worked on Ford Island because the small boats didn’t run all night.

Calling in the married guys never occurred to them, mainly because wives tend to write their congressmen when you do.

So, rather than moving us to Ford Island, the shipyard convinced the Navy to “un-condemn” our barracks, and let us stay there. That worked for a few weeks, until someone on the boat realized that the Navy was paying the shipyard to let us live in the very same barracks we’d always lived in for the bargain price of about $150 per person per day. Why did it cost the Shipyard so much more?

The shipyard responded by hiring maids to come in and straighten up the rooms while we were out, supposedly justifying the obscene amount of money being paid for our room and board. For the first few days, this was pretty sweet... until things started to go missing.

Thievery in the barracks was always a problem, but it was usually a consequence of going off and leaving your room unlocked. This time, it was apparently obvious where all the stuff was going. After numerous complaints to the COB, he started having people covertly in the vicinity of the barracks when the maids were doing their thing. What they found was disgusting:

(1) The maids were eating, and drinking, whatever they wanted out of our pathetic little refrigerators. Since they mainly contained beer, and you do NOT MESS WITH THE BEER, this alone would have been a show-stopper.

(2) The maids would frequently take a break, either watching TV or calling long distance on the phone (if you actually had one, back in the days before cell phones), sometimes scratching their ass or wiping a booger or two on the furniture.

(3) We all had bunk beds (just like camp – enlist today!). Since most of the maids were about five feet tall, they’d stand on the lower bed to make the upper one, then make the lower one. Usually right after they’d finished mucking out the bathroom. There’s nothing like a big slimy footprint on your sheets to wrap up a 14-hour “normal work day” in the yards.

(4) And, lots of little stuff like CDs, VHS tapes, and video game cartridges continued to vanish.

In response, we started hanging “NO MAID SERVICE” signs on our doors, until it reached the point where the maids weren’t welcome in any of the rooms. Perhaps this was the intent all along – the Navy kept on paying the shipyard enough to keep us in a hotel on the beach, and didn’t have to provide anything beyond a crumbling barracks because WE had rejected any other “amenities”. That’s why I laugh when I hear about $60,000 hammers in the news; those guys are amateurs compared to the shipyard.