Radio Free Smallwood

Ah, Smallwood Hall. For one brief shining moment in ’91 we single guys got to live in what was (at the time) the newest, nicest barracks in Pearl Harbor. The rooms weren’t all that big, and the elevators often failed (everything in the Navy has an attitude, not just the people), but being up sixteen floors meant you got a heck of a view and a pleasant breeze all year round. Living in Smallwood was the only time I ever got to sleep under a blanket when I was in port.

The only fly in the ointment was that the Navy, in its infinite wisdom, had built a 300+ room hotel with exactly 10 parking spots. Squids in the barracks don’t have much, but you can bet most of them have a car. And in Pearl, parking is a serious business. Virtually every stall even remotely near something is reserved from the moment it’s created; some next to the shipyard have been owned by the same person so long they’ve installed car ports.

Out of the ten spots adjacent to Smallwood hall, the barracks MAA (who had an office on the ground floor) had the audacity to reserve half of them for himself and his staff. After a few weeks in Pearl you get used to every captain and above having a reserved slot, but the MAA was just a chief, and most of his staff were E-5 and below. He reserved them for the same reason a dog licks its balls: because he could.

What upset us wasn’t the reserved slots. We all knew who the MAA was, and cheerfully ignored the signs. What bugged us was how draconian they became at enforcing the signs. The MAA got his people qualified to write parking tickets, and would slap one down within seconds of someone parking in one of the holy stalls, even at one in the morning (there was a roving security watch in the barracks 24-7). To make matters worse, they started patrolling the other lots around the barracks, writing tickets like they thought they’d win a prize if they racked up enough of them.

Tickets were annoying, because Security would make you appear at their half-assed “traffic court”, which was as inconvenient as they could make it. If you didn’t go, you’d risk losing on-base driving altogether, which meant basically losing your wheels since there was no place safe to park off base. But the MAA wasn’t satisfied with that, and took it to the next stage: having any car parked in a reserved slot towed away.

This new move touched off the Parking War. Remember, the MAA and his gang were a bunch of skimmers, and the barracks was all E5 and above submariners. I doubt anyone but the MAA was surprised to find all the “reserved” signs vanished one night, right under the nose of their own security rover. The MAA countered by painting the “reserved” message right on the asphalt, which was joined in about a week with “blow me, faggots!” in the same reflective spray paint.

Other little nasty bits of vandalism continued to plague the MAA until he did the ultimate: since we were acting like children (all 600 of us, apparently), he had the cable company come out and shut off cable to the entire building for a week. Luckily for us, the building also had a roof antenna with coax jacks in every room. The antenna itself was pure crap, but a pair of enterprising gentlemen from my boat bought an amplifier and started broadcasting “Radio Free Smallwood” over the circuit (you just had to connect your TV to the coax jack). They mostly showed skin flicks, and there were often long pauses when a tape ran out before they put in another, but it was glorious to defy “the man” on such an epic scale. As viewership increased, they started including more and more original content – sort of “man on the street” interviews, shot with a hand-held VHS video camera. You can imagine what the main topic of discussion was.

Finally, complaints from the residents to their respective commands got the cable turned back on, and more than one COB stopped by for a personal one-on-one with the MAA about leaving his people alone during the few hours they had off in port. But the MAA kept a death grip on those stalls the whole time I lived there. During the day I could see, but who gives a crap in the middle of the night?