To Catch A Thief

Unlike the surface ship I was on, neither of the subs had much of a problem with thieves. Well, at least not while we were at sea; if we were in port with IMF or (god help us) PHNSY workers crawling around, all bets were off. There’s some comfort in knowing you could leave practically anything out on your rack (except food) and it would still be there when you got back. After all, you knew all the guys on the boat better than you knew your own family.

But that’s not to say that we didn’t have an occasional problem or two. On my first boat, we sometimes had issues with new people right out of boot camp (most of them went straight to deck div) because they just hadn’t been in long enough for someone to find out they were slime. Anyone dumb enough to try stealing from another sailor on a submarine was not exactly a criminal mastermind; they were usually caught (and given the literal boot) within hours.

However, we did have one incident with things disappearing while we were in port that we weren’t immediately able to solve. At first, it was limited to duty guys who’d hung up their dungarees while they slept, only to realize later they were missing cash out of their wallet. Then whoever it was got bolder, and stuff started vanishing from racks and hanging gear lockers.

You cannot overstate the negative effect this had on morale; on top of the Navy doing its very best to screw you to death, here was someone you’d probably known for years ripping you off! Suddenly, no one trusted anyone else, and people started locking up everything they owned before they crawled into the rack. The CO told the XO and the COB point blank to find the culprit or else.

This was rather like teaming Barney Fife up with Rosco P Coltrane to solve the Brinks robbery. Their first official act was to call each of us in, one by one, and ask us if we were the thief. No, I’m not kidding. When they got to me, I did admit that the mess boys ate the strawberries (the COB got the reference, but the XO just asked “What strawberries?”). Oddly enough, none of the people they talked to confessed, and they had to take stronger measures.

After consulting with base security, the COB decided to set a trap. He got an old wallet and set of dungarees out of the lost and found, loaded it up with a few bucks, and left it hanging in aft crew’s berthing. By this time, no one was leaving anything out at night, so it sort of stood out (that and the fact the dungarees belonged to a guy who’d left six months before, but I digress). You would think that someone smart enough (or dumb enough) to get away with ripping us off for several weeks straight would have spotted this trap a mile away, but a few days later the COB announced triumphantly that the rat had taken the bait: the money had vanished sometime during the night.

It turned out they’d coated the inside of the wallet with some sort of invisible powdered dye that was activated by water. So, the very next morning we had quarters on the pier, and the COB showed up with a bucket of water. He went down the ranks with the XO, watching as each of us (officers too) soaked both our hands in it. He was almost at the end of the line when, to everyone’s amazement, a pair of hands turned bright orange.

The guilty party was hustled off to the XO’s stateroom for the 3rd degree, but it didn’t work. He claimed that he accidentally knocked the clothes off the hook, and the wallet had fallen out on the deck. He’d looked through it before putting it back because he thought may have been a wallet he’d lost earlier (a claim the COB couldn’t disprove because it did come from lost and found), but he hadn’t taken the money.

This excuse was good enough to keep the command from pressing charges, but they quickly arranged for him to be transferred to an east coast boat, probably saving his life. Believe me, prison has nothing on what 130 pissed off sailors in a confined space can do to make your life a living hell, which was what would surely have happened if he’d stayed. He claimed he was innocent up to the day he left, but the crime wave mysteriously stopped the same time he left.

But the story doesn’t end there. The dye the COB got from security was some nasty stuff, and he and the XO somehow managed to “contaminate” a large chunk of the boat with it. We all ended up with little orange spots here and there (a fact the CRA later used effectively during radcon training to illustrate what can happen), but no one got crapped up worse than the COB. He emerged from the shower with two bright orange hands, an orange ring around both nostrils and (hold on to your lunch) orange streaks on his lips and chin. I don’t know in what order he touched what, and I don’t WANT to know. I’m just glad we didn’t get to see if there were any other orange patches on his body.