The VIP Tour

I'd been on my first boat for about a year when we got to ferry some admiral from Pearl over to Maui for the weekend. While I foolishly thought this would mean we'd get a day or two in a tropical paradise, the reality is we had to anchor out and steam the whole time, so no one got to go ashore except cones. Well, the boat wasn't going over there for us, it was going over there so some one-star admiral could impress some three-star admiral, and perhaps get another star himself.

Preparations started about a week before the admiral showed up. Sure, there was a lot of cleaning, and the XO had to move out of his stateroom. But one of the admiral's handlers / roadies showed up early with a list of "special" things we needed to do, including what sort of sheets to use on the admiral's bed and what his favorite foods were.

It turned out that one of our honored guest's favorite foods was soft-serve ice cream. This was a problem, since our "ice cream machine" (really a knock-off brand shake dispenser) hadn't worked in years. As long as it was just the crew going without, no one cared. But when it occurred to someone that the Admiral may be denied, all hell broke loose.

A-gang, and E-div, made fixing that old piece of crap our top priority. There must have been a NAM lodged in there somewhere, 'cause every first class showed up with a flashlight to look for it. On the up side, the SK's promised to get us any parts we needed within 12 hours. On the down side, we didn't have a tech manual for the machine and basically had to guess what was wrong. We did finally get it working (after jumpering out some stuff), but no one knew for how long. To be on the safe side, the A-gang chief covertly ordered the crew not to use it until the admiral left.

The actual cruise was pretty uneventful. We got to leave a bunch of people in Pearl to make room for the admiral's entourage, so no one had to hot rack. We didn't do stuff like angles and dangles that we would have done on a family cruise. No drills, no training, not even a field day; I think the officers were scared we'd screw something up that they'd be remembered for. They shouldn't have worried; the admiral rarely left the XO's stateroom. He brought his own cook, and for the most part ate alone in his room. But they weren't kidding about his love of ice cream; he managed to almost single handedly eat a whole load of the stuff by himself.

We dropped him off and were heading home when the cooks called back that the ice cream machine kept tripping it's breaker. Since we were all allowed to use it now, and since it was such a rare treat, the whole crew was practically living on the stuff. No one was really surprised it died after running non-stop for three days. I looked it over and found that it was basically working fine, except that it would trip the breaker when someone opened the dispensing valve for more than a few seconds. Thinking there must be a clog, I got a bucket and started emptying out the raw goop in the hopper on top.

It was clogged, all right. The loading hopper is refrigerated, and at the bottom were about twenty frozen roaches. Whenever someone opened the valve, a roach would eventually drift over the suction tube and clog it up, which is why the breaker tripped. And these roaches had been in there a while; all of them had lost their legs and antenna. I don't know where the cooks got the powder mix to fill the machine up, but it's couldn't have been all that fresh.

So, pretty much everyone on board got a taste of "classic" Navy cuisine. The only thing that tempered it was the knowledge that, since Rank Has It's Privileges, no one had more than the admiral. I wonder if anyone ever told him...