Lair of the White Worm

Going underway has gotten easier these days, if for no other reason than you can bring your entire CD collection along in an IPOD. In the early nineties our options were CDs (decent sound, but bulky and not very bump resistant) and cassette players (you could make mix tapes of just your favorite songs, but the sound quality got worse every time you played them). Nowadays we’ve got 160 gig MP3 players that can carry more songs than a freakin’ music store (literally), guaranteeing you don’t have to hear the same song twice during an entire patrol.

Then there are the hand-held games. Sure, we had the original GameBoy on my first boat, which was roughly the size and weight of a lead paperback and which could suck down four double AA batteries in an hour. It had a screen resolution about the same as my watch, but it did have one thing going for it: It sort of looked like a calculator, so we got away with having one in maneuvering for a while before anyone caught on. It’s just not the same as today’s games, which are like little laptops.

But the biggest improvement in going to sea is the movies. Back on my first boat we had three big lockers in middle level filled with Betamax cassettes, which were whatever movies IC div managed to snag while we were in port. If you wanted to watch a movie, (assuming you had time, a BIG assumption) the first step was waiting for the cranks to clean up crew’s mess. Then, if you were lucky and no one needed crew’s mess for training, you had to get permission from the COW. He would usually make you wait until they’d inspected some random area of the boat, knowing you’d clean whatever he wanted cleaned if it got the movie rolling faster.

Then you had to vote on the movie. Unless, of course, the A-gangers had the majority; then it was a given that you’d be watching Roadhouse or something with Steven Segal. Otherwise, you had an even chance of getting to see something new. If the movie sucked, it was called a “hacker”, and might suffer some damage on the way back to the locker. If it was good, and we ended up watching it over fifty times, it was considered “qualified” and we stamped it with a little set of dolphins to remind IC div not to trade it away.

Another problem with watching a movie was that you were basically volunteering to be in the ship’s body pool for two hours. If anyone needed anything done, they called crew’s mess first – it’s awful hard to say you’re too busy to do it if you’re wasting time watching a movie. Most of the time we answered the JA with “Crew’s mess – no nucs”, but it didn’t help. You rarely got to watch a movie all the way through to the end, but you usually saw enough to make it worth your while.

But there was one interesting thing about our movie selection – we often had first run, just-out-of-the-theater movies. Nowadays it’s not that unusual to see a movie out on DVD a few weeks after it’s in the theater, but back then it could be six months or more. Sometimes we even got new releases before they were publicly released, and the command always made the most of that. Top Gun and Hunt for Miss October are two I remember them freaking out over, but the biggest was Lair of the White Worm.

The command kept that one secret until we left on a 92 day underway. Once we were out at sea, they announced they had a brand new, never-before-seen movie, and our crew would be the first people in the world to see it. They were going to show it on halfway night, and we couldn’t wait.

Sure, at first we were skeptical; if it was such a great movie, why hadn’t we heard of it? But they kept hyping it (the bottom of the POD kept track of the number of days until Lair of the White Worm) and the rumors were flying. The movie was locked in the CO’s safe, but supposedly one of the chiefs had seen the info card for it. Supposedly it was a multi-billion dollar sci-fi movie, alternately directed by Lucas, Spielberg, or Cameron (depending on which shoot-the-shit you were partaking of). Supposedly it was the next Star Wars movie. And so on.

Well, it took forever, but finally halfway night came and we were ready. All the other crap you normally do (like making the XO smash trash) was just a warmup for the main event. The COB got on the 1MC and announced “The CO has removed the movie from the safe.... The movie is heading to crew’s mess... the movie is in crew’s mess... the movie is about to begin!”

Crew’s mess was PACKED. Dinks, nonquals, nubs, chiefs, officers... they even secured the AEA and ERS. Even though they promised to run the movie all night, everyone wanted to be there for the first showing. Some people had saved their last bag of popcorn and last can of soda for this moment. With a hush, the lights went out and the movie began...

Looking back, there was one guy who tried to warn us – a rider who said he’d seen it before, and that it was the biggest dog turd ever released on film. But no one believed him. You honestly couldn’t believe anything could suck that bad unless you experienced it first hand. Most of us were so stunned at how we’d been had that we physically couldn’t leave until it was over. I mean, it was baaaad. Like MST3K bad. It was so bad I’m surprised they didn’t “award” it to people at NJP.

But the movie did serve one purpose – it was sort of a rite of passage. We kept it on board, and from then on out it was the one movie nubs were allowed (some might say, encouraged) to watch. After all, misery loves company.