Underway Boxes

Although there’s a lot not to like about going to sea on a fast attack, I have to admit we rarely went to sea for more than a few weeks at a time (on purpose, anyways). In fact, we only had two “halfway night” celebrations in the whole five years I was there, and one of those was kind of a joke after we’d been extended yet again.

Going out on a boomer was another matter entirely – you could count on a full-blown halfway night party every patrol. Because of that, my second boat developed a bunch of traditions revolving around it. One of the biggest was the “underway box”; a shoebox-sized container packed full of letters, cards, photos, ect. that your wife would make for you and hand off to the wives’ club for delivery on halfway night. It sounds silly now, but in the days before email at sea (you got a max of 6 family grams, period), sometimes that little box was all that kept you going.

Another tradition was the wives’ club auction. Since single guys usually didn’t get underway boxes, this started out as an attempt to make sure no one went without on halfway night. But soon it became traditional to auction off the boxes, with the proceeds going to support the wives club (they had their own “halfway night” party, and this was often at some ritzy hotel downtown. One time we pulled in unexpectedly during the weekend when their party was scheduled, and the CO’s wife seemed really miffed that some of the women ditched it to be home with their husbands).

Like I said before, these boxes became incredibly important as halfway night drew near, so it was not unusual for them to sell for hundreds of dollars, even though the “auction” boxes rarely contained more than candy, batteries, and comic books. But the best auction of all was on my last patrol, right after we got our new XO.

The new XO was an okay guy, as far as XOs go (you can’t be all that popular and still be the CO’s hatchet man, after all) but his one pet peeve was pornography. Now, I could tell you what it was like at sea in the late eighties, where much of the internal spaces in berthing were dedicated to the display and appreciation of the female form. It wasn’t quite the same on a Trident in the 90’s (this was after Tailhook, of course), but each bunkroom still had a sizeable porn library. Until the XO, anyway.

There was something about the thought of hundreds of skin magazines on “his” boat that just drove the XO crazy. Not only was porn specifically forbidden anywhere but in your personal storage, he also deep-six’d our extensive library of betamax “training” films. We even lost our “tech manual” locker in shaft alley (no pun intended). Things were changing, and not for the better.

Halfway night came, with all the usual festivities. It was no surprise that the XO got elected to run the TDU after dinner, as well as receiving not one but two pies in the face (one bought collectively by the wardroom). But the highlight of the evening was the auction. We’d already handed out the underway boxes, and the single guys were breaking all records bidding on the wives’ club boxes. A-gang went in together on one, spending about $450 on it. Had we known in advance what it was, we’d have paid twice that with a smile.

When they opened up the box, there was a nice little stack of “boudoir” photos of the XO’s wife, most fully nude and some more perverse than Japanese porn. In addition, the box contained (I’m not kidding) three cans of play-doh and a tube of K-Y jelly. Let your mind wander for a bit and I’ll continue.

You see, the XO’s underway box from his wife and the box his wife donated for the auction had got mixed up. No one noticed that the XO seemed a little disappointed when he opened “his” box; small wonder, considering he got a bunch of candy bars when he was expecting something else entirely. You would think that everyone would have gone crazy when we opened his REAL underway box, but A-gang just sheepishly handed it over. Making the matter even more embarrassing, there was someone manning the phones in crews mess to provide the rest of the boat with blow-by-blow details on the festivities, so virtually everyone knew what had happened within seconds. This was the kind of dirt they rack you out to hear.

I’d like to report that the XO relaxed his anti-porn stance, but you know full well that isn’t how things work in the Navy. Nothing changed that underway, though I’ve since heard that on the next patrol that the XO kept finding these little figurines made out of play-doh, often in "interesting" poses, whenever he was doing one of his tours back aft.