Whenever we pulled into a foreign port on WestPac, there were always four vehicles waiting for us: a sedan (reserved for CO/XO use), a pickup (supposedly for the whole crew, but whenever we needed it for something heavy like switchgear testing rigs, the Chop always seemed to have it) and two odd-smelling vans. This was back in the late 80’s, so we’re talking all-white, please-target-me-Mr-Terrorist Chevys that worked more or less when they felt like it.
The command occasionally got worried we might escape if they let us wander off on our own and stationed the duty drivers. Their basic mission was to drive around downtown, picking up drunk squids and returning them safely to the boat where they could be properly reamed in a timely manner by the duty chief. Being a duty driver was actually a good deal if they used duty section guys to do it; given a choice between topside watch or driving around, most people preferred driving. Needless to say, nucs need not apply.
But, true to form, the Navy found a way to screw up even this good deal in Guam by using people who DIDN’T have duty that day as the driver. The argument went something like “we don’t have enough people to support it, and it’s only for a few hours, so why don’t we have someone do it after they get done with the normal work day?” Naturally, no one was volunteering to get bagged with this suddenly not-so-good deal, and the duty driver became even harder to find than the Doc.
After a few days, someone hit on the bright idea of having the cranks do it after they got done with the evening meal. In most cases, cranks didn’t stand any sort of duty while cranking (unless you count putting out bread and peanut butter for midrats as “duty”), so on the surface this was a perfect fit. There was only one problem: none of the cranks knew how to drive.
Let me back up a bit. We were pretty hard on whatever government vehicles they issued us, mostly out of apathy. When we first pulled in to Guam, some lady came down and lectured us for a half hour about how THESE vehicles were actually bought by the rec committee, so please don’t trash them. She was about three or four boats too late with this plea; both vans had already been ridden hard and put away wet. The fist bump we hit in the road, half the windows fell out.
With the vans already worked over, and the threat of having qualified guys stand duty driver on their day off, the whole boat pretty much looked the other way when the cranks started their “learn as you go” driving school. There were some spectacular accidents and even better near-misses. But the real problems were caused by having E-2 nubs acting as chauffeurs for super-drunk E-6’s, most of whom delighted in seeing what they could get the drivers to do with a threat or two.
I’ll give you one example. We were in the van without windows (yeah, both were missing more than one, but this van only had a windshield) and heading back to the barracks when we spotted one of the lesser-loved JOs in a cab ahead of us. We were on a long, deserted stretch of road in the middle of BFE, so we made the driver get up along side the cab, the better to moon him. However, as we got closer, we realized the JO wasn’t alone; he has a girl with him (at least, we hope it was a girl; there were a lot of he-she’s on Guam) and they were, um, ‘busy”. Mooning might go unnoticed, so instead some of the more inebriated among us decided to try to piss in the cab's window from the van.
Okay, let me just say that, had someone thought this through ahead of time, we would have positioned “hose team alpha” at the back of the van, where there’d be no blowback. Instead, they were at the front of the van, and virtually all of it came flying back in (due to the lack of windows), drenching the rest of us who were crowded on that side to see what was happening. To make matters worse, the cab driver freaked out and swerved towards us, making our trusty duty driver (with all of two days’ experience driving) scream like a girl as we went flying off the road and into a ditch.
Then the puking began.
While no one got hurt (and the JO never saw a thing, thank god) we wrecked the van and ended up having to walk the rest of the way back home through a snake-infested jungle in the dark. Besides getting totally spooked by all the noisy critters running around, we managed to sober up enough to come up with a plausible reason the van was trashed. When we returned to the scene of the crime the following morning, it turned out that all we’d done is pop a few tires. The van was good to go (sort of) by the following night, though not even fire hoses could get the inside clean again. Stuff like this is why most people chose to buy $200 “Guam Bombs” rather than take their chances in a duty van.
Tuesday, March 3, 2009
The Delta Force Rescue
I’m always amused when a week in Hawaii is held up as the gold standard in vacationing for middle class America. Despite the PR, Hawaiians aren’t really keen on outsiders (“haoles”, as they say). In fact, the last day of public school in Oahu is affectionately known as “kill haole day”, making Mississippi in the 60’s look positively progressive in comparison. Sure, they’re more than happy to take your money, but if you’re not a local, I wouldn’t go anywhere outside Waikiki by yourself. Here is but one example:
My roommate and I were waiting with some other squids at the bus stop across from Pearl Ridge mall (the closest place with something to do off base) when we noticed a car full of locals slowly cruising by, checking us out. It was the middle of the day, and there were more Navy guys than locals, so we weren’t especially worried... until an exceptionally fat girl in the front passenger seat started freaking out and pointing at us.
The car quickly came to a stop and a bunch of huge local boys piled out. The girl also exited, and began literally jumping up and down as she screamed “Dat him! Dat him!” while gesturing wildly in our direction. The leader of this brain trust hustled over and grabbed one of the squids, a scrawny ET-looking specimen, and started yelling at him. The rest of us watched in silence, curious how it would play out.
After a minute we got the basics of the problem: the fat girl was in the mall with her girlfriends when a passing group of haoles with short hair had said something unflattering about their collective weight problem. She got upset, called her boyfriend (and his friends, of course) and had since been cruising around looking for the haoles in question. The scrawny guy kept protesting his innocence (all us squids look the same to the locals), but it looked like they were getting ready to mess him up bad.
Perhaps the number of other squids waiting there made them rethink their original plan. I’m not particularly violent, but I wasn’t about to let some 19 year old sailor get lynched right in front of us. The boyfriend left to try and call the cops at the nearby gas station (ah, the days before cell phones!) while leaving the ET-ish guy in the care of the girl. She proceeded to slam him repeatedly into their car, while screaming “You frightened me! You frightened me!” at the top of her lungs.
Unbeknownst to the locals, one of the ET’s friends had slipped away when the excitement started, and managed to find someone he knew with a car in the mall. While the boyfriend was away, they screeched up to the bus stop and executed a perfect Delta Force rescue: One guy hopped out and opened the doors while the second guy ran over, rescued the ET from under the fat girl. Then both guys threw the ET in the back seat and piled in after him. Ten seconds later and they were burning rubber, headed towards the base.
The girl, seeing her prey escaping, went running after her boyfriend at the pay phone. He came charging up and made a big show of running after the car on foot, at least until he remembered he had a car. Then they loaded back up and raced after the squids, leaving the rest of us with something to talk about until Da Kine Bus finally showed up.
Well, when we got to the base, the locals’ car was halfway up on the sidewalk (it looked like they may have tried to run the gate) and the marines had all the occupants lined up on the fence and were handcuffing them. The ET and his buddies were on the other side of the gate, and someone from the base police was taking down their side of things. Unfortunately, there’s a good chance they still got in trouble, as the base CO went out of his way to maintain good relations with the community, even if it meant offering up a few virgins for sacrifice (again, I’m not positive he was an ET, but I’d put money on it).
He’s just lucky his buddies saved his ass, whether he was guilty or not. There were always stories in the paper about a gang of locals just totally fucking up some military guy out in town, more or less because they could. Anyhow, the moral of the story is simple: never scare a fat girl.
My roommate and I were waiting with some other squids at the bus stop across from Pearl Ridge mall (the closest place with something to do off base) when we noticed a car full of locals slowly cruising by, checking us out. It was the middle of the day, and there were more Navy guys than locals, so we weren’t especially worried... until an exceptionally fat girl in the front passenger seat started freaking out and pointing at us.
The car quickly came to a stop and a bunch of huge local boys piled out. The girl also exited, and began literally jumping up and down as she screamed “Dat him! Dat him!” while gesturing wildly in our direction. The leader of this brain trust hustled over and grabbed one of the squids, a scrawny ET-looking specimen, and started yelling at him. The rest of us watched in silence, curious how it would play out.
After a minute we got the basics of the problem: the fat girl was in the mall with her girlfriends when a passing group of haoles with short hair had said something unflattering about their collective weight problem. She got upset, called her boyfriend (and his friends, of course) and had since been cruising around looking for the haoles in question. The scrawny guy kept protesting his innocence (all us squids look the same to the locals), but it looked like they were getting ready to mess him up bad.
Perhaps the number of other squids waiting there made them rethink their original plan. I’m not particularly violent, but I wasn’t about to let some 19 year old sailor get lynched right in front of us. The boyfriend left to try and call the cops at the nearby gas station (ah, the days before cell phones!) while leaving the ET-ish guy in the care of the girl. She proceeded to slam him repeatedly into their car, while screaming “You frightened me! You frightened me!” at the top of her lungs.
Unbeknownst to the locals, one of the ET’s friends had slipped away when the excitement started, and managed to find someone he knew with a car in the mall. While the boyfriend was away, they screeched up to the bus stop and executed a perfect Delta Force rescue: One guy hopped out and opened the doors while the second guy ran over, rescued the ET from under the fat girl. Then both guys threw the ET in the back seat and piled in after him. Ten seconds later and they were burning rubber, headed towards the base.
The girl, seeing her prey escaping, went running after her boyfriend at the pay phone. He came charging up and made a big show of running after the car on foot, at least until he remembered he had a car. Then they loaded back up and raced after the squids, leaving the rest of us with something to talk about until Da Kine Bus finally showed up.
Well, when we got to the base, the locals’ car was halfway up on the sidewalk (it looked like they may have tried to run the gate) and the marines had all the occupants lined up on the fence and were handcuffing them. The ET and his buddies were on the other side of the gate, and someone from the base police was taking down their side of things. Unfortunately, there’s a good chance they still got in trouble, as the base CO went out of his way to maintain good relations with the community, even if it meant offering up a few virgins for sacrifice (again, I’m not positive he was an ET, but I’d put money on it).
He’s just lucky his buddies saved his ass, whether he was guilty or not. There were always stories in the paper about a gang of locals just totally fucking up some military guy out in town, more or less because they could. Anyhow, the moral of the story is simple: never scare a fat girl.
NR & NRRO
I know this will surprise most of you, but I'm actually very supportive of the concept of NRRO. The only reason, and I mean the ONLY reason, we haven't had a problem like TMI-2 or SL-1 is the fact there was an outside agency, one specifically not impressed by rank, that could step in with a sensibility check every now and again. You know as well as I how much pressure some SOB at squadron can put on the CO to meet operational commitments; what are the odds that they'll try to solve a problem with "suck it up and fix it at sea"? There were times on all three of my boats that the command was willing to go out with a potentially serious issue and the only thing that stopped them was an NRRO rep.
I only wish some of our other heavy industries (like maybe the railroads, who through the years have killed or injured more people than all the fatalities attributed to nuclear energy, including the bombs) had their own version. But that's not to say I haven't had "personality issues" with a few reps during my years as a nuclear janitor. On my first boat, there were two neckties stenciled on the underside of the RO's chair, representing the two we had fired for crossing the line.
The first was a rep who went into the RC without permission from the SRO, which was the policy at the time. Had he just contacted maneuvering, of course the SRO would have given him permission in an instant. But, even though the control point warned him, the NRRO rep disregarded procedures and entered anyways. The SRO didn't know he was in there until the control point told him, at which time he got on the 2MC and ordered everyone out. When the Eng found out the next day, he went ballistic and raised all kinds of hell about it at squadron. Everyone's got to follow the rules on a boat, not just the crew.
The second was a little more fun. One of the electricians was working in ERF when he overheard two NRRO reps talking in middle level. One of them was telling the other "It's time to give the Eng that old 'engine room's dirty' speech. It actually looks pretty good, but we can't tell him that". When the EDO started rounding people up to get busy cleaning, the electrician was still fuming and told the rest of us what he'd overheard. The EDO disappeared up forward with the electrician, and the squadron CO had a field day (no pun intended) when our CO called him with the story a few minutes later. The NRRO rep got fired, and the next day six others descended on our boat with a passion. We ended up with a cleaning hit list ten pages long, but it was worth it.
I only wish some of our other heavy industries (like maybe the railroads, who through the years have killed or injured more people than all the fatalities attributed to nuclear energy, including the bombs) had their own version. But that's not to say I haven't had "personality issues" with a few reps during my years as a nuclear janitor. On my first boat, there were two neckties stenciled on the underside of the RO's chair, representing the two we had fired for crossing the line.
The first was a rep who went into the RC without permission from the SRO, which was the policy at the time. Had he just contacted maneuvering, of course the SRO would have given him permission in an instant. But, even though the control point warned him, the NRRO rep disregarded procedures and entered anyways. The SRO didn't know he was in there until the control point told him, at which time he got on the 2MC and ordered everyone out. When the Eng found out the next day, he went ballistic and raised all kinds of hell about it at squadron. Everyone's got to follow the rules on a boat, not just the crew.
The second was a little more fun. One of the electricians was working in ERF when he overheard two NRRO reps talking in middle level. One of them was telling the other "It's time to give the Eng that old 'engine room's dirty' speech. It actually looks pretty good, but we can't tell him that". When the EDO started rounding people up to get busy cleaning, the electrician was still fuming and told the rest of us what he'd overheard. The EDO disappeared up forward with the electrician, and the squadron CO had a field day (no pun intended) when our CO called him with the story a few minutes later. The NRRO rep got fired, and the next day six others descended on our boat with a passion. We ended up with a cleaning hit list ten pages long, but it was worth it.
My Hitch in the Sea Cadets
I'd like to look back and say I joined the Navy to serve my country, or to hold the line against Reagan's Evil Empire, but the reality of the matter was that being a sailor was the family profession and there was never any doubt I'd be following in their footsteps. Both my grandfathers were in the Navy during WW-II, and both my parents were in practically my entire childhood. I grew up living mostly on Navy bases and being surrounded by squids; it wasn't long before I equated wearing a sailor uniform with being an adult.
Of course, I only saw the Navy through my dad's eyes; he was a PN-1 who almost never went to sea, had his own office, and had a team of flunkies working for him. Mostly what I remember are things like air shows and command picnics. He and his friends had tons of great stories about visiting far away exotic ports and (more importantly to a teenage boy) exotic women. So it should surprise no one that shortly after my parents joined the Sea Cadets I was easily persuaded to join up as well.
Most people are familiar with ROTC, which trains college kids to be officers. Well, Sea Cadets trains high school kids to be enlisted. It was kind of like a perpetual boot camp, with lots of BS watches to stand, uniform inspections every week, and a stack of rate training manuals to go through. They even made us go to boot camp over the Summer; granted, it was only for two and a half weeks, but WTF were we doing in a real Recruit Training Command at age 14?
We usually met on base once a week, and the major appeal (for me, anyway) was that the Navy more or less treated us like any other squids while we were there. Sure, that may have a negative connotation for those of us actually doing time in the Navy, but back then it was freaking awesome to be treated like like an adult and to get to do all the things Dad did. We even wore the same uniforms; the only difference was a little patch on each shoulder. Most Navy guys mistook us for the real thing, and that was just fine with us.
Even sadder was the fact that all of our "officers" were enlisted guys in real life, mostly first classes who were trying to get some leadership experience on their records so they could make chief. In addition to their normal uniforms, they also had to maintain a set of officer duds, a feat made much easier for the real officers by the fact they get paid a lot more. At least the Navy treated them like they were real officers when they were doing Sea Cadet stuff - if you were a Sea Cadet ensign, and you ran into your real-world chief, he had to salute you while you were in your ensign's uniform.
I suppose another reason to join was to get a head start on all your advancement requirements before you actually joined up. We did stacks and stacks of correspondence courses - from the BMR all the way through the 1st & chief RTMs for several different rates (a small aside: Illustrator Draftsman E4-E5 was the best one, followed by Tools and Their Uses). When you joined up, these were supposed to transfer to your real record, and you would be auto-promoted to E3 when you finished boot camp. That may have been useful if I hadn't gone in as a nuc; instead I found out all those RTMs I finished didn't apply to electricians, and all of us got E3 automatically. In fact, the only real advantage to being a Sea Cadets was that I showed up at boot camp already knowing my general orders.
But here's another thing Sea Cadets prepares you for in the Real Navy: going to mast. That's right, I actually got written up while I was a sea cadet, something I doubt more than ten other people in the whole wide world can say. And, just like most of the times I got written up in the real Navy, it was total BS:
There was a power struggle in my Sea Cadet unit which had been going on long before I joined. We were supposed to be a "ship" unit (as opposed to an airdale unit or a Seabee unit), and our CO was a black-iron BM. However, the only place we could find room on a Navy base was on a Naval Air Station, and as a result most of the officers were airdales. Our CO wasn't all that happy and wanted to move us to 32nd Street, something rest of us weren't interested in.
In all honesty, I think my parents were were trying to avoid exposing me to life aboard ship, since I'd probably be disappointed by the "real" sailors' attitudes. You think middies were bad? Imagine having a bunch of dig'it Sea Cadets underfoot who made the Hitler Youth kids look like slackers. If we'd ever gone on a training cruise, I might have got to experience the joys of an EB-green happy hat five years ahead of schedule.
To make matters worse, there was a healthy amount of infighting among the khakis over who was going to be the first "cadet" to get promoted. Since our unit was relatively new, all us kids were E-1s. There was a race on to be the first to make E-2 and "take command". Unfortunately, every one of our officers had at least one kid in the unit, so favoritism was par for the course. Thank god it was nothing like the "real" Navy, right?
Anyhow, I was kissing ass just like every other kid, trying to get ahead. I ended up volunteering for a lot of extra-curricular crap, like the color guard (we actually got to perform at a bunch of real change-of-commands, since there wasn't an official color guard on the base) and fancy drill, as well as "volunteering" in my dad's office on the weekends. If we'd had the internet back then (or even just a standalone computer more powerful than the Atari-2600), I'm sure this story would have had a much different ending. Instead, it was off to RTC, San Diego.
I was chomping at the bit to go to Boot Camp that Summer, at least until the end of the first day. Since my parents dropped me off early (were they in a hurry to get rid of me?), I got to help the CC's set up the barracks rooms and stuff. I was exhausted by the time we officially formed up the company and they asked for volunteers to fill out the recruit chain of command. Instead of waving my hand like the rest of the kids wanting to be the R-CPO, I sat down. So, in typical back-assward Navy fashion, they put ME in charge.
The next day, when I was strutting around with my RCPO pin, I happened to run into my unit's CO. I thought he'd be happy that one of his guys got promoted so quickly, but instead he kind of sneered at me and cryptically replied "You're going to find out how big an asshole I can be" and stalked off. I puzzled over this for a few moments, but it was quickly forgotten with all the other crap they ran us through.
But he didn't forget. The first meeting I went to after I got back from boot camp my parents were visibly upset about something, and there was a lot of yelling going on behind closed doors. Then they suddenly emerged, grabbed me, and hustled me out to the car. We never went back.
It seems that one of the other "officers" reported that he'd overheard me call the CO an asshole before we all shipped off to RTC. Naturally, our BM-1 "CO" was infuriated and wanted to write me up over that. Hearing this, I recalled the CO's cryptic remark at RTC, except there's no was an ultra-lifer like myself would have EVER said anything like that.
No, seriously.
I'm not kidding when I say I was "positively convinced of the benefits of a Navy career" back then; we used to walk around on base hoping to run into officers just so we could salute them, and I spent more time shining my shoes each week than I did playing video games. I'm not saying its totally impossible that I could have run on at the mouth (after all, look at all other other crap I've told you about), but the odds of me doing it back then were somewhere in the range of me getting a blowjob from Scarlett Johansson today.
I honestly don't know what all that BS was about, except that it may have been related to the fact I was set to take over as the lead Sea Cadet when we returned, something I'm sure most of our "officers" weren't crazy about. But it actually worked out for the best; rather than trying to get in with another Sea Cadets unit, I ended up joining the JROTC unit in my high school instead. It was an Army unit, and within a year they'd more or less burned me out on the whole military experience. I still ended up joining the Navy (no amount of deprogramming could have stopped that), but at least I didn't waste my senior year marching around when I should have been out drinking and trying to get laid.
Of course, I only saw the Navy through my dad's eyes; he was a PN-1 who almost never went to sea, had his own office, and had a team of flunkies working for him. Mostly what I remember are things like air shows and command picnics. He and his friends had tons of great stories about visiting far away exotic ports and (more importantly to a teenage boy) exotic women. So it should surprise no one that shortly after my parents joined the Sea Cadets I was easily persuaded to join up as well.
Most people are familiar with ROTC, which trains college kids to be officers. Well, Sea Cadets trains high school kids to be enlisted. It was kind of like a perpetual boot camp, with lots of BS watches to stand, uniform inspections every week, and a stack of rate training manuals to go through. They even made us go to boot camp over the Summer; granted, it was only for two and a half weeks, but WTF were we doing in a real Recruit Training Command at age 14?
We usually met on base once a week, and the major appeal (for me, anyway) was that the Navy more or less treated us like any other squids while we were there. Sure, that may have a negative connotation for those of us actually doing time in the Navy, but back then it was freaking awesome to be treated like like an adult and to get to do all the things Dad did. We even wore the same uniforms; the only difference was a little patch on each shoulder. Most Navy guys mistook us for the real thing, and that was just fine with us.
Even sadder was the fact that all of our "officers" were enlisted guys in real life, mostly first classes who were trying to get some leadership experience on their records so they could make chief. In addition to their normal uniforms, they also had to maintain a set of officer duds, a feat made much easier for the real officers by the fact they get paid a lot more. At least the Navy treated them like they were real officers when they were doing Sea Cadet stuff - if you were a Sea Cadet ensign, and you ran into your real-world chief, he had to salute you while you were in your ensign's uniform.
I suppose another reason to join was to get a head start on all your advancement requirements before you actually joined up. We did stacks and stacks of correspondence courses - from the BMR all the way through the 1st & chief RTMs for several different rates (a small aside: Illustrator Draftsman E4-E5 was the best one, followed by Tools and Their Uses). When you joined up, these were supposed to transfer to your real record, and you would be auto-promoted to E3 when you finished boot camp. That may have been useful if I hadn't gone in as a nuc; instead I found out all those RTMs I finished didn't apply to electricians, and all of us got E3 automatically. In fact, the only real advantage to being a Sea Cadets was that I showed up at boot camp already knowing my general orders.
But here's another thing Sea Cadets prepares you for in the Real Navy: going to mast. That's right, I actually got written up while I was a sea cadet, something I doubt more than ten other people in the whole wide world can say. And, just like most of the times I got written up in the real Navy, it was total BS:
There was a power struggle in my Sea Cadet unit which had been going on long before I joined. We were supposed to be a "ship" unit (as opposed to an airdale unit or a Seabee unit), and our CO was a black-iron BM. However, the only place we could find room on a Navy base was on a Naval Air Station, and as a result most of the officers were airdales. Our CO wasn't all that happy and wanted to move us to 32nd Street, something rest of us weren't interested in.
In all honesty, I think my parents were were trying to avoid exposing me to life aboard ship, since I'd probably be disappointed by the "real" sailors' attitudes. You think middies were bad? Imagine having a bunch of dig'it Sea Cadets underfoot who made the Hitler Youth kids look like slackers. If we'd ever gone on a training cruise, I might have got to experience the joys of an EB-green happy hat five years ahead of schedule.
To make matters worse, there was a healthy amount of infighting among the khakis over who was going to be the first "cadet" to get promoted. Since our unit was relatively new, all us kids were E-1s. There was a race on to be the first to make E-2 and "take command". Unfortunately, every one of our officers had at least one kid in the unit, so favoritism was par for the course. Thank god it was nothing like the "real" Navy, right?
Anyhow, I was kissing ass just like every other kid, trying to get ahead. I ended up volunteering for a lot of extra-curricular crap, like the color guard (we actually got to perform at a bunch of real change-of-commands, since there wasn't an official color guard on the base) and fancy drill, as well as "volunteering" in my dad's office on the weekends. If we'd had the internet back then (or even just a standalone computer more powerful than the Atari-2600), I'm sure this story would have had a much different ending. Instead, it was off to RTC, San Diego.
I was chomping at the bit to go to Boot Camp that Summer, at least until the end of the first day. Since my parents dropped me off early (were they in a hurry to get rid of me?), I got to help the CC's set up the barracks rooms and stuff. I was exhausted by the time we officially formed up the company and they asked for volunteers to fill out the recruit chain of command. Instead of waving my hand like the rest of the kids wanting to be the R-CPO, I sat down. So, in typical back-assward Navy fashion, they put ME in charge.
The next day, when I was strutting around with my RCPO pin, I happened to run into my unit's CO. I thought he'd be happy that one of his guys got promoted so quickly, but instead he kind of sneered at me and cryptically replied "You're going to find out how big an asshole I can be" and stalked off. I puzzled over this for a few moments, but it was quickly forgotten with all the other crap they ran us through.
But he didn't forget. The first meeting I went to after I got back from boot camp my parents were visibly upset about something, and there was a lot of yelling going on behind closed doors. Then they suddenly emerged, grabbed me, and hustled me out to the car. We never went back.
It seems that one of the other "officers" reported that he'd overheard me call the CO an asshole before we all shipped off to RTC. Naturally, our BM-1 "CO" was infuriated and wanted to write me up over that. Hearing this, I recalled the CO's cryptic remark at RTC, except there's no was an ultra-lifer like myself would have EVER said anything like that.
No, seriously.
I'm not kidding when I say I was "positively convinced of the benefits of a Navy career" back then; we used to walk around on base hoping to run into officers just so we could salute them, and I spent more time shining my shoes each week than I did playing video games. I'm not saying its totally impossible that I could have run on at the mouth (after all, look at all other other crap I've told you about), but the odds of me doing it back then were somewhere in the range of me getting a blowjob from Scarlett Johansson today.
I honestly don't know what all that BS was about, except that it may have been related to the fact I was set to take over as the lead Sea Cadet when we returned, something I'm sure most of our "officers" weren't crazy about. But it actually worked out for the best; rather than trying to get in with another Sea Cadets unit, I ended up joining the JROTC unit in my high school instead. It was an Army unit, and within a year they'd more or less burned me out on the whole military experience. I still ended up joining the Navy (no amount of deprogramming could have stopped that), but at least I didn't waste my senior year marching around when I should have been out drinking and trying to get laid.
The Chief’s Anchor
We electricians got collectively chewed out one day because our chief (aka "The Weasel") left his hat on the E-div locker in middle level and someone had turned his hat insignia (a gold anchor with a chrome "USN" over it) upside down. Apparently he'd been walking around with it upside down for days before one of the other chiefs had pity and told him. Like I've said before, he wasn't a bad guy, he was just oblivious to what was going on around him.
Of course, after that, messing with the chief's hat became one of our favorite past times. Even though he never quite figured out that the simplest thing would have been to just stop leaving it lying around, he did get pretty good at noticing when his pin was on the wrong side or stuck on sideways. But we had to wait until we pulled into the PI for the best hat prank of all time.
Now, there's a lot to be said about Subic, but most of it is not exactly safe for work. One thing I can say is that they had some of the world's best craftsmen right outside the gate who could make anything your heart desired, often for less than one girl's bar fine (the standard for comparison shopping). Several people had a full set of custom-tailored uniforms, fully embroidered (back when most people just hand-stenciled their stuff), made up while we were there. They also made custom-fit furniture and jewelry, T-shirt silk screening, westpac jackets... you name it.
Well, we had a custom chief's anchor made up for our chief's hat, only with "FTN" instead of "USN" (we used my initials, since it was my idea). The finished product looked so authentic even we couldn't tell the difference from a few feet away. We made the swap the next morning, and the only hard part was keeping a straight face when you were talking to him outside.
The prank went on for almost a week before someone who cared (the COB, in this case) noticed it and made him take it off. Which was a shame, because I had "eight days, six hours" in the pool we'd started on how long it would be before we got caught. There were no hard feelings; Weasel was actually kind of proud of the pin and sent it home in a jewelry box. We still have fond memories of this little gag; if you go down on the boat, you'll occasionally see "FTN" written on some out of the way surface in tribute to the Great Pin Swap.
At least, I think it's in tribute...
Of course, after that, messing with the chief's hat became one of our favorite past times. Even though he never quite figured out that the simplest thing would have been to just stop leaving it lying around, he did get pretty good at noticing when his pin was on the wrong side or stuck on sideways. But we had to wait until we pulled into the PI for the best hat prank of all time.
Now, there's a lot to be said about Subic, but most of it is not exactly safe for work. One thing I can say is that they had some of the world's best craftsmen right outside the gate who could make anything your heart desired, often for less than one girl's bar fine (the standard for comparison shopping). Several people had a full set of custom-tailored uniforms, fully embroidered (back when most people just hand-stenciled their stuff), made up while we were there. They also made custom-fit furniture and jewelry, T-shirt silk screening, westpac jackets... you name it.
Well, we had a custom chief's anchor made up for our chief's hat, only with "FTN" instead of "USN" (we used my initials, since it was my idea). The finished product looked so authentic even we couldn't tell the difference from a few feet away. We made the swap the next morning, and the only hard part was keeping a straight face when you were talking to him outside.
The prank went on for almost a week before someone who cared (the COB, in this case) noticed it and made him take it off. Which was a shame, because I had "eight days, six hours" in the pool we'd started on how long it would be before we got caught. There were no hard feelings; Weasel was actually kind of proud of the pin and sent it home in a jewelry box. We still have fond memories of this little gag; if you go down on the boat, you'll occasionally see "FTN" written on some out of the way surface in tribute to the Great Pin Swap.
At least, I think it's in tribute...
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?
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?
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.
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.
Horseplay Leads to Sickbay
It may have just been my second boat, but we had some unnatural fixation on taping things to the shaft. If you left something unguarded in the engine room, and someone else wanted to “stow it for sea” for you, chances are you’d find it securely affixed to the shaft with enough EB green to mummify a nub.
But all of that stopped for good after The IC Div Incident.
One fine fine Navy evening, IC div was back in shaft alley, troubleshooting one of their circuits and basically getting in everyone’s way. Somewhere around midrats they made the mistake of leaving their toolbag behind when they went up forward to eat. One of the mechanics found it, and, with an evil glint in his eye, set about rounding up every roll of tape in the engine room.
He and his brethren spent the next twenty minutes taping each and every tool in IC div’s bag, plus the bag itself, to the shaft. This was made easier by two things: One, they’d posted a watch near the tunnel, and two, we’d been going 2 knots to nowhere for the last few days. When they were done it truly shattered all records for number of items taped to the shaft at the same time. Those of us who were privileged to see it stood in awe.
We were just settling in to wait for the IC guys to return from chow when, for no apparent reason, the bell suddenly changed to ahead flank. As everyone scrambled around to answer it, a loud “clangggg” rang out from middle level. The tools were flying off the shaft in every direction, much like five pound bullets.
The mechanics frantically tried to get the rest of them untaped, while dodging the ones that had untaped themselves, as the shaft sped up. They managed to do it, but one of them ended up with a broken finger as a souvenir. Luckily, nothing (and no one) else got broken. Most everyone on board knew what really happened, but the command officially accepted the lame-ass excuse they came up with for the injury.
As doc always says, horseplay leads to sick bay.
But all of that stopped for good after The IC Div Incident.
One fine fine Navy evening, IC div was back in shaft alley, troubleshooting one of their circuits and basically getting in everyone’s way. Somewhere around midrats they made the mistake of leaving their toolbag behind when they went up forward to eat. One of the mechanics found it, and, with an evil glint in his eye, set about rounding up every roll of tape in the engine room.
He and his brethren spent the next twenty minutes taping each and every tool in IC div’s bag, plus the bag itself, to the shaft. This was made easier by two things: One, they’d posted a watch near the tunnel, and two, we’d been going 2 knots to nowhere for the last few days. When they were done it truly shattered all records for number of items taped to the shaft at the same time. Those of us who were privileged to see it stood in awe.
We were just settling in to wait for the IC guys to return from chow when, for no apparent reason, the bell suddenly changed to ahead flank. As everyone scrambled around to answer it, a loud “clangggg” rang out from middle level. The tools were flying off the shaft in every direction, much like five pound bullets.
The mechanics frantically tried to get the rest of them untaped, while dodging the ones that had untaped themselves, as the shaft sped up. They managed to do it, but one of them ended up with a broken finger as a souvenir. Luckily, nothing (and no one) else got broken. Most everyone on board knew what really happened, but the command officially accepted the lame-ass excuse they came up with for the injury.
As doc always says, horseplay leads to sick bay.
The Seabees in Guam
While I was in Guam I found the most awesome shore duty billet ever created: Barracks MAA for the Proteus submarine barracks. These were off base and in the middle of nowhere, so the only time this guy saw other squids was twice a month when he drove back to the base to pick up his pay check. He never wore a uniform and got to keep whatever people left behind in their rooms - let's just say his hair was a tad long and he had the single biggest collection of alcohol on the island. And, all he really did was make sure no one burned the place down.
I got to know him pretty well, because there just wasn't that much to do during the day in Guam. Other than scuba diving and drinking, which weren't mutually exclusive, there wasn't anything going on but a lot of sweating. But I didn't know that before we arrived, and I was dumb enough to take two weeks of leave there.
E-div had a rotating leave schedule so that everybody got a chance to take leave at least once every year and a half. Originally, my turn was going to be while we were in the PI, but one of the senior electricians convinced me that it would be a waste, as they wouldn't be letting anyone off the base due to the locals protesting outside the gate. Since he didn't plan on leaving the base anyway, he graciously agreed to swap with me. As some of you may have already guessed, they never actually closed the base, so he got to disappear into Subic City for two weeks, and I got scenic Guam.
But at least I got a room. There was a Seabee battalion in port with us, who were on their way to Desert Shield (that's the first Gulf War, the one we wrapped up inside a football season) when their transport ship broke down. When it looked like they'd be in Guam a while, they asked the Navy base for a place to stay other than a 110F cargo hold. But they were told there just weren't enough rooms; if they wanted a barracks, they'd have to build their own.
So that's just what they did.
First they build a huge barracks complex (really more like a BOQ or a hotel than a barracks), big enough that even the E-3's had their own air-conditioned rooms. Then they added a chow hall and paved a four-lane road out to their camp, which was out in B.F.E.
Much like the Doozers in Fraggle Rock, the longer the Navy left them stranded, the more they built. They eventually added a giant swimming pool, tennis courts, a movie theater, and a go-cart track. I got to see all this splendor once when I snuck on their bus (which was the easiest way to get back from town at night - much more reliable than our duty drivers) and they stopped there on the way to the Proteus. I'm telling you, it was like being at a luxury resort compared to the crap hole we lived in. They were still there, and still building, when we finally left for Singapore.
I got to know him pretty well, because there just wasn't that much to do during the day in Guam. Other than scuba diving and drinking, which weren't mutually exclusive, there wasn't anything going on but a lot of sweating. But I didn't know that before we arrived, and I was dumb enough to take two weeks of leave there.
E-div had a rotating leave schedule so that everybody got a chance to take leave at least once every year and a half. Originally, my turn was going to be while we were in the PI, but one of the senior electricians convinced me that it would be a waste, as they wouldn't be letting anyone off the base due to the locals protesting outside the gate. Since he didn't plan on leaving the base anyway, he graciously agreed to swap with me. As some of you may have already guessed, they never actually closed the base, so he got to disappear into Subic City for two weeks, and I got scenic Guam.
But at least I got a room. There was a Seabee battalion in port with us, who were on their way to Desert Shield (that's the first Gulf War, the one we wrapped up inside a football season) when their transport ship broke down. When it looked like they'd be in Guam a while, they asked the Navy base for a place to stay other than a 110F cargo hold. But they were told there just weren't enough rooms; if they wanted a barracks, they'd have to build their own.
So that's just what they did.
First they build a huge barracks complex (really more like a BOQ or a hotel than a barracks), big enough that even the E-3's had their own air-conditioned rooms. Then they added a chow hall and paved a four-lane road out to their camp, which was out in B.F.E.
Much like the Doozers in Fraggle Rock, the longer the Navy left them stranded, the more they built. They eventually added a giant swimming pool, tennis courts, a movie theater, and a go-cart track. I got to see all this splendor once when I snuck on their bus (which was the easiest way to get back from town at night - much more reliable than our duty drivers) and they stopped there on the way to the Proteus. I'm telling you, it was like being at a luxury resort compared to the crap hole we lived in. They were still there, and still building, when we finally left for Singapore.
The Neighbor’s Dog
One of the best things about getting transferred to shore duty was finally being allowed to live off base. While I could have moved out when I was still on the boat, the Navy wouldn't give us single guys any extra money to do so as long as there was room in the barracks. There was no way a single sailor could afford the astronomical rent out in town without the extra pay, so we were essentially trapped. They always talked about letting us move out if the barracks got overcrowded, but somehow it never happened. I don't remember how much room we were supposed to have (it was based on rank) but I knew we didn't have it when we were packed in 4 to a room.
It took forever for the Navy to get my pay straight (I was practically camping out at PSD every pay day), and the commute was horrible, but I loved having a place to myself. I ended up renting a little condo in Ewa Beach that was about the same size as my barracks room for the outrageous price of $850 per month (back in '94). It even had a pool, and I didn't have to worry about making my bed before I went off to work. There's nothing like having your barracks room inspected by several different agencies every week (the boat, the barracks MAA, security, etc.) to make you feel exactly like a convict.
Like I said, having my own place again for the first time in five years was sweet, up until I got transferred to the mid shift. Once I started being home during the day, I noticed something I'd previously overlooked: my neighbor had a dog.
I probably knew he had a dog all along, but it never really registered because the dog was fairly quiet when he was home. But once he left for work in the morning, the little rat bastard would start barking almost nonstop until he returned. When I finally got tired of sleeping with earplugs in, I went next door to ask him to keep it down. He wasn't exactly rude, but his response was along the lines of "What do you expect me to do about it? It's not bothering me, and I'm not getting rid of my dog. Deal with it."
This went on until I couldn't take anymore. For a brief period I considered "relocating" the dog myself, but that wouldn't have fixed the root cause: his inconsiderate owner. He may have just went and got another yippy mutt, and I'd have to start all over. No, the real problem was that he'd never got to enjoy the tender serenade of man's best friend himself, and that I could help with.
So I bought a dog whistle. I couldn't hear it, but the dog sure could - every time I gave it a good blast, the dog next door would go apeshit. Of course, now my neighbor didn't think it was all that cute, and I could hear him screaming at it to stop barking. What upset him most was that the dog seemed to be barking for no reason whatsoever... the very same thing that bothered me. Since I was up all night anyway, I was more than happy to demonstrate how hard it is to sleep with a dog barking incessantly. As an added bonus, keeping the dog up at night meant it tended to sleep during the day, and I got some blissful peace and quiet myself.
He moved out a few weeks later. I'm not sure if the dog barking had anything to do with it (there was a high turnover rate in our condos) but I was just glad he was gone. The new tenants were two college girls who liked to have really noisy sex from time to time. That I didn't mind as much, though it was a real conversation starter if I had people over myself. All in all, it was still better than living on base.
It took forever for the Navy to get my pay straight (I was practically camping out at PSD every pay day), and the commute was horrible, but I loved having a place to myself. I ended up renting a little condo in Ewa Beach that was about the same size as my barracks room for the outrageous price of $850 per month (back in '94). It even had a pool, and I didn't have to worry about making my bed before I went off to work. There's nothing like having your barracks room inspected by several different agencies every week (the boat, the barracks MAA, security, etc.) to make you feel exactly like a convict.
Like I said, having my own place again for the first time in five years was sweet, up until I got transferred to the mid shift. Once I started being home during the day, I noticed something I'd previously overlooked: my neighbor had a dog.
I probably knew he had a dog all along, but it never really registered because the dog was fairly quiet when he was home. But once he left for work in the morning, the little rat bastard would start barking almost nonstop until he returned. When I finally got tired of sleeping with earplugs in, I went next door to ask him to keep it down. He wasn't exactly rude, but his response was along the lines of "What do you expect me to do about it? It's not bothering me, and I'm not getting rid of my dog. Deal with it."
This went on until I couldn't take anymore. For a brief period I considered "relocating" the dog myself, but that wouldn't have fixed the root cause: his inconsiderate owner. He may have just went and got another yippy mutt, and I'd have to start all over. No, the real problem was that he'd never got to enjoy the tender serenade of man's best friend himself, and that I could help with.
So I bought a dog whistle. I couldn't hear it, but the dog sure could - every time I gave it a good blast, the dog next door would go apeshit. Of course, now my neighbor didn't think it was all that cute, and I could hear him screaming at it to stop barking. What upset him most was that the dog seemed to be barking for no reason whatsoever... the very same thing that bothered me. Since I was up all night anyway, I was more than happy to demonstrate how hard it is to sleep with a dog barking incessantly. As an added bonus, keeping the dog up at night meant it tended to sleep during the day, and I got some blissful peace and quiet myself.
He moved out a few weeks later. I'm not sure if the dog barking had anything to do with it (there was a high turnover rate in our condos) but I was just glad he was gone. The new tenants were two college girls who liked to have really noisy sex from time to time. That I didn't mind as much, though it was a real conversation starter if I had people over myself. All in all, it was still better than living on base.
The Sub Base Nazis
These days, most naval facilities are guarded by civilian rent-a-cops. While I do have some great stories about them, today I'm thinking of a simpler time when Sub Base Pearl had a security force made up primarily of enlisted guys on shore duty. They had a tough job, since they were a natural target for all us disgruntled submariners who some would say tended to drink to excess. Add to that the fact that most of the "cops" were skimmers, and you can just imagine the crap they took trying to keep the peace on the mean streets of Pearl.
Things came to a head one night when security stopped a couple of A-gangers off the Buffalo who were staggering home from Beeman's. We don't know exactly what happened, but one of them managed to steal the "police" car (in reality just another white Navy sedan with a bubble light) and took it for a drunken joy ride all around the Air Force base next door. Even though no one was hurt, the base command freaked out and bought in some hard-ass skimmer lieutenant to take over the security team.
Things got bad in a hurry. The first thing they changed was their whole look - rather than wearing the normal Navy uniforms with arm bands, they started walking around in these all-black stormtrooper outfits, complete with gun and badge. Then their vehicles got repainted to look like real cop cars, and after a few months that's exactly who they thought they were.
Where before the security guys would only hassle you if it looked like you were up to no good (which was often, I'll admit), these new guys would randomly stop anyone not wearing khaki and check their IDs. They started searching the barracks on a weekly basis with the biggest, meanest dogs you ever saw - at first for drugs, but then just to be pricks. We even had guys busted for talking back when security stopped them, which is damn-near a birth right for submariners. And, if they did pick you up, chances are you were going to get the snot knocked out of you on the way to the brig. The Navy, as it so often does, had gone from one extreme to the other.
We complained, but nothing happened until the day they made the mistake of arresting our CO.
One of the things he liked to do was go running at lunch time. At first, all the JO's were jogging with him (never miss an opportunity to shine a little ass, as they say), but the XO put a stop to that in a hurry. He pointedly remarked that, if they had time to go jogging during the normal working day, they obviously weren't all that busy. So the CO ended up jogging alone on North Road most days, which is what he was doing when base security stopped him.
They asked to see his ID, which was a problem because he'd left his wallet in his stateroom. Rather than just escorting him back to the boat (where one assumes they could easily confirm his identity) they instead chose to put the cuffs on him and take him to jail. You might think it's sort of ballsy for a pair of E-4's to arrest a senior Captain in the middle of a Navy base, but the CO never told them who he was.
Our CO was known for this sort of thing. When we got a new ensign, our CO usually picked him up at the airport himself, wearing an enlisted uniform he borrowed from one of the cones. Then he would complain about how crappy the boat was all the way back, just to see what the new butterbar would do. When the security Nazis started hassling him, the CO decided to see what would happen if they thought he was just another blueshirt.
The skipper ended up spending about an hour in jail. Of course, when he didn't come back from his run, the XO and the COB went looking for him. But, by the time they found out he'd been apprehended, the CO was already a free man.
When they arrested him, the base cops told our captain to call his command and tell them what had happened. So that's just what he did: our CO called his CO, the commodore who ran Squadron One, and explained that he'd been arrested while exercising because he didn't have his ID card on him. Instead of just calling back and chewing some ass, the commodore instead called up the CO of Sub Base (who he outranked by a considerable amount) and asked him to go for a little ride.
When all this brass converged on the security office at the same time, the "cops" therein practically busted a gut getting the old man out of his cell. But the damage was done. The Sub Base CO took away all their fancy uniforms and put them back in whites, sans badges, guns, and cop cars. Their lieutenant was quietly replaced with a no-bullshit Senior Chief shortly thereafter, and they went back to writing parking tickets and rounding up drunks on Saturday nights. I'm assuming that busting our CO was not exactly career-enhancing, but who knows?
Things came to a head one night when security stopped a couple of A-gangers off the Buffalo who were staggering home from Beeman's. We don't know exactly what happened, but one of them managed to steal the "police" car (in reality just another white Navy sedan with a bubble light) and took it for a drunken joy ride all around the Air Force base next door. Even though no one was hurt, the base command freaked out and bought in some hard-ass skimmer lieutenant to take over the security team.
Things got bad in a hurry. The first thing they changed was their whole look - rather than wearing the normal Navy uniforms with arm bands, they started walking around in these all-black stormtrooper outfits, complete with gun and badge. Then their vehicles got repainted to look like real cop cars, and after a few months that's exactly who they thought they were.
Where before the security guys would only hassle you if it looked like you were up to no good (which was often, I'll admit), these new guys would randomly stop anyone not wearing khaki and check their IDs. They started searching the barracks on a weekly basis with the biggest, meanest dogs you ever saw - at first for drugs, but then just to be pricks. We even had guys busted for talking back when security stopped them, which is damn-near a birth right for submariners. And, if they did pick you up, chances are you were going to get the snot knocked out of you on the way to the brig. The Navy, as it so often does, had gone from one extreme to the other.
We complained, but nothing happened until the day they made the mistake of arresting our CO.
One of the things he liked to do was go running at lunch time. At first, all the JO's were jogging with him (never miss an opportunity to shine a little ass, as they say), but the XO put a stop to that in a hurry. He pointedly remarked that, if they had time to go jogging during the normal working day, they obviously weren't all that busy. So the CO ended up jogging alone on North Road most days, which is what he was doing when base security stopped him.
They asked to see his ID, which was a problem because he'd left his wallet in his stateroom. Rather than just escorting him back to the boat (where one assumes they could easily confirm his identity) they instead chose to put the cuffs on him and take him to jail. You might think it's sort of ballsy for a pair of E-4's to arrest a senior Captain in the middle of a Navy base, but the CO never told them who he was.
Our CO was known for this sort of thing. When we got a new ensign, our CO usually picked him up at the airport himself, wearing an enlisted uniform he borrowed from one of the cones. Then he would complain about how crappy the boat was all the way back, just to see what the new butterbar would do. When the security Nazis started hassling him, the CO decided to see what would happen if they thought he was just another blueshirt.
The skipper ended up spending about an hour in jail. Of course, when he didn't come back from his run, the XO and the COB went looking for him. But, by the time they found out he'd been apprehended, the CO was already a free man.
When they arrested him, the base cops told our captain to call his command and tell them what had happened. So that's just what he did: our CO called his CO, the commodore who ran Squadron One, and explained that he'd been arrested while exercising because he didn't have his ID card on him. Instead of just calling back and chewing some ass, the commodore instead called up the CO of Sub Base (who he outranked by a considerable amount) and asked him to go for a little ride.
When all this brass converged on the security office at the same time, the "cops" therein practically busted a gut getting the old man out of his cell. But the damage was done. The Sub Base CO took away all their fancy uniforms and put them back in whites, sans badges, guns, and cop cars. Their lieutenant was quietly replaced with a no-bullshit Senior Chief shortly thereafter, and they went back to writing parking tickets and rounding up drunks on Saturday nights. I'm assuming that busting our CO was not exactly career-enhancing, but who knows?
An Anti-C Story
I was in the second-to-last class to go through prototype at S1W. As most of you know, this was the first Navy prototype, ever, so it had been around a while. In fact, about one out of every five “drills” was often the real thing; that plant had the worst attitude I’d ever seen in the program, and that includes my own.
One of the things we all had to do before we graduated was an “end of the world” drill in full anti-C’s. These were typically huge productions with twenty or so students actually playing, several staff guys supervising, and everyone from IBO on down monitoring. Since we couldn’t all fit in hull, they always ran the drill on the starboard floor inside the main building, where a lot of the auxiliary systems were located.
When my section got to run the drill, they had us suit up in the outhull building and then muster for a pre-drill briefing before going inside. The novelty of wearing anti-C’s (a.k.a. “Devo suits”, if you’ve never had the pleasure) had yet to wear off, and we were all pretty excited. Besides, it beat studying for checkouts or trying to look busy for twelve hours.
Just before the briefing started, we were joined by one other student in anti-C’s, a relative newcomer to our plant: Miss L. She was one of a handful of civilians going through the officer version of prototype. Back when I went through school, there were no female nucs, (and there were only two women at the site, period; the other worked in the cafeteria) so she always got noticed anywhere she went in the plant. We blueshirts were under strict orders from our TC to be polite, but avoid unnecessary contact with, Miss L. This wasn’t much of a problem; although she was quite the little flirt (especially when trying to get a checkout), she only seemed interested in the officers.
So we got down to business in-hull, cleaning up the spill and trying to put on a show for all the people watching. Inevitably the spill was located in the dirtiest place they could find, probably to maximize the field day potential of a bunch of enthusiastic nubs with kimwipes. While the cleanup was fairly easy, removing your anti-C’s correctly once it was over (and while thirty or so guys are watching for any screwup) was a real pain.
But the drill got interesting when Miss L set the radiac off while she was doing a survey, and it was traced to her anti-C's. This was not unusual at our site; S1W was out in the middle of the desert, and there are lots of natural sources of short-lived radiation in the ground. Since we’d just surveyed the heck out of that little patch of the plant, we weren’t especially concerned; you just take off the anti-C’s like always and frisk out. That was until Miss L. started frantically whispering with the staff guy who was monitoring the control point.
Apparently, rather than putting on her anti-C’s over her clothing like normal, she’d instead stripped down and was wearing nothing but skivvies under her suit. While humorous, this wouldn’t have normally been a problem, except now that we had a real situation they couldn’t just stop the drill and let her go change somewhere else. And she sure wasn’t planning on taking them off in front of half the plant.
With the clock ticking and IBO glaring, the staff guys came up with a quick improvisation: they extended the boundary to a nearby bathroom and had her change into a paper poopie suit there. Our shift’s lead ELT was sweating bullets; if she needed to be decontaminated we were up the creek, since there were no female ELTs to do it on site, and the nearest civilian rad techs were a half hour away. Not to mention they’d have to survey the whole bathroom once she got done.
Luckily she frisked out clean, but they never let her play in this kind of drill again. And, from then on out, whenever we were training on donning anti-C’s, the staff always reminded us in a pointed fashion to put them on OVER our dungarees.
One of the things we all had to do before we graduated was an “end of the world” drill in full anti-C’s. These were typically huge productions with twenty or so students actually playing, several staff guys supervising, and everyone from IBO on down monitoring. Since we couldn’t all fit in hull, they always ran the drill on the starboard floor inside the main building, where a lot of the auxiliary systems were located.
When my section got to run the drill, they had us suit up in the outhull building and then muster for a pre-drill briefing before going inside. The novelty of wearing anti-C’s (a.k.a. “Devo suits”, if you’ve never had the pleasure) had yet to wear off, and we were all pretty excited. Besides, it beat studying for checkouts or trying to look busy for twelve hours.
Just before the briefing started, we were joined by one other student in anti-C’s, a relative newcomer to our plant: Miss L. She was one of a handful of civilians going through the officer version of prototype. Back when I went through school, there were no female nucs, (and there were only two women at the site, period; the other worked in the cafeteria) so she always got noticed anywhere she went in the plant. We blueshirts were under strict orders from our TC to be polite, but avoid unnecessary contact with, Miss L. This wasn’t much of a problem; although she was quite the little flirt (especially when trying to get a checkout), she only seemed interested in the officers.
So we got down to business in-hull, cleaning up the spill and trying to put on a show for all the people watching. Inevitably the spill was located in the dirtiest place they could find, probably to maximize the field day potential of a bunch of enthusiastic nubs with kimwipes. While the cleanup was fairly easy, removing your anti-C’s correctly once it was over (and while thirty or so guys are watching for any screwup) was a real pain.
But the drill got interesting when Miss L set the radiac off while she was doing a survey, and it was traced to her anti-C's. This was not unusual at our site; S1W was out in the middle of the desert, and there are lots of natural sources of short-lived radiation in the ground. Since we’d just surveyed the heck out of that little patch of the plant, we weren’t especially concerned; you just take off the anti-C’s like always and frisk out. That was until Miss L. started frantically whispering with the staff guy who was monitoring the control point.
Apparently, rather than putting on her anti-C’s over her clothing like normal, she’d instead stripped down and was wearing nothing but skivvies under her suit. While humorous, this wouldn’t have normally been a problem, except now that we had a real situation they couldn’t just stop the drill and let her go change somewhere else. And she sure wasn’t planning on taking them off in front of half the plant.
With the clock ticking and IBO glaring, the staff guys came up with a quick improvisation: they extended the boundary to a nearby bathroom and had her change into a paper poopie suit there. Our shift’s lead ELT was sweating bullets; if she needed to be decontaminated we were up the creek, since there were no female ELTs to do it on site, and the nearest civilian rad techs were a half hour away. Not to mention they’d have to survey the whole bathroom once she got done.
Luckily she frisked out clean, but they never let her play in this kind of drill again. And, from then on out, whenever we were training on donning anti-C’s, the staff always reminded us in a pointed fashion to put them on OVER our dungarees.
Tales of the Occult
You may have heard sailors are an exceptionally superstitious lot, but you really don’t believe it until you see grown men, many with six or more years of higher education, chanting and waving chicken bones in an attempt to get an MG to start up correctly. And they’re not playing around; on my first boat there was a standing order not to touch the little rubber gremlins stashed in a certain troublesome piece of Nav gear in the overhead outside Radio. The only time the gear seemed to break was if someone messed with the gremlins, so after a while we just accepted the fact that not everything you need to know is written in the tech manual.
My second boat was haunted by two different ghosts. The first was some dead officer we were supposed to bury at sea. They gave us his ashes in a jar, and for some reason they ended up stowed in a locker outboard some switchgear in the engine room. Unfortunately, we missed our opportunity to do the burial (bad weather, which also screwed us out of the follow-up swim call) and the jar somehow was overlooked when we turned over to the other crew. It was only after they turned back over to us, and we went out on patrol, that the weird, creepy shit started happening.
First, that switchgear became the bane of our existence. Grounds we couldn’t isolate, fuses that would just blow for no reason, and one huge AC breaker that would just trip (and sometimes fail to close) seemingly at random. Then the ghost started screwing with us directly.
Almost all of the watchstanders in upper level reported strange happenings. They’d take their logs, hang them up, and the clipboard would mysteriously vanish, only to reappear a second later. Many of us would be walking along and suddenly find ourselves in a pocket of cold air, much, much colder than the rest of the engine room (that part was actually okay, especially during drills). Sometimes you’d get this creepy sensation like someone was watching you, but you were all alone. At least three guys said they’d felt someone tap them on the shoulder; when they spun around, no one was there.
Like I said, the old bastard was just fucking with us.
It was during one of our little troubleshooting sessions on the breaker that we found the urn while looking for a place to stash some parts. We took it up forward and almost immediately all the weird stuff stopped happening back aft. When gear started breaking up forward, the crew pretty unanimously demanded we get rid of the ashes ASAP. Since we couldn’t surface where we were, they ended up using the TDU. Probably not as ceremonious as it should have been, but better than admitting we’d “misplaced” the remains for over a year.
The second ghost got triper’d on with a lube oil pump a few patrols later. The lower level watches kept seeing someone wearing a blue poopie suit darting around in lower level; at first they thought it was the EWS or ERS, but when they’d go to check, no one was there. This ghost didn’t do much more than play peek-a-boo, so it became a generally-accepted part of life at sea. Since it liked being back aft so much, we even toyed with the idea of qualifying it, but the Eng wouldn’t sign the card when it was filled out.
When we pulled back in, the rumor we heard was that either an electrician or a mechanic had been electrocuted by the pump on some other boat, which is why it ended up in the shop before we got it. I was never able to substantiate this (we’re usually told when something bad like that happens on another boat as sort of a morbid cautionary tale), but both crews continued to see the ghost up until we went in the yards. Even a ghost can’t stand being in the shipyard for long.
My second boat was haunted by two different ghosts. The first was some dead officer we were supposed to bury at sea. They gave us his ashes in a jar, and for some reason they ended up stowed in a locker outboard some switchgear in the engine room. Unfortunately, we missed our opportunity to do the burial (bad weather, which also screwed us out of the follow-up swim call) and the jar somehow was overlooked when we turned over to the other crew. It was only after they turned back over to us, and we went out on patrol, that the weird, creepy shit started happening.
First, that switchgear became the bane of our existence. Grounds we couldn’t isolate, fuses that would just blow for no reason, and one huge AC breaker that would just trip (and sometimes fail to close) seemingly at random. Then the ghost started screwing with us directly.
Almost all of the watchstanders in upper level reported strange happenings. They’d take their logs, hang them up, and the clipboard would mysteriously vanish, only to reappear a second later. Many of us would be walking along and suddenly find ourselves in a pocket of cold air, much, much colder than the rest of the engine room (that part was actually okay, especially during drills). Sometimes you’d get this creepy sensation like someone was watching you, but you were all alone. At least three guys said they’d felt someone tap them on the shoulder; when they spun around, no one was there.
Like I said, the old bastard was just fucking with us.
It was during one of our little troubleshooting sessions on the breaker that we found the urn while looking for a place to stash some parts. We took it up forward and almost immediately all the weird stuff stopped happening back aft. When gear started breaking up forward, the crew pretty unanimously demanded we get rid of the ashes ASAP. Since we couldn’t surface where we were, they ended up using the TDU. Probably not as ceremonious as it should have been, but better than admitting we’d “misplaced” the remains for over a year.
The second ghost got triper’d on with a lube oil pump a few patrols later. The lower level watches kept seeing someone wearing a blue poopie suit darting around in lower level; at first they thought it was the EWS or ERS, but when they’d go to check, no one was there. This ghost didn’t do much more than play peek-a-boo, so it became a generally-accepted part of life at sea. Since it liked being back aft so much, we even toyed with the idea of qualifying it, but the Eng wouldn’t sign the card when it was filled out.
When we pulled back in, the rumor we heard was that either an electrician or a mechanic had been electrocuted by the pump on some other boat, which is why it ended up in the shop before we got it. I was never able to substantiate this (we’re usually told when something bad like that happens on another boat as sort of a morbid cautionary tale), but both crews continued to see the ghost up until we went in the yards. Even a ghost can’t stand being in the shipyard for long.
Maid for the Barracks
You know, I love giving the zeros crap over all the little perks they get to emphasize how much better they are than us, but in reality the one time we got them ourselves we hated it. Of course, the Navy didn’t set out to reward us or try to make our lives better; it was just one Navy organization gouging another, with us in the middle.
Towards the end of 1991 we had to go in the yards for an extended availability. It was supposed to last 6 months; in reality it took 18. No Ka Oi! Anyhow, back then everyone from my boat who wasn’t smart enough to get married had to live in the oldest, nastiest, most run-down cinderblock uglies this side of a Bangkok prison. Ours were so bad, in fact, that they were going to be condemned and knocked down as soon as we went in the yards.
You see, when a boat goes in the yards, the shipyard becomes the “parent” command for the boat, and the Navy actually pays them to take care of us. Part of that is supplying quarters for the single guys, something the Navy pays out the ass for. Since the shipyard doesn't have barracks of its own, the shipyard would normally just put us up in hotel rooms for the duration, but that meant actually spending the money the Navy gave them for us ON us. No profit in that, brudda.
In our case, the shipyard originally wanted to move us to some abandoned barracks on Ford Island, left over from back when they thought they were going to home port a battleship there (what’s Ford Island without a battleship, folks?). But this was not the Ford Island we know and love today, easily accessible by bridge and relatively modern; Ford Island in ’91 was a run-down ghost town with nothing in the way of amenities and only accessible by boat.
It was that last fact that got the command into it on our side. Not that they were particularly worried about our well-being, only our recall-ability. For years the traditional response to any problem in the middle of the night was to send someone from the duty section up to the barracks to round up help; this wouldn’t have worked on Ford Island because the small boats didn’t run all night.
Calling in the married guys never occurred to them, mainly because wives tend to write their congressmen when you do.
So, rather than moving us to Ford Island, the shipyard convinced the Navy to “un-condemn” our barracks, and let us stay there. That worked for a few weeks, until someone on the boat realized that the Navy was paying the shipyard to let us live in the very same barracks we’d always lived in for the bargain price of about $150 per person per day. Why did it cost the Shipyard so much more?
The shipyard responded by hiring maids to come in and straighten up the rooms while we were out, supposedly justifying the obscene amount of money being paid for our room and board. For the first few days, this was pretty sweet... until things started to go missing.
Thievery in the barracks was always a problem, but it was usually a consequence of going off and leaving your room unlocked. This time, it was apparently obvious where all the stuff was going. After numerous complaints to the COB, he started having people covertly in the vicinity of the barracks when the maids were doing their thing. What they found was disgusting:
(1) The maids were eating, and drinking, whatever they wanted out of our pathetic little refrigerators. Since they mainly contained beer, and you do NOT MESS WITH THE BEER, this alone would have been a show-stopper.
(2) The maids would frequently take a break, either watching TV or calling long distance on the phone (if you actually had one, back in the days before cell phones), sometimes scratching their ass or wiping a booger or two on the furniture.
(3) We all had bunk beds (just like camp – enlist today!). Since most of the maids were about five feet tall, they’d stand on the lower bed to make the upper one, then make the lower one. Usually right after they’d finished mucking out the bathroom. There’s nothing like a big slimy footprint on your sheets to wrap up a 14-hour “normal work day” in the yards.
(4) And, lots of little stuff like CDs, VHS tapes, and video game cartridges continued to vanish.
In response, we started hanging “NO MAID SERVICE” signs on our doors, until it reached the point where the maids weren’t welcome in any of the rooms. Perhaps this was the intent all along – the Navy kept on paying the shipyard enough to keep us in a hotel on the beach, and didn’t have to provide anything beyond a crumbling barracks because WE had rejected any other “amenities”. That’s why I laugh when I hear about $60,000 hammers in the news; those guys are amateurs compared to the shipyard.
Towards the end of 1991 we had to go in the yards for an extended availability. It was supposed to last 6 months; in reality it took 18. No Ka Oi! Anyhow, back then everyone from my boat who wasn’t smart enough to get married had to live in the oldest, nastiest, most run-down cinderblock uglies this side of a Bangkok prison. Ours were so bad, in fact, that they were going to be condemned and knocked down as soon as we went in the yards.
You see, when a boat goes in the yards, the shipyard becomes the “parent” command for the boat, and the Navy actually pays them to take care of us. Part of that is supplying quarters for the single guys, something the Navy pays out the ass for. Since the shipyard doesn't have barracks of its own, the shipyard would normally just put us up in hotel rooms for the duration, but that meant actually spending the money the Navy gave them for us ON us. No profit in that, brudda.
In our case, the shipyard originally wanted to move us to some abandoned barracks on Ford Island, left over from back when they thought they were going to home port a battleship there (what’s Ford Island without a battleship, folks?). But this was not the Ford Island we know and love today, easily accessible by bridge and relatively modern; Ford Island in ’91 was a run-down ghost town with nothing in the way of amenities and only accessible by boat.
It was that last fact that got the command into it on our side. Not that they were particularly worried about our well-being, only our recall-ability. For years the traditional response to any problem in the middle of the night was to send someone from the duty section up to the barracks to round up help; this wouldn’t have worked on Ford Island because the small boats didn’t run all night.
Calling in the married guys never occurred to them, mainly because wives tend to write their congressmen when you do.
So, rather than moving us to Ford Island, the shipyard convinced the Navy to “un-condemn” our barracks, and let us stay there. That worked for a few weeks, until someone on the boat realized that the Navy was paying the shipyard to let us live in the very same barracks we’d always lived in for the bargain price of about $150 per person per day. Why did it cost the Shipyard so much more?
The shipyard responded by hiring maids to come in and straighten up the rooms while we were out, supposedly justifying the obscene amount of money being paid for our room and board. For the first few days, this was pretty sweet... until things started to go missing.
Thievery in the barracks was always a problem, but it was usually a consequence of going off and leaving your room unlocked. This time, it was apparently obvious where all the stuff was going. After numerous complaints to the COB, he started having people covertly in the vicinity of the barracks when the maids were doing their thing. What they found was disgusting:
(1) The maids were eating, and drinking, whatever they wanted out of our pathetic little refrigerators. Since they mainly contained beer, and you do NOT MESS WITH THE BEER, this alone would have been a show-stopper.
(2) The maids would frequently take a break, either watching TV or calling long distance on the phone (if you actually had one, back in the days before cell phones), sometimes scratching their ass or wiping a booger or two on the furniture.
(3) We all had bunk beds (just like camp – enlist today!). Since most of the maids were about five feet tall, they’d stand on the lower bed to make the upper one, then make the lower one. Usually right after they’d finished mucking out the bathroom. There’s nothing like a big slimy footprint on your sheets to wrap up a 14-hour “normal work day” in the yards.
(4) And, lots of little stuff like CDs, VHS tapes, and video game cartridges continued to vanish.
In response, we started hanging “NO MAID SERVICE” signs on our doors, until it reached the point where the maids weren’t welcome in any of the rooms. Perhaps this was the intent all along – the Navy kept on paying the shipyard enough to keep us in a hotel on the beach, and didn’t have to provide anything beyond a crumbling barracks because WE had rejected any other “amenities”. That’s why I laugh when I hear about $60,000 hammers in the news; those guys are amateurs compared to the shipyard.
The Recirc Pump
It should come as no surprise that space is extremely limited aboard a sub, even a monster like a Trident. If there is a choice between some new gadget for the forward ETs or something to make life easier for the crew, the gadget always wins. But there is one odd exception: The CO’s Recirc Pump.
This pump exists solely so the CO and XO (who share a private bathroom) will have hot water the instant they turn on a faucet, rather than having to wait a second for it to warm up like us common folk. Sure, it probably saves a half-gallon or two of water, but its real purpose is to re-enforce their superiority.
The problem is not the pump as much as where they put it – right next to the hallway where you have to wait with fifty other guys for every meal. While you stand there, thinking about all the mistakes in your life that led you to this point, there’s that pump, mocking you. And the switch is right there, too.
So it should also come as no surprise that the recirc pump is often mysteriously shut off, usually right around meal times. It got so bad on my first boat that they actually caution-tagged it on. When that failed, they posted a watch. You heard me right – some poor cone got to spend the entire watch making sure no one made the CO wait for hot water. It’s not just a job, after all.
Even more mysterious, around the time that cones were grumbling about this situation, one of the overloads on the switch for the pump failed, and couldn’t be fixed until we pulled back in. No point in the watch, when the pump had to stay tagged out for a few weeks. They never stationed it again after it was fixed, but they did relocate the chow line down to lower level and away from temptation.
This pump exists solely so the CO and XO (who share a private bathroom) will have hot water the instant they turn on a faucet, rather than having to wait a second for it to warm up like us common folk. Sure, it probably saves a half-gallon or two of water, but its real purpose is to re-enforce their superiority.
The problem is not the pump as much as where they put it – right next to the hallway where you have to wait with fifty other guys for every meal. While you stand there, thinking about all the mistakes in your life that led you to this point, there’s that pump, mocking you. And the switch is right there, too.
So it should also come as no surprise that the recirc pump is often mysteriously shut off, usually right around meal times. It got so bad on my first boat that they actually caution-tagged it on. When that failed, they posted a watch. You heard me right – some poor cone got to spend the entire watch making sure no one made the CO wait for hot water. It’s not just a job, after all.
Even more mysterious, around the time that cones were grumbling about this situation, one of the overloads on the switch for the pump failed, and couldn’t be fixed until we pulled back in. No point in the watch, when the pump had to stay tagged out for a few weeks. They never stationed it again after it was fixed, but they did relocate the chow line down to lower level and away from temptation.
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...
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...
Why We Can’t Afford Tools: Relamping
There's nothing like a good old career-making inspection to bring out the hypocrite in all of us. ORSE is a great example; the engine room needs to be cleaned and polished up like a '56 Ford in an auto show, but during the inspection we're not allowed to have any cleaning gear back aft, period. Is the ORSE team supposed to think it ALWAYS looks that way? They're all nucs, too - they know you just spent the last five weeks cleaning, drilling, and auditing paperwork. It's all a big act.
One of the dumbest things we did before a big inspection is re-lamping the engine room. The theory was that one burned out (or, god-forbid, blinking) fluorescent bulb could cost the Eng his chance at the big time, so E-div got to go around and change out every single freaking bulb in the engine room before we left on work-ups.
There are lots of problems with this, not the least of which is trying to dispose of thousands of perfectly good, but fragile-as-china fluorescent bulbs. One time we accidentally dropped one over the side when crossing the brow. We knew the first khaki who saw it would throw a fit, so we threw rocks at it until it broke up and sank. When it imploded, it created an impressive geyser of water that caught the topside's eye. He had us leave the rest of the bulbs with him, and he spent the rest of the watch "depth charging" them with coffee cups.
Another problem with changing out bulbs is that the parts that break most often are the parts that only get used when the fixture is first turned on. Since the lights are never off in the engine room (unless we've let a mechanic shift the plant), you don't know there's a problem until you swap out bulbs and the new ones won't turn on. Congratulations; you've just changed a perfectly good light fixture into a broke-dick P.O.S. that will take hours to tag out and fix.
But the best re-lamping incident happened right before ORSE on my first boat. As many of you know, fluorescent bulbs contain a minuscule amount of mercury, which vaporizes when the bulb is on to help support conduction from end to end. Since mercury is very hazardous, and the bulbs it's contained in are as sensitive as a twidget, someone back at NAVSEA got the brilliant idea of covering the bulbs with a thin coat of plastic in a vain attempt to make some sort of half-assed safety glass. And we were ordered to start using them right before the Great Pre-ORSE Re-lamping.
Then we left for the workup and inspection. For the first few weeks, everything was fine. But around the time we pulled in to pers-trans on the inspection team, the plastic coating on the bulbs started to turn yellow. The effect was immediate: not only did the engine room take on a sickly yellow pallor, but it looked like everything in it was covered with oil. If you stayed back there too long, everything being off-color would start to mess with your head.
The Eng was naturally horrified, but there was nothing we could do. The boat didn't carry enough bulbs to re-lamp it a second time, and changing out only part of the bulbs would just make the areas we didn't change look even worse. I'm sure someone explained the problem to the inspection team, but it didn't help; that was the lowest grade on an ORSE we ever got, even though there were no specific issues.
So, of course we got to re-lamp for a second time when we pulled back in, and of course lots more fixtures decided to stop working when we changed out their bulbs, resulting in even more fun. But the worst problem is that the plastic-coated bulbs didn't sink when you beaned them with a coffee cup. But that's why we give the topside watch a boat hook.
One of the dumbest things we did before a big inspection is re-lamping the engine room. The theory was that one burned out (or, god-forbid, blinking) fluorescent bulb could cost the Eng his chance at the big time, so E-div got to go around and change out every single freaking bulb in the engine room before we left on work-ups.
There are lots of problems with this, not the least of which is trying to dispose of thousands of perfectly good, but fragile-as-china fluorescent bulbs. One time we accidentally dropped one over the side when crossing the brow. We knew the first khaki who saw it would throw a fit, so we threw rocks at it until it broke up and sank. When it imploded, it created an impressive geyser of water that caught the topside's eye. He had us leave the rest of the bulbs with him, and he spent the rest of the watch "depth charging" them with coffee cups.
Another problem with changing out bulbs is that the parts that break most often are the parts that only get used when the fixture is first turned on. Since the lights are never off in the engine room (unless we've let a mechanic shift the plant), you don't know there's a problem until you swap out bulbs and the new ones won't turn on. Congratulations; you've just changed a perfectly good light fixture into a broke-dick P.O.S. that will take hours to tag out and fix.
But the best re-lamping incident happened right before ORSE on my first boat. As many of you know, fluorescent bulbs contain a minuscule amount of mercury, which vaporizes when the bulb is on to help support conduction from end to end. Since mercury is very hazardous, and the bulbs it's contained in are as sensitive as a twidget, someone back at NAVSEA got the brilliant idea of covering the bulbs with a thin coat of plastic in a vain attempt to make some sort of half-assed safety glass. And we were ordered to start using them right before the Great Pre-ORSE Re-lamping.
Then we left for the workup and inspection. For the first few weeks, everything was fine. But around the time we pulled in to pers-trans on the inspection team, the plastic coating on the bulbs started to turn yellow. The effect was immediate: not only did the engine room take on a sickly yellow pallor, but it looked like everything in it was covered with oil. If you stayed back there too long, everything being off-color would start to mess with your head.
The Eng was naturally horrified, but there was nothing we could do. The boat didn't carry enough bulbs to re-lamp it a second time, and changing out only part of the bulbs would just make the areas we didn't change look even worse. I'm sure someone explained the problem to the inspection team, but it didn't help; that was the lowest grade on an ORSE we ever got, even though there were no specific issues.
So, of course we got to re-lamp for a second time when we pulled back in, and of course lots more fixtures decided to stop working when we changed out their bulbs, resulting in even more fun. But the worst problem is that the plastic-coated bulbs didn't sink when you beaned them with a coffee cup. But that's why we give the topside watch a boat hook.
Zapped
Electricians on the boat are lucky, because we are the only ones who never get shocked (though you may occasionally see us jump back if we touch something "sharp" inside a controller). In fact, after fifteen years working around high voltage, the only time I ever got truly zapped was the one time I ignored my better instincts and just did as I was told.
At the time, I was a nub. A real nubby nub, not even qualified to run the ball valve on a shitter. It was one of my first duty days, and I was in middle level cleaning up after we'd just got done with the MG monthlies. The A-gang leading first (a huge bear of a man, who was only in the Navy because he was over-qualified to be a professional wrestler) came stomping by on his way to maneuvering. Then he came stomping by again, heading forward. He stopped, and looked at me like he'd never seen me before.
"You an electrician?" he growled (there's no other word for it)
"Uh-huh"
"Grab some tools and meet me in AMR - I need you to unhook a motor."
And then he left, leaving me to ponder exactly what tools I needed. I sure didn't want to screw anything up - it had been impressed on me from day one that, until you get your fish, you do not, under any circumstances, piss off A-gang. Not to mention the fact that most of them looked, and acted, like the Navy was the only thing between them and an Alabama chain gang.
I scurried up to AMR with a bag of miscellaneous tools and was presented with a big black cable coming out of one of the refrigeration compressors. In the center was a huge knot of rubber and vinyl tape - presumably where the cable connection was. "Hurry up" commanded the A-ganger, as he started to leave.
"Umm..." I asked nervously, "Do you need me to tag this out?"
"Nah, we took care of that" he replied, pointing out that the mechanical connections to the compressor were already disassembled. That just left the motor connections (in a junction box) and the cable going to the heaters.
Now, even an electrician nub knows better than to trust a non-electrician tagout. It's not that other rates don't know how to tag things out, it's that lots of equipment has multiple power supplies (sometimes for no apparent reason other than to make the tagout harder) that can easily be overlooked on a wiring schematic. It's almost like tribal knowledge, and A-gang just wasn't in the tribe.
So I started to leave to go get a multimeter to check it de-energized, and to make sure all the breakers were tagged. The A-ganger stopped me at the door to AMR.
"Just disconnect the fuckin' thing, nub" he ordered "It was supposed to be up on the pier two hours ago, and I'm tired of waiting on E-div to get their shit together".
"But..." I started to protest, before a look from him told me it was pointless, and probably suicidal, to argue with him.
I started hacking away at the ball of tape with my trusty dig'it tool. Sure enough, the one time I took someone's word for it, I got zapped. To make the day complete, when I stumbled back I ended up knocking half my tools into the bilge. But, no one else knew what had happened, and I sure wasn't going to tell. I grabbed some fuse pullers, found the power supply (the heaters were on a different circuit than the motor itself), and quickly de-energized it. By the time the leading first came back I managed to get the motor completely disconnected and some (but nowhere near all) of my tools out of the bilge.
That would probably have been the end of the story, except that I later went back and added the heater power supply to the original tagout. When it was time to reinstall the motor, the A-ganger noticed the extra tag and probably figured out what had happened. He never said anything about it to me, but I never got hassled by his brethren the way most of my fellow nubs did. Since I wasn't exactly the most knowledgeable nub around, I can only assume it was some sort of compensation for almost killing me.
Lesson learned - never trust someone else's tagout.
At the time, I was a nub. A real nubby nub, not even qualified to run the ball valve on a shitter. It was one of my first duty days, and I was in middle level cleaning up after we'd just got done with the MG monthlies. The A-gang leading first (a huge bear of a man, who was only in the Navy because he was over-qualified to be a professional wrestler) came stomping by on his way to maneuvering. Then he came stomping by again, heading forward. He stopped, and looked at me like he'd never seen me before.
"You an electrician?" he growled (there's no other word for it)
"Uh-huh"
"Grab some tools and meet me in AMR - I need you to unhook a motor."
And then he left, leaving me to ponder exactly what tools I needed. I sure didn't want to screw anything up - it had been impressed on me from day one that, until you get your fish, you do not, under any circumstances, piss off A-gang. Not to mention the fact that most of them looked, and acted, like the Navy was the only thing between them and an Alabama chain gang.
I scurried up to AMR with a bag of miscellaneous tools and was presented with a big black cable coming out of one of the refrigeration compressors. In the center was a huge knot of rubber and vinyl tape - presumably where the cable connection was. "Hurry up" commanded the A-ganger, as he started to leave.
"Umm..." I asked nervously, "Do you need me to tag this out?"
"Nah, we took care of that" he replied, pointing out that the mechanical connections to the compressor were already disassembled. That just left the motor connections (in a junction box) and the cable going to the heaters.
Now, even an electrician nub knows better than to trust a non-electrician tagout. It's not that other rates don't know how to tag things out, it's that lots of equipment has multiple power supplies (sometimes for no apparent reason other than to make the tagout harder) that can easily be overlooked on a wiring schematic. It's almost like tribal knowledge, and A-gang just wasn't in the tribe.
So I started to leave to go get a multimeter to check it de-energized, and to make sure all the breakers were tagged. The A-ganger stopped me at the door to AMR.
"Just disconnect the fuckin' thing, nub" he ordered "It was supposed to be up on the pier two hours ago, and I'm tired of waiting on E-div to get their shit together".
"But..." I started to protest, before a look from him told me it was pointless, and probably suicidal, to argue with him.
I started hacking away at the ball of tape with my trusty dig'it tool. Sure enough, the one time I took someone's word for it, I got zapped. To make the day complete, when I stumbled back I ended up knocking half my tools into the bilge. But, no one else knew what had happened, and I sure wasn't going to tell. I grabbed some fuse pullers, found the power supply (the heaters were on a different circuit than the motor itself), and quickly de-energized it. By the time the leading first came back I managed to get the motor completely disconnected and some (but nowhere near all) of my tools out of the bilge.
That would probably have been the end of the story, except that I later went back and added the heater power supply to the original tagout. When it was time to reinstall the motor, the A-ganger noticed the extra tag and probably figured out what had happened. He never said anything about it to me, but I never got hassled by his brethren the way most of my fellow nubs did. Since I wasn't exactly the most knowledgeable nub around, I can only assume it was some sort of compensation for almost killing me.
Lesson learned - never trust someone else's tagout.
The Great Cereal Caper
One time, I almost went to captain’s mast over cereal.
That in and of itself was not so unusual; I’m sure it will surprise no one that I went to mast lots of times during my hitch in the Fun Time Navy. Sometimes it was righteous, like the time I told a master chief he was all screwed up (apparently, you’re not allowed to do this, even if it’s true). Sometimes it was BS, like the time I got busted for “talking about non propulsion plant related material in maneuvering”. But nothing tops getting written up over cereal.
Believe it or not, cereal is actually very important on a boat. We usually didn’t have time to sit around in crew’s mess and wait on a cook to screw up eggs and bacon, so those little “fun-sized” boxes were all we had. When I first got to the boat, though, the only cereal we could get were some knock-off versions of raisin bran and cheerios.
Or, so we were led to believe.
A funny thing happens if you complain about the food enough – your chief makes you the division’s representative on something called the “menu review board”. That’s when the Chop and the MS chief pack twenty or so people in crew’s mess and lecture them for a half hour about how hard it is to balance nutrition and a limited food budget when you’ve got to cook a meal for one hundred guys in a kitchen about the same as you’d find in a small apartment.
But it did give me access to the catalog that lists what food they could order. Believe it or not, there was LOTS of good, brand-name crap in there. But when we asked the chop why he didn’t order us stuff like doritos and snickers bars, his response was “You guys would just eat it”. And this was the guy in charge of feeding us.
Anyhow, one day I got stuck working on a grounded circuit in the pantry. We’d had this intermittent ground for about two years on forward lighting, and it had become sort of a hobby for off watch electricians to try and find it (And, we did, too – it turned out there was a light switch, in the ceiling no less, right above where the cooks used to stick big pans of stuff to cool off. Every time they slammed a pan into the rack, it would smash into the switch. I’m positive some yardbird installed that switch there specifically to screw with electricians, but I digress). In the course of tracing a cable run, I had to unload the pantry cabinets and, since the pantry was already full, I ended up stacking the stuff up in crew’s mess.
About twenty minutes later one of the cooks comes in, all pissed off. It seems that one of the boxes I put out there was full of cereal. Not just any cereal, but all sorts of good stuff, like cocoa pebbles, frosted flakes, and (holiest of holies) captain crunch. It didn’t take long for someone to notice this forbidden fruit, and now crew’s mess was packed with sailors shoveling down cereal as fast as they could.
The problem was that all the “good” cereal was supposedly reserved for the officers. Whenever a box of assorted cereal came in, one of the cooks would go through it and sort out all the name brand stuff, leaving us blueshirt scum with the knock-offs. The MS’s, not to mention the denizens of the wardroom, were pissed I’d got into their secret stash; the MS chief stopped by personally to tell he wrote me up for stealing or misuse of government property or something else equally pointless.
Now, I didn’t mind that the crew thought I was playing Robin Hood, even though I had no idea what was in the in the boxes when I set them out there. But I didn’t feel like going to mast because some hungry guys got to eat something other that gruel for a change. When the chief got done, I just quietly reminded him of all the stuff I overlooked whenever I had to work on the galley gear; stuff that I could have just as easily shown to Doc, which would have resulted in a cleaning frenzy the likes of which the cooks only saw around the NEY competition. Plus, there’s just too many ways an electrician can ruin your day, be it gear mysteriously tagged out when you need it most, or a rack light that just won’t stay on for more than thirty seconds at a time. Somehow the report chit never made it to the XO.
But at least we had something more that "oaty-o's" to eat for breakfast after that. Now that we knew what the cooks were up to, they had to put some of the good stuff out on the mess decks to keep us from raiding the pantry. I count that as a victory, sort of.
That in and of itself was not so unusual; I’m sure it will surprise no one that I went to mast lots of times during my hitch in the Fun Time Navy. Sometimes it was righteous, like the time I told a master chief he was all screwed up (apparently, you’re not allowed to do this, even if it’s true). Sometimes it was BS, like the time I got busted for “talking about non propulsion plant related material in maneuvering”. But nothing tops getting written up over cereal.
Believe it or not, cereal is actually very important on a boat. We usually didn’t have time to sit around in crew’s mess and wait on a cook to screw up eggs and bacon, so those little “fun-sized” boxes were all we had. When I first got to the boat, though, the only cereal we could get were some knock-off versions of raisin bran and cheerios.
Or, so we were led to believe.
A funny thing happens if you complain about the food enough – your chief makes you the division’s representative on something called the “menu review board”. That’s when the Chop and the MS chief pack twenty or so people in crew’s mess and lecture them for a half hour about how hard it is to balance nutrition and a limited food budget when you’ve got to cook a meal for one hundred guys in a kitchen about the same as you’d find in a small apartment.
But it did give me access to the catalog that lists what food they could order. Believe it or not, there was LOTS of good, brand-name crap in there. But when we asked the chop why he didn’t order us stuff like doritos and snickers bars, his response was “You guys would just eat it”. And this was the guy in charge of feeding us.
Anyhow, one day I got stuck working on a grounded circuit in the pantry. We’d had this intermittent ground for about two years on forward lighting, and it had become sort of a hobby for off watch electricians to try and find it (And, we did, too – it turned out there was a light switch, in the ceiling no less, right above where the cooks used to stick big pans of stuff to cool off. Every time they slammed a pan into the rack, it would smash into the switch. I’m positive some yardbird installed that switch there specifically to screw with electricians, but I digress). In the course of tracing a cable run, I had to unload the pantry cabinets and, since the pantry was already full, I ended up stacking the stuff up in crew’s mess.
About twenty minutes later one of the cooks comes in, all pissed off. It seems that one of the boxes I put out there was full of cereal. Not just any cereal, but all sorts of good stuff, like cocoa pebbles, frosted flakes, and (holiest of holies) captain crunch. It didn’t take long for someone to notice this forbidden fruit, and now crew’s mess was packed with sailors shoveling down cereal as fast as they could.
The problem was that all the “good” cereal was supposedly reserved for the officers. Whenever a box of assorted cereal came in, one of the cooks would go through it and sort out all the name brand stuff, leaving us blueshirt scum with the knock-offs. The MS’s, not to mention the denizens of the wardroom, were pissed I’d got into their secret stash; the MS chief stopped by personally to tell he wrote me up for stealing or misuse of government property or something else equally pointless.
Now, I didn’t mind that the crew thought I was playing Robin Hood, even though I had no idea what was in the in the boxes when I set them out there. But I didn’t feel like going to mast because some hungry guys got to eat something other that gruel for a change. When the chief got done, I just quietly reminded him of all the stuff I overlooked whenever I had to work on the galley gear; stuff that I could have just as easily shown to Doc, which would have resulted in a cleaning frenzy the likes of which the cooks only saw around the NEY competition. Plus, there’s just too many ways an electrician can ruin your day, be it gear mysteriously tagged out when you need it most, or a rack light that just won’t stay on for more than thirty seconds at a time. Somehow the report chit never made it to the XO.
But at least we had something more that "oaty-o's" to eat for breakfast after that. Now that we knew what the cooks were up to, they had to put some of the good stuff out on the mess decks to keep us from raiding the pantry. I count that as a victory, sort of.
The Oly in Oly
Words cannot describe how happy we were to leave Pearl behind and return to the States for a few weeks. Yeah, sure, Ha-vi-ee is supposedly a state, but I didn’t see a lot of difference between Oahu and Guam, Singapore, or any of the other Pacific rocks we’d been stuck on. Hawaii has Pearl Harbor, Washington has Bangor. In Pearl everything’s so nut-to-butt you feel like you’re at sea; the Bangor submarine base was so big that some of the roads had a speed limit of 55 mph (back then). There are more trees in the exchange parking lot in Bangor than there are on the whole base in Pearl. The list goes on and on.
Now, we were supposedly heading back to do some upkeep stuff at Bangor, but most of the time it was liberty ports. And the best, by far, was the city of Olympia. Our boat didn’t have a great relationship with our namesake; the last time we’d stopped by we were greeted with protesters carrying “Disown the Death Ship!” signs. But this time was after Desert Storm, where even the hippies were supporting the troops. Needless to say, we were front-page news the whole time we were there.
We showed up with a bang. Literally. The diesel they gave us for shore power ate itself, and we ended up having to rig hoses topside to fight the fire, because the pier was so jam-packed with gawkers and press that the fire trucks couldn’t get to the scene. We were a little amused at all the attention, but we assumed it was a one-time thing. We were SO wrong.
Everybody in the city wanted to tour the boat. At first, the CO tried to control this by handing out a certain number of passes per day (mainly to politicians and other people worth brown-nosing), but that scheme quickly fell apart. Every day, there was a line of people waiting for a tour that stretched the length of the pier. This gave us a huge bargaining chip with the locals, since we could give them a “personal” tour, allowing them to bypass the line. Can you say “boat groupie?”.
The SK’s made out like bandits selling crap with the boat’s logo on it – they sold virtually everything in the ship’s store (including those crappy lighters). In fact, after they ran out of junk to sell, some local guy started selling home-made boat shirts on the pier, and our Chop actually considered buying him out.
We did get one protester, though I think he was protesting the basic concept of paying for a military, and not us in particular. Since the nearest military base was to the north in Tacoma, we probably made his week by cutting down the travel time. He had a cooler full of soda, which he was giving away to anyone who’d listen to his rant. The locals waiting for a tour did their best to ignore him, but we didn’t – free soda is free soda. The only reason we stopped was the Nav said it looked bad to have a bunch of us standing around his little table.
I screwed up the first night, and ditched before someone could order me to go out in a dress uniform. That was understandable; wearing a uniform off base was a solid gold guarantee no woman would ever speak to you and looked like a big sign that said “please come fuck me up” to everyone else. But not in Olympia – we were rock stars that first night. I actually had to team up with some cones who were in uniform to get in on the action. Lots of free stuff that night, and life was good.
About halfway through our visit the command rounded us all up, cleaned us up somewhat, and presented us to the governor. That was a long day, made even longer by the swarms of vets they also invited to the ceremony. We didn’t mind, except they had a tendency to corner you and talk your ear off about how things were when THEY were in. Sea stories are like going for a trip in the car – time passes faster if you’re the one driving.
Now, we were supposedly heading back to do some upkeep stuff at Bangor, but most of the time it was liberty ports. And the best, by far, was the city of Olympia. Our boat didn’t have a great relationship with our namesake; the last time we’d stopped by we were greeted with protesters carrying “Disown the Death Ship!” signs. But this time was after Desert Storm, where even the hippies were supporting the troops. Needless to say, we were front-page news the whole time we were there.
We showed up with a bang. Literally. The diesel they gave us for shore power ate itself, and we ended up having to rig hoses topside to fight the fire, because the pier was so jam-packed with gawkers and press that the fire trucks couldn’t get to the scene. We were a little amused at all the attention, but we assumed it was a one-time thing. We were SO wrong.
Everybody in the city wanted to tour the boat. At first, the CO tried to control this by handing out a certain number of passes per day (mainly to politicians and other people worth brown-nosing), but that scheme quickly fell apart. Every day, there was a line of people waiting for a tour that stretched the length of the pier. This gave us a huge bargaining chip with the locals, since we could give them a “personal” tour, allowing them to bypass the line. Can you say “boat groupie?”.
The SK’s made out like bandits selling crap with the boat’s logo on it – they sold virtually everything in the ship’s store (including those crappy lighters). In fact, after they ran out of junk to sell, some local guy started selling home-made boat shirts on the pier, and our Chop actually considered buying him out.
We did get one protester, though I think he was protesting the basic concept of paying for a military, and not us in particular. Since the nearest military base was to the north in Tacoma, we probably made his week by cutting down the travel time. He had a cooler full of soda, which he was giving away to anyone who’d listen to his rant. The locals waiting for a tour did their best to ignore him, but we didn’t – free soda is free soda. The only reason we stopped was the Nav said it looked bad to have a bunch of us standing around his little table.
I screwed up the first night, and ditched before someone could order me to go out in a dress uniform. That was understandable; wearing a uniform off base was a solid gold guarantee no woman would ever speak to you and looked like a big sign that said “please come fuck me up” to everyone else. But not in Olympia – we were rock stars that first night. I actually had to team up with some cones who were in uniform to get in on the action. Lots of free stuff that night, and life was good.
About halfway through our visit the command rounded us all up, cleaned us up somewhat, and presented us to the governor. That was a long day, made even longer by the swarms of vets they also invited to the ceremony. We didn’t mind, except they had a tendency to corner you and talk your ear off about how things were when THEY were in. Sea stories are like going for a trip in the car – time passes faster if you’re the one driving.
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