Purposeless Required Test (PRT)

I was actually in decent shape when I joined the Navy. Throughout high school I was pretty active in sports (football, soccer, and wrestling), not because I was some jock douche nozzle but because it was what most of my friends were doing. The physical side of boot camp was a joke.

I never exercised during my first few years in the Navy, and yet did fairly well on the PRT when it came up. Not so much on the push-ups or sit-ups (I could do 70 or so of each), but I almost always came in first on the run. One time I stopped and smoked a cigarette a few feet from the finish line while I waited for the #2 guy to catch up (which I thought was funny, but which my section adviser had a real hard spot with).

Doing time on my first boat, coupled with age and a general lack of healthy living, began to take its toll. By the time I was twenty five, I was just barely passing (I still didn't work out), and soon after I started cheating like most of the other guys.

Yes, we cheat. Much like the underway sock, anyone who says we don't is either a liar or the XO. You can't really do anything about the run (unless you're buds with the PRT coordinator, which I never am since it always seems to be some suck-up cone), but there is usually some creative counting going on when you pair up for the sit-ups and push-ups. As an organization, I think the Navy is fairly ambivalent, since we all know the real PRT is when you have to haul a red devil blower from one end of the boat to the other.

The key is to make sure you do the PRT when everyone else does it, so that you can pair up with someone you know and hide out in the crowd. Usually this is not a problem, but one time I happened to miss the regularly scheduled PRT and had to take the make-up. There were ten guys (including me), all of them were khakis (except me), and I ended up paired with the CO himself.

At the time, the CO we had was pretty cool (we called him "red dawg", a nickname he himself provided), but I was fairly nervous all the same. Did he expect me to keep an accurate count when he was working? If I didn't, he may nail me for a lack of integrity. However, if he was expecting some creativity, and I was dead-on honest, I could be in even more trouble. Either way, I was screwed when my turn came, since I hadn't done 40 pushups in a row in long, long time. Suffice to say, I was sweating it long before any physical exertion took place.

As it turned out, I got to go first on the sit-ups, something I knew I could at least scrape by on. I did like 45, but red dawg appeared distracted the whole time. When the PRT monkey came by, red dawg asked ME how many I did before repeating it to him. So, with a little trepidation, I did the same when it was his turn. Ditto for the push-ups. I claimed I did forty five, but a few of them were not exactly regulation.

So far, so good. But I still had the run to do, and that was the part I ended up failing. Not because I coundn't run fast enough, but because I was stupid enough to run along at the same pace as everyone else. That's what I normally did, and never had a problem before. This time, however, I was running with a bunch of old dinosaurs, and they had like an extra ten minutes to finish the run. Some of them weren't even running; "ambling" might be a better word for it.

So, I ended up failing, and had to go to mando-PT for a month and re-take the test. Nothing makes a Navy day as long as starting it off with a two mile run, followed by various exercises (on gravel, for the most part), followed by ten to twelve hours of "normal" manual labor. The guys who ran that little program can smoke a turd in hell. But I've never failed another PRT, so I suppose it was effective in its own way.

LEAN that!

Well, the LEAN event I've been stuck at for the last week is wrapping up tomorrow, and the only thing I've ever seen that was a bigger waste of time was our annual SPRUCE back in Pearl. We showed up on the first day already knowing what the problem was and how to fix it, yet the LEAN acolytes made us play all their little games anyhow. The first two days accomplished absolutely squat.

Day three, the LEAN overseer departed and let us get down to business. We managed to actually accomplish most of our goal, just in time for them to show back up this afternoon to help us prepare for the final testimonial tomorrow.

Yes, tomorrow we all have to stand up and explain how much time and money we're going to save to the brass. Even though LEAN had nothing to do with these savings, the presentation we're giving has their logo prominently displayed on every slide. We'll stand up and repeat the catechism, making LEAN look like some sort of godsend, and thus keeping the LEAN office in business. If we don't toe the line, we don't get any of the resources necessary to actually make the changes we need. No LEAN, no LEANbucks.

I wonder how many people in that room tomorrow will be true believers, and how many are just going along because it's what everyone else does. Fuck LEAN and anyone who forces it on others to compensate for their lack of leadership and organizational ability.

The Phone Sex Girl

Pearl Harbor, early Nineties. I'd reached a point where I was happy getting drunk in my room on the weekends, having finally come to accept the utter futility of club'ing as a way to get laid. As I said before, there had to be around 50 guys for every woman in Waikiki, single or not. Not as bad as Guam (about 300:1) but sort of a letdown after the PI and Thailand. So, because I was home one Friday night, I happened to get in on the ground floor of a six-month long relationship our barracks collectively had with a person we referred to as "the Phone Sex Girl."

As the name implied, this woman (as far as I could tell she was female, but who really knows) would call up our room and try to get us hot & bothered over the phone. The first time I got one of these calls, I thought for sure it was either a prank or a wrong number. However, if it was a prank, I certainly didn't mind because whoever the caller was, she was GOOD at it. Although I was fairly abrupt the first time she called, it didn't deter her; she called back at least once a week for the next several months.

Everyone in my room talked to her at one time or another. But, while she was trying to get us to talk dirty to her or whatever, we were just trying to get her to give us a clue who she was. After a few calls (and a lot breathy conversation) all we knew was that she was in her early to mid twenties, not in the military, and not in school. We knew all sorts of other crap, like what she could do with various fruits and vegetables in the shower, but no hard data.

We also soon realized that we were not the only ones in our barracks getting calls; since they had all the single guys on the boat packed in the same building, and since weird phone sex is just one of those things that naturally comes up in conversation during a six hour watch, it wasn't long before we were all comparing notes. Interestingly, she didn't call the squids in the adjacent building (who were on the Buffa-ho), which made us suspect she'd targeted our boat specifically.

I wish this tale had a happy ending (pardon the pun), but I still don't know for sure who she was. Our best guess was that it was someone's wife, someone on the boat who had access to the recall list. Phones were relatively new in the barracks back then (no one had cell phones), and there weren't any by-building phone directories. However, she never seemed to know who she was calling the first time she called, so that was only a guess. There is also the fact that the calls stopped around the same time one of the JO's got sent to DC. We were almost sad when she did finally stop calling; the only other person who ever called wanting to screw us on a regular basis was our chief.

Recognizing Art

I'd been in the Navy about five years before I got a chance to come home and visit, and then it was only because the boat I was on happened to stop off in Seattle on the way to Olympia. There were some changes, of course, but for the most part it seemed like the same old place. A lot (and I do mean a LOT) of the people I knew in high school were still there, and most were working the same menial jobs they'd always had. Not that my career scraping paint was all that better than waiting tables, but at least I'd got to travel some while doing so.

I brought some guys from the boat home, and we sat around drinking beer with my dad. He'd been in the Navy about 20 years by then, and was salty as a mermaid's taint. At one point he mentioned he had last Monday's game on tape and asked me fire it up. There were about twenty VHS tapes stacked up around the TV, and none had labels, so I resorted to holding them up at random intervals and asking "This one? How about this one?"

I was about halfway through the stack when my 14 year old sister happened to wander by. "What's on this one? " I asked.

"Oh, that's that FAG tape!" she exclaimed. The rest of us slowly turned and look at my dad. No one asked, but we were clearly curious.

"I don't know what she's talking about." he finally said, after an awkward pause.

"What do you mean?" I asked my sister.

"It's totally gross. It shows two girls doing it!" she explained.

There was another long pause, then everyone started laughing.

"When it's two guys, then it's gay" I told her "When it's two girls, it's art."

LEAN this!

Is LEAN the most fucked-up thing to happen to the U.S. Navy sailor since they took away our grog, or is it just me? I studiously avoided attending their indoctrination classes for years, but today fate caught up with me. There's four hours I'd rather have been scrubbing shitters.

For some reason it took four instructors to teach the class, and all four were continuously in the room. They had one of 'em just hitting the "enter" button on the laptop to advance the PowerPoint presentation, while another did the talking. Here's LEAN suggestion number one: buy a freaking wireless mouse and join the twenty first century, you masters of efficiency! Actually, as it turns out, all four of them are trained to pounce on (and stifle) any criticism as a team. Maybe that's why they give them combative titles like "green belt".

The training starts out with a completely BS "exercise" designed to be as inefficient as possible. Even if everyone in the class can recognize how screwed up it is right off the bat, the LEAN people still make you act it out, wasting about an hour of everyone's time. How else can they demonstrate the superiority of THEIR god if they don't show you how much you need their help?

After Contrived Exercise #1, they allow your class to discuss ways of improving performance, while they sit back and smirk at your feeble attempts. They've run this drill a million times, so they know all sorts of tricks you couldn't think up in the short amount of time they give you to do so. But, to stack the deck even further, they leave out some information as well. In our case, they just flat out lied to us about what our objectives were.

We run the exercise again, and dramatically improve efficiency (by their standards, anyway). Even so, what follows is a Bataan Deathmarch of a presentation, which is a mix of common-sense crap that's been around forever (like the idea of drawing outlines of all the tools hanging on a pegboard, which is something my Grandpa did) with a sprinkle of self-congratulatory masturbation that makes you think you're really at a Scientology recruitment seminar.

Finally, we run the exercise again, only this time "their way". This time through, they tell you all sorts of stuff they forgot to mention the first two times, like how many products you're actually supposed to be making. They also dramatically reduce the "acceptance criteria" for said product, thus virtually assuring "their way" is the most efficient. (Oddly enough, their own calculation showed that we had improved the efficiency almost twice as much BEFORE the training as they did with their techniques after it. I pointed this out, to the amusement of my team).

While we were instructed to remain "open minded" to new ideas at the start of the class, none of the folks teaching it were leading by example. At the start of the third exercise, I had this lively conversation with one of the teachers:

Her, to me: "Would you like to be the Water Spider" [The person running around handing out supplies]

Me: "No."

Her: "Why don't you want to be the Water Spider?"

Me: "Since we know this time around how many we're making, why don't we just hand out enough supplies beforehand?"

Her, firmly: "The question I asked was 'Do you want to be the Water Spider?' ".

Me: "No."


Which was pretty much how the whole class went. If they detected even a little criticism, all four of the bastards would gang up on you until you shut up (and it took all four to shut ME up). They most definitely did not like me pointing out the obvious flaws in their proof-of-concept exercise, and that nothing in the training between the second and the third exercise would lead you to make all the improvements they made. It was just advertising, pure and simple.


You know, Admiral Rickover hated management systems, and frequently said so. I'm not actually as close-minded, but I've yet to see a management system that applied to something other than an assembly line... and if you need a management system to figure out how to make widgets a little faster, you're a retard and no management system will save you. They have yet to show me how LEAN has anything to do with being a nuc, and became downright hostile today when I asked for that very information.

I subscribe to Admiral Rickover's management system: Work hard, do your fucking job as a chief (or first or whatever), and you'll figure out all on your own how to improve. It isn't rocket science, or even nuclear physics.

My Wife, She...

One of the numerous reasons that Civilian Life Is Preferred (or "clip", as in the paper clip surreptitiously peaking out of my chest pocket) is that, as a civilian employee, you can pretty much take time off whenever you need it. Sick? Call in sick, stay home, and get better. No hiking to the nearest sickbay to convince some corpsman to write you a note. Car trouble? Call in, take a "personal day", and just get the thing fixed. No one freaks out, the world doesn't come to an end.

Unfortunately, that's not the way the Navy does it.

Generally, there's no time off without prior approval, even in port. And it's not always easy to get that approval; the better you do your job, the more likely the command is too scared to let you take a day off under any circumstances. So, being devious and not to be trusted, we blueshirts have to come up with iron-clad excuses if we need a break. The most hallowed of these is the "my wife she" gambit.

While no guy wants to bag his buddies, it's another matter altogether if you're doing something for your wife. There's an unspoken understanding that, while you may work for the chief, your ass actually belongs to the admiral at home. It's not all that unusual for a squid to call in around 0700 and tell his boss "my wife needs me to take the kids to school" or "my wife needs me to fix the toilet before I come in", and these excuses are generally accepted. The only people likely to give you shit are the single guys, and they're not getting any, so who cares what they think?

While most sailors are fairly proficient at the My Wife She when necessary, one electrician on my first boat was a true artist. This guy, who I'll call "Hoogus", was so good at coming up with excuses that he didn't even need to use the "wife" part. Here is just one of his gems:

"I can't come to work because the radio in my car isn't working."

And, when told this, our leading first just sort of nodded and let him have the day off. Hoogus had once again raised the bar, and thus had earned a break. But there was actually more to the story.

If you try to call the boat, especially in the morning, you're lucky if you can even get someone to answer the phone. There are only a couple of phones, but answering one almost always means more work (tracking down whoever the call is for, taking a message, etc.) so no one does so unless they're really bored.

Hoogus couldn't get anyone to answer in the ER when he called that morning, so he ended up talking to a forward ET in Control. Hoogus asked him to find our chief and tell him that he'd be late, as his car wouldn't start. That was a pretty lame excuse (for Hoogus, anyhow), so it was probably true. The forward ET, always helpful, asked him what the problem was.

"My battery is dead, and there's no one to give me a jump" Hogus explained
"How do you know the battery is dead?" inquired the ET
"It won't turn over, " Hoogus elaborated "none of the lights are on, and the radio doesn't work. Not to mention I'M A FUCKING ELECTRICIAN; I think I know a dead battery when I see it!"
"Shit man, okay!" stammered the ET, as he scurried off to find the rest of us and deliver the message.

Of course, by the time he actually made it back aft, the ET had forgotten a large chunk of it, and all that got reported was that Hoogus couldn't come in because the radio in his car was broke. We were all impressed, and did not begrudge him a day off. Unfortunately, Hoogus was unaware of all this and showed up about an hour later, having caught a ride with a neigbor. The chief saw him before any of us could tell him what happened, so he ended up having to stay. It was a shame; that was one of the best "my wife she"s ever.

The Shaved Hampster

Believe it or not, there was a time when the coners had ratings other than MM, ET, and COOK. Back then, there was this weird little rate known as "IC man", who's insignia was a phone handset over a globe. This was to remind them to call an electrician when their shit broke, which was rather often.

When I got to my first boat, "IC div" was led by a first class they affectionately nicknamed The Shaved Hampster ("SH" for short). To give you an idea how things operated back then, all work in IC div came to a stop for a solid week when the SH forgot to leave the key to their tech manual locker behind before he took off on leave. None of them were especially adept at fixing stuff, mainly because the SH wouldn't let anyone touch their gear but him.

So, one fine fine Navy day I was heading forward through crew's mess when I spied three of them opening a P-panel with a diggit tool. For those of you lucky enough to not know, a P-panel is just a big metal box full of fuses we use to distribute power to non-essential crap, like crew's mess. P-panels were also an enigma: while we couldn't work on any other equipment energized (without a major flop-n-twitch, anyhow) the command never said a word when we'd open P-panels to pull the fuses out, even though half of the thing was copper bus bars full of juice. At least the tool we used was made out of non-conductive melamine.

The diggit tool the IC men had, however, was not made out of melamine. My spider senses tingling, I reminded them not to use it to pull fuses. "Fuck off, nub" one replied, which I promptly did. I was a nub on a soda run, with sigs at stake. But, when I came back though crew's mess a few minutes later, there was the entire IC div gathered around the SH. They had rigged a complete rubber room around the P-panel, and SH was decked out in rubber from head to toe. As he approached the open panel with trembling hands, I asked him what he was doing.

"Dipshit (not his real name) got shocked trying to pull some fuses - there may be a short." he said.

"He got shocked because he was pulling them with a set of steel pliers," I replied "let me do that."

A few seconds later all three fuses were pulled and I continued aft with the sodas I'd been sent to get. These days I'd never dream of intentionally looking the other way when someone was about to do something stupid, but you have to admit it's an effective training tool. After that, they'd just call us when they needed fuses pulled.

America’s Navy – The Video Game

Five years ago, the Army decided to try a new approach in their attempt to improve their horrible recruitment rates: using a video game to lure unsuspecting children, much like a modern-day gingerbread house. On the surface, I’m sure it made sense to someone; after all, they’re looking for people who’s idea of a good time is shooting other people, which happens to coincide with basic plot of just about every video game out there. The Army’s game was free to download, with the caveat that they could contact you (ala The Last Starfighter) if you proved especially “l33t”.

Well... the video game was a success, in that lots of people have downloaded it and continue to play it. But it also flopped horribly because now the DI’s in boot camp are confronted with hoards of scrawny shut-ins who suck at playing soldier without a keyboard-mouse interface. Maybe a tank simulator would have been more practical.

But it got me thinking – what if the Navy tried a similar approach? A free online game that supposedly showed what being a sailor was like, thus pairing up people who found the Navy interesting with recruiters willing to exploit said interest to meet their quota for the month.

The game, once started, would have to run for some random period between two days and nine months. While you can’t ever really predict how long it will run should you load it, your EULA warns you in no uncertain terms that shutting it down prematurely will result in jail time. Initially, a panel with a bunch of meaningless gages appears, along with some sort of sensor that can tell if your eyes leave the screen. Should that happen, a petulant voice comes out of your rear speakers, ordering you to “mind your fucking panel”.

After that goes on for about six hours, the gages are replaced by a message saying it’s now safe for you to go eat and/or sleep. But before you can even stand up, another voice booms out of the speakers, either telling you to clean the keyboard or disassemble and lubricate the mouse. This is followed by a seemingly endless series of other menial tasks, including some random training sessions.

You initially look forward to these, as the box art for the game promises you'll be taught all sorts of neat things. But the training you receive is either pointless (like the detailed instructions on how to start up your computer, which is pointless because you couldn’t do the training if you couldn’t start it up), overly simplistic (like how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, which for some reason takes a whole hour), or insanely difficult and just as useless (like how to conjugate irregular verbs in Klingon).

As soon as the last of the training ends, but before you can even go to the bathroom, the panel with the pointless gages reappears. At the bottom, a popup message constantly reminds you that you’ll go to jail if you leave before the game says you can leave. But, on the other hand, if you get the high score on the game for the week (which is determined at random) a form letter will spit out of the printer, telling you how much Uncle Sam appreciates all your hard work.

You may ask yourself, “Who’d be stupid enough to play such a game?” Well, just think about that for a minute.

Another PI Story

The Philippines. Would any collection of lies and slander like the EM Log be complete without a few PI stories? I think not. Unfortunately, all the best ones are NSFW (where I am right now, supposedly earning my time-and-a-half overtime, but really just putting in hours for appearance’s sake). I can, however, tell you the two things about the PI that I miss the most, and here they are:

The first was being rich. Well, not really, but every one of us broke-ass squids was a freakin’ millionaire compared to the locals. At first it was a little embarrassing, but after a little while that kind of power was so intoxicating that we all went a little insane. I’m not exaggerating because it’s impossible TO exaggerate where the PI is concerned. No matter what excess you can think of, I saw worse while I was there. One time I watched some drunk Army guys pay two teenage boys to beat the crap out of each other in the center of the bar, gladiator-style. We’re talking some serious, tooth-loosening damage.

The second thing I miss is the sex. But it's not just the sex, its having so much sex that it literally became a non-issue. That is saying something, or at least it was for me when I was 20. The only thing that even comes close is the kind of sex you have when you’ve been dating a girl for a while and she’s really trying to set the hook: anything you want, whenever you want it. Somewhere there are real-life engineers working on a practical Cherry 2000, and that is what the world will be like for all of us when they finally pull it off.

Women will just never understand.

The pursuit of sex is like the pursuit of food. When you're hungry, it's all you can think about. On the other hand, after a good meal you can go for several hours without food even crossing your mind. The best-case scenario is to have so much food around that you're not worried about where your next meal is coming from. Well, sex is just another need for guys like food, only it seems like we spend most of our lives on the edge of starvation.

Visiting the PI was like moving into the world's biggest supermarket; whatever you were into, you got so much of it that you were well and truly satisfied. But it wasn’t just that, it was knowing, KNOWING, that you were going to get laid when you left the barracks, and it was probably going to be the best you’d ever had. Talk about role reversals – I bet being stationed in the PI for women was like being stationed anywhere else was for guys. Come to think of it, I don’t remember seeing many Navy chicks the whole time I was there, and those few I did see looked mighty unhappy.

This was probably made worse by the fact that they still acted like they were still enjoying a 500 to 1 male-female ratio, when in reality it was just the opposite. I saw this first hand one day while I was waiting at Cal-Jams. It was early and the place was fairly empty, so I had to actually bribe one of the girls there NOT to bug me. Anyhow, I was just sitting there watching the TV when two young (and obviously Navy) women came in and sat at the table next to mine. Just to be polite, I leaned over and said hi.

One of them said “hi” in return, but the other gave a fuck-off stare and muttered “whatever”.

“What was that?” I asked.
The second one rolled her eyes and launched into some sort of ready-made speech: “We’re not interested. We don’t want to dance, we don’t want a drink, so just leave us alone, okay?”

“Whatever” I responded in turn.

Eventually my friends showed up and we took off. A few hours later we happened to be back in the area, so we stopped by Cal Jams to see who else was around (it was one of my boat’s adopted bars – the other was Island Girls). Those same two girls were still there, looking to all the world like someone pissed in their Wheaties. The funny thing was, not one single guy in the whole place paid any attention to them during the hour or so we were there. If they’d gone to the place to be left alone, they were sure getting their wish. It was kinda sad; whenever someone would get near their table the first one would look up expectantly… only to be utterly ignored.

Navy Picnics

On a hot summer day like today my thoughts turn to the picnics I used to go to when I was younger; most of which were sponsored by the Navy. I loved when my dad's command would have a picnic - they were usually on a school day (missing school makes anything better), they normally let me eat and drink as much as I wanted (another plus when you're dad's trying to make ends meet on an E6's pay), and they were always someplace cool I hardly ever got to visit.

Up until I was about 10, most of the picnics I went to were at a place called Admiral Bakersfield Park in San Diego. In addition to all the hamburgers and soda, this place had some incredible kid playgrounds, including a three-story high robot you could climb up inside, and this big jungle gym that looked like a pirate ship. After I got too old for ABP, I started going to the beach parties that were usually at Mission Beach or the Strand, by the Amphib base. Those had the added attraction that you could usually find a group of SEALs-to-be nearby doing something that looked really tiring.

So it's sort of sad that I almost never go anywhere near a command picnic these days. On my first boat, the only after-hours function I went to of any kind (not counting the stuff that was supposedly voluntary, but at which the Eng informed us he'd be taking muster) was a Christmas party in the early nineties. Boy, that was a mistake.

I'd just started dating this girl, and she really wanted to go, though I told her it would most likely suck donkey balls. Naturally it did, and she got waaay too drunk out of sheer boredom. The problem was that there were also a bunch of younger cones that showed up stag, and they started chatting her up. She wasn't particularly good looking (you can't be choosy in Hawaii), but she was about the only non-married female there, and I think all the attention went to her head. When she went off to dance with a group of them, I left.

It's not like I was going to marry this chick or anything, but still. Kinda hard to live crap like that down, but I don't specifically blame the Navy. At least I was the only non-lifer nuc there, so no one who's opinion I cared about saw her first hand. I didn't see a lot of her after that, but I heard a sonar tech on the Indy left her knocked up a few months later.

Anyhow, there were two main reasons I stopped going to Navy picnics once I was actually in the Navy: (1) The guys from the boat who normally showed up at them were the same ones I wanted to see as little of as I could when we were actually in port, and (2) The food was horrible. If I did have to go to something like that, I'd bring my own. When the Navy started frowning on command-purchased beer (early nineties; I just know Clinton had something to do with it) Navy picnics became only slightly more fun than eating sliders in crew's mess.

There's nothing you can do about the crew; sometimes you like the guys you work with, and sometimes you pray for the sweet release of death to end your tortured existence. But I can at least explain why the food was so horrible. When I was the admin weenie for Radcon, I got stuck planning a Navy picnic of my own.

The division officer announced he was looking for a volunteer to put together a command picnic at a staff meeting one morning. Since none of the people wearing khaki felt like demonstrating some leadership and organizational ability, I got bagged with it. The only help I got was the address of the housing / rec committee building off base, where the Navy supposedly had money set aside for just this purpose. That's right, every year, the command gets money just for picnics and other recreational activities, which is why a lot of that crap is free to attend.

But it's not a lot of money. In fact, if I remember correctly, it worked out to be about $1.25 per sailor per year, and you could only save up about three year's worth. If you didn't spend it in time, the housing folks got it, so they made it damn-near impossible to actually get any of that money.

As the admin weenie, I was used to bureaucracy and filling out five different forms just to get a $10 mail bag from Servmart. But getting to the rec funds was a whole new level of bullshit. Before they'd cut you a check for food (for example) you had to fill out a shopping list, including SKU numbers, which they would approve line by line. If you put down French's mustard on your list, that was all you could buy - if they were out when you finally got to go shopping, you couldn't substitute in some other brand, even if it would be cheaper.

To make matters worse, we only had about $300 in the fund, total, and the Navy wanted $100 off the top to reserve a picnic area on the beach. You'd think that recreational facilities ON A FREAKIN' NAVY BASE would be free for sailors, but you'd be wrong. They gave me some BS about private contractors who maintained the facilities (also Clinton's fault), and held out their paws for the money. The best thing you could say about it was that it was cheaper than anywhere else remotely near the water, a fact made even sadder because Oahu is one big beach, and a lot of it's owned by Uncle Sam.

So I had about $200, total, to feed about eighty sailors and their families. The one time I inquired about charging a few bucks per head, the division officer shut me down fast. "No one will show up" he predicted, and he was probably right. The only way to even come close to feeding all those people was to buy no-name brands whenever possible. When you find a box of one hundred hamburger patties for $20 at the Hickam commissary, you know that they're probably not made from top-of-the-line cows.

Just like always, I ended up bringing my own food... but this time I knew exactly why the chips were all Granny Goose and the condiments looked suspiciously like they'd been stolen from the galley. We squeaked in just under budget, but I had to pass the hat mid-picnic when we ran low on ice. Unlike a normal picnic, I had to stick around for the whole thing, and ended up shooting about 300 pictures with the office Polaroid.

Afterwards, pretty much everyone looked like they had a good time. I thought it was just another crappy command picnic, but maybe that's the point; if they can manage to do anything with the pathetic resources the Navy provides, it's a heck of a success.

In Honor of Racks

Ah, your rack. Even the beds in an RV look spacious in comparison, but there's no place you'd rather be after a 20-hour "normal" work day at sea. If you're lucky (or on a boomer) you may even get one all to yourself. And nothing puts you to sleep faster than rocking along when you're near the surface.

Every now and again the COB would go on a tear about making your rack when you weren't in it. This may make sense on a skimmer, where everyone is up all day and the lights are on in berthing, but the only time you could even tell whether a rack was made or not in a perpetually dark submarine bunk room was during drills and field day. I usually just brought a sleeping bag, which could be rolled up if necessary to give the impression I'd made my rack.

One time, this rack-making obsession got so bad they actually had someone inspecting berthing after every watch relief to make sure all the empty racks got made. In retaliation, several of us went out and bought kids' sheets - my own personal favorite was my Fraggle Rock set. I'm sure the sight of a bunkroom full of colorful cartoon characters set the COB's teeth on edge (made or not - and made was actually worse in this case, since you could see the cartoons better) but the CO had graciously allowed us to use whatever sheets we wanted when not in port.

So our sheets highlighted two things: One, the racks were so small that little kids' sheets fit them perfectly, and two, that they were treating us like kids. A few guys even got their wives to sew them custom matching curtains (or, at least they told us it was their wives who did the sewing... some of the ETs seemed to know an awful lot about sewing machines for a dude). The rack-making mania quietly faded away in a few weeks, though I kept using kid sheets the rest of the time I was there.

When I was on a fast boat, one COB we had was famous for shuffling the berthing bill on a regular basis. You almost never had the same rack for more than a month or two. These moves were seemingly random, until we electricians noticed that we almost always got a rack with a broken rack light... just as the A-gangers kept getting racks that had a broken post or hasp. And there was a lot of broken shit in berthing; it was such a low priority that even the Eng was okay with us blowing it off. But the COB knew we'd fix whatever was broken in racks we had to use, usually on our own time, so he just kept moving us as necessary 'til everything got fixed.

The Burner

The Burners are A-gang toys in AMR used to remove hydrogen and carbon monoxide (the last is courtesy of you smokers, thanks). Here's an article about them if this interests you, or you've brain dumped it all: }clicky{

As the name implies, every burner contains a bank of big heaters, which are normally turned off and on automatically via a heavy-duty electrical relay called a "contactor". These are usually pretty reliable, but one underway the main contactor in one of our burners ate itself, apparently out of spite. Unable to explain why the contactor had died, we simply replaced it. This fixed the problem, and life went on.

That is, until the new one broke just a few days later. Now we really had to roll up our sleeves, as these contactors are not exactly cheap, and we didn't have an infinite supply of them. Still unable to find anything wrong with the circuit electrically, we finally just decided to leave it tagged out. After all, that's why the Navy gives you more than one.

Those of you who've seen Murphy's Law first hand know what inevitably happened next: The second burner failed just hours after they put it online, and it failed on a massive scale. There was no way to fix it at sea, even if we scavenged parts from the first one. Having little choice, we moved the contactor from the really broken burner to the possibly-broken burner. This again worked for a few days, and then died in a cloud of stinky black smoke.

We eventually ran out of contactors, and had to jury rig a big LVRE circuit breaker in place of it to keep the one remaining burner going. That also meant stationing someone in AMR to manually operate the heaters, a watch only slightly less exciting than guarding an empty parking lot in BFE. Since it was E-div's shit that was broken (as the A-gang chief so kindly put it), we got to stand the watch.

Then fate intervened, in a manner that a sailor only sees once or twice in his entire life. While we were installing the replacement switch, one of the A-gang nubs happened to wander by and asked what we were up to. We told him that the contactor kept burning out, probably because it was cycling too often, but we couldn't figure out why before we'd fried the last one on board.

"Well, " he said, innocently "If the heaters are cycling too much, why don't you try shutting the bypass damper?"

"The whaa...?" inquired my leading first.

And, sure enough, there was a damper open that was basically causing the heaters to constantly cycle on and off in an attempt to heat the air up properly. At first, there was some suspicion among the forward gentlemen that WE'D opened the damper... but that was until someone pointed out it had been open so long it was painted in that position.

The spotlight shifted to A-gang, and the poor nub and his firends ended up having to stand the watch rather than us. I'm sure his brethren were less than thrilled, but I can assure you he had everything on his card that we could sign off done by the following day. Lesson Learned: When you're an electrician, everything looks like an electrical problem.

Fun With Liquid Nitrogen

Some day I’ll meet the engineer who designed the MG brush rigging, and I’ve promised myself I’m going to kick his nuts up around his ears for every time I had to try swapping out brushes at 2 am without a stubbie. But, at the same time, I’d be more than happy to buy a round or two for whoever came up with a PMS item that gave us a legitimate reason to order liquid nitrogen. As there are a multitude of uses for liquid nitrogen aboard ship (very few of them having anything to do with it's intended use), we tried to make the most of it when it came due.

We always ordered about five times as much as we thought we’d need, and that seemed okay to everyone. It would show up in these little tan bullet-proof canisters we called “doozers” for some reason, along with a set of bad-ass gloves. There were the usual pranks, like freezing stuff and dropping it to watch it shatter (ballcaps and qual cards worked the best), as well as the occasional soda can or two that needed cooling. But nothing tops the time we discovered what happens if it comes in contact with seawater.

If you just spray some into the harbor, it makes lots of bubbles and a dense white cloud, kind of like tossing dry ice in the punch bowl. We found this out, sort of by accident, one night when we were hauling the doozers down from the pier. Pretty much all the offwatch nucs were topside, and the general consensus was that this phenomena warranted further study.

For “stage two”, we filled up an empty soda can and dropped it in. It caused a much more violent reaction when it hit the water, but not enough to convince us to stop while we were ahead. One of the cranks also happened to be topside, so we sent him belowdecks to find something with a lid. He came back a few minutes later with an empty peanut butter jar, which we promptly filled up, capped off, and tossed over the side.

There were four or five of us on the brow, watching expectantly as the jar sank. At first, nothing seemed to be happening. But then we saw a big green bubble rapidly rising from the depths. I would guess it was about five feet wide when it got to the surface, where it erupted just like a depth charge. We didn't get out of the way in time, and ended up getting soaked. I had to spend the rest of the duty day in wet, smelly dungarees, but it was worth it.

Housing

Growing up with a dad in the Navy, we mostly lived in Navy housing. It seemed like we moved ever two years or so, and always from one end of the earth to another. I got to see a lot of different housing, and it pretty much all sucked. Some because you were basically living in an off-base ghetto (the worst was “Gateway”, outside RTC San Diego), and some because of the folks at “Housing” who would threaten you with eviction if they drove by your house some morning and your lawn wasn’t mowed. Most of them were staffed by cadre of busybodies who made the CIA seem apathetic in comparison.

Then there was a cute little scam that we saw from time to time when we were trying to move out. After the movers left with all our stuff, we normally spent a few days cleaning the place from top to bottom in preparation for the final inspection by Housing. Until they sign you off, you can’t leave, and we were usually on a tight schedule. This puts a lot of pressure on the family to get it right, a fact not overlooked by the folks doing the inspecting.

The scam starts with them failing you for something inconsequential (once we got dinged because the guy found a little cobweb under the kitchen sink). The inspector will sympathize, but tell you he can’t come back to do another inspection for a few days. And, right before he leaves, he’ll “recommend” some local cleaning service. Said cleaning service will guarantee you’ll pass the next inspection... but certainly not because they’re any better at cleaning than you are.

No, the truth is usually that either a relative of someone at Housing works for them, or the inspector is getting a kickback. It really doesn’t matter which - until you hire them, you’re not going anywhere. We didn’t see this scam every time, but it happened often enough that we would just ask beforehand if there was a specific company they wanted us to use. If they said no, or gave us a list of several different ones, we knew we could just clean it ourselves. If, on the other hand, they were quick to hand us a business card, the message was pretty clear.

The Lieutenant

My first real shore duty was at radcon in Pearl Harbor as a RCT. I honestly don’t know how I got tapped for the admin officer job, since this was a considerably better deal than being an RCT and I had only been there about six months. The other guys who had the job before me were all senior firsts who had earned a break from the horribly long hours, whereas I had only recently qualified and was one of the few E-5s.

I was actually pretty good at this job, but I think that was mainly because I put so much effort into it. With everyone else doing real work for 10 – 12 hours a day, I always made sure my weenie ass was the last one out the door. I also took on as many collateral duties as I could. I hadn’t suddenly become a born-again lifer; I just wanted to head off any criticism that I wasn’t pulling my weight, since I stayed in the office the whole time. Sometimes that even meant sleeping under my desk… go Navy!

As the admin weenie, I worked directly for the RCO, though there was an MMCM somewhere in the chain as well. I was normally on independent ops for most of the day, which suited me just fine. But something about this really bugged one of the officers, who I’ll just call The Lieutenant. Even though I wasn’t in his group, he made numerous attempts to “absorb” the admin section (there were actually four of us, but the others dealt with supply and worked out of a warehouse).

He never was able to convince the RCO that things would be better with Admin working for him, but that didn’t stop him from occasionally trying to give me rudder orders on projects that didn’t concern him. Most of the time I’d protect him from himself (the duty of every enlisted man), but towards the end of our time together I’d had enough and let him dangle on one of them.

The division was working on the mother of all projects, and one of my jobs was to document stages of the work with a Polaroid camera. The RCO explained my job in detail, as there’d be no second chance to get some of those photos. This meant I was working all sorts of weird hours (the project was going on during all three shifts), and The Lieutenant was bothered to no end when he saw me leaving at lunchtime one day. We got into it, and I explained that I was more or less covering all three shifts, so I had to sleep when I could. His answer? The guys at the photo lab should be taking the photos, and I should be at my desk so I could get whatever it was he needed at that moment.

He flat-out ordered me to stop taking the photos, and informed me he would make arrangements with the photo lab to cover the rest of the project. I did try to tell him that there were any number of reasons why that wouldn’t work, from the fact the photo lab didn’t have enough people to cover both their normal job and our project, to the fact that none of them were qualified to be in the areas they’d need to be in. He dismissed all this with an airy “Yours is not to reason why, Petty Officer XXXXX”.

To which I muttered “Mine is just to do or die,” with a shrug. His big mistake was assuming I had an entirely different attitude than I did, based on the quantity of work I was doing. But the truth of the matter was I really didn’t care if he screwed something up, so instead of going straight to the RCO, I just sat back down at my desk and got busy with some paperwork like nothing had happened.

The RCO had regular meetings with all the supervisors to discuss the project status and to review the logs. A few days later I was at the meeting (my primary job was to take notes) when the RCO turned to me and asked where the latest batch of photos was. Without missing a beat I looked across the table at The Lieutenant and said “Lieutenant XXXXXX ordered me to stop taking them, sir.”

The RCO was flabbergasted. “Why?” he ask me.

“He felt I couldn’t support the office and take photos at the same time.” I replied, still looking at The Lieutenant, who was now staring daggers at me.

“Is this true?” the RCO asked him.

“Yes sir. I thought the photo lab would be able to handle it, but they’ve had some problems catching up with us.” he replied.

“Everyone out,” the RCO ordered “except you, lieutenant.”

Since I was the admin weenie, my office was right next to the RCO’s, and I got to hear one of the loudest, most creative verbal slap-downs in Naval history. When it was over, the RCO called everyone back in, and announced:
a) I would resume taking the photos, according to plan, and
b) I worked directly for him and the MMCM. If someone else wanted to march me around, they needed to talk to one of those two first.

We actually got lucky, in that the missed photos could be replaced without any rework. But it could have been pretty costly, and I probably would have got nailed for malicious compliance if it had been. Instead, I got a few months of relative peace.

However, I should mention that The Lieutenant got the final laugh. When I was later sent to NAVIMFAC, I ended up working for him, and he was able to get the NCM the RCO put me in for downgraded to a NAM. I didn’t really care either way, because the RCO had already given me a much better award: When the project was over, he treated me and some of other guys to a big steak dinner out in town.

The Backpack Incident

When you’re on a fast attack, you love schools. Even though the school itself is normally boring and irrelevant, every hour at school is an hour away from the boat. Sometimes you might even get left in port, which is almost like being on leave. Sure, all that work you’re missing out on will catch up with you when you return, and sure, everyone in your division will give you crap about having to cover for you, but you still love going to school.

Which is why nubs on fast attacks rarely, if ever, get sent to school. In fact, until I earned my fish, the only school I ever got to attend was some lame-ass PVO class on Ford Island. And I almost missed out on that as well.

We were all standing around the e-div locker in middle level while our chief was handing out the day’s assignments. He had just given me some nub-worthy task and was getting ready to vanish when he whipped around fast and exclaimed “What are you doing here? I thought you were supposed to be at PVO school…”, which was how he usually let one of us know when we had to be somewhere else.

The problem at this point was that you had to catch a small boat over to Ford Island in those days, and they only ran on the half hour. If you missed the boat, you’d be late to the class… and they normally wouldn’t let you come in late. No way was I missing out on a good deal like school! I grabbed my things, shoved them in a backpack, and hauled ass to the ferry landing.

On the ride over, I figured I might just be able to still get in if I ran the whole way. The nuc schools were hell and gone from the ferry landing (as well as the club, the galley, the mini-mart.. pretty much everything), so I took off running the second I got off the boat. I made it about twenty feet before some chief grabbed me.

“Hold up, son” he said, in his best patronizing voice “you can’t wear a backpack while you’re in uniform.”

(Sure enough, I had my backpack slung over one shoulder while I was running)

“Oh, sorry chief.” I mumbled, removing the offending strap. But he was not appeased by my subservient demeanor, so he took a wheel book from his back pocket and wrote down my name and my boat (from my ball cap – the Navy has ensured that any uniform you’re likely to wear has your command’s name on it somewhere for just such emergencies).

“Who’s your chief and what’s his number?” He asked. I provided the requested information, but I no longer felt like groveling, since it would obviously do no good.

“Can I go now?” I asked, somewhat sarcastically “I’m going to be late.”

“Yeah, “ He replied after a moment “But don’t think I’m going to forget about this. I’m going to call him as soon as I get to my office.”

“Chief, “ I replied “If the only trouble I get into today is you catching me with a backpack, my chief will give me a NAM.”

Then I took off, leaving him to ponder why a 19 year old punk like me was less than impressed with him. To be honest, I was still more worried about missing the school than anything else, and really wasn’t thinking about what sort of trouble a pissed off skimmer chief could cause.

Well, I got to the class with plenty of time to spare; the instructor was having car trouble and we didn’t end up starting until 9 am. I think the class was about three days long (don’t hold me to that), so I didn’t see my chief right away. However, he did have a word or two with me when I got back to the boat.

I explained my side of things, admitted I might have been a tad disrespectful, and Weasel let me off with just a lecture about behaving myself when I wasn’t on sub base. Things like this were a non-issue around the boats (they were honestly just happy if you showed up in the right uniform in those days), but skimmers live for that crap. When I was later stationed on a carrier, we had uniform inspections several times a day.

It turned out that the chief who stopped me was one of a group who had taken it upon themselves to hang out at the ferry landing in the mornings, just looking for uniform issues. Weasel listened politely while his fellow chief tattled on me, and then just as politely asked him to mind his own fucking business. They may not be perfect, but no submarine chief worth the name lets someone else screw with their guys.

Military Financing

If there's one thing guaranteed to piss me off when I’m driving around off base (other than my fellow drivers, of course) it’s going by some hole-in-the-wall used car lot with 30 or so junkers and a big “Military Financing” sign out front. The lesson they need to pound into every kid's head at boot camp is that “military financing” is code for “we will screw you”. I wouldn’t buy a condom in a whorehouse from them, and neither should you.

You better believe they have more up-to-date pay tables than PSD, so that greasy salesman trying to push some old beater on you knows exactly how much you make per year. And they know you wouldn’t be anywhere near their lot if you had a choice, so you’re already bent over the table and ready to receive before he even quotes you a price.

Sure, junior enlisted don’t make all that much, so you might wonder why these guys target them. After all, they may WANT a Porsche, but the best they’re going to get on an E-4’s pay is a broke-dick Sunbird. No, the reason lenders love the military is because they know if the sailor misses even one payment they can go straight to his CO and complain. Then the poor kid may find himself with the car payment being deducted directly from his paycheck, and, if the CO is a real loser, he’ll probably end up at mast as well.

So, once you get a loan with Honest Al’s Used Cars for some POS at 20%, big-hearted Al knows the Navy will be all the collection agency he’ll need. No civilian has to put up with crap like this, so it must be another one of those intangible “benefits” we get for serving our country. To make matters worse, two doors down from Honest Al is a check cashing place that will finish the poor squid off for good when he can’t make ends meet.

Kids are financially dumb, for the most part, so there’s no real solution for this problem... other than paying them enough to live on, of course. If we can afford 2 billon a week to go camping in Iraq, we can afford to pay some E-4 enough to buy a decent car like the rest of us.

Rather than screw around with our horrible antique pay system, how about one simple break: if you’re on Active Duty, you don’t pay income tax. Period. No state tax, no federal tax, nothing. I seriously doubt someone could stand up in either house of Congress and say the pittance they’re making by taxing our fighting forces is critical to the nation's well being. It’s just another junket to Hawaii for them, but it could make a real difference for us.

Married With Dependents

I've seen a lot of friends get divorced since I joined the Navy. While no divorce is all that pretty, the worst by far involved 20-something guys who got married right after they got to the boat. These were the knock-down, empty-the-bank-account, sic-Security-on-your-spouse bloodbaths where you just prayed there were no kids caught in the middle. As the Admin weenie, I got to see around twenty of these up close and personal.

It's almost always the same story: The guy joins up, goes through school, and sows a few wild oats along the way. Then he gets to his first boat, and start to feel a little homesick once the newness of it all wears off. He goes home on leave, and happens to run into a girl he knew in high school. Within days, getting married seems like a great idea to both of them.

For him, it means a huge increase in pay and not having to live in the barracks. If he happens to be stationed at one of our larger ports (Pearl Harbor, San Diego, Norfolk) it also means an end to trying to compete with thirty thousand other single guys just like himself in the bars. Plus, the Navy takes care of everything, from a place to live to medical and dental insurance for both of them. Instant family; just add wifey.

For her, it usually means getting out of some podunk town and seeing the world. In most cases, she's graduated high school, possibly taken some community college, and is working full time in the service industry. Moving out of mommy and daddy's house doesn't seem like the smart move it once did, and things are tight. The only guys she knows are the same losers she went to school with, most of whom are working right along side her at the supermarket or the auto plant. Then along comes this dashing young fellow to whisk her away to live in beautiful Hawaii... how could she say no?

If the couple is lucky, the boat he's on only goes out for a few days at a time after they're married. Sure, he's got duty once every three days, but they're together more than they're apart. But then the Navy, as it so loves to do, inevitably starts sending him out on some longer underways... maybe a patrol, maybe even a WestPac. Now she's all alone for weeks on end, in a strange city, with no friends or family. Some of the other wives start whispering about all the screwing around her man is probably doing when the boat ties up in some other port.

About 40% of the marriages end right here, when she can't take anymore and leaves for home. The guy usually finds out when he stops getting mail / family grams / phone calls (despite what you my see on TV about military men getting "dear John" letters, usually the girl just leaves without a word). He eventually comes home to find the credit cards maxed out, the checking account empty, and the house either trashed or likewise empty. Sometimes they part on better terms, but I saw more of the former than the latter.

However, an even worse scenario plays out far too often. That's where the couple (or maybe just the girl) decide to have a kid so she'll have some company while he's away. Also, there's some sort of unspoken understanding that it will keep one or both of them from fooling around while they're apart; in my experience it's just the opposite. But the plan almost always backfires, since being alone in a strange city with a screaming infant increases the sucky factor by an order of magnitude. Add in the final ingredient: the fact they're both around 20 years old, and it's a recipe for tragedy.

Some of the more vicious shit I saw:

Security had a rule (maybe they still do) that if they get called to someone's house because of a domestic dispute, they have to take one of the two lovebirds away for the night. One guy's wife did that to him a few times; once just because he wouldn't take the garbage out. When the cops showed up, she would whip up a few tears and claim he was threatening her with a knife. Off he went for a night in the brig.

One fellow's wife (and he was far from a 19 year old kid at the time) knew their marriage was circling the drain and decided to pay him back for all those years of bliss. Rather than just empty the bank account (which he could have contested in court) she instead bought super-expensive presents for all her friends, under the mistaken assumption he couldn’t force them to return any of it. This actually backfired, because one of the “friends” she bought stuff for turned out to be the guy she was banging on the side, making the divorce a lot more favorable for the guy than it probably would have been otherwise.

One ex-wife wasn’t happy just skipping town while we were on patrol; she had some friends over and literally trashed their place in Navy housing from top to bottom. We’re talking spraypaint on the cabinets, holes in the walls, and a bunch of bathroom fixtures that someone worked over with a sledgehammer. There was also quite a layer of garbage on the floor, which had got pretty ripe. Eventually, the neighbors called to complain about the stink and Security got involved; they were waiting on the pier for the husband when we pulled in. Even though his was out at sea when all this happened, protecting the country, they still held him 100% accountable for whatever his wife did on base.

The Brow

When I was going through nuc school in the late 80's, a fairly detailed nuclear power plant simulation called Chernobyl came out for the C-64. Despite the name, it was actually a simulation of a pressurized water reactor (Chernobyl was a BWR) which was obviously modeled on TMI-2. The instructions were practically non-existent, and the interface was primitive to say the least. Still, I enthusiastically bought a copy, with an eye to trying out all this great new stuff I was learning about in nuc school.

But, after several frustrating hours, all I could do was cycle some valves. The box art promised all sorts of “thrilling” plant evolutions and casualties to tackle, but I couldn’t get the freaking plant out of hot standby no matter what I did. This was long before the internet or even same-day customer support, so instead I turned to the Brow.

That was our section advisor, an odd looking ET chief who had one big eyebrow running across his forehead, just like Animal on the Muppets. We called him the Brow not just because of the prominence of this feature, but also due to his distracting habit of waxing it with his own snot while he was talking to us. I was willing to overlook this for the simple reason that he didn’t immediately put me on mando-35 (as later section advisors did) if I tubed the occasional exam.

I mentioned the problems I was having with the simulator, and the Brow agreed to have a look at it for me. While I’m sure the last thing he wanted to do was stand watch while he was on shore duty (something I understand a lot more now that I’ve had his job a few times myself) he probably wanted to know if there was any educational value in it for us kids. After all, most of us had C-64s, and what better way to reinforce a lesson on reactor kinetics than to try it out for yourself?

He ended up keeping the game so long I almost forgot about it. Right before he turned us over to another section advisor (the one we called Zipper, because his fly was almost always unzipped. He had weight issues… or maybe he just didn’t care anymore), the Brow gave me the game back with a set of hand-written “operating instructions” that was thicker than a phone book. Apparently, both he and some of the other instructors had been playing around with it for weeks, and got it to do pretty much everything the box promised.

By then we were headed to the “dark side” of the school, however, and time off quickly evaporated. His instructions worked perfectly, but the game was actually pretty boring once you got the plant up and steaming… just like real life. Maybe that’s why there’s never been an updated version for PCs. Still, if flight simulators have some value for guys in the pilot pipeline, I wonder if it might be useful for nuc school students to have a generic plant simulator to play with, while it’s all still new and exciting.

Foreign Women

Being in the Navy introduces a young man to lots of new experiences, including foreign women. In fact, I believe that’s one of its top selling points, besides getting to shoot really, really high-powered weapons. Most of the women I met in the nineties were from Europe or Australia, and take it from me, they almost made life in Hawaii bearable.

Almost.

But along with all the advantages of dating someone born and raised anywhere but here, there were some cultural differences which sometimes caused problems. Like the time I took a date to a nice little beach right next to the back gate to Barber’s Point NAS. This was the perfect Hawaiian beach: soft white sand, decent-enough waves for surfing, and even a little non-profit snack bar. Oh, and it was on base, so no tourists and no big crowds. Like I said, perfect.

Anyhow, we’d been there for a few hours when I went out to hit the waves for a bit. I screwed around for a while, until I noticed a huge crowd in the general vicinity of where I’d left my date. I paddled in, just as the base police pulled up. It looked like a fight had broken out, and there was my girl (a cute little German lady I’d known for a while) right in the middle of it.

Well, it turns out that right after I paddled out, she decided to go topless. Apparently this is just fine everywhere else in the world (and, judging by the reaction of most of the guys at the beach that day, it wasn’t exactly a crime here, either), but of course verboten on an American beach. Some of the other guys’ dates started to complain, and I guess a fight broke out between the guys being hounded into calling the cops and the guys who were fine with letting the women go topless. My girl was a little chagrined, but also really surprised at how “repressed” (her word, not mine) Americans were.

So the cops got called. After sorting out who did what, they took down my information and asked us to leave. When I got back to work Monday, my division officer was waiting for me:
“I got a call Saturday from Barber’s Point. They said one of my guys had almost started a riot by letting his girlfriend walk around with no clothes on." He said, shaking his head. "Only you... only you....”