Copyright 2026 by Manuel A. Gentile

All rights reserved.  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the author.

Lie, Cheat, and Steal: one boy’s Navy adventure

Mannie Gentile (2026)

 

 

 

 

 

 

For March and Susan, the women in my life

 the author, Naval Communications Station Guam, 1971.

Foreword

This book has been percolating for a long time. More than once, after I’d entertained someone with a sea story, they’d say, “You should write a book.” Somehow, I just wasn’t interested. There is already an abundance of service-memoirs out there, many of them aren’t that good…I didn’t want to be just another old man shaking his fist at the sky, sort of like grandpa Simpson. I did feel that I had something to say, something personal, and often, something funny.

I finally persuaded myself to undertake this project when I realized that this could be a gift for my two most significant people.  In that, I am certain of my audience - my wife, Susan, and my daughter, March. Both have heard some of these stories, though certainly not all of them. I want this book to be a window into my history as a teenager in the U.S. Navy of the Vietnam era. I especially want my daughter to see a side of me which she may not know—that I was a teen once: zany, immature, naïve, and manic‑depressive…a volatile combination. As you turn these pages, you’re listening-in on a private conversation between me and the two people who mean the most to me.

There’s an old adage that has some truth: How can you tell if a sailor is lying?…His lips are moving. I remember my former Navy brother telling me a particularly funny story. When I stopped laughing, I asked if it was true. He said, “It could be.”

For my part, I promise that every story in this book is true. Some details have softened with the decades, but all of these events happened to me. And get used to the name Beeler, you’ll meet him often.

Rather than a complete narrative, this is a series of separate, but chronological, essays, each freestanding but still connected to the others.  Certainly not every story is here, but equally certain, the best ones are.  Also, this is only my story and it may or may not be representative of those of others who served, but surely some, if not most of these stories will ring with familiarity for many old salts of a particular time in the Navy…and the country.

Please join Susan, March, and I as we set sail on the adventure of a lifetime.

— Mannie Gentile

 My faithful shipmate

Through Fair Weather and Foul—My Kodak Instamatic

My battered Kodak Instamatic joined the Navy with me. Scratched plastic lens, cube flash, a viewfinder with a mind of its own. I got this little approximation of a camera second‑hand from my Uncle Joe when I was fourteen. It did exactly what it promised: it took snapshots. Nothing artistic or even of very good quality, but every fuzzy, crooked, washed‑out photo in these pages passed through this little box. For that, my junky little shipmate earned its place here. It was the pocket‑sized documentarian that helps keep these out‑of‑focus memories alive.

 

The author, Burt Michigan, 1962

Introduction

In July 1970, at seventeen, I was sworn into the U.S. Navy—the culmination of a childhood dream.

I’d been preceded into the sea‑going service by my two older brothers, whose colorful, funny, fascinating stories fueled my imagination. One served for four years; the other wore the uniform for twenty‑seven. That’s a lifetime of sea stories, and as their little brother, I listened wide-eyed.

As soon as I was old enough, I also joined the Navy. For a short time our enlistments overlapped—three brothers serving in the same Navy, in different places and at different stages of their careers.

Our household was as patriotic as any other. For my parents, uncles, and aunts, World War II was still a recent memory. Unsurprisingly our enlistments met with approval and a measure of pride by our parents.

My generation was another story. The country was being torn apart by the war in Vietnam. As the body count grew, so did opposition to that tragic conflict. Many people my age failed to separate the war from those burdened with fighting it. My enlistment was met coolly by many in my graduating class. Their parents were proud; my classmates were skeptical. We G.I.s bore the brunt of the cultural divide.

On July 8, 1970, my father dropped me off at the castle‑like post office building in Saginaw, Michigan—home to the Navy recruiter and my jumping‑off point for the next four years. Although I really hoped that Pop would say he was proud of me, his parting words were simple and, at the time, uninspiring: “Do your best.” Three sparse words emblematic of the tension between us, and I’m pretty sure that he thought I was going to fail. I had hoped that my voluntary enlistment might have sweetened his opinion of me. Pop was a good guy, but I didn’t give me much to work with, I admit.

I waded through a phalanx of antiwar protesters and made my way up to the second floor to check in with two Navy chiefs—one a Pearl Harbor veteran—pick up my bus ticket, and get a ride to the Greyhound station. The bus took me to the airport, where I joined a dozen other kids, all bound for San Diego and the first eleven weeks of our adventure: boot camp.

Unlike most others, I almost enjoyed basic training. I was immersed in the lore, the traditions, and the hardware of the Navy. I’d been eagerly awaiting this experience, and now it was happening. It was tough but exciting, nearly brutal but nearly thrilling as well. It was the beginning of an experience that was so wonderfully removed from Birch Run High School in rural Saginaw County, Michigan.

After boot camp, and a short leave to show-off the uniform to my high school sweet-heart (and try to warm up my father), I reported to Naval Training Center San Diego for Radioman “A” School, where new sailors, designated for the radioman rating, were taught radio theory, equipment, and message handling.

It was an intensive three months of surprisingly scholastic training, with equal parts book-work and hands-on experience.  The idea was to get the new RM (radioman) to the fleet with enough of the basic knowledge of his craft to meet the mission.

Upon completion I was a Radioman Seaman Apprentice. After another short leave, I got orders to Naval Communications Station, Guam—along with twelve other classmates, including my good friend from boot camp and “A” School, Dan Beeler, of West Sacramento California.

Guam meant fifteen months in a bustling, often chaotic Fleet Communications Center, through which all communications to and from the war passed. It was hard and demanding work, but between watches I snorkeled, hiked, and explored the island’s WWII history. The leap from rural Michigan to a tropical island in the middle of the largest ocean on the planet was intoxicating.

After Guam, I reported to my first ship, a WWII‑vintage destroyer—the USS DeHaven (DD‑727). I was aboard for a year. When she was sold to South Korea, I transferred to another 1944 destroyer—the USS Higbee (DD‑806). I enjoyed going to sea, though after fifteen months of pulling punched paper tape on Guam, I was out of my depth as an all‑purpose fleet radioman.

Along the way, I attended teletype repair school for a three months and did two weeks of detached duty back in San Diego, building an antenna for the Higbee.

On July 9, 1974, I was honorably discharged as a third‑class petty officer and returned home to Saginaw County, Michigan. Because of the hostility with which G.I.s were being greeted in airports, I didn’t travel in uniform. I arrived home in civilian clothes—again disappointing my father, who expected me to come down the ramp in dress blues. Now, decades later, I do have some wistful regret about not donning that uniform for one last hurrah, despite potentially being hassled by those angered by the war.

But as the months passed and the sea stories poured forth, Pop warmed up. We became good friends—remaining so until his death ten years later. That alone made the experience worthwhile.

From bewildered Seaman Recruit, to excited Seaman Apprentice, to worldly Seaman, to jaded Petty Officer—this is the story of one boy’s Navy adventure. Thanks for coming along.

A Boy of Distinction

The day after my father signed for me—I was only seventeen—I reported back to the recruiter for the next phase of my Navy adventure: the induction physical.

Chief Billy Filhart handed me a bus ticket to Detroit with vague instructions and an even vaguer sketch of where the hotel was. He drove me to the Saginaw bus station and saw me off for the Motor City. It was scary and exciting in equal measure.

In Detroit I followed his map to the Hotel Tuller, where I and about fifty potential draftees would lodge for the night. It was March; Michigan spring was still very brisk. And a chill drizzle of rain was falling…a portent.

The Tuller was many things - part haunted house, part old‑people’s home, and part flop‑house. Draftees stayed on the upper floors; the lower floors housed elderly residents who couldn’t afford retirement homes but could manage a long‑term hotel stay. The contrast between the two populations couldn’t have been sharper.

Boisterous young men breezed noisily through the gloomy, overstuffed, dark‑paneled lobby, past old men dozing, smoking, reading newspapers or arguing (“If my wife ever has an abortion, I’ll kill her,” one octogenarian declared). There was a like number old women knitting, gabbing, telling dirty jokes, and working crossword puzzles.

I spent the night wide awake as pranksters roamed the hall with a pail of warm water, playing the old “hand in water – pee the bed” prank. That was a risk I couldn’t take—and believe me, I didn’t need the help(more to come). Morning found me groggy for what would be a long, grueling day spent in my underpants.

A bus took us to Fort Wayne—not the city, but the Civil War–era masonry fort in Detroit, completed in 1851. As a Civil War nerd, I was disappointed that I wouldn’t have time to explore the historic fort; our day would be the active Army facility: tests, paperwork, and the physical, forever enshrined by Arlo Guthrie.

Of the fifty inductees, two of us were volunteers headed to the Navy; the other forty‑eight were Army bound—and in those days that meant Vietnam. A watershed day for those guys. I wondered whom among them wouldn’t be coming back.

The morning is hazy in memory—overshadowed by what came later. I recall glimpsing the old fort, stepping in a puddle of icy slush, hearing my first “hurry up and wait,” and filling out endless forms. Then we were herded into a large locker room, handed small paper bags, and ordered to strip to our underpants. The underpants were for modesty; the paper bag was for wallet and car keys. Thus began the ordeal.

Thrown in with forty‑nine other boys and young men, I got a quick education in varying degrees of intellect, ability, and hygiene. Casual, nervous conversation revealed who was drafted and who had volunteered. Learning that we two had volunteered, a spokesman for the draftees stared and asked, “Are you retarded?”

There was plenty of lining up, trotting from station to station, stretches of waiting, uncertainty, and wisecracking. Many tried to convince skeptical doctors that they were unfit for duty. Of the fifty, only two or three were found unfit—and I was one of them.

For me it was a trifecta: bad vision, flat feet, a heart murmur, plus an odd bone spur for good measure. The physicians poked, prodded, listened, conferred, and finally shook their heads. “Congratulations, young man,” one said. “Looks like you get to stay home.”

I was shaken—didn’t they understand that I’d been wanting to join for years. I could only imagine returning home a failure, it would have been a total embarrassment. How would I face my friends?  This was a disaster. It was bad enough being a nerd, but a washed-out nerd would have been worlds worse.  I was thinking fast to form an argument. Squinting vaguely in their direction (they had my glasses) I insisted they reconsider, I dimly remember giving them the sort of speech that you hear eighth-graders make about patriotism and school spirit, and teamwork…and other such “all-American boy” claptrap. At first they laughed me off, until they realized that I was serious.  They soberly stepped away, conferred, and returned. “Well,” one said, “if you’re sure you really want this, we’ll pass you. But there’s a whole roomful of young knuckleheads who’ll think you’re crazy.”  Of course, they were right, but I didn’t care as relief washed over me. I also had a feeling of triumph, when I thought of the boys I went to high school with – “Take that, assholes!”; who knew that only a couple of years later, as a jaded petty officer, I’d look back on that moment with a snicker: “You’ll be sorrrry.”

After several fatiguing hours, the physical examination concluded and we were allowed to dress. A Naval Reserve officer administered the oath. I raised my right hand, and for the next four years, two months, and twenty‑seven days I belonged to Uncle Sam.

Before boarding the bus home, another fellow and I received lapel pins: white and blue, with a gold anchor and the legend United States Navy – CACHE around the edge. The CACHE program was for seventeen‑year‑olds who entered the Naval Reserve until their eighteenth birthday, when they reported to boot camp as “regular” Navy.

Back at school, I wore that button with great pride—and no small aloofness. I went from invisible nerd to someone distinctly different—maybe even a little better—than the rest of the boys, or so I felt, anyway; nonetheless, I must have been annoyingly smug, but undeniably proud. I was a boy of distinction

Lie

On my next‑to‑last day as a civilian, the recruiter stopped at my parents’ house with final forms to be reviewed and signed. As Pop had to sign for me, he sat in on the proceedings.

There’s a tiny ink dot by one of the yes/no boxes—where my pen hesitated at “Have you, in the past five years, wet the bed?” I checked “No”…with a guilty conscience.

I’d been eager to join the Navy since I was about ten. My mother—ever the realist—gently reminded me of why it might not work out.

I had a secret that hammered my self‑esteem and made me withdrawn and invisible in high school; I was a bed-wetter since I was about three. I thought the Navy could change that. I wrapped myself in magical thinking—everything would be okay—but the worry remained.

So I joined up, flew to San Diego, and that first night at “Taps” I turned in—sure I’d wake to disaster, return home with my head hung low, and invent a story about washing out. An auto‑plant job loomed in my future.

Then came a transcendent moment. For the first time in eighteen years, I woke up…

with a dry bed.

From that point forward it was smooth sailing.

Arrival

The flight from Detroit to San Diego was my first time in an airplane, I was excited to fly, but anxious about what the next eleven weeks would bring. Although I had been thoroughly briefed by my sailor brothers, I was still apprehensive, and a little scared.

There were about twelve of us heading to California, and the recruiter put one guy in charge; he was as bewildered as the rest of us, but did his best to keep us together.  The flight was uneventful, though the GIs on the on the plane delighted in telling us lots of bootcamp horror stories; which didn’t do anything for our confidence.

When we arrived in San Diego we were directed to a bus that would take us to the Recruit Training Command (RTC) at the Naval Training Center (NTC). Now the joking and bravado was gone, and we were all alone in our thoughts. As the bus drove through the gate and up to the receiving building, we entered what the company commanders referred to as “a world of shit.”

A first-class petty officer with a blue braid looped around his shoulder stepped aboard the bus and immediately started shouting at us. He referred to everything as “my” and “mine”: “Your are now in my fucking Navy”, “You will get the fuck off my fucking bus.” He shouted lots of bewildering instructions and made it clear that he was not going to repeat himself.

Most of the rest is a blur with only fragments of memory. We were herded into a large room, and lectured immediately on the penalties for homosexuality, contraband materials, and venereal disease…all of this stuff was news to me.

Shortly after that we were led out into a hallway – for the next four years referred to as a “passageway.” We were ordered to form a straight line, hugging the righthand wall (“bulkhead”) at attention – “nuts to butts” meaning a very compact and compressed line.  Then came the concept of “hurry-up and wait” – a hallmark of the next four years. We new recruits had entered a truly foreign world, and each of us looked like a deer in the headlights. All we could do was pay close attention to the bellowed orders and instructions.

Next, we entered a very large room where there were big cardboard cartons aligned in neat ranks on the “deck.” We were ordered to stand at attention directly behind the box before us. We were ordered to strip to the skin and place all of our clothing and possessions into the box, which would be shipped home. Then we went through a line to receive our first clothing issue – one pair of dungarees, one pair cheap tennis shoes, one pair of socks, basic toiletries, and one set of underwear. We also received the ballcap that designated us a “squirrels” and “worms.”.

We hurriedly dressed, and were shouted into the “great equalizer “– the barber shop. There were a dozen chairs and a dozen bored barbers. The busy clippers became a cacophony of buzzing, as locks of hair hit the deck. I heard one wiseguy barber ask “do you want to keep your sideburns?”, he met the recruits affirmative answer with: “then hold out your hand.”  This was our first experience with the humor that we were continually exposed to in bootcamp – humor that we were forbidden to even smile at lest we end up on the deck doing twenty-five pushups with a petty officers foot on our back.

It was a long, dizzying, frightening, and bewildering day which ended about one o’clock in the morning.  We arrived at our barracks, which we would occupy for the first five weeks of training. At about one a.m. we were ordered to “hit the rack” until reveille at four o’clock the next morning.

We all lay in our racks, in the dark considering the day, and only imagining the bellowing, cursing, slapping, kicking, double-timing, punishment, and confusion that lay ahead. We would also be instructed in the terms, technology, and traditions of the Navy.  Gradually fear gave way to confidence and eventual graduation…for those of us who could hack it.

 

Clothes Make the Man

On the morning of July 10, 1970, I had underpants in my mouth.

It was our second full day of Navy boot camp in San Diego—the day we were issued our next set of uniforms.

We double‑timed to a large stretch of open pavement behind a buff‑colored building. Painted in rows six feet apart were bright yellow footprints. We were ordered to stand on them at attention.

Actual sailors – petty officers - passed among us, issuing—one at a time—articles of clothing and equipment. Each item had to be held in a visible, regulation manner to demonstrate receipt: towel draped over the back of the neck; shoes neatly to the left; seabag on the right; ditty bag and skivvy shirts on the pavement directly in front. Then came three pairs of skivvy shorts: left hand, right hand, and teeth.

And so, it went until each of us had a basic uniform. Only dungarees at this stage—no dress blues or whites. Those came later, for those who made it that far. Each company started with one hundred guys. Eleven weeks later, sixty‑seven of us graduated.

Once the issue was complete, everything got jammed haphazardly into our seabags. Then came the test: hoisting the seabag over the shoulder and double‑timing to the barracks—a quarter‑mile. Most of us arrived huffing and puffing like straining locomotives, staggering under the weight. And this was only half of what we’d eventually be issued.

Each recruit was received three whitehats—the iconic sailor’s cap. We weren’t allowed to wear them; not yet. Those stayed packed away until five weeks later when we crossed the bridge separating “Squirrel Island” from the main base and advanced training. Only then would we become “Whitehats,” ready to begin the next five weeks of training.

Following what was, for me, twelve weeks of basic training, I passed through the terminal at San Diego International Airport—seabag fully loaded, valise in hand—this time, without even breaking a sweat.

Swim School

Fifty‑odd years ago, I had to prove to the Navy’s satisfaction that I could drown.

On the morning of July 11, 1970, at the Recruit Training Center in San Diego, I—along with ninety‑nine other guys—had to jump into the deep end of a pool. In the Navy, as one might imagine, swimming is an essential skill.

Just about all the recruits could swim. I knew this, because I had a great view—from my seat at the bottom of the pool. After a few moments of looking up at the blur of splashing recruits, a long bamboo pole tapped me on the head—my cue to grab hold so some indifferent petty officer could haul me back to the surface. I had demonstrated, quite ably, that I was a non‑swimmer, utterly and entirely.

As ninety‑seven other guys toweled off and marched away, I—and two others—were told to stay behind. Ten minutes later, a petty officer returned and ordered us to get dressed and muster in front of the building. We’d just been matriculated into Swim School.

We watched what would’ve been our company march away, and we three sad sacks speculated about our fate. Eventually three young sailors in whites showed up—seaman apprentices with two half‑stripes on their sleeves and a braided blue cord on the left shoulder: adjutants. They could also be called assholes. They were fresh out of boot camp and had been given a mere whiff of authority over we seaman recruits; and oh, how they did lord it over us!

They hazed us mercilessly, and not in the fun way, but in a manner that demonstrated their favored phrase – “There’s a fine-line between maltreatment and motivation.” One exercise had us extend our arms straight out, index fingers side‑by‑side. Onto our fingers they’d balance a gray Swingline stapler. Simple, right? Try five minutes. Then ten. Arms on fire; fingers numb; adjutants screaming. That’s when I first learned—from a person in authority—that I was a “stupid four‑eyed retard.” In my entire time in the Navy, this was the only instance of hazing that was truly cruel—and simple as it sounded, it was miserable.

As more non‑swimmers showed up, the class grew to about fifteen. I made friends with a recruit named Harly Greer from Macomb County, Michigan; nice guy—swam like a rock. He was a Chippewa Indian and said that everyone called him “Chief”…I called him Harley.  With a handshake, we formed a partnership.

Every morning, we marched to the pool building for instruction, paused for lunch, and returned to the pool in the afternoon. Evenings were spent back at the barracks, where a low‑key and good-natured petty officer taught us basic military skills: stowing lockers (an incredibly precise ritual), making a rack (bed), Navy terminology, and folding blankets as a two-man team. He was a patient guy—who was stuck there with us while waiting for his ship to come in, literally.

We had five days to learn to swim or we’d end up in the U.S. Army. Seriously.  If you washed out of Swim School, you were still government property, so they’d just put you in the Army…as Country Joe sang at Woodstock: “…next stop is Vietnam.”

We were highly motivated to succeed.

Over the course of five days we were taught the sidestroke, the backstroke, and the breaststroke—none of which I came even close to mastering. The guys who learned to swim, left our ranks to join regular rifle companies. On the fifth-and final day, the instructors taught Harley and I – the last of the Mohicans (so to speak) -  to “scull”- the most rudimentary swimming imaginable. Sculling is simply locomotive floating—enough to stay alive until rescue. The instructors shouted encouragement; some of them gleefully referenced Vietnam.

We both passed.

We received a bright red, three‑inch‑high WEAK SWIMMER stamp on the front of our service record folder—the first thing any command would see when we reported aboard. Still, scarlet letters were better than Army green.

Now, an official swimmer, I joined a regular company: newly formed Company 297. We assembled on one hundred pairs of yellow footprints; mine was number sixty‑three. We were told to memorize the recruits to our left, right, front, and rear—this would be our marching position for the next eleven weeks

Then our Company Commander—our “C‑Daddy”, equivalent to a drill sergeant—introduced himself: Chief Boilerman’s Mate R. Luft. He stood on a crate and greeted us thus:“Awright you fuckin’ shitbirds, this ain’t no Gilligan’s Island…”And just like that, the fuckin’ shitbirds of Rifle Company 297 were off and running. And I was proud to be one of them.

Rites of Passage

Just as there’s a progression to becoming a full‑fledged sailor, boot camp has its own progression to becoming a full‑fledged recruit. Immediately after initial processing—usually on the first full day—the recruit receives a minimal issue of clothing: dungarees, skivvies, and canvas‑and‑rubber deck shoes. Marching around in those cheap sneakers marks the brand‑new and bewildered “squirrel.” Squirrels become targets for derision from other recruits—sometimes their senior by mere days. The newest recruits look enviously at the heavy black “boondocker” boots on the more advanced recruits. They might have been less envious had they known how many hours went into polishing those boondockers to a mirror sheen.

Another step in the progression—for guys wearing glasses—was a rubber cord to keep spectacles from falling off. That black band stood out starkly against a shaved head. I and all the other “four-eyed sealed-beams (an early auto headlight brand)” wanted to sport those.

Next came the dog tags. The newest recruits could hear the faint jingle of the more seasoned boots as they marched by. In those days, Navy dog tags had three embossed lines: name; service number/ blood type; and religion. Recruits haggled with the stamping‑machine operator for alternate religious designations—Buddhist, Seventh‑day Adventist, atheist—but they had to accept the generic PROTESTANT or CATHOLIC . There was always one pain‑in‑the‑neck who’d offer membership in the “BDT club”—the Bent Dog Tag club—by crunching-up one of your tags. Hardy har-har.

Finally came the common denominator of the boot…the rifle.  We were each issued a WWI-vintage Springfield rifle. It was with us day and night. We marched with it, we drilled with it, and as the heat and exhaustion built, we cursed at it. Though we did have a respect for the military appearance it conferred upon us.

The final and most envied badge came after week five: the whitehat. For the first five weeks, new recruits were isolated at Camp Nimitz—"Squirrel Island”—for primary training. On the day we marched over the bridge to the main base for the final six weeks of advanced training, we were finally allowed to wear our whitehats. Before that, we wore a dark blue WWII‑pattern ball cap. Being allowed to wear the whitehat set apart the advanced recruit as “almost” a sailor. I was proud of that hat, and I still have my original—yellowed, frayed, and still holding the salty shape that I bent into it.

Boot camp was transformative. We were cursed and screamed at—theatrically, colorfully, comically, and imaginatively. We marched and double‑timed everywhere. We drilled for countless hours with our rifles, received a dozen inoculations, fought-back sleep in classrooms, learned to fold clothes the Navy way, stood guard duty, constantly cleaned the barracks, scrubbed our clothing, rushed through meals, and slept little. We were hurried, harried, hassled, and harangued. We were cursed at, slapped, choked, and occasionally kicked. We were gassed, we fought fires, and we learned to shoot.

From the first head shave to the final day when we donned our dress blues, boot camp turned us from disorganized individualists into polished members of a team. We were sailors of the U.S. Navy. Still, plenty of boy remained in me, but the next four years would change my abilities, outlook, and self‑esteem—an influence that remains with me today, and has made me, if not a better person, at least a more interesting one.

Where High School Ended, and the Real Tests Began

The three most exciting diversions during boot camp were the rifle range, the gas chamber, and firefighting. Each was different, but each gave one a sense of purpose, confidence, and immediacy.

The rifle range day was under a blue southern California sky and mild weather. We were at an installation miles from the main base, at some other military facility out in the middle of nowhere. After several days of “snapping in”—that is, dry-firing our old Springfields—we finally were issued, for the day, the classic M1 Garand battle rifle, the hallmark of the WWII G.I.

I can’t remember what distance we were shooting at, but it was considerable. We shot at large targets that were raised and lowered from a trench beneath and out of the line of fire; that trench was called “the butts.” On range day, you would cycle through two positions—the firing line and the butts.

The fun thing about the butts is that you were unsupervised. Wearing a helmet, bullets whizzing overhead, dirt-clods flying, you’d raise the target on pulleys. After each shot, you’d lower the target, find the hole, place a large disc marker in it, and run the target back up so that the shooter and the instructor could see how the shooter did. Then you’d again lower the target, place a little paper patch over the hole, and raise it up again for the next shot.

We shot from the standing, kneeling, and prone positions, with prone being my preferred. Sadly, we weren’t shooting for qualification that day, so the fact that I shot at “expert” level was neither recorded nor noted with a ribbon that I could wear on my chest. It wasn’t until later in my career that I was able to shoot for qualification and gained the right to wear that “expert” ribbon.

The day was relaxed, as the instructors were there to make us crack shots rather than just yell at us, as was the usual drill. We also had box lunches at picnic tables. It was a very pleasant day.

Not so pleasant, but equally noteworthy and exciting, was the day that we went into the gas chamber. We spent the day prior learning how to maintain, store, don, and use a Navy gas mask. By the next day, we were facile in the use of the mask.

We lined up single file and entered the chamber where we fell into ranks of one platoon. Then we were ordered to don our masks. With teamwork being a cornerstone of the Navy, each sailor was responsible for tightening the straps on the head of the sailor in front of him. Masks securely in place, we waited.

All the while, the petty officers in charge were giving us instructions. There was no yelling or shouting—they were calm, measured, and reassuring. When they were satisfied that all of the masks were in place and that everyone knew the procedure, the moment came when they ignited the gas grenade.

The room was silent except for the hiss of the grenade. Wearing the mask, slow steady breaths proved the worth of the mask, as we could feel the effect of the gas on our exposed skin. I remember my neck feeling as though it was sunburned. After about five minutes came the much-anticipated and dreaded order—“Remove masks!”

Off came the masks, and by the second breath we were gasping, wheezing, and coughing. Our noses ran like rivers, and our vision was blurred as though we were underwater. Despite all of this, I remember thinking, “This isn’t as bad as I thought it would be.”

Now the instructors began shouting for us to repeat our general orders. “What is your fifth general order?” barked the petty officer. “Sir, my fifth general order is: I will quit my post only when properly relieved, SIR!” It went on like this for three or four general orders, interspersed with general information about the masks as well as the various chemical agents that they provided proof against. It should be noted that throughout this entire exercise, the instructors were not wearing masks—we were pretty impressed by the mettle of those men.

Finally, they ordered us to right face and, in a military manner and in single file, march out of the gas chamber and into the fresh air outside.

The lawn was filled with coughing, retching, bleary-eyed recruits. The fronts of our shirts were literally soaked through with all of the water that poured forth from our eyes, mouths, and most notably, our noses. The petty officers circulated among us, reminding us not to rub our eyes but to, instead, just wait it out.

It took a good ten minutes before we were mostly recovered. After a brief postscript by the instructors, we were dismissed and marched back to the barracks for showers and fresh dungarees. It was an unforgettable day and something very unlike what most of the boys that I had graduated high school with would ever experience.

The most exciting and most dangerous day was when we fought live fires.

As with the rifles and gas masks, we had been thoroughly trained, drilled, and tested on the equipment and techniques necessary for fighting a shipboard fire—one of the greatest threats to the life of a ship and a sailor.

We spent a few hours practicing with the equipment, and then we were marched to a steel building that simulated a compartment on a ship. Prior to going in, we donned the “OBA”—the oxygen breathing apparatus. It is an airtight mask and goggles connected by hoses to a chest-worn canister that, when activated, produces oxygen. You cannot use a gas mask when fighting a fire. In a gas attack, the gas mixes with the breathable air; you can survive tear gas without a mask. However, smoke displaces and poisons the air, and a gas mask would be of no use. That is why you need a device that produces breathable oxygen. The OBA was a brilliant invention introduced to the fleet in WWII and remained until the mid-2000s.

We were divided into ten-man teams. Each team member wore an OBA and held a single-file position gripping the hose. When the hose is charged with water at high pressure, it takes many men to control it. With the charged hose, we marched into the darkened compartment.

The compartment was divided into two sections; in one stood we waiting firefighters, in the other section, which was a large tank, was kerosene. When the team leader reported “ready,” the fuel was ignited. Immediately, thick black smoke rose to the overhead in a blanket of lethal blackness. As the fire grew to a roar, the blanket of smoke came lower and lower. Finally, the nozzleman was ordered to open the mist nozzle and play it on the fire.

As soon as the water hit the fire, the smoke enveloped us, and we were blinded, but we knew where the fire was and where to point the hose. We stayed in constant contact with the sailor in front of us and the sailor behind us. It took a great deal of time to extinguish the fire, and when it was out, we were ordered to back out the superheated compartment.

It was the scariest and most thrilling thing that I’ve ever done.

After each of the teams completed this evolution, we reassembled to fight a “topside fire.” In this scenario, we climbed a ladder to the top of the compartment and stood on the flat steel plating of its roof. With OBAs donned and hoses at the ready, again the kerosene was ignited, and thick, black, deadly smoke began to pour out of every opening of the compartment, and again we were enveloped.

There were shipboard-style hatches on the roof, and it was through these that we played the water and foam over the fire. As we were fighting it, the steel under our feet grew increasingly heated until it looked like we were tap-dancing to keep from burning the soles of our shoes.

When the fire was extinguished, the hose was uncharged, and we “hot-footed it”, in an orderly fashion, back to the ground. It was the second dangerous and thrilling experience of the day.

These three events were life-changing and pushed me to a limit far beyond what I thought myself capable of.  Now I felt that I had stood three genuine tests and had passed each with skill, alacrity, and some small amount of courage.

Beeler

He appeared one morning.

There were maybe two days left of boot camp. We’d graduated and were hanging around the barracks, waiting to be processed out. I woke up—no chief shouting, no “hurry up and wait”, no being cursed at— I rolled over, and, sitting on the next bunk - there he was.

“Hello there.”

Tall, older and with mischievous smile—a foreshadowing of two years of hijinx. He introduced himself as Dan. We shook hands, possibly the most meaningful handshake of my life.

I couldn’t remember seeing him before, yet here he was—a member of Company 297. He was a returned prodigal. Two weeks into boot camp, before I’d gotten to know the guys, Beeler had volunteered for the Fifty‑State Flag Team—sailors in dress whites who marched at football games, car races, grand openings—public‑relations duty. As a result he’d skated out of some everyday boot‑camp misery, though the special‑unit guys – choir, band, drum and stumble corps - all had their own annoyances. It was boot camp, after all. Dan had rejoined the company for that low-key final week of training.

That sunny morning Dan and I formed a bond and began a friendship that continues to this day. Our conversation turned to the orders that we had just received. We were both slated to train as radiomen, and we’d be returning to San Diego for radioman “A” school and we’d be in the same class after fifteen days of leave.

Returning to the Naval Training Center, San Diego, Dan and I reconnected and chose to room together. On the weekends and evenings, we found lots of fun things to do. Dan was more mature than me—zany, but mature—and he knew more about life. Sticking close to him was an education for me. He was also an Eagle Scout, deeply attuned to the outdoors, something that I would come to share.

Upon graduation we received orders to Naval Communications Station, Guam. Dan and I ended up in the same division and the same section—meaning the same watch schedule. We became roommates in Barracks 32 with two other radiomen.

Our fifteen months together were filled with high adventure and low misadventure—bright ideas gone wrong, wrong ideas turning out fine—and lots of time outdoors: hiking, snorkeling, and howling at the moon. Dan was often the instigator, and a posse of about ten of us hung out when our watches aligned. There was a lot of weed, a lot of laughter, and a lot of memories in the making.

I, the straight arrow, was the odd man out among the potheads—but still a full‑fledged member of the gang. It dawned on me that this was the “bad crowd” that Uncle Joe had warned me about.

It was a fifteen‑month circus and Dan was the jolly ringmaster.

When I left Guam for the USS DeHaven , we finally went our separate ways. Our paths crossed only once more when I was at teletype repair school; we parlayed that weekend into a mountain camping trip. After that, we weren’t stationed together again—much to my regret—though we did stay in touch with each other.

The last two years of my time in the Navy were diminished by the absence of Beeler. He managed to bring out the humor in just about every situation.  I can only imagine what it would have like to have had him as a shipmate.

In 1995, living with my wife of that time, and our daughter March, Dan and his partner, Larry, passed through Michigan. He called, and a day later a car pulled into my driveway in Grand Rapids. Out climbed Beeler. We looked at each other and said, simultaneously, “Who’s that old man?”

It was a great visit, and we’ve kept in touch. Dan looms large in many of these essays because—to me, as a kid—he was larger than life.

To my mind, he still is.

Fleet Town

After leave, I reported back to NTC San Diego for Radioman “A” School. The contrast with boot camp couldn’t have been greater. Boot camp was yelling, double‑timing, marching, exhaustion, anxiety, pain. Radioman School felt like one delight after another. It was a real culture shock.

Waiting for a class to fill, we were berthed in the beautiful 1920s Spanish‑colonial barracks that were the hallmark of the base—two‑story yellow stucco with red tile roofs, fronted by breezy arcades. Inside: a sleeping porch and a traditional open berthing-bay, housed the sailors. The layout was duplicated on the second floor. There were open‑air smoking patios, black‑and‑white checkerboard floors, and attractive fixtures. Furnishings, however, were typical old‑Navy: gray double bunks, ancient gray wool blankets, dented polished‑aluminum lockers, battered Steelcase chairs, and the remnants of generations of pinups inside locker doors. I loved my berth on the sleeping porch.

Unassigned for days, I explored the base to the soundtrack of music that I’d been deprived of during the weeks of boot camp.  All kinds of new songs met my ears. Eric Burdon’s weird and wonderful Spill the Wine was the earliest entry on my “A” school soundtrack followed by the Kinks Lola, and Edwin Starr’s timely War.

Though this was the same base as boot camp, I was on the service‑school side. I’d see recruits marching everywhere—as many facilities were shared—it was fun to watch them march by, now that I was no longer among those weary ranks.

During boot camp leave I’d dreaded returning to the yelling, chaos, and punishing routine that I had previously endured at San Diego. Instead, checking into this Spanish‑colonial marvel, I met a very relaxed petty officer who glanced up from his Playboy magazine long enough to assign me a rack and locker. “Report for muster every morning in case there’s a work detail.” It became a delightful week of leisure, in pleasant surroundings, among sailors as surprised as I was at the new and relaxed lifestyle…for as long as it lasted.

I met back up with Beeler. Our friendship cemented. On our first weekend he organized a trip downtown to enjoy the wonders of San Diego. I grew impatient as he finished his laundry; I’d tasted “Dago” on graduation liberty and was hungry for more.

We rode to beautiful Balboa Park and its famous zoo. It was 1970—hippies, Hare Krishnas, drum circles, spontaneous street theater, underground comics. It seemed that everyone but me—and the zoo animals—were high. It was sex, drugs, and rock and roll. New, exciting, and “bad,” which for a nice, virginal, Catholic boy was half the attraction.

As we wandered in the Southern California sunshine, Chicago’s 25 or 6 to 4 became the day’s soundtrack. The orange‑robed Hare Krishnas snake-danced through the crowd; the hippie girls were languidly stoned. An impromptu play about Nixon drew laughs I didn’t yet understand. An anti‑war procession paraded past, led by a North Vietnamese flag—uncool to my naïve patriotism. It was a cultural stew I found intoxicating. I was the zeitgeist of the moment, and I reveled in it.

Downtown San Diego was a revelation. A whiff of patchouli still brings back the memory head shops with psychedelic posters, pot paraphernalia, and plentiful pornography. I saw my first dildo in one of those smoky shops—"Rasputin’s Revenge” embossed upon it’s flank. Heavens to Betsy -I was not in Saginaw County anymore.

The main drag was Broadway—broad, long, brilliantly lit, filled with neon temptation. There were “locker clubs” places where liberty-hound sailors could store their civilian cloths and switch out of uniform for liberty.  Those clubs were rapidly going out of business as new reforms allowed sailors to keep civilian clothes aboard ship. The old fleet town was changing.

At both ends of Broadway stood the neon temples: the Seven‑Seas stores—the all-inclusive tailor shop, uniform, store, tailor shop, shoe repair shop, souvenirs, sailor‑bait—with enormous locker‑club facilities. You could buy non‑regulation uniforms and gee‑gaws to look extra squared away. They were catnip to a rookie sailor who didn’t realize how inflated the prices were. It was such a pleasure to get so bedazzled.

On the street were bright lights and the smells of decadence and fun—cotton candy to cheap perfume, urine to cigar smoke, car exhaust to salt air. Tattoo parlors and clip joints, sleazy stag-movie houses and massage parlors. Smarmy salesmen outside junk‑jewelry shops tried to twist your arm into buying something to “show Mom how much you love her.” Generations of sailors had passed through those shops and parlors since the days of coal‑fired men‑of‑war. Sailors rolled up and down the main street in a procession that spanned a century.

There were penny arcades with shooting galleries and nickelodeons from WWII days. The massive USO building offered a lounge, game room, and a thirty‑foot slot‑car table. The matronly ladies serving fresh donuts were the same women who had served G.I.s in the earlier war.

San Diego was a fleet town through and through—…and I loved every minute of it.

 

The three Gentile boys, author at lower right.

Them Gentile Boys

My brothers and I were all Navy communicators, and that meant thorough background investigations. Over a  ten-year period there was a steady pulse of FBI agents visiting our neighborhood, questioning friends and neighbors about our families, our character, and our loyalty. Visits by “them guys in dark suits” became such a regular event that neighbors commented on it to each other—and to our parents.

We brothers spanned three decades of service: the oldest joined in 1961, the next oldest in 1966, and I in 1970. We each left hearth and home for the adventure—and service—of the U.S. Navy. Or, as Mrs. Crandall was heard to say at the general store, “Them Gentile boys sure got the hell out of Burt.” We surely did, and we never looked back.

 Cheat

In 1970, my Radioman “A” School class was among the last required to learn Morse code. We plunged into it the first week—shout school. The name was earned.

The instructor called out the international name for a letter; we shouted back the code:

“Tango!” — DAH. “Mike!” — DAH‑DAH,“I CAN’T HEAR YOU! ”Foxtrot!” DI‑DI‑DAH‑DIT.

By week’s end our voices were wrecked, but we knew the code and responded instantly.

Next came the telegraph key for sending and the earphones and typewriter for receiving. First hurdle: typing—24 wpm required. I’d taken high‑school typing, so I passed easily. Then the serious business: send and receive at 12 wpm of Morse code.  I was a little skeptical.

Donning headphones, I hammered at the keyboard, turning dits and dahs into letters, numbers, and lots of punctuation—with plenty of errors:  I received at a paltry eight wpm. Sending was worse—slow and clumsy, six wpm, errors galore. Like many others, I failed…repeatedly

The remedy was night school.  For a week, about half the class returned evening after evening to practice until we passed. When someone qualified, he earned back evening liberty. I was not among the fortunate.

Night after night I sat in that classroom while my buddies grew impatient—they wanted me with them on liberty. Instead of prowling San Diego, I was stuck with headphones and a fatigued index finger.

On the fourth night, despair loomed. Pounding the key with minimal results, I heard a low mutter over my shoulder: “Slide over.”

It was Bob Fountain from New Jersey—tall, dark, handsome, and master of the key. We’d been friends in boot camp and now we were in A school together. He slipped on the headphones, tapped briskly, then moved to the typewriter and rapidly pounded out a coded message. When time was up, he ripped the form from the machine, handed it to me, and said: “Turn this in. We’re all waiting outside.”

With that perfect score I became the newest liberty hound to hit San Diego……and I never had to use Morse code again.

The Shadow Knows

After three months of instruction, Radioman School ended at 10:00 a.m. on a Friday—and because of one mystery man, all hell broke loose.

With about four weeks left, a new student appeared. The story was that an injury had “set him back” from his original class. He kept to himself, said little. We called him “the Shadow.” He was a ghost, a cipher. Where the rest of us craved camaraderie, he rejected goodwill. In short, he was a dick.

On that quiet Friday morning we exhaled with relief and good cheer. Training was complete. A long weekend, then leave, the fleet, or first duty stations. Service School Command had us for one more weekend; then we would scatter to the forewinds.

That afternoon the darkened TV lounge was packed with sailors watching sergeant Joe Friday on Dragnet. There were fifteen of us crammed in that room with snacks, pizza, and sodas. We were done with homework and blissfully ignorant of the storm that was about to hit.

“The narcs!  narcs are in the building!” A breathless new radioman burst in to the lounge with this shouted alarm  with Beeler in the lead. Chaos erupted. Sailors piled into the lobby, then sprinted for their rooms to grab their stashes.

“Which floor?” someone shouted. Young men barreled up the staircase, racing the NIS (now NCIS) agents to their lockers. Padlocks fumbled, goods grabbed, rushed exits made.

I, too, panicked. Though not a user, I feared the prescription Darvon I’d been given after a boot camp concussion would get me arrested. I jammed the remaining capsules down the shower‑room drain. I didn’t know what counted as contraband so I wasn’t taking chances.

The G‑men went through every locker on four floors. A small amount of weed was confiscated, and one guy was carted off. By five o’clock it was over, and we gathered to collect wits and swap stories.

Someone noticed the Shadow was nowhere to be seen. Not suspicious at the time, but noteworthy.

In 2024 I contacted one of the guys to refresh my memory. “I was the one who got busted,” he laughed. Turns out he was hauled before the commanding officer, read the riot act, chewed out, and sentenced to extra duty. But nothing more. After the Navy had spent a fortune on his background check and training—and with Radioman a critical rating—they weren’t about to throw him out.

When the “Guam Thirteen” assembled at the airport for departure, we rehashed the episode. After animated debate, the consensus was that the Shadow was a narc. That explained his sudden appearance, mysterious disappearance, and lack of connections. He was the rat.

“I never trusted that guy anyway,” Beeler said. “He was a total dick.”

 Come Fly with Me

I spent a lot of time in air terminals and airplanes during my Navy years—traveling to and from training, duty stations, and home on leave. Flights were generally boring, but something interesting occasionally happened.

The first flight took a handful of us to boot camp. From Detroit, about a dozen of us flew to Chicago for a connection to San Diego and the Recruit Training Center. Aboard the plane we met some sailors who immediately hazed us with boot‑camp horror stories—especially the many inoculations, including the infamous “square needle in the left nut.” “No kidding, it’s square, and it’s huge. Guys scream. Some pass out. You won’t walk for a day and a half.”

By the end of the tale we were believers. The story followed us into boot camp, where guys processed weeks ahead solemnly warned us about the square needle. Needless to say, it never materialized—but it left a mark on the psyche.

Six months later I found myself on a big Pan Am 727 bound for Hawaii, Guam, and ultimately Vietnam. Seventeen hours to Guam, broken only by an hour on the big island. Rumor said we might spend a day on the “magical islands.” It was just scuttlebutt. We weren’t even allowed out of the terminal. The hula-girl aloha greetings with floral leis were for the civilian tourists, not the G.I.s. An hour later we reboarded and took off.

All the sailors, in dress blues, were bound for Guam—except for a couple headed on to Vietnam. The Army guys, in class‑A greens, were all Vietnam‑bound. Not much joy on that flight. No civilians—just servicemen. An hour after leaving Hawaii we noticed the flight attendants had disappeared, there were no more drinks, no meals, not even peanuts. Amenities disappeared along with paying customers. For the rest of the trip, we were left alone in sullen silence.

The flight home from Guam was the opposite: joyous. A big, fat 747 loaded at Guam International, packed with G.I.s heading stateside. Again it was a mix of civilians and servicemen. The atmosphere was jolly—boisterous joshing, jostling, joking. Gone was the anxiety of the earlier trip; now it was all adrenaline and exuberance.

I was in a four‑across seating section with three other sailors. Chatting with two kids behind us, we learned they were nineteen‑year‑olds from Guam who’d been drafted—lottery numbers 1 and 2. We thought that was hilarious, and there was much good‑natured joking at their expense. Inevitably, the conversation turned to…the square needle in the left nut.

 

The author in the highlands of Guam, 1971.

Guam Adventure

The first morning on the island I knew I’d arrived at a place I would remember for the rest of my life—and forever miss when I was gone. As an eighteen‑year‑old, the moment was intoxicating and transcendent.

It was Saturday; everyone else slept in. Sunlight peeked through louvered windows. A light, scented breeze wafted through the barracks. I could see myself as if from above—a boy from Burt, Michigan, on a speck of land in a vast ocean. A tiny dot waking on another tiny dot in the planet’s largest body of water. It was a moment both exciting and moving.

Freedom from my past woes, fuel for my love of history, a real devotion to duty, desire to see an exotic part of the world, longing to reinvent myself—it was all right there on that island. I was happy in that quiet pool of sunlight.

Unlike many of the guys, I loved Guam. It was so different from anything I’d ever experienced, and everything that I had hoped to experience. Adventure was just outside the door; history and mystery all around. It was the antidote to much of my high‑school malaise. I felt like the most unique kid from my graduating class, having the most singular adventure.

From the start, I spent off‑duty hours outdoors—snorkeling, exploring, hitchhiking, meeting friendly Guamanians, and “boonie‑stomping” -. the G.I. term for hiking through the bush, and I did plenty of it—swatting mosquitoes in steamy lowlands or enjoying breezes on grassy highlands. In photos from that time I’m almost always grinning.

Beeler—an Eagle Scout—loved the outdoors. We spent a lot of time together in the boonies. One of the first boonie‑stomps was comprised the old A school classmates, and was organized by Beeler.

When that first hike ended, we realized that any boonie‑stomp without planning is a death march. There were eight of us; only Dan and I brought canteens. Most wore street shoes. No one brought bug repellent. We stumbled, cursed, backtracked, and head‑scratched. Guys groused at Beeler for getting them into this mess.

The loudest complainer elbowed for leadership of the group, barking orders like a half‑assed field marshal. We ignored him. He’d been an annoyance since Radioman School.

We reached a narrow, unassuming stream—not even two feet wide, dark, and still. The field marshal declared he’d be first to cross. Beeler smirked and suggested he check the depth with his foot. The marshal wasn’t taking orders and hopped in, expecting ankle‑deep water. Like a brick, he disappeared under the murky water. What looked like a trickle was deep; he went straight down, water over his head. He surfaced sputtering, spitting and swearing—still clenching his sodden cigarette in his teeth. We all howled with delight; Beeler nearly choked on his Marlboro. Suddenly the grueling trek became a riot of laughs. Irritability went up in smoke, and—one soggy exception aside—we had a jolly time stumbling and wisecracking back to the road.

Beeler soon linked up with more experienced hikers who clued him in to the best trails and beaches. Within a week most of us had fins, masks, and snorkels. After work we’d rush to the barracks, grab our gear, and hitchhike to the beach. I remember the first plunge each afternoon into crystal‑clear water—and the peculiar sensation of salt drying on skin, leaving an itchy residue.

We arrived at the height of the dry season, though localized squalls were common. Standing on a highland peak, I once counted eight simultaneous rain showers under a blue sky filled with puffy clouds. Banks of cloud always marched against the brilliant Pacific dome. It was breathtaking.

The rainy season was just that—rainy. Overcast and drizzling for weeks. Shoes turned green with mold. Everything was cool, clammy, damp. Books that I took with me, today still smell of mildew. Despite the weather, even then, I was outdoors, hunting the island’s history—ancient Micronesian mariners, Spanish colonizers, and the persistent memory of WWII.

The detritus of that war was everywhere. On returning from a boonie‑stomp I’d empty my pockets of relics—buckles, bullets, empty cartridges. I developed a nose for finding them. Buddies ribbed me that I was missing the scenery, always shuffling along looking for relics. Decades later, as a park ranger at Antietam National Battlefield, law‑enforcement rangers termed illicit relic hunters as doing the “Mannie shuffle.” Some things never change.

The island experience was made a joy by the cast of characters around me—freewheeling, raggedy‑assed, dope‑smoking jokers; each one a comedian, an asshole, a legend—often all three. Friends for a lifetime.

I’m looking at you, Beeler.

Bob, Rich, the author, and Beeler.  Despite appearance, the author was the only one who wasn’t high.

Uncle Joe

Everyone knew I was going to join the Navy—even years prior to my enlistment. One day when I was fourteen, my Army‑veteran Uncle Joe pulled me aside. “It’s important to choose the right friends,” he said. “Don’t fall in with the bad crowd.”  When I got to the island, I chose my friends carefully…

…and all of them were charter members of the bad crowd.

They were a great bunch of hooligans. Despite naïve me being a little horrified at their weed consumption - the hijinx, memories, and bonds were indelible and indestructible.

 

Beeler, Bob, and Mister Zig-Zag, Guam 1971.

Dope Culture, a Midnight Commando Action, and Mister Zig-Zag

In the division, I was one of the few radiomen I knew who didn’t smoke marijuana. Nearly all of my friends did, and even though I was a straight arrow, I still got happily caught up in the dope culture—including one significant prank.

Zig-Zag was, and remains, a favorite cigarette paper for those who roll their own joints. Its logo is a jaunty zouave soldier from an earlier era.

One day Beeler had a brainstorm for subversive fun: he wanted to paint Mister Zig-Zag all over NCS (Naval Communications Station, Finegayen, Guam). I pointed out that hand-painting the design would take too much time and raise the odds of our getting caught. Dope use was taken seriously by the powers that were, and a sailor could get in serious trouble for drug-related activities—not to mention vandalism. Nonetheless, always game for adventure, I suggested using a stencil, a quicker way to apply the image in a fast-strike kind of action.

As the artist of the gang, I was elected to draw and cut the stencil. Beeler found a nice sheet of shirt-board, and I had a craft-knife set. I freehanded the image of Mr. Zig-Zag and carefully cut it out. We ended up with a really good stencil. Now all we needed was a can of spray-paint and a moonless night.

That night came. About five of us scurried around the base, silently leaving the symbol of the great American pothead in at least a dozen locations. It was our own little commando operation, and we thought it was hilarious.

Just before first light we returned to the barracks—tired, paint-stained, and filled with mirth at the thought of the authorities spotting, surveying, and seething at, our handiwork.

Within twenty-four hours of our spree, an investigation was launched. All the likely suspects were interrogated. When I got off watch, I rushed back to the barracks, rifled through my locker for the stencil, slipped it under my shirt, and discreetly ditched it in the nearest dumpster. When our barracks was searched, no evidence was found. We were all in the clear—safe, sound, and smoky. Despite the master-at-arms ordering those most likely responsible to paint over the logos, some survived in out-of-the-way corners, where they amused sailors for a long time afterward.

It was my first taste of how mischief and monotony could collide in the Navy. And it would be far from the last.

The author upper left, Beeler lower right.

The Cube

The barracks at NCS were two-story concrete buildings with entire walls of screened-in windows fitted with wooden louvers. Even by 1970 standards, they were considered “living rough.” Built in the 1950s, they followed the standard Navy design of the era: a long bay with racks and lockers in two straight rows along the port and starboard sides, separated by an open space down the middle, running the length of the building. The shower rooms and a couple of offices were near the entrance, with a back door at the opposite end. This same layout was used on both floors. Upstairs was a TV lounge with a beer machine, a couple battered sofas, and an old television.  The room reeked of stale beer, and the only thing holding the ceiling up was the cigarette smoke.

Five of these identical barracks were connected by a raised, covered concrete breezeway. Everything was reinforced concrete and completely typhoon-proof. As habitability standards improved, sailors at NCS were allowed to use stand-up lockers and plywood partitions to improvise four-man rooms—“cubes.” A central passageway still connected everything, and most “doors” were nothing more than a sheet, beach towel, or tablecloth hung at the entrance. Outside each cube was a roster listing the names of the men billeted there.

The rule was four men to a single cube and six to a “double” (created by moving a locker aside to open into an adjoining cube). There were three of us in a double, and we got away with it for a while by listing former girlfriends’ last names on the roster. Eventually the barracks master-at-arms caught on to our ploy and stuck two more guys in with us. Even then, it still felt kind of spacious—one room as a bedroom, the other as a “living room.” Of course, with a fourteen-foot ceiling and lockers only six and a half feet high, everyone could hear everyone else’s business. And that wasn’t the half of it.

As soon as a sailor arrived on Guam, he’d start stocking up on discounted, duty-free, high-end camera and stereo gear. Every third man seemed to have a complete component stereo setup—turntable, amplifier, pre-amplifier, reverb unit, two to four speakers, and a reel-to-reel deck. There were usually several such rigs in a single cube. The result was a cacophony of sound—every album competing for dominance over every other album. The album Aqualung seemed to be blasting from every cube simultaneously, it’s no wonder that just a few years later when my first ex-wife dragged me to a Jethro Tull concert, about halfway through the first flute solo, I knew the marriage was doomed.

Noise was the main downside, along with the lack of air conditioning. Still, those floor-to-ceiling louvered windows allowed a constant breeze to flow through the building, which was especially pleasant at night.

If you toured our cube, you’d part the tablecloth door and step into a room with three bunkbeds framed by lockers and plywood. In the connecting “living room” you’d find beat-up furniture rescued from dumpsters, stereo setups, psychedelic posters, pornography, pinups, hash pipes, and the ubiquitous ironing board with its can of Niagara spray starch. Cans of Brasso and Kiwi shoe polish sat here and there. Dungarees were draped over the backs of chairs. Fruit crates served as bookcases, filled with record albums, paperbacks, hobby stuff, and other cultural artifacts. Banged-up lamps of varying abilities, stood at odd angles. We had a rattan floor covering and a disreputable queen’s chair, which we thought really classed up the place. Eventually a battered television—reportedly handed down from a sailor in the Continental Navy—sat in the corner. Candles and incense burners completed the mid-century junkyard look.

About fifty sailors lived on each floor. Aside from the cigarette and marijuana smoke, the place stayed relatively fresh—except for the upstairs lounge. This was during the tenure of Elmo Zumwalt, the young, side-burned, and “hip” Chief of Naval Operations who brought sweeping changes to Navy enlisted men’s lives. In the lounge stood one of Zumwalt’s “habitability” improvements—two beer vending machines. As a result, that room smelled like the back alley of a VFW hall on bingo night.

Despite it all, of every ship and station I ever lived in—even the air-conditioned ones—my concrete home on Guam remains my favorite. It perfectly captured the zeitgeist of era and the young men caught up in it.

 

Jake rushing into the cube to watch the beat-up television.

MTM, My Guamanian Girlfriend

One afternoon, I came off watch and headed toward the barracks. Halfway down the long central passageway, two radiomen blew past me and disappeared into my cubicle. A heartbeat later, Jake Jacobs. barreled past me, going in the same direction.

“What’s going on?” I called after him.

He didn’t slow down. “MTM, MTM!”

When I stepped into the cube, nine sailors were jammed into a space meant for four, all glued to our battered old television.

“Shut the fuck up—it’s starting!” someone ordered.

♪ Who can turn the world on with her smile? ♪

Mary Tyler Moore.

I was smitten.

Mannie’s Tailor Shop

In bootcamp we were all issued a sewing kit. In bygone days a kit such as this was referred to as a “housewife”, though I never heard them termed as such, just as I never heard a radioman called “sparks.” Most guys tossed their kits out; others just lost them in the shuffle of going from one ship or station to the other. I held on to mine, and it quickly evolved into a small sewing box.

To many guys, sewing was “women’s work.” I, however, saw it as an opportunity to make some money. My mother had taught me how to mend, and I was pretty good at it. Mending was a necessity in the days of sail. “Rope-Yarn Wednesday” was a time set aside on Wednesday afternoon for sailors to see to the maintenance of their uniforms—simple mending, and for some, fancy embroidery. Even in the modern Navy, an unscheduled period of time-off during the day is referred to as “rope-yarn,” though few know of the traditional origin of that expression. I did, and I blended tradition, mending, and capitalism, and came up with a money-making scheme.

Beeler was the one who got things going. He walked into the cube one morning and found me hemming a pair of pants. “How much for a button?” he asked. I pulled a number out of the air, and the number was fifty cents. He seemed to think that was a real bargain; I thought it was highway robbery…but I got to mending. Fingers only slightly punctured, I made the final stitch and called it good. Beeler was satisfied and was sure that he could get me more business.

Beeler made himself my promoter. “If you assholes need some sewing done, Mannie will fix you up, for cheap.” Word got around that there was a half-assed tailor in the division, and before long I was taking orders from sailors who couldn’t tell a needle from a coconut. Eventually I expanded from buttons to hemming, and a couple of times, I did some alterations. Guys were awestruck by this very simple skill. I couldn’t believe that I was making money from their reluctance—or inability—to use a needle.

By the time I left the island for the fleet, I must have made around fifty bucks, fifty cents at a time…

seventy-five for Marines.

Bungle Through the Jungle

Always the font of bright ideas, Beeler once suggested that he, I, and another sailor become assistant scoutmasters for Boy Scout Troop 25 at Naval Air Station Guam. I was never a scout, but Dan was an Eagle and knew the ropes. He also saw it as an opportunity to get out of doing our work.

The plan was this: we’d get involved in scouting so that we could be released from watch—just as the guys on the NCS baseball team were. It only made sense that three community-minded (and self-interested) sailors should get sprung from duty for doing something as worthy as shaping the youth of America…after all, it was a troop sponsored by the Navy.

We were recruited by a Naval aviator named Bill Moore. This was the only time I let my guard down around an officer—he put scouting first and treated us as equals. He took Dan and I to the three-day scoutmaster training at the Boy Scout campground on the island. Except for the rain, it was a fun weekend at a very cool permanent encampment. Beeler and I were housed in a canvas Army wall tent with a wooden floor, cots, and mosquito nets. The sessions themselves were boring—a blur, really. Dan and I were asleep on our feet, having just come off the mid-watch. Dan’s bright idea about getting relieved of watches had been met with scorn by the chief; he wasn’t as community-minded as Beeler and I were. Still, we persisted.  The chief finally put his foot down “If you assholes want to monkey around rubbing two sticks together, you’ll do it on your own time…not the Navy’s.”

The chief had spoken.  Nevertheless, Dan and I kept our commitment to Bill Moore and the boys of Troop 25.  We welcomed the diversion, figuring that there was some fun to be had in the whole enterprise.

After scoutmaster training, we received certificates, handbooks, and membership cards, and later in the week reported to the Quonset hut that served as Troop 25 headquarters. There were about fifteen scouts of various shapes, sizes, and intellectual and physical abilities. Despite being run by a Navy lieutenant, there was little discipline or organization. Still, the boys were enthusiastic and game for anything.

One week, following a string of watches, we had 52 hours off and were assigned to take the troop on a jungle “survival hike.” Dan, I, and another sailor were dropped off in the rain-soaked boonies with a dozen underprepared scouts. Equipment was minimal, as this was to be a “survival” hike—meaning maximum discomfort. It was only an overnight: point A to point B, with a camp-out in between.

We bungled through the jungle all morning and afternoon, sustained only by pre-made sandwiches. It was rugged going through rain, razor grass, tangan-tangan, and thorny bushes. The footing was uncertain, making tripping a constant hazard. We were wet, annoyed, and exhausted. The three of us sailors providing what scouting called “responsible adult leadership” were growing irritable. Dan and the other sailor eventually erupted into a profanity-laced shoving match—much to the amusement of the boys.

Around five o’clock we found a barely suitable campsite and began making shelters with palm fronds balanced between boulders to form a rudimentary roof. Doing this in the rain met with minimal success—our roofs kept out, at best, about half the water.

Meanwhile, canned beans and other items emerged from backpacks, and it was time to build a fire. Finding dry wood was very difficult and took a great deal of time and hunting to find an adequate amount of fuel. To make matters worse, the merit badge requirement was that the fire be kindled using only flint and steel. One by one the boys tried, all unsuccessfully, to kindle a fire in this traditional manner. After much fruitless effort we were soaked to the skin and frustrated. Finally Beeler snapped. He pulled out his Zippo lighter with a disgusted, “Goddammit, this is ridiculous.” Flicking the lighter open, he declared, “This is flint and steel!” and lit the kindling. Soon we had a smoky fire going, and the beans were heating.

The night was sheer misery. Water trickled through our palm-frond shelters, and the clouds of mosquitoes were relentless. The rain washed off our bug repellent, leaving us defenseless. It was a sleepless night. At first light, stiff and miserable, we crawled out to start breakfast. With a cupped hand shielding his cigarette, Beeler coached a scout on the finer points of using a Zippo. Before long a breakfast fire was going, and leftover beans, bananas, and Kool-Aid were passed around.

After packing up, we took a quick muster to ensure we hadn’t lost anyone, then resumed the sullen, sodden, and silent march. The quiet was punctuated only by noisy stumbling, tripping, and falling, followed by muttered profanity from we assistant scoutmasters - much to the delight of the kids.

After four more hours of hiking, swearing, smoking, stumbling, and whining, we reached the road where parents were waiting in their warm, dry cars. One by one the boys were picked up and whisked away. We stood there alone—none of the parents were willing to give us a ride back to base.

Beeler lit another Marlboro, “I forgot what a bunch of assholes parents can be.”

“The chief too,” I added.

Guam by bicycle

Bicycling on Guam in 1971 was one of the many pleasures of being stationed on that beautiful island.

 

One day, after watch, I requisitioned a bicycle and set out for the beach that was part of the Naval Communications Station. NCS beach was at the foot of a long and winding steep road.  It was fun to coast down that road, gaining great speed and, finally, plunging into the surf at road's end.  I'd done this once before, so I thought I knew what I was doing.

 As I was barreling downhill,  some minuscule and unseen, discontinuity in the road surface turned the bike into a catapult, sending me hurtling over the handlebars and onto the abrasive coral road surface - still at a great rate of speed as the bicycle crashed, rolled, bumped, and clattered down hill with me still hanging on to it by one handlebar grip.

 I ended up heaped in a ditch as the bike landed on top of me.  I've no idea how long I was in that position, before I heard an approaching car.

 A very nice Chamorro lady, driving by, stopped to give me some water and to summon an ambulance from the base.  Within thirty minutes I was at the base dispensary, quite dazed, having a hospital corpsman removing the coral particles from my bleeding road-rashed arms with a laundry scrub brush, all the while giving me a stern lecture about my reckless behavior.

 Although the bike was totaled, I was still walking, and I was back on watch at my regularly scheduled time, arm in a sling for the next three weeks. Despite my injured wrist, I still managed to work at my usual breakneck pace; as the chief said: “If you’re looking for sympathy, you’ll find it in the dictionary – between ‘shit’ and ‘syphilis’.”

 He was right, I checked.

 Truk Bunny

On Guam, sailors occasionally took R&R (“rest and recreation”) to interesting places—Taiwan, Bangkok, even Japan. Beeler and I, for reasons unknown to me, planned to spend a week away from Guam by hopping to a smaller island: Truk Atoll. I know it sounds unlikely to leave one Micronesian island simply to visit another, but Beeler insisted we’d have a good time. I was skeptical but game.

Truk played an important role in WWII. It was a stronghold for the Japanese fleet, its lagoon providing a large, deep-water harbor for ships of all types and sizes. On February 17–18, 1944, the base was struck by American carrier aircraft. After two days of one-sided fighting, our Navy sank or damaged 48 Japanese ships. Those wrecks later made the atoll a diver’s paradise—something Beeler was enthusiastic about.

He was speaking from experience. He had been to Truk months earlier and raved about it: the hiking, snorkeling, swimming, history, and…the women. Beeler claimed that on his first trip he met a beautiful, vivacious blonde Peace Corps volunteer and spent an entire afternoon poolside with her—“the most beautiful woman in the whole goddamned world!” His tale was met with guffaws of skepticism, accusations of being drunk or high, and he was shouted-down with vociferous disbelief by his audience. Beeler fumed with disgust and stomped from the cube with a muttered – “Assholes.”

For his second R&R to Truk, I was to join him. I was lured by the island’s WWII history, as well as the chance to escape the noisy chaos of the Fleet Center for five days. My anticipation grew in the weeks before our flight, fanned by Beeler’s continued insistence that Truk was full of beautiful women.

Departure day came. With light luggage we hitchhiked to the airport. It was a typical hot island day, and we arrived at the terminal damp with sweat but full of excitement. The hop was on a C-130 Hercules, set up to accommodate about 120 passengers. Looking around the waiting area, we saw at least fifty more than that. We had never heard of the concept of “bumping.”

Numbers - corresponding with seats - were issued based on some unknown criteria, though it was obvious officers and families got the choicest numbers. Ours were 135 and 136—for a plane that carried 120. The gate agent explained that flights were routinely overbooked to allow for no-shows, and our seats depended entirely on cancellations.

We grumbled, but joined the line. Feverishly counting the people ahead of us, we knew it wasn’t going to happen. Sure enough, the plane took off without us, leaving Beeler and I bewildered and disgruntled at the gate. “Fuckin’ officers” Beeler Muttered…”Fucking families” I contributed. Defeated, we decided to cut our losses and just head back to base.

We were two dejected hitchhikers, our bags seeming to get heavier with each step under the tropical sun. When we trudged back into the cube. The chorus was immediate: “What the fuck are you two sad-sacks doing back?!” It was like walking into a laugh track. The situation was pathetic enough—the absurdity of leaving one rock in the Pacific just to visit another—but failing even at that invited endless ribbing. The razzing was good-natured but humiliating, and it took a couple of weeks for us to live it down. We stowed our gear, got on with life, and put the sorry episode behind us.

A couple of months later came Beeler’s redemption. I was just off the eve watch, lounging in the cube with the usual guys and usual distractions, when Beeler burst in waving a Playboy magazine aloft. He slapped it down on the desk with a triumphant: “Read it and weep, assholes!” The centerfold was Sharon Clark, 1971 Playmate of the Year, happily nude. The blurb noted that she had been a Peace Corps volunteer in Micronesia.

Every dog has his day and this one belonged to no one but Beeler.

 

The fleet center, Naval Communications Station, Guam

Typhoon Rita: polka dot cigarettes, indigestion, and the world’s greatest can-opener

In July of 1972 Typhoon Rita grazed Guam. Typhoons are exactly the same as hurricanes, but they form in the northwest Pacific. And on July 7, we experienced a very rainy and windy near miss.

Guam has been the target of some particularly devastating typhoons, including November of 1962’s Typhoon Karen. With sustained winds of 175 mph, it was the most powerful ever recorded on the island, destroying a staggering 95% of the homes. A scant six months later a second typhoon swept across the still-recovering island, causing even more devastation. As a result, Guam was very typhoon conscious, and all of the buildings at NCS were made of reinforced concrete, some nearly bomb-proof—or so went the scuttlebutt.

On July 7, 1972 came Typhoon Rita, barreling toward the island. In the days of its approach, we were all scurrying around the base securing all “gear adrift”—that is, anything that wasn’t nailed down. Sailors were all over the place with coils of rope, securing outdoor vending machines, motorcycles, flimsy sheds, Dumpsters, and anything else that could be blown away. Despite a certain anxiety, it was kind of exciting, making all those hurried preparations in an atmosphere of growing urgency.

As the wind rose and the rain started to fall, all three watch sections—over 100 radiomen—were locked down in the Fleet Center, the cavernous nerve-center of Naval communications for the western Pacific. Normally, each watch section was about 35–40 guys, and only one section would be in the space at a time. Here we were cheek-by-jowl, crammed into the big room for who knew how long. Because of the highest-security nature of the building, there were no windows at all, so we couldn’t gawk at the storm raging outside. But in the head (the big restroom) there was a small fan in an opening high on the wall. I hauled a chair over and, standing on tiptoe, I was able to see what was going on outside. It was an absolute blur of wind and rain. Palm trees were being uprooted and all objects that had been missed during preparations had become  dangerous projectiles, I even saw an empty dumpster sliding through the parking lot. The howl of the wind was intense and the rain was nearly horizontal.

When it came time for supper, none of us could leave the floor to trek to the mess hall. But the division officer was prepared: the day prior he had delivered to the building a heap of C-ration cartons dated from 1943. We were eating chow packaged nearly 30 years earlier—this was going to be grim.

There was a ripple of excitement as the cartons were broken open. Out spilled brown pasteboard boxes and rust-spotted tin cans with black lettering announcing the delicacy inside, all dated from WWII. The smokers shouted in delight as the little five-cigarette packs of Chesterfields were handed around. Once out of the pack, though, they provided more curiosity than smoking satisfaction. The paper of each cigarette was covered in brown spots, and those who lit up judged the flavor as akin to “horse-shit.”

Then the cans were opened and the food appeared—chunks of “mystery meat” and discolored beans. A thin oily sheen floated on the meat, which tasted like salt with a side of rubber. Some guys had the beans and franks, others the more exotic spaghetti and meat. We ate it in hunger, as well as a sense of reckless adventure.

I started in on a chunk of meat and was impressed at how they could make a shoe edible. It was frighteningly chewy, salty, and very odd-tasting. The beans I avoided altogether. It didn’t fill me up, so I hunted through the cans for some ancient crackers to round out the meal. It was still light fare but I was quickly losing my appetite. Always a World War II enthusiast, I recognized the historical aspect of the moment, disgusting as it was. Within ten minutes, I—and nearly everyone else—had a monumental case of heartburn.

The best thing about those cases of rations wasn’t the food at all. Each carton contained a dozen “P-38”s - tiny folding steel can-openers. The savvier sailors dove for them immediately, holding the little marvels aloft in triumph. In a total “follow-the-leader” manner, I dove too, ignorant of the value of the thing for which I was grabbing. I snagged the last one, and was thrilled, though I had no idea what it was. Within minutes Beeler showed me how to use it on a can of rancid “meat.” I was enthralled and refused all offers to trade.

The two sections not on duty just had to stay out of the way of the duty-men, and grabbing sleep wasn’t easy in that cacophonous and crowded cavern of a room. I settled onto a big heap of burn-bags filled with paper-tape messages waiting to be destroyed. It was close to comfy, but not quite.

Within eight hours we secured from typhoon routine and were let out of the building to excitedly survey the damage. It wasn’t as bad as expected. Despite appearances, Rita was a near miss, and the island dodged a bullet. There was damage—mostly uprooted trees and scattered corrugated iron—but nothing catastrophic. Rita did explain the sprouting coconut tree on the roof of our barracks a month later.

That was Rita – wind, rain, noise, and a bellyache. And the can-opener?
It still goes with me on every camping trip.

 

 Jake with helmet and buckle found in cave

The Unknown Soldier of Yigo

Just outside of the tiny hamlet of Yigo, Guam, is the Yigo Battlefield, and in 1971–72 it was a frequent pilgrimage for me—my frequent boonie-stomping place.

My first exposure to Yigo was on a guided tour organized by the USO. There was a minibus full of interested history buffs and a very knowledgeable guide who was intimately familiar with the ground. Beeler and I went along for the diversion.

We visited the decaying Japanese revetments constructed from 55-gallon drums filled with sand, rainwater catchment cisterns made of concrete, and also huge underground bunkers—only one of which had an accessible entrance. It was a fascinating place. One of the participants found a rusted “pig-tail” barbed-wire support as a souvenir; needless to say, I was quite envious. I vowed to myself that I would return for another exploration—but, at my own pace.

For the second trip, I talked Beeler into accompanying me again, and we both had a very good time. We ventured into the accessible bunker—something that the guided tour hadn’t done. The air in the bunker was very stale; it was very hot and humid and it was difficult to breathe. I shone my flashlight at the ceiling of the bunker and was horrified to see that it was alive with the three-inch,flying cockroaches, the largest species in the Pacific region. We stayed down there for less than five minutes, as it was so inhospitable. We considered what it must have been like for the Japanese soldiers who sheltered within that cavernous concrete structure while under intensive artillery shelling and naval bombardment

On a subsequent trip, Beeler brought along a metal detector that he had recently purchased. He was disappointed with his haul—comprised of a single Japanese cartridge. He was discouraged, but I assured him that an intact Japanese bullet was a good find. Nonetheless, I, using only the naked eye, went home with a pocketful of relics—as was usually the case.

Another foray to the Yigo Battlefield was particularly noteworthy—quite incredible, really. There were about five of us. Beeler and I had talked a few other guys into coming to Yigo with us for an all-day boonie stomp, and they were game.

We explored the usual attractions there, and someone suggested that we follow the tiny stream that flowed downhill from the cisterns. It was rugged going, but after about five hundred yards, the little trickle disappeared into the side of a bluff. We pulled aside the vegetation to reveal a small opening, no larger in diameter than an oil drum.

It took only a moment of discussion to decide to crawl in to see where it led. Owing to our exploration of the bunkers that day, we were all carrying flashlights, so that bolstered our courage. Single file. on hands, knees, and bellies, we wriggled into and along the cave. The little stream was still present as a three-inch-deep trickle on the floor of the cave. The cave was wet but cool, and any discomfort we had was overshadowed by the thrill of exploration.

After about fifty feet of crawling, the cave finally petered out, the stream disappearing into a small hole at the very end. It was time to turn around and creep back out—until Jake Jacobs muttered, “Look at this.” His flashlight was playing on a rusted Japanese combat helmet. We gasped. Immediately we started feeling around in the water and gravel at the bottom of the cave, revealing buckles, buttons, metal fragments, and eventually—human bones.

We agreed that it was a solemn place, and even though we were a bunch of happy knuckleheads, we withdrew in respectful silence; nonetheless, Jake salvaged the helmet.

When we emerged into the light, we spent considerable time trying to reconstruct what may have led that young soldier to take refuge in that tiny, inhospitable cave. We agreed that it must have been representative of the desperate combat of that battle. We also couldn’t help reflecting on the reality of that young soldier being the same age as we were—it made for a sobering conversation.

Eventually, we became our zany selves again and made our way back to the trail, back to the road, and thumbed our way back to the base—wet, footsore, but happy with the novel adventure that only that island could afford us.

When Jake rotated off Guam for his next duty station, he bequeathed the helmet to me. I started collecting helmets at that moment. Now I have over 150 combat helmets of the 20th century, and Jake’s helmet holds pride of place in that collection.

And I never look at that helmet without reflecting on the unknown soldier of Yigo.

Sherman tank at the “tank farm” in the highlands of Guam

The Tank Farm

Guam was absolutely littered with the detritus of war, including burned-out tanks. There was a place in the highlands known as the “tank farm” – a collection of shot-up amtracks and a couple of Shermans. There was also reported to be a pair of wrecked Japanese tanks in the area. On one of our off periods, about a half-dozen of us hitched and hiked to the red dirt trails to the interior.

The going was not easy, and it seems like we never carried enough water on our treks. We finally rounded a hillock and there they were – three Shermans (maybe two, I can’t remember) They were on a prominent piece of high ground, and in the surrounding area were several shot-up, and cut-up amphibious vehicles - amtracks.

We spent an hour or so exploring and skylarking in, on, and around the tanks. On a couple of them you could still see traces of the white star insignia. They were also marked with insignia of a non-military nature. “Bud and Oly” were painted on the turrets of two tanks – the choice of beer for some earlier jolly explorers.

We spent a lot of time theorizing about the battle that had happened there, and we came up with a couple convincing scenarios. It wasn’t until decades later that I found out that the tanks had been hauled to that location for post-war gunnery practice, which would explain the Swiss cheese effect on the front of one of the Shermans.

We had a great time, but the heat was getting to us, it was becoming late, and we didn’t want to be in the boonies after dark, so we abandoned any efforts to find the Japanese tanks. Somehow I ended up on the back of a dirt bike for a harrowing ride back to NCS through the gathering darkness…my first time on a motorcycle. We got back to the barracks tired, beat, but happy. It had been a good boonie-stomp. Though sadly, no Japanese tanks.

About a month later, I connected with another radioman from our division who wanted me to take him to the tank farm, this time with a firm resolution to find the Japanese tanks. Again, it was a long hike, again we played on the Shermans, and again, after a very long search, we came up empty-handed on the Japanese tanks. We started to think that those tanks were just mythological. We ate our sandwiches in the shade of one of the Shermans, and then made the long trek back to the road. I arrived back at the cube with a negative report. It was not until years later that I saw photos of those elusive Japanese tanks, and it appears that we had walked right passed them as they were concealed in elephant grass…

and surrounded by empty beer cans – Budweiser and Olympia, no less.

The three-inch shell casing and radioman’s helmet that followed the author home.

Steal

“King Shit” in Navy jargon, refers to a lowly peon who’s been granted some morsel of authority — which he then proceeds to lord over everyone else.

In early 1971, I was processing-in at Naval Communications Station, Guam. As part of check-in, there was a long list of tasks to complete before you could join your assigned division. Typical items included: report to the dispensary for a refresher on the clap; visit the chaplain for a spiritual refresher on the clap; check in with the barracks master-at-arms to find out where you’d be living — and to hear sea stories about the last port in which he got the clap. You get the idea.

One of my stops was the linen-issue room — the place where you were issued sheets and blankets. The guy running it was a non-rated man (meaning he hadn’t yet trained for a specific Navy occupation), and handing out linen was about as far as he was likely to go. He was the ultimate King Shit. He gloried in his tiny domain — a cramped cubicle of an office, filled with the aroma of dirty linens — and he was rude and abusive to all of us. A real pain in the ass. For the record, he was one stripe below me.

When I checked in with him, he immediately started bitching about some petty thing I’d done to offend his royal sensibilities. As I leaned on the lower half of his dutch door, I noticed , behind the bottom half of the door, two brass three-inch shell casings. I made a mental note.

I returned to his office weekly to exchange linens. Each time, I saw — and coveted — those brass shell casings.

One day, while collecting fresh sheets, I casually directed his attention to something behind him on a top shelf. As he turned, I reached over the lower half of the door, lifted one of the shell casings in a single smooth motion, and slipped it over to my side of the door — out of his sight.

He never noticed.

That shell casing came home with me, and is now paired-up with an inert 3-inch projectile, compliments of King Shit.

I love the Royals.

 Five sailors, a shit-box car, and Maggie Mae

Guam 1971.  Guam has many great beaches, on both the Pacific side and the Philippine Sea side.  One off-duty day, five of us Radiomen crammed ourselves and a load of snorkeling gear into an unreliable sixth-hand VW Beetle and headed for Tarague beach on the Pacific side. It was like a clown-car that reeked of marijuana.

It was a typical dry-season Guam day: crystal-blue sky being shared by big rain clouds. The sailor driving was struggling to find second-gear while simultaneously taking a hit off a joint that was being passed around.

The windows were rolled-down, the radio was blasting, and we were all laughing and trying to out-bullshit each other.  We were five jolly swabbies on the way to a day of fun in the sun and surf.

We crested a hill and two things happened at the same time – the magnificent Pacific Ocean came into view and spread out before us, and Rod Stewart’s “Maggie Mae” came on the radio…the first time I had ever heard it.

It was a transcendent moment that I think of every time I hear that song.  The instant that this snapshot was taken, Rod Stewart entered my consciousness to stay.

Wake up Maggie, I think I got something to say to you.

 Boonie-stomping, Bullets, and Bombshells

 Hiking through the jungles and highlands of the island is called "boonie-stomping", and that is how I spent nearly all of my time off, either with buddies, or usually, by myself.  These solitary hikes remain some of my best memories.  My pals used to joke about how I was spending all of my time on the island staring at the ground, and they were partially right.  Whenever I was going down a trail I kept my eyes peeled for stuff from the war...and I found lots and lots of it (more than my forward-looking friends).

 Bullets, shrapnel, buckles, a helmet...my collection continued to grow and grow.

One of my usual haunts was outside the village of Yigo. It was the site of a major battle and a sharp eye would always yield a bullet or two.

The Yigo battlefield is the site of the Peace Memorial and is a place of pilgrimage for many Japanese who lost family members in the war.

 The site is dominated by an elegant stark-white monument - a stylized pair of praying hands reaching fifty feet to the sky.  Within it, I'd often find bundles of smoldering incense and small bottles of sake left on an alter-like plinth.  The exposed bluff in the background was where I'd always find bullets, and in a position facing it was a foxhole where I found enough empty .30-caliber shell casings to cause me to believe that it had been an American machinegun position.

After each of these jaunts through the jungle, I'd return to the barracks and sit down with a small file and my trusty can of 3-in-1 oil and start cutting into the shell casings pouring out the powder, rendering the bullet inert...except for the primer, of course. If I were able, I'd extract the bullet from the casing with a pliers, but usually they were too corroded for this technique to be successful.

It was on one these boonie-stomps to Yigo, that I did the stupidest thing in my life…so far, that is.

One morning I was walking down a trail through a bamboo grove that I had trekked many times before.  It was a beautiful day with the sun dappling through the bamboo leaves and the trunks bumping together in the breeze making the distinct and mesmerizing sound that they do; and my goodness!... right next to the trail was an unexploded Japanese mortar round.  I froze in my tracks.

It was about the shape and size of one of those old aerosol cans of Right Guard deodorant.  It was rusty but fully intact.  On the nose of the shell was the contact fuse.  This was the type of fuse that would cause the shell to explode on impact...and it hadn't.

The first thing they tell you when you arrive on Guam is NEVER... NEVER EVER... pick up unexploded ordnance...

I immediately picked it up.

I was almost breathless with excitement, never stopping to think about the ideas of death or dismemberment.  It was heavy in my hand as I started to examine every detail of this lethal debris.

I can't relate what I was thinking next, simply because I can't remember, though I do recall as sudden urge to throw it to see if it would go off. Sheltered behind a rock, I threw it toward an old concrete slab... the foundation for an antenna or something.

"Clunk"...nothing happened. I tried it a couple more times with the same result.

Believing it was a dud, I started thinking about the souvenir potential.  Certainly, I couldn't keep the whole thing, but I thought that perhaps I could keep the fuse.

Grasping the shell firmly in one hand, I gingerly gave the fuse a gentle nudge...

With surprising ease, it started to turn.  Leaning away from the shell, and squinting...like that would do any good...I continued to unscrew the fuse, until I had the shell in one hand and the fuse in the other.  I'd done it.

The non-explosive fuse, I happily put in my pocket...the shell, I tossed down a deep and narrow ravine (it is doubtless, still down there).  With that, I decided to call it a day and hitchhiked back to the base.

And that was that. I lived to tell the tale...literally.  Do note though, that when I got back to the barracks, I didn't trumpet this adventure to my friends, as I didn't want to expose myself as the biggest idiot on the island. Today, the fuse resides in my war room, a memento of times past and a reminder that I may not be as smart as I think I am.

And that, my dears, is how I defended Democracy in 1971.

Sigua River Expedition, and a Taste for Shrimp

Beeler and I got a great idea to hike the Sigua River to the falls. It was a long way to the trailhead, which meant it would take two or three successful hitchhike rides and a lot of walking. That would burn up a lot of time and probably get us to the trail, already fatigued

Enter ensign J.

Ensign J. was one of those brand-new officers who thought it could smooth his path if he ingratiated himself with the enlisted men—never a good idea. He would joke around with the guys on watch, buy us Cokes, and do all those other things that blur the lines between officer and enlisted—something that officers were specifically forbidden to do. His over-familiarity was duly noted by us for future use.

Beeler had a bee in his bonnet to get to Sigua Falls, which in those days was inaccessible by car, and only by a strenuous trail. Eagle Scout Beeler proposed an alternative route of hiking down the shallow Sigua River and reaching the falls that way. We had done it successfully once before, and though not an easy hike, we managed without injury—though a quick grab from another sailor kept me from plunging off a cliff.

We thought it would be swell if we could hitch a ride directly to the trailhead. Overly-friendly ensign J was our ace-in-the-hole. It was time to exploit his good will, and his car.

We knew that ensign J. enjoyed seafood, so we regaled him with stories of the abundance of large and delectable freshwater shrimp that abounded in the Sigua River. Truly, native Chamorros did a lot of shrimp trapping in that river. Ensign J. was very interested, and we knew that we had a fish on the line – so to speak.

After a little coaxing, ensign J. agreed to join us. His brand-new Honda Civic (the first model) would get us to the trailhead in style and air-conditioned comfort. That would be his main contribution for a successful trip.

On the day of the hike, we gathered our gear—canteens, machete, combat boots, etc. Ensign J. rounded up some rubber high-tops and a shrimp dip-net – his confidence made us shoot amused side-long glances to one another, and, with that, we were off to the river.

At the trailhead, we hiked the mile or so to the river. The plan was to get our feet wet by using the shallow river as our trail. Sometimes the Sigua narrowed down to just a dozen feet wide, and even at its greatest width it wasn’t much more than that. There were a couple of spots where it was too rocky or too fast to continue wading, so we climbed up the steep banks to detour around the tricky spots. It was on one of these detours that I nearly fell off a high bluff, except for the quick action of a sailor named John Schuster. I’m grateful to this day for his quick action, but he never let me live it down and reminded me of it constantly.

The jungle overhang blocked out the sun for much of the trek, but eventually, we came to the foot of the falls and the large swimming hole.

Clothes came off, and in our skivvy shorts we dove or waded in. As a non-swimmer, I had to be particularly careful, as the water was well over my head. Nonetheless, the cool water was really a tonic after the long, hot, and humid hike.

Swim done, clothes on, lunch eaten, we gathered our gear and started the long hike back. We knew that it would be getting dark by the time we got to the road, as it was about a two-hour hike, and we didn’t want to get stuck in the boonies after dark.

Ensign J. was sulking as we hurried him along; he wanted to keep trying to catch shrimp for his imagined shellfish dinner.

By the time we got back to the road we were absolutely bushed but happy and satisfied with the boonie-stomp to the falls—most of us, that is.

The whole drive back to the base, ensign J. was sulking. He was pretty steamed that after a day of exertion; he had only caught three undersized shrimp. It was clear that he knew he had been had by us.

From that point on, ensign J. had little to say to the enlisted men on watch—his familiarity with the troops had come to an end, and the balance of hierarchy was restored to the entire U.S. Navy.

You’re welcome.

 

The fleet center in the quiet days before Operation Linebacker.

Operation Linebacker: When Everything Went Nuts

When the thirteen of us classmates from radioman school reported to 32 Division at Naval Communication Station Guam, we were actually met with applause. Our arrival meant that the overworked radiomen at the Fleet Center would go from three-section duty to four-section duty. That translated to going from thirty-two hours off between watch strings to a luxurious fifty-six hours off. That was really something to celebrate for those beleaguered RMs of 32 Division.

I enjoyed four-section duty for most of my tour on Guam. That stretch of time allowed for sleep, laundry, incidentals, and plenty of time for snorkeling, boonie-stomping, and general lounging or clowning around. It was wonderful.

Then came 9 May 1972, and everything changed.

It was still the dry season (December to June), and Beeler organized a major boonie-stomp/camping trip to the interior of the island. Owing to the amount of gear we were taking, he did something unprecedented for a boonie-stomp—he got a car. If you put in a reservation far enough in advance, you could check out the car that was made available from Special Services on the base. Special Services was also where we checked out most of the camping gear.

We organized about five guys for the two-day trip; there was lots of planning and consulting of maps. After the last watch of the string, we made it back to the barracks, picked up the car, gear, water, and food, and were on our way. We did, however, have to inform our division chief of our destination.

We drove about a third of the way around the island to the trailhead, unpacked our gear, shouldered our packs, and hadn’t even made our first steps when a gray Navy pickup truck screeched to a halt next to our station wagon.

“You those guys from 32 Division?” asked the sailor at the wheel. We answered in the affirmative, when he dropped the bomb—so to speak. He informed us that our division had just reverted to three-section and that we were ordered to return to the Fleet Center immediately. The reason? Operation Linebacker—we had just resumed the bombing campaign against North Vietnam.

When we arrived back on the floor of the Fleet Center, the difference from the day prior couldn’t have been more dramatic. Just hours before, a typical watch would handle ten or fifteen pieces of flash (highest priority) traffic per watch. When we returned, all of the plywood bins at each teletype station were heaped with flash messages—the overflow was contained in up to a dozen burn bags full of flashes at each position. The sound on the floor was a deafening cacophony of bells, buzzes, clacking teletypes, shouts, and bellows. The activity and effort were tremendous. This had all happened within hours.

Linebacker affected every installation on the island. Andersen Air Force Base increased its complement of B-52 bombers from around a dozen to a staggering 153. The population of Andersen had increased so exponentially and so rapidly that men were living in tents. Many Air Force personnel were living in our barracks at NCS.

The pace of work for my two remaining months on the island was blistering, and fatigue was the order of the day. Boonie-stomping was still a priority for me, but my jaunts were less frequent and of shorter duration.

When I rotated back to the States and to my first ship, I had left the chaos of Linebacker behind, and my tenure aboard ship was very sedate by comparison. The guys that I left behind on the island kept up the pace for another four months before Linebacker wound down.

It was the hardest that I worked in my four years in the Navy, and it was a reminder that I was playing some small role in the war effort.

 

Short-Time

As your enlistment winds toward its end, you’re referred to as a short-timer. The earliest that guys start calling themselves “short” is when they have a year left—and that’s really pushing it. A guy with 365 days remaining who calls himself short is often met with derision. It’s only when you get to 100 days that you’re truly worthy of the term.

When a guy has about thirty days left, he cops a certain “I don’t give a shit anymore” attitude that’s usually quite evident—mostly because he’s always proclaiming that he doesn’t give a shit. Frequently, the chief just gives up on him: no more extra duty, no more nagging about haircuts, no more scrubbing out the coffee urn. Often, the short-timer is detailed to interesting odds and ends—do a two-week gig at the antenna shop (unsupervised), put a coat of haze gray on all the helmets, inventory the inflatable life jackets. Simple diversions a guy can do while sitting in the shade listening to the radio…that’s what I ended up doing anyway.

“Short-time calendars” were a thing. Sometimes scrawled on a locker, a pant leg, or a helmet cover—just about anywhere—you’d find a 30-day countdown. The short-timer positively radiates short-time and constantly reminds everyone of it.
“I’m so short, I can sit on a dime and swing my legs.”
“I’m so short, I can walk under the stapler.”
“I’m so short, when I fart, I raise a cloud of dust.”
Usually someone is a willing straight man: “Hey Smitty, how short are you?”

There was one short-time tradition you found throughout the Pacific theater, including both Vietnam and Guam: the short-timer’s ribbon.

Seagram’s V.O. Canadian Whisky has a narrow gold-and-black ribbon around the neck of the bottle. When a G.I. hit his 30-day mark, he’d buy a bottle, find a quiet place, and share it with his friends. Bottle drained, the ribbon would be removed—amid much ceremony and general bullshitting—and be affixed through a buttonhole on his shirt. This little badge of honor was entirely against uniform regulations, but the higher-ups always looked the other way. The Navy has always been about traditions and sailor rituals, so they let this one slide.

My ribbon night took place on the ball diamond at NCS at midnight. There were five of us, including Beeler. We all had little paper cups, and the whiskey was poured. I was a staunch non-drinker at that time—only because I hated the taste—so in the darkness I simply poured mine on the ground. As we sat there in a small circle, many hours of drinking, reminiscing, bitching, and bullshitting ensued. It was a wonderful rite of passage.

I showed up at the Fleet Center on my next watch, proudly sporting my short-timer’s ribbon, to much handshaking and backslapping, and sailors buying me Cokes. It was very satisfying—but it wasn’t over yet.

Teletypes use miles of punched paper tape per watch; that’s what messages were sent and received on. The tiny paper confetti disc that’s the waste when the hole is punched is called chad, and chad, at the Fleet Center, provided the basis for the final act of hazing in the division.

In preparation for the event, many burn-bags filled with bushels of chad were stealthily stored away for the ceremony. At some point during the short-timer’s final watch, he would be ambushed—grabbed, pushed to the deck, and dragged to the middle of the room. Radiomen with bags of chad would appear and ritually empty them over the head of the soon-to-be-departed, one bag after another, until the short radioman was kneeling or lying under a huge heap of chad. All of this was done to uproarious laughter and good-natured shouting.

When it was all over, all that remained was for the short-timer to clean up the huge mess, then check out of the Fleet Center for one final time.

My last watch was an eve-watch, ending at 8:00 p.m. At about five, I was grabbed from behind and dragged to the ceremonial altar in the center of a ring of about thirty radiomen—twelve of them raising big burn-bags bulging with tiny discs of chad confetti. One after another, the bags were emptied over my head. The howling and shouting were nearly deafening.

The paper tape is slightly oiled, which makes the chad stick to skin and clothing; it’s really difficult to get off—sort of tar-and-feather lite. Eventually the laughter subsided, and everyone returned to their positions, leaving me with a foxtail brush, a large steel dustpan, all the empty bags, and a mountain of chad. It took half an hour to clean it all up.

The rule was that once you got the mess cleaned up, you could secure from watch. I checked out and made my way back to the barracks, with itchy chad in every nook and cranny of my body and every fold in my dungarees. I was shampooing it out for a week.

When I returned to the Fleet Center the following afternoon to pick up my mail, all I had to do was follow the trail of chad—and that ran about an eighth of a mile.

It was all over: short-timer ribbon, drinking ritual, and chadding party. All that was left was to lounge around the cube for a couple of days, take one last boonie-stomp, and have a friend drive me to Andersen Air Force Base to catch flight H2A2 off the island and back to the States.

Eighty-two days later, I was underway with the DeHaven, somewhere off the coast of California. On watch one slow night, I felt an itch in my left ear. I stuck in my pinkie and retrieved the final piece of chad…

though I may be speaking too soon.

 Getting my crow

As with all the branches of the armed forces, in the Navy there is a hierarchy of rank, from the most exalted captains and admirals, to lowly seaman recruits. Each step up the ladder brings an increase in pay, responsibility, and status. In the enlisted ranks, the highest of all of those are held by the chief petty officers – chiefs, senior chiefs, and master chiefs. The chiefs are traditionally acknowledged to be “the backbone of the Navy” and are treated accordingly by both enlisted men and by officers. Below the chiefs are the petty officers, with first-class being at the top of the heap.

Where chiefs are uniformed like officers, the first-class petty officers wares the regular sailor’s uniform - whites, blues, dungarees, dixie cup or ballcap. A petty officer’s rank is denoted by a sleeve insignia – a number of chevrons surmounted by an eagle – referred to as the “crow.” First-class petty officers (E-6) have three chevrons, second-class (E-5) have two, and third-class (E-4) have one chevron. The common denominator is the cherished crow.

The first-class has a ton of responsibility, usually being the leading petty officer of a watch or work-group…middle management – “the boss.” With their responsibility goes a great deal of authority. The first-class speaks for the chief, and his word is law. All assignments are issued by the first-class, and a sailor must jump when given the boss’s instructions.

A step down brings us to the second-class petty officer – the happy “invisible man.” The second-class is the easy-going enforcer. He has authority, but much less so than the first-class. He also has a lot less responsibility and manages to escape much of the work that is to be done. The second-class inhabits the space between the leader and the worker-bee, not a drone, but certainly a care-free guy with plenty of time on his hands and coffee consumed. They can afford to be nice guys.

Next comes the third-class (E-4). Where chiefs are the backbone of the Navy, the third-class petty officers are the ones who get things done…the ones who lie, cheat, and steal to ensure that the mission is met. They are wheeler-dealers who the chief goes to when things need to be done “under-the-table.”

The E-4s inhabit the world between the rated and non-rated men, between the higher-ups and the galley-slaves. They have their finger on the pulse of the ship, they know all  the current rumors, the hot gossip, the folklore, and have an uncanny knack for knowing where the ship is bound when the rest of the crew doesn’t. Their crow gives them authority, but they still have a lot of responsibility. The third-class petty officer supervises the non-rated men (E-1 through E-3). Alhough he is in charge of work details, he is also expected to participate in the labor…often while a coffee-drinking second-class kibbitzes from a shady spot.

E-4s are the most common petty officer rate on any ship or station…the Navy couldn’t function without their sly knowledge of how the system works. Today, the term “E-4 mafia” is used to describe that cadre, and it is the same in all branches. The E-4 is very proud of his crow and will use it to best advantage to stack any deck, or subvert any system, in the service of getting things done.

There is a painful tradition when a brand new third-class gets his crow; it has to be “tacked-on.” Sporting the new insignia on his sleeve, every other sailor he encounters for the next few days will “tack-on” that crow by punching it with a fist. After a few of these, the new E-4’s arm really starts to hurt, and by the end of the day, the sailor can barely lift that black-and-blue arm.

This is a ritual that every sailor dreads, and it can take some of the initial luster off of “making-rate.” It is the first price to be paid for having some authority. It is also a real drag.

I passed the third-class exam two months before leaving Guam. The promotion was scheduled to take place after I left the island, and before I reported aboard my first ship. I made rate “in transit”...on leave. I was in the comfort of my parents’ dining room back in Burt, Michigan, as I sewed my crow on my dress blues. There was no one to tack my crow on but my dog, and he wasn’t interested.

I reported to the DeHaven, unbruised, and ready to lie, cheat, and steal for my country.

 

Dehaven shipmates, author at bottom center.

Shipmates, stand together!

There’s a port on a western bay

and it serves a hundred ships a day

Lonely sailors pass the time away

And talk about their homes

And there’s a girl, in this harbor town…

Brandy, Looking Glass, 1970

That was as far as the song got before a muttering sailor laid aside his pool cue, strode over to the communal radio, and disgustedly snapped it off.  Romanticized versions of Navy life as envisioned by hippie musicians do not play well in a building filled with bored and irritable sailors.

It was my second day at the Naval Station, Long Beach transit barracks.  I’d just come off of a 30 – day leave following a 15-month deployment to the Naval Communication Station at Finegayen Guam in the Marianas Islands.  It was great to be stateside again and it was with some anticipation that I awaited the arrival of my first ship, the destroyer U.S.S. DeHaven (DD-727).  I was literally “waiting for my ship to come in”.

The DeHaven was out on a two-week reserve training cruise and I had arrived at the Naval Station Long Beach, the 727’s homeport, midway through that cruise.  Upon reporting for duty at the Naval Station I was apprised of the situation and assigned a bunk in the transit barracks to await the return of my new ship.

A transit barracks is an earthly manifestation of limbo, or perhaps more like a very lax jailhouse, a jailhouse where the inmates can come and go as they please and order in pizza.  A sailor in transit, if clever, has no duties while in that status, unless, of course, that sailor carelessly announces his presence to the notice of the Master-at-Arms (MAA) the arbiter of law and order in a division or transit barracks setting.  The plan of the canny sailor is to evade being placed upon the MAA’s watch bill, that roster of unfortunates which assigns specific duties to those enrolled upon it.  Generally, a clever sailor can avoid the shackles of the watch bill by spreading the word that he is scheduled for oral surgery.  When morning roll is called and the MAA enquires “Where’s Smith?”  more than one witness will attest to Smitty’s preexisting medical/dental commitment, and generally the matter will be dropped until the following morning.  Usually, after two or three days of this, the elusive Smiths’ ship has come in and he affects his escape from the domain of the MAA, however, such evasion grows increasingly difficult with the length of incarceration in the transit barracks.

Characteristically, it behooves shirkers to stay away from the barracks during working hours, say eight in the morning to four in the afternoon.  Beyond four-thirty the coast is clear and all the prodigals return; swelling the ranks of the barracks residents considerably.  The evening is consumed in going to and returning from the mess hall, watching television, drinking Ripple fortified wine, smoking tobacco or weed and sleeping the hours away like stateless nomads, refugees in flight, orphans with nasty habits.

The very transient nature of the denizens of the transit barracks is not conducive to forming friendships, or in tipping one’s hand to any great degree regarding personal status or situation.  That’s sort of the jailhouse mentality part of the transit barracks.  However, if you run across another sailor who’s reporting to the same ship as you, that’s an entirely different story. The two of you, now shipmates, instantly bond into an unbreakable alliance against all “those other assholes”.   Find a shipmate in transit and it can be very smooth sailing indeed.

My new shipmate, Rick, was just as glad to find me as I him.  Seems he had broken his glasses, quite severely, one lens was missing and the other was haphazardly held together with a band-aid.  He was a steward, essentially an officer’s valet and cook “I think I’m the only white steward in the fleet” was his bewildered self-assessment. He may have been right.

Rick and I joined forces on that second day and managed to form a fine alliance to get us through the remaining three days of our incarceration.  We’d watch each other’s belongings when one or the other had to leave the building,  we’d take turns making frequent calls to the harbor master’s shack inquiring as to the status or imminent arrival of the DeHaven, and we’d provide each other with plausible alibi’s to explain our absence at morning muster.  We were a working model of how to successfully navigate the rocks and shoals of the transit barracks milieu, a living embodiment of the phrase “shipmates stand together”.  A lone wolf in a transit barracks, a county lock-up, or a family reunion is the picture of vulnerability, easy pickings for the sharks and maiden aunts that patrol such places, shipmates, however, are invincible in their unity.

On the fifth day, our deliverance, like Ricks new lenses, was at hand and we were summoned to the MAA’s office with the news that the DeHaven was clearing the breakwater and would be tying up at piers 17 and 18.  After delivering this welcome news, the MAA surveyed both of our faces and asked, “How long have you two jokers been aboard my barracks?”  Rick swiftly replied for both of us;

“Just got in last night chief”.

 

USS DeHaven (DD-727), 1973

Catching My First Destroyer

After five days at the transit barracks at Naval Station Long Beach, California, I reported to the USS DeHaven, which had just returned to her homeport after a short training deployment. This was the life event that I had been anticipating since childhood — duty on a U.S. Navy destroyer.

I had no idea of the size or vintage of the DeHaven — I only knew that her hull number was 727 and that she was tied up at piers 17 and 18, on a strip land that extended two miles from the main base into the channel; it was like the gigantic appendix.of the station.  This narrow peninsula  was known as the mole, and it was the home of scores of cruisers and destroyers. I was directed to an idling bus, and thus, my seagoing adventure began.

The bus dropped me off near the pier, and I had to walk the rest of the way. Many moored destroyers hove into view — this was the home of Destroyer Squadron 27. While I was standing and gawking, a sailor carrying gear in both hands passed by. I asked him where the DeHaven was. Pointing with his chin, he tersely replied, “Tied up with the McKean,” and didn’t even break his stride. I was no further ahead than before I asked him. I continued walking, my seabag growing heavier on my shoulder with each step.

Finally, I saw a sleek greyhound bristling with guns, and the huge numerals “727” painted on her bow. The moment gave me goosebumps. This 1944-vintage destroyer was to be my home for the next year.

I was nervous and excited as I crossed the brow from pier to ship. I snapped off a salute to the flag at the stern and repeated the tribute to the Officer of the Deck, with a smart “Request permission to come aboard.” “Granted,” replied the OOD, who was standing at a lectern on the quarterdeck, with two bored enlisted men wearing pistols.
“Petty Officer Gentile reporting for duty” — a line I had been imagining for years — and I handed the OOD the fat envelope that contained my service record and orders.

A grinning first-class petty officer in a white tee-shirt, white apron, and matching baker’s cap  rolled up, practically rubbing his hands in gleeful anticipation of my arrival. When he saw the eagle and single red chevron on my arm, he stopped short. “Goddammit, he barked,  I thought I was getting a non-rated man.” He turned on his heel with a parting, “Goddammit” and stomped off, I had just greatly annoyed the leading cook.

I asked the OOD what that was all about, and he explained that they weren’t expecting a petty officer, but a sailor of a lower rank who would spend his first three months aboard as a mess cook — also referred to as a scullery rat — the person who gets stuck with the most unpleasant tasks in the process of serving, bussing, and cleaning.

I had dodged a very large bullet, much to the cook’s displeasure.

The two enlisted messengers snickered at the sight of the  frustrated cook, who was retreating back to the galley in disgust. One of them picked up my seabag with a casual “Welcome aboard, mate… follow me.”

I was a fleet sailor at last.

Berthing Space Oddity

On the morning of my second day aboard the USS DeHaven, we got underway. It was only a weekend training cruise with a load of Naval Reservists, as reserve training was our primary mission.

I was down in the operations berthing compartment, tasked with swabbing the deck. The berthing space was crammed three-high with “racks” (bunks), each with a small built-in foot locker beneath for all our worldly goods. It was a very tight fit. Adjacent to the compartment was the large refrigeration room, which filled the air with the aroma of past-its-prime meat and vegetables. A perpetual puddle ran out from under the unreliable air-conditioning unit. The place was built more for stowing sailors than for comfort.

I was alone, adrift, and given few instructions, but at least a local Top 40 station was being piped in for company. As I mopped, David Bowie’s Space Oddity came on. Just as he sang:

“Am I sitting in a tin can
Far above the world
Planet Earth is blue
And there’s nothing I can do…”

I was literally sitting in my “tin can”—the nickname for destroyers—and the irony was not lost on me.

Over the loudspeaker came the order: “Now set the special sea and anchor detail.” Soon after, I felt the first sway of the ship as she got underway. Two thoughts came immediately: This is it, I’m finally a fleet sailor; and I hope I don’t get sick. The seas were fairly calm, and I didn’t…

at least not that time.

Here is a short video of the DeHaven at sea:

 

The Operations Division berthing compartment, with author’s rack indicated.

Destroyer Life

Some wag once observed that living on a destroyer was like sharing, with many other men, a year in a rocking, smelly, hot, and smoky dumpster—being sprayed with water while someone beat on it with a sledgehammer.
That’s a good approximation.

I was, and will always be, a destroyerman.

A unique ship, termed “greyhound” or “tin can,” a destroyer is very fast, heavily armed, but unarmored. It is an all-purpose vessel—combat, escort, transport, search and rescue—perhaps more versatile than any other type in the fleet.  American writer John Steinbeck affectionately referred to a destroyer as “the busiest ship in the fleet.”

The profile of a destroyer brings the sea very close to the sailor. The main deck is often submerged in the waves, and the ship is small enough that no matter where you are on one, you feel the shock when the guns fire.

A tin can’s crew is small, so the dynamic is that of a close-knit, sometimes dysfunctional but always affable family. Everything is shared, including the spoon in a #10 can of chocolate frosting being passed around the mess decks; unsurprisingly, we frequently shared colds as well.

We called the greyhound navy “the real Navy,” and though they never admitted it, sailors from other classes of ships didn’t disagree with that proud assertion. And destroyermen, for better or for worse are a different breed of sailor. Civilians sometimes think sailors in general are disreputable; other sailors think destroyermen in particular are disreputable. It all evens out.

The tin can bristles with guns but has no armor. The steel of the hull is only five-eighths of an inch thick, but what the ship lacks in protection it makes up for in agility and speed. I remember the exhilaration of walking briskly toward the bow in a tailwind while steaming at full speed. I felt like I was flying.

Both of my destroyers—the DeHaven and the Higbee—were capable of 32 knots, about 37 mph. They were powered by high-pressure steam turbines and ran on Navy fuel oil Though they were old, they were still fast, and still lethal.

Enclosed on the main deck ran a long passageway fore and aft. Connecting to it were offices, storerooms, sick bay, and various workshops. The barbershop, tiny ship’s store, and post office were also on this level, as were many officers’ quarters—two officers per stateroom. The rest of us galley-rowers slept belowdecks, forward and aft. Our berthing compartments were crowded, hot, damp, smelly, and somewhat unpleasant. On the rare occasions when the air conditioner worked, it was almost livable—though still stinky with fragrant feet and cigarette smoke.

The beds -“racks”- were stacked three high. Each was a rectangular aluminum frame strung with grommeted canvas, topped with a three-inch mattress, a beat-up pillow, linens, and two (suspiciously crunchy) gray wool Navy blankets—possibly aboard since 1944. Despite it all, that rack remains the single most comfortable bed I’ve ever slept in.

Below the racks, along the deck, were lockers—one per man—about two and a half feet square and eighteen inches deep. Woe betide the sailor who left his locker unlocked: it was a punishable offense. Petty officers, if lucky, rated a front-opening stand-up locker. The ceiling—“overhead”—was a riot of pipes, ducts, and electrical cables. The lights shone white by day and red by night. Ventilation ducts blew tepid air, and when the air conditioner functioned, condensation streamed across the space and puddled on the deck.

My compartment was two levels below the main deck, under one of the five-inch gun mounts. We had guns above and the sonar dome below. Forty sailors attempted to sleep amid the shudder of gunfire and the high-pitched squeal of the sonar. On the DeHaven, the compartment also shared space with the main refrigeration unit, so the air reeked of rotting vegetables and past-its-prime meat – something recruiters never mention in their sales pitch.

Normally a destroyer carried about 300 men, but as a reserve training ship we had a crew of only around 160. That gave us some breathing room—until we took on reservists for training. Those poor guys often got seasick, adding yet another fragrance to the compartment. It is amazing what you can get used to if you have no choice. Often, when we had a particularly large complement of reservists, we had to practice what is called “hot-racking.” That’s when there are more men than there are beds, so when one sailor gets up to go on watch, the sailor he relieves returns to the compartment and sleeps in that first sailor’s rack. As a petty officer I was spared of this little indignity.

I worked one level above the main deck in the radio shack. About eight or nine radiomen were assigned, working in shifts or “watches.”  The radioshack or Radio Central - the official name - was filled with transmitters, receivers, patch cables, cryptographic machines, typewriters, teletypes, a beat-up desk, and a few chairs – like everything else – all painted gray; there was also the ever-present, and much-revered coffee urn, which never ran dry. The mimeograph machine copied incoming messages, which were then pigeonholed into departmental mailboxes.

As a training ship we fired the guns and, with regularity, pretended to chase Soviet submarines, and occasionally did real search and rescue missions. The longest period we steamed with reservists was about two weeks, though steaming on weekends was the norm, with frequent week-long readiness missions thrown-in.

The food was usually poor and generally in short supply. The cooks did the best they could with what they had, but with a reserve-training mission, we were always at the bottom of the supply chain, with the best food going to the combatant ships.

We had a movie every week on the mess decks, with a an old projector and beat-up screen. The movies were all second, and third-run, but we were happy to have the entertainment.  Similarly, for our periods in port, the messdecks also had a rickety old TV with a coat-hanger antenna.

The messdecks and the fantail were the two hang-outs on both of my ships, with the messdecks being conducive to letter-writing, reading, and entertainment.  The fantail was the place to go to watch the ocean, marvel at the night sky, to smoke cigarettes, and to furtively imbibe in weed.  One night, underway, I went back to the fantail to take a breather.  I didn’t announce myself and when they heard me, so many joints got flung over the side, it looked like we were firing tracers; and then came a muttered: “Shit, it’s only Gentile.”

Frequently, especially on larger ships, there can be one or two surly bullies and their entourages of toadies, who make life dicey for other sailors, especially the newly arrived boots.  Fortunately, both the Dehaven and Higbee were free of such assholes, with the animus directed only to the officers and chiefs.

Occasionally, with a broom-handle and ball made of wadded up teletype paper and electrical tape, the radiomen would have a ballgame.  We’d compete against the electronics technicians in a game of baseball on the torpedo deck, which was the largest open space on the ship.  An out-of -the-park hit would end the game, with much grousing directed toward the batter, as the ball went drifting away on the waves. There was a lot of such horseplay and “skylarking” which the chiefs and leading petty officers tried to keep to a minimum – still, despite all the work, hassle, and hardship, we managed to have a lot of fun.

The working day consisted of training and the maintenance of the ship, with the never-ending chipping and painting of decks and bulkheads, to keep the ship looking good, For  ships as old as ours maintenance was a challenge as the rust could be very pitted and deep, with holes literally rotted through the steel. Everyone works on a destroyer, all the time.

The so-called “non-rated men” carried a heavy load onboard ship.  These were the “boots” – the kids just out of basic training who didn’t go to a specialty school to learn a Navy profession.  These unfortunates got stuck with most of the grunt work – messcooking (bussing and washing dishes) working over the side painting the hull, deck work like line-handling and anchor detail, and all other “shit-details.”  Non-rated men could improve their lot by “striking” for a rating – or job.  The boot would identify a profession – or rating – that he would like to do, and arrange an apprenticeship with the division chief to work at and learn the job; all of this in addition to his regular duties.  The striker would learn the job, get the experience, take an exam and secure the recommendation from the higher-ups, and then become a full-fledged rating.  This is how kids would go from the drudgery of being a “deck-ape” to a man with a profession.

The ship’s company was divided up into “divisions” usually by rating.  I was in the operations division, which was made up of radiomen, signalmen, and electronics technicians – all of the communications ratings. We were certainly blue-collar, but we considered ourselves more sophisticated than the other ratings.  We generally behaved a little better on liberty, didn’t fight, and never got tattoos.

We had some amenities which are the norm for any ship – a barbershop, tiny ship’s store, and a closet-sized post office.  Mail was very important to us with care packages from home a welcome arrival, with the expectation that they would be shared with shipmates.  Letters from home and from girlfriends were a tonic, except for the “dear John” letters.  You could always assumed that the bummed-out sailor after mail call had just gotten shit-canned by the girl back home.

All the while our haze-gray home pitched, rolled, swayed, and shuddered—through gray, squall-filled days and nights, or across glassy-blue seas under cloudless skies. We saw octopi, whales, dolphins, flying fish, and more stars than there were in the MGM commissary. In foul weather or fair, in heavy seas or calm, we were a team, a family, a crew. Even men who didn’t like each other stuck together when things got tough.

There were many nights on the ocean when I thought of the boys I went to high school with—working at auto plants and grain elevators—and thought with smug pride…

If those assholes could see me now.

The Sea at Night

The sea, at night, is a wonder. It can be transcendently beautiful, or frighteningly black.

On a moonlit starry night, the calm sea is beautiful. Everything is illuminated, the moonlight dances off of every discontinuity on the surface of the water, the brilliant stars seem to bear down on you, the breeze is brisk and cool. Standing on the fantail you can watch the phosphorescence churning up from the propellers and trailing behind the ship in a glowing wake a half mile long.

Often, we’d be doing night-time gunnery practice off barren San Clemente Island. We’d be training Army and Marine Corps artillery spotters – teaching them how to call in naval gunfire support for the fight in Vietnam. To illuminate the area of the target, we’d fire “star-shells” – projectiles that would release a canister of burning white phosphorous, suspended on a small parachute. The shell would cast a brilliant illumination that would carry far out to sea, imbuing everything with a ghostly glow. The shell would descend for long minutes, illuminating its smoke-trail as well as the target, until finally sputtering out in the sea.

Firing the five-inch guns at night provided another kind of light show – an instantaneous and deafening blast and flash of reddish-orange fire, casting an orange glow on all exposed surfaces and reflecting off the surface of the waves. I never tired of lounging on the weather decks during nighttime firing missions to watch the spectacle.

On moonless, overcast nights, when stepping out onto the weather decks, I’d be blind. It was as unnerving as it was disorienting, and even a little scary. Only a glance at the navigational lights on the mast would orient me, to some degree, as I’d feel my way along, relying solely on my memory of the layout of the deck and all of its myriad fittings and fixtures.

The black-of-night was especially hard on the new hands, who had no familiarity with the layout of the ship. With many stubbed toes, barked shins, and creased foreheads the new guy was in danger with each step. The moonless, starless, nights were full of phantoms, hazards, and hallucinations. The moments that I was on a moonless, starless deck were among my least favorite.

At night, the interior passageways on the ships are illuminated with red light enabling the sailor who steps out on deck to have retained some night vision. But without moon nor stars, this made no difference, it was simply black.

One black night at sea, I was on duty in the brightly lit radio shack. It was a slow night, and I stepped outside to the torpedo deck for a quick cigarette, a gulp of fresh air, and a puke. The seas were rough that night and I was feeling the effect of it.

I frequently got seasick, but not violently so. I’d get queasiness and headaches from the relentless motion. It dulled my senses and knotted my stomach. It made me irritable and hollow feeling. It was always unpleasant when the seas were running high.

I undogged the watertight door that separated the radio shack passageway to the torpedo deck. As it swung open, I stepped out into sheer blackness. So dense was the black it was as if I was wrapped in a black velvet blanket. To stave off disorientation, I held on to the handle of the door and waited for my memory of the deck to take over.

To my right I could feel the sea breeze, to my left the vague warmth of the forward stack. Before me was a void of nothingness. I pictured in my mind the layout of the deck, a relatively large open space flanked by sets of torpedo tubes on the port and starboard sides. Fortunately, there was a life-rail at the deck edges.

It was always startling to bump into another sailor on nights such as these, so we always moved with one hand stretched out before us and the other groping for something to hold onto. The emptiness of the deck seemed vast…ten paces forward, right face, ten paces forward and I would, or should, be able to place my hand on the torpedo tube array.

With groping hand outstretched, I found the tube. Everything must be done very slowly to avoid getting disoriented, which could end in injury or worse. Grasping the tube, I eased myself against it, staring out to the blackness of where I knew the sea to be. It’s odd, how even when blinded, we’d instinctively look out to sea.

I groped into my shirt pocket for the pack of cigarettes and book of matches carried there. Don’t drop either, and be sure to light the correct end, these are the things we’d think to ourselves, in the great and breezy black.

Striking the match was blinding, and once the match had done its job it would go streaking over the side, like a machine gun tracer, until it was extinguished in the waves. Now the only illumination was the glowing cherry tip of the cigarette – a tiny sun struggling against the black. When in conversation with another sailor on such a night, the only time we could see each other was when our inhale caused the cherry to flare up and a Halloween mask of a shipmate would momentarily appear in the blackness.

That night I was particularly queasy and I intended to step out on the deck and make myself vomit over the side, just to get it over with. My condition worsened when a downward gust of breeze enveloped me in a cloud of acrid stack-gas. It was miserable waiting to puke. Nothing happened.

I turned my face to the breeze and alternated breathing in cigarette smoke or cold sea air. Calling it quits I reversed course – about face, ten paces forward, left face, ten paces forward, grasp for the watertight door. Success. I stepped back into the blinding light of the radio shack.

“How is it out there?” asked the other radioman.

“Black as a whale’s fucking stomach,” I replied.

Such is the sea at night.

 

Don, Mannie, and Ted, the three amigos, with the mysterious blanket man.

¡Carnival!

In February of 1973 the USS DeHaven steamed from our homeport in Long Beach CA, down to Mazatlán Mexico for Carnival.

The voyage took about three days, and we went from a cool Southern California winter to the tropical climes around the southern tip of the Baja Peninsula.

I was a greenhorn in life and I had no idea what “Carnival” was, and that it is a world-wide phenomenon.  I was one of the few among a crew of very excited destroyermen who had no idea that we were steaming toward the biggest party in Mexico, and the fourth-largest Carnival celebration on the planet.

We pulled a three-day liberty in Mazatlán, and the captain extended maximum time-off for the crew.  On the final day, I and two fellow-radiomen - Don and Ted - were sitting on the seawall enjoying a beautiful afternoon of watching cliff-divers entertain the tourists.  One of them, a very fit young man in swimming trunks approached us and demanded money to watch him dive…he wanted five dollars.  I asked if he would get killed doing it, and he replied that he was so skilled that he would be fine. “Then forget it” was my reply…I was a smart-ass, not a diplomat.

Moments later, a man came up to us selling blankets.  The local blankets are very colorful, and I still have two that I bought on that visit.  His English wasn’t very good, but fortunately Ted spoke a little Spanish. As is the custom, we did some haggling, with the sticking point being the color – he had blue, I wanted red.  The give-and-take went on for some moments, and we noticed that every time the cops strolled by, he was quick to turn in the other direction, similarly, he only reluctantly allowed us to take his photo…he clearly wanted to stay on the down-low.

I did buy a blanket from him, and when we got the photo developed back in Long Beach, the three of us had a good laugh…our Mexican friend was truly a man of mystery – he obscured his face with the blanket.

All Thumbs in the Gun House

My left thumb is not very “bendy”; it is quite stiff, in fact. The cause of its immobility goes back to 1973, when I had an accident in a gun mount.

One time, our most junior radioman on the USS DeHaven went on leave, so for thirty days I—the next junior man—had to man his battle station, which was in the forward five-inch gun mount: “Mount 51.” It thought it would be a thrill serving a gun that big, something I had fantasized about as a kid. Swiveling the gun around, shooting down kamikazes or blowing Kraut submarines to smithereens—exciting stuff, for sure. The reality, however, was a rude awakening.

The enclosed the gun house has two big five-inch guns—five inches being the diameter of the 55-pound projectiles. To serve the two guns takes about fourteen men, crammed into a very tight space. It is hot, smelly, gloomy, and LOUD. Between the explosive detonations, the clang of the ejected casings, and the rush of high-pressure compressed air to clear the smoke and gases, it is nearly impossible to hear, and everything is communicated by hand signals. As a kid I imagined a smooth ride as the gun house revolved on its pedestal, but the reality couldn’t have been more different. It was a herky-jerky ride of shuddering fits, starts, and jiggles as the mount fine-tuned its aim on the moving target.

I was the hot-case man: grabbing the empty shell casings as they were ejected from the breech and throwing them—still hot and smoking—out a small hatch at the very back of the gun house. You could hear the “CLANG” as they hit the deck.

It was never routine, as the casings never seemed to eject the same way twice. I often had to catch them on the rebound as they bounced off the bulkhead or deck. It was hard, dangerous, exhausting work—all at a feverish tempo.

On one stretch of firing, I had caught maybe fifty empties when the fifty-first caught me by surprise. As it rocketed out of the breech, it hit me squarely on the end of my thumb, driving the whole digit toward my wrist. I winced and saw sparks of pain dancing in front of my eyes. At first I thought I had lost my thumb.

The mount captain saw the whole thing. He instantly gave the signal to cease fire while simultaneously bellowing the same command. From his elevated position he tapped me on the shoulder with his foot, and shouted: “Gentile, report to sickbay!” I opened the watertight door at the back of the gun house and made my way along the main deck to the wardroom, where emergency sickbay is set up during general quarters (“battle stations”). I’d note that while I was out in the open, the detonations from Mount 52—just behind and slightly above the mount I had just exited—were still firing. Without the protection of the gun house, I was buffeted by the blasts as I ran in the open. I finally darted inside and reported to sickbay.

The chief hospital corpsman greeted me with a terse: “Not now, Gentile, I’ve got an injured man coming.” Nonplussed, and with a throbbing thumb, I made my way back out to the weather deck and ran the gauntlet of gun blasts back to the gun house. We worked for another hour until we secured from general quarters. The whole time my thumb was protesting.

Two days later, when the pain subsided, I ran into that chief who had turned me away. He seemed very chagrined. “Sorry, Gentile, turns out you were the injured man they had called me about. How’s the thumb?”

Because of the lag in timing, I never had that injury documented, and now, every time the weather changes, I wonder what disability percentage I could have been getting from the VA all these years.

Not all of my heroic service-related injuries were paper cuts, but none of them hurt more.

Mannie Gentile: Dope Detective

One of my favorite, and funniest, memories of my first ship, the destroyer USS DeHaven (DD-727), comes from a time when things in the Navy were not particularly jolly. The war in Vietnam was winding down for the U.S., the gap between civilians and service members was widening, and there seemed to be a growing hostility between the four-year enlistment sailors and the career men, also known as "the lifers". This was also a time when drug and alcohol abuse was rampant throughout the services, and the 727 was a microcosm of the Navy and many of its problems in those dreary days. That's the deep background to provide some context for this story.

Sometime in late 1972 we were tied up, as usual, along piers 17 and 18 out on the mole at Naval Station Long Beach (California). It was a typical duty evening on an in-port weekend. I was the duty Radioman (RM3c) having a pretty laid-back evening listening to the top 40 radio station, monitoring communications traffic, and reading a science fiction paperback. We didn't have the radio-guard so I had little to do but read. I was still a new guy and was having only limited success making friends with guys in other divisions (remember being the "new guy"?). Along about eight in the evening hunger set in, and I made my way down to the mess decks to build myself a PB and J., I barely got myself sat down when my leading petty officer and a pretty good guy, the RM1 of the shack, came zooming onto the mess decks with a battle lantern ...looking for me.  That night, my boss was the duty Master at Arms (the ship's policeman). "Mannie" he said breathlessly, "come with me".

Now, I was a sailor who was always ready to oblige a shipmate, so without question or hesitation I followed my RM1 off the mess decks up to the radio shack. "What's up boss?" was my only question. He made a finger to the lips gesture to clue me to pipe down and scowled, and sniffed, at the overhead ventilation duct. "Do you smell that shit?" he whispered. "That's 'green smoke', and it can only be coming from one place".  A historical note: For some reason, there were those among the senior enlisted who referred to marijuana smoke and the smell thereof as "green smoke". I even met those who insisted that it was called that because the smoke of burning cannabis is emerald green. Obviously, they'd never imbibed themselves.

The RM1 moved his intent gaze to me and snarled “Someone's smoking dope in OUR fan room!".  There was a fan room just abaft the radio shack on the starboard side. Accessible only with a stepladder through a scuttle in the overhead, it was a space the RMs referred to as "the void" and it was where we stored our supply of teletype paper and teletype tape. For inspection purposes it was the radio crew's property and responsibility. "Let's go!" hissed the RM1 as he handed me that battle lantern and pushed me out the door of the ahead of him. Had I been a cartoon character at that moment my word balloon would have said something like "buh, buh, buh...ahhh wait a second". Off we went into the dark of the night, the RM1 becoming quite impatient with all of the noise I made as I clumsily followed him.  "Quiet! or they'll know we're coming" he whispered. "That's, sort of the whole idea" I thought to myself.

We made our way to the main deck I, carrying the lantern, and the RM1 armed with righteous indignation. He briefly examined a rickety stepladder which was set up beneath the scuttle. "Now get up there and roust those guys out.”  At that time I was choosing to believe it was merely a request rather than an order. "But boss," I protested, "these are guys that I have to live and work with, and I've got no beef with them, cause, y'know..."  It was as if he hadn't heard me, like a fine hunting dog on the point he was intently staring at that overhead scuttle and just as intently pushing me up the ladder. The "why me?" question was simply one of girth…I could fit through the scuttle; he couldn’t.

I mounted the ladder to the Babylon above. This was to be my show.

With my head pressed nearly sideways against the overhead I wrestled with the dog-wheel of the small-round hatch. I could hear indistinct murmuring coming from within. As the dogs retracted, I slowly swung the hatch down, swallowed hard and poked my head through the opening. The experience was unlike any I've had before or since. If one could stick one’s head inside a bong at a frat-party, that might approximate the sensation I had. As my nostrils cleared the coaming of the hatch I became immediately aware of an all too familiar aroma...in spades!  That was one very smoky space and because it was a fan room, that smoke was being communicated throughout quite a bit of the ship. "I don't see anybody boss" was my very lame report. "Jeezus! use the lantern!" he shouted (the need for stealth was now past). I craned my head over and squeezed my arm and the battle lantern through the hatch. I snapped on the light, the beam of which became a ghostly and thick illumination of smoke. My head poking through the scuttle, eyes only inches above the deck, I slowly played the beam 360 degrees around the space level with my eyes. That smoky beam revealed fully a dozen pairs of shoes; oxfords, boondockers, flipflops, all attached to pantlegs that extended up into the faceless gloom. The sound was that of breath being held by twelve shipmates caught red-handed (though all I saw was ankles).

"Well?" was the sharp question from below. Now, remember, I was a sailor who was always ready to oblige a shipmate, so again, without question or hesitation, and with great presence of mind I gave my report:

 “They’re gone boss.”

Clearly disappointed at losing his quarry, he stomped off into the night looking for other crime to fight. I secured the hatch and retreated to the mess decks, my book, and my sandwich,  No sooner had I gotten settled in and resumed reading, than did  a mix of snipes and deck division types slide in next to me, and one piped up: "So Gentile, you just got off Guam eh? Whatcha readin'?". And a lively, breezy bull-session began, of which I was a full partner. Eventually everyone trailed off to hit the rack or relieve the watch. I realized that my status as the new guy was coming to a welcome end. "What a great bunch of guys" I thought, "a great bunch of bleary-eyed guys who smell like they've been fighting a brush fire".

And the rest was pretty smooth sailing.

 

Midshipmen: the bane of our existence

Every summer on the ships, Naval Academy midshipmen would descend upon us for their summer cruise. They were a real pain in the ass.

In 1973, midshipmen, at the end of their first year at Annapolis, came to the fleet for the summer and worked and dressed as enlisted men. They were distinguished from the rest of us by a black band on their whitehat. Senior midshipmen, after their third year, came to the ships to practice leadership. Except for their insignia, the third-year men were dressed as officers, and were entitled to a modicum of respect from the enlisted men…on paper, at least.

The first-year midshipmen were generally treated as a nuisance: they were assigned to work beside us, but they didn’t know the job, and usually we were too busy to teach them; they had to get by with monkey-see monkey-do. They were tolerated, as long as they didn’t get in the way. The philosophy was that these guys would one day be ordering us around, so we had a little fun at their expense while we could.

The third-year midshipmen were a different thing altogether. Strutting around in their officers’ uniforms, they spent all of their time being instructed by actual officers in the basics of driving the ship, operating the systems, and practicing leadership - but you can only lead if someone is willing to follow.

These particular officers-to-be suffered their own kind of purgatory at the hands of the enlisted men. Generally, their orders were taken as “suggestions” and complied with accordingly. They’d be constantly second-guessed by us, and reminded that the fleet wasn’t the academy. Sometimes, it was even worse.

One sunny afternoon on the DeHaven, three of us junior petty officers, all charter-members of the “E-4 mafia”, were lounging against the torpedo tubes taking a smoke-break. One of these young khaki-pharaohs came up to us and curtly said: “I’m forming-up a working party, and I need three volunteers; you, you, and you.” This guy had watched too many old movies. We skeptically appraised him through a cloud of cigarette smoke and didn’t budge.

I said, “Sorry mate, I’ve got the duty.” The second guy said, “I’ve got a medical light-duty chit.” The third petty officer (thought to be high at the time) cut to the chase with a particularly cheery “Fuck you, man.” The chagrined officer-to-be slinked away. As he retreated, we were gratified to see that he had recently sat down on wet paint.

Usually those guys were harmless, but sometimes they could be real assholes…

much like us.

The Brow

These essays frequently mention “the brow.” The brow is what civilians call a “gangplank.” Simple as that.

The brow is how you get on or off a ship, and sometimes how you cross over another ship to reach the pier. Once we were tied up in a raft of five destroyers, and we were on the outside. That meant I had to cross five brows to get to the pier.

There is a prescribed ritual surrounding the brow, taught and drilled in boot camp. As you reach the top of the brow, you face aft toward the flag on its staff at the stern. You come to attention and snap off a salute. Then you turn to the Officer of the Deck (OOD), salute again, and say, “Request permission to come aboard.” The pro forma response is, “Granted.” If you’re crossing another ship on your way ashore, you say, “Request permission to cross over.”

Here’s how it went when we were five ships out: “Request permission to leave the ship” salute, salute. Salute, salute, “Request permission to cross over.” Salute, salute. Salute, salute “Request permission to leave the ship.” Salute, salute “Request permission to cross over.” And so on, until you finally made it to the pier. That’s a lot of salutes.

Though sailors aren’t supposed to loiter on the quarterdeck—the ceremonial area where the brow is located—there was always plenty of hanging around going on. Sailors in civilian attire would queue up there waiting for liberty to be called. Others would linger waiting for pizza delivery, the dry-cleaning truck, or the “roach coach.”

The only authorized people to be at the brow were the Officer of the Deck (OOD)- always an officer or senior petty officer - and two young non-rated messengers.  All carried sidearms.  Interestingly, there was a long-standingm tradition that radiomen don’t stand quarterdeck watches.

Everyone was anxious to get off the ship at the end of the working day. Married guys wanted to get back to their apartments or Navy housing. The single guys were eager for town and all its delights. Don E. would always exclaim, “Don’t get in my way, ’cause I’m going down that brow so fast I’ll have smoke coming out of my titties!”

The brow was also where you could get stopped and prevented from going on liberty because of some grooming or uniform infraction. Once, as I was leaving the ship, the OOD—Chief Z., a prick if there ever was one—said, “I better see you wearing a haircut tomorrow morning, Gentile.” Morning came, I crossed the brow on my return, and wouldn’t you know it, there was Chief Z. He stopped me, and I spent the afternoon cleaning heads and chipping paint off urinal pipes.

As I said, a lot happens at the brow. When in port, it—along with the mess decks—was the focal point of every sailor’s life. And the brow marked the beginning and the end of every fleet-sailor’s seagoing career…with the final “Request permission to go ashore.”

The Columbia Bar

When I was on the DeHaven, we were invited to steam up to Portland, Oregon, to participate in the Rose Festival as part of the “Rose Fleet.” There were four of us making up a tight squadron, including the McKean, which was a regular steaming partner with DeHaven. It was a great trip. We took a few days to get up there from our Long Beach, California homeport, and we did a lot of exercises along the way — pretending to track and attack Soviet submarines and things like that.

As we steamed off the coast of California, we started hearing stories of the Columbia Bar and how terrible it was to sail over. The Columbia Bar is at the mouth of the great river and is formed by dangerous shoals and by eons of sand and sediment piling up to create a sandbar just below the surface. That six-mile-long stretch of shoals is considered by most to be the most dangerous bar in the world, earning the nickname “Graveyard of the Pacific.” The old salts among us spent a lot of time regaling the newer sailors with horror stories of their first crossings. We listened wide-eyed, our anxiety – and excitement - growing.

On the day of the crossing, the general announcement was passed to secure all “gear adrift” — anything not fastened down was to be made so. Loose objects could become projectiles as the ship took forty-degree rolls crossing the bar, and heavy gear like the typewriters, coffee urn, numerous coffee mugs, heavy publication books, and any number of other items in the radio shack could cause serious injury if they started flying across the space. There was a very rigorous inspection of all compartments to make sure everything was tied down in preparation for the event.

With the expanse of the Pacific behind us, we made a turn to starboard toward the bar — and the Columbia River beyond. The Columbia Lightship, an anchored vessel that served as a floating lighthouse, came into view. “COLUMBIA” was emblazoned in white letters across her red hull. The lightship was taking tremendous rolls, and we marveled — a little horror-stricken — to realize there were ten Coast Guardsmen stationed aboard her.

The captain lined us up to make as straight a run as possible, and we headed in.

I was in the radio shack when I spotted one last piece of gear adrift — a half-full coffee mug. I made my way out to the torpedo deck to toss the coffee over the side… and at that moment, the bar enveloped us.

I was at the life-rail when we took our first forty-degree roll. It came as a complete surprise to me. I was instantly bent over at the waist against the lifeline, with the cable cutting into my belly as the ocean rose toward me.  Had those 1944 stanchions given way, that would have been the end of sailor Mannie.

The ship slowly heeled over in the other direction — a steep roll to starboard — which flung me across the deck in the other direction. I landed against a torpedo tube and held fast until the motion settled, then quickly staggered back inside. In the passageway outside the radio shack, I saw a black scuff mark from someone’s boot— on the wall.

That was one of two times I almost lost my life aboard that ship.

It was scary — and relatively short-lived. The passage is only six miles of turbulence, and then it’s over. We found ourselves in the calm, green waters of the mighty Columbia, steaming up toward Astoria, Washington.

A year later, now an old salt myself and again about to cross that bar, I was the one scaring the pants off the new guys with horror stories of the Graveyard of the Pacific.

 My Astoria Girlfriends

Once, on our way to Portland, DeHaven tied up at Astoria Oregon, where we were granted liberty. The old salts told us it was a sailor-friendly town, and that if we went ashore in uniform, we’d have a great time.

“Oh yeah, mate — when the women get a load of those dress blues, you’ll have to beat ’em off with a stick.”

That sounded very promising to us rookies.

We fortunates in the liberty section, scurried down to the compartment to shower, shave, and shift into that classic crackerjack rig with the thirteen-button bellbottoms. We made our way up to the main deck and queued at the brow — a pack of liberty hounds, frothing in anticipation.

The announcement came over the loudspeakers:

“Now liberty, liberty — all hands in the liberty section muster at the brow, liberty is now commenced. Liberty will end at 2300 this evening.”

The thunder of feet across the brow was deafening as we scrambled down to the wharf.

The town spread out before us, and the world was our oyster as we rolled up the main drag looking for action. Then we heard it — more than one female voice calling out:

“Hey saaaaailor!”

The greetings turned into catcalls — dozens of female voices, many with shouted invitations to a “good time.” What we didn’t know was that Astoria had a women’s Job Corps center — and we were strolling right past it.

Women were literally hanging out of the windows calling to us. At the time, the irony of women catcalling sailors was lost on me.

A glance reavealed that they were really rough-looking women.

Big women.

Dangerous women.

We had been set up by the old salts — and it’s odd that none of us noticed they’d all gone ashore in civilian clothes. Based on their earlier experiences in Astoria, they knew better than we innocents.

We did a quick about-face and, with increasing pace — almost a jog — we hurried back toward the ship, pursued by a gaggle of unattractive women.

We made it back to the brow and hustled aboard to howls of laughter from the old-timers.

A year later, we tied up in Astoria again.

I stayed aboard.

My Portland Girlfriend

Steaming down the Columbia River to participate in the Portland Rose Festival, the DeHaven was operating in perfect weather, surrounded by the breathtaking landscape of the Pacific Northwest. Branching off onto the Willamette River, we approached our destination—the City of Roses.

It was the height of the anti-war period, and every bridge we passed under was crowded with sign-carrying protesters. Make no mistake, we were pretty fed up with the war too, but it was still a dismaying welcome.

On one of the bridges, among the cat-calling protesters, I spotted a beautiful young woman in a bikini. I was rapt. Perched languidly fifteen feet above me, she met my eye. My heart fluttered. Her slender arm began to rise—along with my hopes. Then her graceful hand slowly unfolded… and she extended her lovely middle finger.

And I thought:

Gosh, girls are finally starting to notice me.

The author standing behind the breech of a five-inch gun…a lethal location.

A Close Call with the Grim Reaper

Here’s  a tale from the high-seas that happened to me when I was a young sailor-boy on the USS DeHaven back in 1972.

The main armament on a Sumner-class destroyer is the five-inch gun.  The DeHaven mounted six of them, in three double, rotating, gun houses.  They can hurl a 55-lb projectile up to ten miles or so with great accuracy. You can imagine that to achieve such a feat the gun must be complicated, well-engineered, and HEAVY

Although I was a Radioman on the DeHaven, I found myself working in the forward five-inch gun mount for a month. Initially, I was down in the handling room sending projectiles up into the mount.  The handling room is a small piece of hell on earth, where you struggle to keep your footing on a greasy, moving deck, while trying not to get your fingers crushed. You spend your time frantically manhandling heavy projectiles from the magazine elevator into the ready racks and then to hoists which run them to the gun above. It is grueling and very strenuous work, and I, with my puny arms, was having a difficult time keeping up with the rapid tempo of work.

As we were firing, a voice came from above. Appearing through the small hatch was the streaked face of one of the gunner's mates up in the mount. While he was shouting the type of ammo to send up.  He spotted me, or more correctly, the petty officer insignia on my sleeve (the "crow") and yelled: "Hey dude, what the fuck are you doing down there!?  You're a goddamned petty officer, get up here with the rest of us."

Seeing this as a welcome reprieve I gratefully scrambled up the ladder and through the narrow hatch, and emerged into the ear-splitting, bone shuddering, reeling, jolting and fuming world of the gun house.

My gunner's mate deliverer - realizing I'd never been in a mount before - gave me the simplest possible job - that of the "hot case man".  Handing me one asbestos glove (instead of the required two) a glove, may I add, that had a large hole worn through the palm, and quickly instructed me on my task.

As the hot empty shell casings were ejected from the breach I was to grab them and toss them out a little scuttle that got them outside, and out from underfoot.

Those smoking casings would pile up on the deck outside the gun mount.  Sometimes, after a sustained period of firing, there could be hundreds of them out there, rolling back and forth with the motion of the ship.

About a dozen guys worked the mount.  It was so noisy that the only communication was done with hand signals; hand signals like the one I gave to the guy at the trigger, indicating that a casing had been lodged below the mount, impeding the elevation.  I gave him the "finger across the throat" signal and indicated the jammed casing.  He grinned, nodded, and gave me the "thumbs-up".  I was about to find out that there had been a grave miscommunication.

As I bent down, head behind the giant breech block, I fumbled with the casing while scrambling to get out of the way before hearing the click that signals that the trigger has been pulled, which would be followed by the recoil of the block…right was where I was standing.

Despite the grinning assurance of my shipmate by his "thumbs-up" signal, I heard that most frightening sound… “click.”

Instantly I felt myself flying backward; two huge, powerful, hands at my belt providing a jarring jerk, pulling me clear of the recoiling breech block.

It all happened in the blink of an eye. I watched as the breech block rocketed past my face, filling the space where my head had been a split-second prior.

The guy who pulled me from harm’s-way was a gunner's mate who I only ever knew as "Cracker".  A greasy, portly, and altogether unkempt sailor who was, for me, the man of the moment. He had, quite literally, saved my life.

As I thanked him profusely, he shrugged it off with " You're lucky that was the last shot or I'd have been too busy to bother"

And that's how I helped to defeat the commies.

Fire in the hole

In my earliest weeks in the radio shack of the USS DeHaven, I was having trouble fitting in. Most of the other radiomen weren’t very cordial to me. They had recently returned from a deployment to the waters off Vietnam, and they were a very tight group. I, however, was the outsider.

Fortunately, I had reported aboard with a second-class petty officer radioman who had most recently served aboard a minesweeper — those little ships produced some of the most competent radiomen in the fleet, and he was no exception; He and I hit it off immediately. During our first two days, Ted and I checked in with the captain, the executive officer, our divisional officer, the operations officer, and any number of others in authority.

Another supportive radioman was a guy named Don, who introduced himself with, “Hi, I’m Don. I’m the attitude case.” I knew I was going to like this guy.

Despite these two alliances, my first months in the radio shack were uncomfortable. I was frozen out of conversations by the old hands — all compounded by the fact that I was shaping up to be a pretty mediocre fleet radioman.

All of that changed one day when the living embodiment of an Italian Popeye rolled up the pier.

About two months into my tenure on DeHaven, we got word that we were getting a new leading petty officer — a first-class radioman just coming off a Vietnam deployment with the elite Beach Jumpers unit.

Uh-oh.

The general consensus was that the easy days were coming to an end.

And they were… sort of.

The day of his arrival came, and all of us RMs were bracing for it. On the fateful day, the announcement came over the loudspeakers: “Now all radiomen and signalmen muster on the torpedo deck.” We assembled in two sloppy ranks by the torpedo tubes, facing the pier.

From a Yellow Cab emerged one of the burliest, saltiest sea dogs we had ever seen. Smoking a pipe and shouldering his seabag, he slowly surveyed the ship, stem to stern. Then his eyes rose upward to the torpedo deck, and with a scowling glare, he surveyed us.

“Oh fuck…” was muttered by more than one nervous sailor.

This no-nonsense jack-tar looked like he meant business, and the happy days were over. Still locking eyes with us, he tapped out his pipe, jammed it into the pocket of his working jacket, and made his way across the brow to the quarterdeck.

Ten minutes later, he addressed us:

“Alright ladies, I don’t know how it was before, and I don’t care. This is my radio shack now, and when I say ‘jump,’ you say ‘how high?’ You will follow my orders without question or hesitation, and I will not tolerate an RM who is a fuck-up.”  He went on like this at some length, we didn’t even dare to shoot each other sidelong glances. He closed with something we’d hear frequently – “Don’t be the weak link in the strong naval communications chain.” By the time his gruff and humorless introduction had finished, we were all pretty intimidated.

Then came a voice from the rear rank:

“Hey man, yer pocket’s on fire.”

And, by Neptune — it was.

The pipe he had stashed in his pocket hadn’t been fully extinguished, and smoke was now billowing out of it.  After some frantic slapping at his jacket, the smoldering ceased. He looked up at us, grinned, and said:

“Well, that was some kind of happy horse-shit, wasn’t it?”

The ice was broken.

RM1 Dave D’Amico was firm, fair, and funny… and he ended up being my friend and mentor.

 

USS DeHaven off San Clemente island, making history

The Last Six Gun Salvo

This was kind of a big deal.

While I was aboard the USS DeHaven, she was slated to fire what would be, according to Navy historians, the last full six-gun broadside from an American destroyer — a final echo of defiance from the age of all-gun surface combatants.  The Navy was pretty interested in this event.  The DeHaven was one of the last WWII-vintage destroyers that still mounted six five-inch guns.  This event occurred with the crew’s knowledge that soon the DeHaven would be leaving the fleet to be sold to South Korea.  We were going out with a bang…literally.

The day came and the smart-asses were betting that the old girl would break in half from the shock of it all, as rust, and magical thinking, were the only things keeping that old hull together.  Nonetheless, the announcement came for all hands to man general quarters.  I went to the emergency radio room which was on the main deck, starboard side, and amidships.  I went inside, put on a helmet, dogged-down the watertight door, and waited for the big boom.

There were multiple delays as a couple of the old guns kept having one failure after another.  Finally, a terse announcement was made to commence firing.  There was a pretty good jolt that I could feel through the deck-plates beneath my feet; and even though I was buttoned up in the radio room, I could hear the blast of six cannons going off in unison.  It was pretty cool.

All week, the captain had been making a big deal about what the disposition of those six empty shell-casings would be.  They were to be distributed between the Smithsonian, the Naval Academy, the Secretary of the Navy, the Naval Institute, and of course, the captain and executive officer were going to keep one each.  That was the plan.

After the smoke had cleared and the gun-mounts were secured, the Weapons officer sent a detail scurrying to each mount to retrieve the empties.  Unfortunately, the diligent gunners mates, as was the procedure, threw the still-warm empties over the side to Davey Jones’s locker.  When it was realized what had just happened, a general “holy shit” was uttered by all involved.  Immediately the gunners fanned-out through the ship, confiscating the odd 5” shell casings that had been used, for years, as ashtrays.  Working fast, they rounded up six such ashtray shell casings,  emptied the butts over the side, and presented the nicotine-stained relics to our very proud captain —who was none the wiser.

If you ever visit the museum at the Naval Academy, lean in close. You might still catch a faint whiff of stale tobacco.

Hail and Farewell

On December 5, 1973, the USS Higbee  (DD-806) relieved the good old DeHaven. After 29 years of service in the U.S. Navy—through three wars and countless miles—it was finally time for the old girl to call it quits after a long and distinguished career as an American warship. Fortunately, DeHaven wasn’t going out with a whimper; she had been sold to our ally, the Republic of South Korea.

Three transitions were to happen simultaneously: the ship’s preparation for transfer, the transfer itself, and the “cross-decking” to the Higbee of the DeHaven men who chose to stay in Destroyer Squadron 27. I was one of about fifty DeHaven sailors who went with the chief and two other radiomen to the 806. Fortunately, RM1 Dave D’Amico decided to stick around.

The rest of the DeHaven radio crew, like all the other divisions, scattered to the four winds. A few guys took “early-outs,” as the war was winding down and a smaller Navy was inevitable. The Navy Department had begun letting men leave early if they only had a couple of months left on their enlistments. It was a melancholy time aboard DeHaven as, one by one, guys drifted off to other ships, other stations, or, for the lucky few, back home.

We got word about two months before the transition that DeHaven – our home – was on the way out. It came as a shock to many of us, but the old hands—who knew what a battered and war-weary tin can the DeHaven was—saw the handwriting on the wall, or the bulkhead, as it were. They knew she had come to the end of the line, and now it was time to pass the baton to another ship to take on our reserve-training mission. Enter the Higbee.

USS Higbee had just come home from the war, having spent countless hours off the shores of Vietnam providing naval gunfire support for U.S. and ARVN combat operations inland. Still fresh in the minds of the Higbee crew was the April 19, 1972, Battle of Dong Hoi. Higbee had been attacked by North Vietnamese MiGs that struck her with two 500-pound bombs, doing major damage to the fantail and totally destroying the after 5-inch gun house. She bore a battle-scarred hull and carried an extremely proud crew—proud of their ship, proud of their record, and proud of each other.

There’s nothing like duty in the Seventh Fleet and “WestPac” to draw a crew together, and nothing like combat to cement it. The Higbee sailors had been through thick and thin—months away from home, months without touching dry land, the rigors of life at sea, and the uproarious fun of shared liberty in some of the most picturesque, hospitable, and nefarious ports of the Pacific. They had done it all together—as shipmates.

Now, the 806 was hanging up the sword for more mundane duties—taking over from DeHaven to spend weeks at a time babysitting Naval Reservists. It was an important mission, to be sure, but it was nothing like months of combat, exotic liberty, and the feeling of shared purpose the Higbee crew had known. As a result, there was some resentment among the Higbee sailors, and we fifty DeHaven guys bore the brunt of it—at least for a while.

For weeks prior to the change of command and our transition to the Higbee, members of the Republic of Korea Navy came aboard to learn the systems and idiosyncrasies of the DeHaven. The learning curve wasn’t too steep, as the practice of selling old destroyers to the ROK Navy had been in place for some time. Nonetheless, there was much work to be done by the Koreans to take possession, and much to be done by us before they could.

DeHaven sailors and Korean sailors, though spending time together, didn’t mesh. Certainly, there was the language barrier, but there was something more. It was as if these men from another country had swooped in and taken our beloved ship from under us; as if the U.S. Navy had simply dismissed DeHaven from its consciousness. None of that was true, of course, but to sailors aged eighteen to twenty-five, it sure felt that way.

The transition period, for us, turned into a giant spare-parts raid.

We had been tied up next to the Higbee for several weeks before the handover, to make the transition more streamlined and to get the fifty DeHaven guys integrated with the Higbee crew. Having the ships moored side by side made for easy, unauthorized, and totally clandestine transfers of parts, materials, and supplies from the 727 to the 806.

The deal was that the Koreans were buying the ship intact—with all parts, stores, and systems—much like when you buy a house: the previous owner can’t make off with the light bulbs. Well, it was a lot more than light bulbs we were spiriting away.

In a wholesale fashion, DeHaven sailors were crossing the brow to the Higbee with spare parts, odds and ends, and bits and pieces concealed under coats, in buckets, and in crates—right under the noses of the Koreans. The larceny got so egregious that the new owners had to post guards at the brow to inspect all sailors crossing from the DeHaven to the Higbee. And because the traffic between ships was constant, it was chaos.

Undeterred, we began tossing parts over the side to waiting hands on the adjacent Higbee, out of sight of the quarterdeck watch. I even helped pass a twelve-foot whip antenna across the gap.

This frenzy of pilfering was fueled by the Higbee’s new status. No longer an active combatant, the 806 was given low priority when ordering parts and supplies—food included. Even with our talented cooks, there’s only so much you can do with rations weeks past their “best by” date. This low priority extended to every level of supply, so we were simply planning for the future—much to the frustration of the brass, and especially the South Koreans.

About three weeks into all this came the official “cross-decking” ceremony. All hands were mustered on the DeHaven’s fantail, those continuing on to the Higbee standing beside their packed seabags. The Navy Department made the official transfer, and our captain and the new ROK captain conducted the traditional change-of-command ceremony. It was a pretty big deal. When it was over, those of us cross-decking to the Higbee shouldered our seabags and went over the brow, no longer part of the DeHaven family. For many of us, it was a sad moment.

Though we had transferred, weeks of preparation still lay ahead. DeHaven men continued assisting the newly-named ROKS Incheon, training the Korean sailors who were eager to steam the newest member of their fleet home to South Korea.

We fifty DeHaven guys were spared the sight of our old home steaming away forever, as the Higbee—our new home—was out on a two-week training deployment. When we returned to port, there was a forlorn empty space where the 727 had been just days prior.

We picked up the thread of destroyer life and got back to work, and eventually we became part of the Higbee crew. There were still a few holdouts among the Higbee gang who stayed chilly towards us, but for the most part, we were shipmates.

I sailed my final nine months aboard the Higbee, up and down the West Coast. She was a good ship, with a good crew and a fine record, but as far as I was concerned, the DeHaven was still my ship, first, last, and always.

For as tired as DeHaven was, after all those nautical miles and all those wars, it must be noted that the South Koreans coaxed another nineteen years out of her as an active combatant.

Such was the stuff of DeHaven.

Teletype Repair School

With a little less than a year left in the Navy, I requested teletype repair school, thinking it would give me an edge for working unsupervised and let me goof off undetected. Mostly though, I just wanted to get off the ship for three months. I got off the ship all right, but I wasn’t too successful on the first two objectives.

I thought teletype repair was going to be simple mechanics. It wasn’t. There are thousands of parts in a teletype, each doing something on its own or in conjunction with something else, and electricity, of course, plays the crucial role of making everything work. Every part has to be precisely tuned—one screw, spring, or pulley out of adjustment and you’ll get garble instead of a clear message. And it’s much easier to get the former than the latter.

The work was hard for me—both the hands-on mechanics and the textbook schematics and wiring diagrams. Added to this was the fact that I wasn’t applying myself very hard. My main focus was weekend and evening liberty in San Diego—a great liberty town.

I was living in one of the old WWII-era, two-story wooden barracks. It was decrepit but recently reactivated to handle an overflow of radio school students. For a week I was the only one there, but soon the place filled with young radioman strikers fresh out of boot camp. I was one of only two petty officers, which meant I was nominally “in charge” of the kids.

As a petty officer, I had my own small room, while everyone else slept in the open bay with rows of bunks. My WWII-era mattress felt like it was stuffed with rocks, but I enjoyed sitting in the second-story window, listening to my radio and waiting for the pizza guy.

The other petty officer was Sylvester H. He anointed me his “token white friend” and proceeded to teach this affable white kid a lot about Blaxploitation films – Superfly, in particular which he must have seen a half-dozen times.

Sylvester and I were in different sections of the same class, which meant that he spent his day in one classroom and I in another. What we had in common was that we were both lackluster students, struggling to make it through the quizzes and exams.

One of my daily duties was making coffee for the senior enlisted men—something that always rankled me, since I wasn’t a coffee drinker. It meant scrubbing two large institutional coffee urns, measuring grounds, filling them with gallons of water, and brewing the java. One day, while begrudgingly doing this chore, I overheard two instructors discussing Sylvester’s abilities. One petty officer used a racial epithet in reference to him. I told Sylvester that evening about what I had heard—it was duly noted.

As we slogged through the minutiae of teletypes, graduation day finally came. The passing grade was 51. I squeaked by Sylvester did not. Even though we’d gotten identical marks on the quizzes, practicals, and exams, I passed and he failed. Something was fishy, but it came as no surprise to Sylvester, if you catch my drift.

We went straight to the office of the man who ran the program—a very old and very wise master chief petty officer. His bearing was not only military, but regal. He listened, questioned me closely about the epithet, then made his on-the-spot decision; turning to Sylvester he proclaimed: “You pass, lad. Now return to your ship and sin no more.”

We left his office as happy men…

and as the most mediocre teletype repairmen in the fleet.

A Tale of Two Mountain Expeditions

I’ve been an avid camper for years, something that I never did as a kid. I owe my affection for camping to two guys—Ted C. and, not surprisingly, Dan Beeler. Both were avid outdoorsmen, and Ted was an enthusiastic angler.

The first trip was with DeHaven shipmate Ted to the Whitney Portal of Inyo National Forest beyond Sequoia National Park—a long haul from Long Beach. It was Ted’s idea; he wanted to do some fishing, and he thought that it was high time that I experienced some camping in the high country. We planned the trip for a couple of weeks prior, which included me getting my first (and only) fishing license.

Then came a three-day weekend, and we loaded up his boss 1971 yellow Plymouth Roadrunner and took off to the mountains. It was a new and completely unforgettable experience for me in some of the most beautiful terrain this country has to offer.

After a long drive, with ever-increasing altitude, we entered the mountains and made our way to the National Forest campground. I was so excited that as soon as I got out of the car, I went running uphill, filled with exuberance at being in a new place on a beautiful day away from the ship…I nearly fell over from the dizziness. A laughing Ted cautioned me about the altitude and that I should give it a day before I started exerting myself.

We made camp and immediately went fishing. Ted put a six-pack in the mountain stream, and it chilled down quickly. As I recall, Ted caught a couple of fish for supper; my catch, however, was mere inches in length and had to be tossed back. That night we had a delicious supper, and Ted taught me how to play gin.

The following day Ted wanted to do more fishing; I, however, opted for some hiking up the mountain. These were the days when my stamina matched my enthusiasm. I climbed higher and ever higher. The scenery was breathtaking, and I threw caution to the wind as far as personal safety was concerned. It was not until very recently that I realized how lucky I was that I didn’t encounter a mountain lion or venomous snakes.

As I gained altitude, I encountered patchy snow, and the air was refreshingly cool and sharp.. It was springtime back in Long Beach, but here it was chilly, save for my exertion. The views were spectacular, and I was having the time of my life.

Eventually, hunger signaled that it was time to get back to camp. I had been hiking uphill for over three hours; the descent, however, was a completely different story. I grabbed a stout stick to use as a paddle, and by the seat of my pants, I went briskly sliding down the icy snow, making rapid headway. It was an exhilarating slide down the mountainside, the ground it took three hours to go up only took twenty-five minutes to go back down. Had I encountered one sharp rock, I might not be the man I am today – such was the foolishness of my youth.

I arrived back at camp breathless and with a cold and soaking-wet pair of jeans, but I had made a memory for a lifetime. After another fish dinner, we turned in, and on the third and final day of our all-too-brief time in the mountains, we packed up and headed back to the grind of life at sea. We agreed that the trip was a ringing success of organization, scenery, and fun.

My second experience was with Beeler. At that time, I was on the Higbee and had been sent to do three months back in San Diego for teletype repair school. Dan’s tin can was tied up at the Navy pier, and we rendezvoused at my barracks for a quick trip to the Cleveland National Forest, not far from town.

Dan had one of those tiny Datsun pickup trucks. We packed minimally, as we’d be gone only for an overnight. For our main meal, Dan put a can of ravioli on the top of his engine block, confident that by the time we got where we were going it would be sufficiently heated up.

On the way, Dan stopped at some sort of tape exchange place where he picked up a couple of 8-tracks. I remember listening to Tommy James and the Shondells on an endless repeat -.Crimson and Clover, over and over, so to speak.

I was totally unprepared. I had borrowed a pair of boondockers from one of the “A” school kids and grabbed a blanket from the barracks. I had been deceived by the very warm San Diego weather and had forgotten how much cooler it was in the mountains. I was still a rookie at camping.

When we arrived at the campground, we decided to do some off-roading. The Datsun was not really meant for back-country travel, but it put up a very good fight. We met our match, however, when Dan drove down a steep embankment to check out a pond, and found that the truck had neither the power nor the traction to reverse back up the steep grade.

Realizing he had been defeated, Dan set the handbrake and blocked the rear wheels with a couple of large rocks. The front wheels were partially in the water, and all I could think of was the risk of losing the ravioli..

Ever the man of unflagging confidence, Beeler was sure that there was a way out of this fix, and we started hiking down the road. Eventually we encountered a guy with a tractor. Dan explained the situation, and the good Samaritan followed us back to the stuck Datsun, deployed a stout chain, and pulled us back up the embankment. Disaster averted.

That night we slept in the back of the truck, which had a cap to keep the weather out. With no coat, no sleeping bag, and little sense, I shivered through a miserable night wrapped in a flimsy Navy blanket. The next morning, I stumbled out of the truck, and Dan and I had a meager breakfast of cheese and crackers before hitting the road back to San Diego.

The trip was certainly eventful, as well as uncomfortable and a little disconcerting; nonetheless, any time spent with Beeler was always time well spent. We got back to the base, said our goodbyes, and went our separate ways—he back to his ship and me back to the classroom for another month. It would be twenty-five years until our paths crossed again.

And the ravioli?

Stone cold.

 

My San Diego Girlfriend

The radioman school in San Diego California was a multistory building with a large central stairway.  Traffic was heavy on those stairs during the shift between classes, at lunchtime, and at the beginning and end of each day.  Every day on those stairs, I would pass a WAVE ensign.  She was very small and very pretty, and it was uncanny how even in the hustle bustle of sailors rushing up and down those stairs, our eyes would meet every time. This went on for weeks.  Then one day as she passed, she gave me the sweetest smile, and I was visibly stunned. As he passed, a sailor who had seen it said: “As you were mate, she’s an officer.”

Our brief affair had come to a close.

That hat

In 1968, Canada had a brain-glitch that lasted seventeen years. It was called “Canadian Forces.” Canadian Minister of National Defense Paul Hellyer decided to do away with the distinctive uniforms and names of the Royal Canadian Navy, Royal Canadian Army, and Royal Canadian Air Force, and put them all under one common administration and title—the generic and boring “Canadian Forces.”

This really rankled the many of the Canuk  troops, who felt much of their tradition and esprit de corps was lost. Their distinctive uniforms were abandoned for outfits that made Canadian service members look like old-time bus drivers. The standard was a green suit, shirt and tie, and a visored cap. That hat is the plot device.

One summer aboard the USS Higbee we had a special guest - a sailor from the Canadian Forces (navy) assigned to a three-month exchange tour. He reported for duty in his “rifle-green” jacket, trousers, and tie, light green shirt, and visored hat—the same style of hat that our chief petty officers wore. He was warmly greeted by the chiefs, escorted to his berth in the relatively luxurious chiefs’ quarters, and welcomed by the chiefs as a brother and boon companion. There, he enjoyed better food, from a better galley, in a better dining area—better than what the rest of us galley-slaves saw.

After a month or so it was revealed that he wasn’t a Chief at all, merely the equivalent of a second-class petty officer. Though not exactly an international-incident, there was a little embarrassment and mild disapproval at his subterfuge, and he was discreetly relocated to the operations berthing compartment, bunked across from me. How the mighty do fall.

Undeterred, he continued to pull the wool over our eyes: huaraches on duty? - Canadian issue. Extra-long hair? - within Canadian regulations. Cozy civilian quilt and printed linens? - Canadian issue. No quarterdeck watches? - Canadian regulations. They drew the line at alcohol.

At first we admired his skill at getting one over on the powers that be, but eventually the charm wore off as we went about the monotonous daily routine. After three months, without fanfare, he left the Higbee and rotated back to Canadian duties. Though he was not particularly missed by us, he left behind our grudging admiration for his mastery of the snow job

The Antenna Caper

One night I was on watch in the Higbee’s radio shack when an announcement came over the bitch box that one of the 35-foot whip antennas was on fire. I jumped up from the desk, went out onto the torpedo deck in a light rain, and made my way up a vertical ladder to the Electronic Countermeasures (ECM) deck. Climbing that ladder on a dark-rainy night on a rolling ship was a pretty unforgettable experience. Huffing and puffing, I finally made it up and was met by an equally breathless young lookout who excitedly stammered out the problem: “Fucking thing’s burning up!”

Sure enough, sparks and smoke were pouring out from the base of the tall transmitting antenna. I used the lookout’s sound-powered phone to call the radio shack and tell them to secure power to the thing, then gave it a couple of good blasts with a nearby fire extinguisher. Daylight revealed that the insulator was shot. It had to be replaced.

As a reserve-training ship, we were far down the list when it came to food, stores, and spare parts. The active combatants always had first dibs. Getting a new insulator through proper channels would take weeks, and we were scheduled to get underway with a load of reservists in just three days.

There was an antenna shop on base, and a plot was hatched.

The chief sent me on a recon mission to the big repair facility. I went at lunchtime, knowing no one would be around, and located a couple of likely insulators. These things weighed hundreds of pounds, so the heist would be a team effort.

The following day the chief requisitioned the ship’s truck, and he and two of our burliest radiomen drove off to the antenna shop—again at lunchtime. Twenty minutes later they returned with the new insulator, which we stashed under a tarp, pier-side next to the ship. The quarterdeck messenger asked no questions, and the officer of the deck spent a few minutes looking the other way.

Like all the best capers, this one had a lot of moving parts. The day before, the chief had gone ashore with ten pounds of Navy coffee to negotiate with a shipyard crane operator. Right on schedule, the big crane arrived at our berth. By then we had the long antenna bolted to the new insulator. The crane lifted it to the ECM deck, we dropped it into position, bolted it down, and hooked it up. The crane operator drove away, no one the wiser.

That left the useless burned-out insulator. We had no room for it, and more importantly, it was evidence - so we simply dropped it over the side. It hit the filthy water with an explosion of spray and vanished into the sludge. We knew it would sink deep into the muck and disappear forever.

The next day an ensign and a petty officer from the antenna shop showed up, the ensign visibly agitated. They were missing a just-unpacked insulator for a 35-foot whip. He claimed a chief driving a red Navy pickup truck had been seen leaving the area with a tarp-covered object in the bed. Trouble was, every other ship’s truck was gray—except ours. And the only Black chief radioman in the squadron was assigned to the DeHaven.

Get the picture? It was a tense moment.

The ensign demanded answers, but we all stuck to the same story: the truck had only been in the area to get its tires inflated. The chief even invited him aboard to look for the insulator—or for the one we’d replaced, which was currently buried in ten feet of mud, fecal matter, and coffee grounds.

No evidence. No case. No sweat.

The frustrated ensign drove away, and the next day we were out to sea… happily transmitting message traffic over the airwaves.

The Goat Locker

Chief petty officers are the backbone of every Navy in the world; they are the interface between officers and enlisted men. Officers, even occasionally the ship’s captain, will frequently defer to the wisdom of the chief.  It is truly an exalted and revered position.  Chiefs have a baked-in authority that comes from experience and wisdom.  Some chiefs are paternal and kind, a few are authoritarian and mean-spirited, and plenty of others are in between.

Because of their elevated status, they have their own berthing and messing space, commonly called “the goat-locker.”  Most of us have only had rare glimpses of it, as it was an absolutely sacrosanct space, from which all but chiefs were barred, even the ship’s captain had to ask permission to enter.

It wasn’t until I started volunteering on the few destroyers that are preserved museum ships, that I was able to really explore the luxurious space that was the goat-locker.

Aside from the pea-green wall-paint and the hundreds of cables and pipes along the overhead (ceiling) the space couldn’t have been more different than those inhabited by everyone else.  The chiefs had their own well-appointed galley, a dining room that doubled as a lounge, with plenty of table space for dining and playing cribbage.  There was soft furniture and divans, all, of course, built-in to forestall furniture and appliances sliding around with the motion of the ship. The vinyl upholstery was nicer than that on the rest of the ship as was the deck finishing. There was also a large head with spacious showers. Below all of this, was the berthing area, with the racks (bunkbeds) and large lockers. Despite the plush appointments, like any other space on the ship, the footprint is shaped according to the needs of the mission, for that reason, one of the bulkheads (wall) of the goat locker on both my destroyers was round, an indication that the ammunition-handling “carousel” was on the other side of that bulkhead.

One of the reasons that the goat locker was so nice was because occasionally some of its appointments had been “cumshawed” (stolen) from other places.  Televisions, coffee urns, display cases, all manner of stuff  appeared as if by magic to make the chiefs quarters more pleasant and livable, after all, it was still a destroyer which is by its very nature uncomfortable.

Between the DeHaven and the Higbee, I made three hesitant forays into the goat-locker.  Once to enter the ammunition-handling carousel during general quarters, once to deliver a message – greeted by a hostile chief and a “What the fuck are you doing here, and take your goddamned hat off”, and this third time which was particularly dicey.

One underway mid-watch, I pulled an encrypted message off the teletype printer and took it to the leading petty officer of the watch, who informed me that our chief – chief L. – was the one who had to decrypt it.  As it was marked “immediate”, someone had to go and fetch the chief, and as it was two o’clock in the morning, chief L., like most of the other chiefs, would be soundly slumbering in his warm rack.  The leading petty officer snickered as he delegated the task to me.  “Don’t forget to take a flashlight, and if you know what’s good for you, it’s best to use the red filter.”

Armed with a flashlight, dimmed in red, I made my way to the goat locker.  Once inside, I approached a glowering chief and inquired as to which rack was chief Lee’s.  “You’ll just have to dope that out yourself” and went back to his Playboy magazine.

Descending the ladder, quiet as a mouse on Xanax, I began searching for chief L., shining the dimmed flashlight into the face of one snoring chief after another.  Now chief L. was the only African-American chief aboard, so I thought that would give me an advantage, however, the red lens on a dimmed flashlight is the great tool of equality, in that it makes everyone the same color.  I had to lean in and peer into the faces of the sleeping chiefs.  Finally, I found chief L., and gingerly woke him – much to his annoyance. I explained the circumstances and retreated back to the radio shack.  Ten minutes later, a bleary-eyed chief L. – wearing slippers - entered the radio shack took the encrypted message to the tiny crypto room and decoded it.  Fifteen minutes later, he emerged with an annoyed look, directed at me.  “This could have waited until morning, petty officer Gentile” and he trudged off, back to his now-chilly rack.

As a reflection of his displeasure, he had me scrubbing out the coffee-urn for two weeks.

Hell hath no fury like an awakened goat.

Tittie up ‘dere

Naval Station Long Beach in the early 1970s was the home of five destroyer squadrons, each containing about five destroyers—that’s a lot of destroyers.

The Higbee was assigned to Destroyer Squadron 27, along with Hollister (DD-788), McKean (DD-784), and Henderson (DD-785). We were a happy little family of tin cans whose mission was to train Naval Reservists from the western and west-coast states. I think it is fair to say that we were a little more relaxed than the other squadrons. The others were still being regularly deployed to Vietnam, whereas the ships of DESRON 27 were tired veterans who had been recently taken out of combat-rotation duty.

Reserve training was not exciting. There was no combat, no regular underway replenishment, and no exotic liberty ports. We mostly chugged up and down the West Coast from Vancouver, British Columbia, to Mazatlán, Mexico. I don’t think we ever operated more than 150 miles from shore, if that. It was pretty sedate for the ships in DESRON 27—a backwater.

All of the destroyer squadrons were berthed at a man-made breakwater called the “mole.” The mole was a two-mile long, dogleg projection into San Pedro Bay, providing safe harbor for the fleet since the Second World War, and had its own culture. Removed from the rest of the Naval Station, the mole was pretty remote, and as a result there were nearly no amenities. All of the facilities—laundromat, clubs (officers, chiefs, enlisted), movie house, commissary, exchange, dry cleaners, snack bar, etc.—were on the main base, a two-mile bus ride from the tip of the mole.

The one thing that we did have was our own run-down and slightly sleazy enlisted men’s club called the Flotilla Club, or the “Flot.” The Flot was a popular destination for a quick lunchtime burger and beer. A specialty of the house was the buffalo burger, which was good…and greasy, as were the fries—greasy but delicious.

On one of my rare lunchtime forays to the Flot, the place was packed and smoky. Inside the front door, at a lectern, sat a shore patrolman dressed in whites, and within his reach was a highly polished brass bell. Above the bell was a placard reading: “He who enters covered here will buy the house a round of beer.” In the Navy, it is forbidden for a sailor not on duty to wear his hat—cover—indoors. If a sailor entered the Flot with his hat on, the SP would clang the bell, and everyone would raise, with great gusto, a roof-raising cheer. That meant that the poor swabbie who had forgotten to remove his cover had to buy a beer for everyone in the place or be banned. This could be a very expensive proposition, so it was rare that a sailor forgot to enter the club bare-headed. I only saw the bell get rung once, and luckily for the poor sailor the Flot only had a couple dozen patrons at the time. Still, between paydays, this could be quite an unwelcome expense.

Frequently there was entertainment, whether a fatigued four-piece combo trying to rock out covers of Top-40 tunes, or country-and-western artists twanging away. Occasionally they’d have a half-assed comedian plying his trade among an ocean of happy hecklers—it was a tough house. And frequently they’d have alternative entertainment.

One day when I was serving aboard the Higbee, I and a couple of other guys from the radio shack headed over to the Flot for lunch. As usual it was loud with shouted conversation and music, and smoky as a burning lumberyard.

That lunchtime there was live music, which was very “throbby.” I ordered my buffalo burger from the Filipina behind the counter and proceeded to watch her prepare it. She looked at me and shouted over the noise: “No lookee me, tittie up ‘dere!” Pardon the dialect, but that’s what she said. I had a hard time hearing, so I said, “WHAT?” and she repeated, “NO LOOKEE ME, TITTIE UP ‘DERE!” She was pointing at something behind me. I turned and was delighted to behold, on the tiny stage, a very bored-looking topless dancer barely going through the motions to the rhythm of an equally bored and tired four-man combo.

It was noteworthy in that it was my first such experience.

I didn’t notice how greasy the burger was.

Watch-Standing and Midnight Modeling

The Navy is a round-the-clock operation; as a result, someone always has to be minding the store. The 24-hour day is divided into watches—two, four, or eight hours long—with names like dog, mid, eve, and day. Most often, watches are four hours, with a two-hour “dog watch” to allow for overlap.

Following boot camp and radioman school, I worked only eight-hour watches—day, mid, and eve. On Guam we worked what was called a string: day, mid, eve, followed by an off period. When we had enough men to fill out the sections, we got fifty-six hours off; when times were lean, only thirty-two—and believe me, that’s quite a difference. A string could be exhausting. Fifty-six hours off allowed both recovery and recreation, with time to spare. Thirty-two hours allowed recovery and basic necessities—maybe a short trip to the beach or a minor boonie-stomp—then back to the grind.

On both of my destroyers, radiomen also stood eight-hour watches. Your eight hours in the radio shack were followed by supper, a shower, incidentals, and six hours of sleep—or, depending on the rotation, eight on watch, eight doing ship’s work, and then back to the shack for another eight. No rest for the weary at sea.

The mid-watch—the night shift—is less busy, but you’re still sending, receiving, copying, and routing messages to the appropriate people, plus doing routine maintenance. In port, during the day, everyone is involved in ship’s work, with one radioman on radio watch. The evening and mid-watches in port were quiet, and that’s when I became a fan of science fiction.

It started with Robert Heinlein’s The Door into Summer. By the time my enlistment ended, I had read all of his published works. I also became fond of R. F. Delderfield, who wrote thick novels about an Edwardian family—Downton Abbey-style soap operas. How I got turned on to Delderfield is anybody’s guess, but I sure enjoyed him. Pogo and National Lampoon were also in the mix. On the rare occasions when someone came into the shack in the middle of the night, they’d find me leaning back in a chair, feet on the desk, nose in a book. It was a secure space with limited access, so interruptions were rare.

Then I got into model building—tank models. I’d sit at the desk building or painting, lost in my own little world, and soon had quite a collection. The problem was storage. On a WWII-vintage destroyer, incidental storage space was nearly nonexistent. The models wouldn’t fit in my locker, and even if they had, the delicate pieces would’ve broken off.

Just as some guys looked for secret places to stash their weed, I searched for similar spots to conceal my model tanks. It was vital to keep them hidden from the Master-at-Arms, the leading petty officer, and most of all the chief. Personal items in work spaces were unauthorized and therefore strictly forbidden.  I had to be resourceful to find storage space – but I did.

The pedestal of a large teletype machine had an access panel, and behind it was a void—three feet by three feet by eight inches - perfect for hiding model tanks. One by one my models disappeared into that compartment, safe, sound, and secret, where no one would ever find them. Those panels were almost never removed. Almost never.

One fine day, I walked into the shack to see several radiomen—chief included—bent over, looking under a teletype. For some improbable reason, the chief had opened the panel.

I stood behind them unnoticed. They were all oohing and aahing over the detailing on my models. The chief was holding one, turning it over in admiration. That was an unexpected development.

When he spotted me, he grinned and said, “You never thought I’d look in here, did ya?” He wasn’t angry – but rather, impressed by the workmanship. He told me to put them back and, at my first opportunity (and he meant first), mail them home. Which I promptly did.

The model-tank debacle had come and gone without prejudice. Fortunately, he hadn’t looked much farther—or he would’ve found my secret library stash.

Starship Troopers, anyone?

Who”

Seldom has a single word caused so much heartburn.

When a ship comes into port, it often utilizes the services of a tugboat and pilot. The Naval Station at my homeport of Long Beach had about half a dozen tugs—all referred to by the prefix “Tiger.”

As the ship nears port, the order is passed: “Now set the special sea and anchor detail.” At that announcement, sailors scurry to their stations for mooring the ship. Extra men show up in the pilot house to communicate with various parts of the ship, take readings, and someone must communicate with the tugboats. As a radioman, that was my job.

One day, coming into Long Beach, the sea and anchor detail was called and I mounted the ladder to the pilot house from the radio shack. As I arrived, sailors were hurriedly but methodically putting on sound-powered telephones, checking circuits, and taking soundings and bearings. The captain, the OOD, and the operations officer- Lieutenant M. - were all in their positions in the crowded pilot house.

I was at the door of the portside (left) bridge wing so that I could see the tug. The captain gave maneuvering orders, and I, through a radio-telephone handset, relayed them to the tugboat. All orders were acknowledged by a short “toot” from the tug’s whistle.

Everybody was poised and ready, we started the evolution.

I communicated to the tug: “Tiger Five-one, this is Higbee, Higbee, over.” The tug acknowledged with a “toot.” The captain would clearly say, “Come in to make fast.” I’d relay to the tug: “Come in to make fast.” The tug answered with a “toot.”

It continued: “Tiger Five-one, pass your line when ready”—“toot.”
“Make fast aft”—“toot.”
“Stand by to take the strain”—“toot.”

And so on.

We often had a licensed pilot come aboard to take us in, as he had the greatest familiarity with the vagaries of the harbor. One on such occasion the captain turned to me and said, “Find out who our pilot is.” That simple question was about to unleash a firestorm.

In radioman-speak, you don’t say who, what, when, where, or how; instead, you say interrogative. “Interrogative arrival of…” “Interrogative location of…” and so on. When relaying the captain’s inquiry regarding the pilot, I made an error. I said:

“Tiger Five-one, this is Higbee. Interrogative, who is our pilot?”

That who changed the mood in the pilot house in the blink of an eye.

The operations officer Lieutenant M. was an ill-tempered, sawed-off, and overworked martinet; he was standing next to me when I made that error. He exploded into a rage. The job of the operations officer is a stressful one, and some handle the stress with more equanimity than others…ours didn’t.

He erupted.

“WHO? WHO? You don’t fuckin’ say fuckin’ who, goddammit!”

He went on like that for maybe fifteen seconds, but it seemed like an eternity. He absolutely flipped out, calling me every name in the book. I was a little scared of the guy, as he hopped up and down, fists balled, red-faced, shouting a chain of expletives.

The bridge gang was startled at first, but as it went on, they began to shoot each other sidelong glances and grins; a couple were pantomiming the lieutenant’s gestures to the entertainment of others. The captain, always serene, simply assumed an “oh my” expression.

The lieutenant, in his rage, didn’t realize that I had the handset keyed the whole time. As he was screaming in my face, his rage was being transmitted across the whole radio net, startling and entertaining radiomen all over the harbor. Of course, the tug heard it too, and responded with a wry “toot.”

When that uncomfortable eternity was over, I slinked back down to the radio shack to be greeted by the duty radiomen. “Goddamn, Mannie, that was some pretty good show you had up there.” I calmed down after this trauma, and before long I was happily going down the brow on liberty with my shipmates.

But for the rest of my time on board—and who knows how long after—when the irate Lieutenant M. was angrily scurrying from one place to another, you’d frequently hear, uttered from a group of sailors he was passing…

“Toot-toot.”

Don’t Give Up the Ship

This episode happened aboard my second destroyer, the USS Higbee, and it’s as much about a “malcontent” as it is about saving the ship.

One rainy evening, I was the duty radioman. I was hungry, so headed down to the messdecks to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. When I entered the space the 16mm projector was clacking away with the evening movie—the now, camp-classic Blackula. I got distracted and decided to extend my break for a few minutes, hoping (in vain, like my shipmates) for some on-screen nudity.

Suddenly, over the loudspeaker came the urgent announcement:
“Now the duty section muster on the fantail—on the double!”

Suddenly, over the loudspeaker came the urgent announcement:
“Now the duty section muster on the fantail—on the double!”

That didn’t bode well.

Stepping out onto the weather deck, the rain had turned into a downpour. My dungarees quickly soaked through as I joined other duty men rushing aft. What greeted us was a shock—the brow had fallen into the water. It had fallen because the distance between the ship and the pier had widened. That gap widened because our mooring lines had parted. Now the Higbee was slowly inching toward open water, pushed by strong winds hammering her beam.

Shouted orders rang out above the howl of the wind as the Officer of the Day tried to decide what to do—fast. When the mooring lines parted, the telephone lines went with them. We couldn’t call for more hands or notify the captain. The OOD was in charge, yet if the ship were damaged or ran aground, It would be the captain who would  be held responsible.

We had to get lines over to the pier, but no one was there to catch them. The gap had grown too wide for anyone to jump across. We were slowly drifting further out into the channel.

In a rare moment of competence, I ran to the radio shack for a walkie-talkie and tuned to the tugboat net. Huffing and puffing back to the fantail, the OOD ordered me to summon a tug; without delay, I made the call.

When the tug arrived, the water was too rough, and the winds too fierce, for the powerful tug to safely nudge us back without risking damage to our hull. Tense minutes went by -  and then the tug captain relayed to me his idea.

He began running parallel passes close aboard, his powerful wake pushing against our hull. Each pass urged us a little closer to safety. Inch by inch, in the drenching rain, we were being eased back toward the pier.

Still, we faced the same problem: no one was on the pier to catch our lines. Then the cavalry arrived.

A taxi pulled up where the brow should have been,  and out tumbled two very intoxicated members of our deck force. Using a cupped-hands, to be heard over the storm, the OOD shouted instructions to them. One of the inebriates managed to catch a messenger line thrown from the ship. This lightweight cord was attached to the heavier hawser used to secure the ship. The two bosuns looped it around a bollard, and by now the rest of the duty men—thirty or forty sailors—were on deck, heaving in unison.

Soon we were close enough for a couple of men to leap to the pier with another line. Slowly, we won the battle. Soaked and shivering, we snugged up to the pier and made fast. The crisis was over.

We were all ordered down to sickbay, where a long and shivering line formed in the main passageway. One by one, we paused at the dutch-door of the tiny hospital as the Chief Corpsman handed each of us a tiny paper cup of Navy brandy. It was my first taste, and I remember the warmth as it went down. Then it was time for a brief, but hot, shower, dry dungarees, and back to my duties in the radio shack, grateful for the exciting diversion.

A couple of weeks later, two plainclothes agents from the Naval Investigative Service arrived. Every man who was aboard that on that night was interrogated. The lines hadn’t broken—they’d been cut. It was a deliberate act of sabotage.

When asked if I knew who could have done it, I had to admit there were so many malcontents aboard it was impossible to be sure. Weeks later, a consensus emerged among the crew about the likely culprit was, but there was no evidence, no witnesses, and no action taken.

It was the wettest, most hair-raising, and most memorable evening of my Navy career. 

Skinny as a rail, and always hungry.

Food, glorious food

Few things affect morale, for good or bad, more than food. More often than not, a good meal is the high point of a sailor’s day, and the quality and quantity of food varies from station to station and ship to ship.

When a boy enlists, he leaves behind Ma’s home-cooking, which can be for better or worse. Some guys come from backgrounds where food was scarce, some came from homes where the food was bland and boring, for others, every meal seemed a banquet. Navy chow is the great equalizer.

My mom was a pretty good cook, even with seven mouths to feed on my father’s very modest paycheck. Her standouts were her spaghetti and meatballs with the homemade sauce from the tomatoes she grew. Her roast beef and mashed potatoes were also delicious, as were her pies. There was also a lot of bland food, as well as a great deal of much humbler fare.

The Navy of the modern era has always taken great pride in the chow that it serves to the ranks. The cooks and bakers are trained at the fleet culinary schools, and are well-versed in the Navy cookbook…still the best strawberry shortcake I’ve ever had. The cooks are talented, with their only limitation being the quality of the raw materials.

San Diego’s chow hall was a consistent award-winner in the Navy for its menu. It was a huge base with thousands of sailors. There was aa enormous main chow hall which accommodated everyone from recruits to first-class petty officers (chiefs and officers had their own mess facilities). In San Diego there were two distinct sides to the chow hall. The recruits ate on the boot camp side, and everyone else on the other side – the two groups never coming in contact.

In boot camp the recruit receives three meals a day, and for many sailors these are the first square meals that they’ve ever had. These boys come from all economic backgrounds and their experiences with the quality and quantity of food varied greatly.

The food in boot camp was great, but sadly, we had no time to enjoy it…we barely had time to chew.

We’d march to the chow hall, get in line, at attention, grab a tray, and mechanically move down the line until we had what we wanted on our metal tray. We’d quickly join the rest of the company at the long mess tables, and in about ten minutes we’d have gobbled down everything and then double-timed back out to the company formation to march away. We barely had time to taste anything, and there was little table conversation, as there was simply no time for it.

The only sailors who had it worse than us were those unfortunates who were in the punishment company – “40-50.” These guys, for any number of serious infractions, were in the brig. Like us, everywhere they went, they went “at the double.” But unlike the rest of us, they had to run really fast, often carrying two buckets of sand. Everywhere they went they were accompanied by a “chaser,” a sailor in whites with a white helmet, duty belt, and billy-club. The chaser pushed, prodded, and shouted at the unfortunate prisoner everywhere he went.

The 40-50 prisoner was distinguished by his headgear – a sailor’s whitehat dyed red. Other sailors were to give these guys a wide berth and to always avert their eyes when a 40-50 sailor came through. A boot could get a severe chewing-out for looking directly at a prisoner. Nonetheless, it was like a car wreck or pornography, you just had to steal a glance or two, and it was a jarring thing to see.

For as fast as the rest of us ate, the 40-50 prisoner had it much worse. Generally, the chaser would run him to the chow hall and directly to the head of the line. The prisoner had to speed through the line and his chow would be unceremoniously glopped onto his tray with little regard for the mixing of dessert and entrée. While this was happening, his chaser grabbed something small, usually a carrot stick or a cookie.

Double-timing to a table, but not allowed to sit, the prisoner would hold his tray at chest-height and shovel all of his food into his mouth in a frenzy, while the chaser ate his morsel in three bites. When the chaser was through, the prisoner had to stop eating, regardless of how little he was able to consume. Usually the 40-50 sailor had less than a minute to eat. When finished, the chaser would harry the prisoner out of the chow hall and back to the brig or punishment detail.

This sorry spectacle reminded us of how fortunate we were, and also helped to keep us on the straight-and-narrow.

Following boot camp came radioman school, also in San Diego, and again, our meals were taken at the main chow hall. With boot camp behind us, now we had the luxury of a relaxed meal. We had forty-five minutes to get from class to the chow hall and then back again. We could luxuriate in our lunch, and lively conversation.

On the non-recruit side of the chow hall were served the traditional four meals of the Navy – breakfast, lunch, dinner, and “mid-rats.” “Mid-rats,” or midwatch rations, was served throughout the Navy and is for the sailors who are working the night shift.

The food in San Diego was great and it set a high bar for the rest of my time in the Navy.

On Guam the chow was equally good with a lot of variation. The meals were delicious, even with the limitations of powdered milk as well as other sub-par ingredients. Most of the cooks were Filipinos who came from a real food-culture. They took a great deal of pride in serving us four delicious meals a day. Indeed, for Thanksgiving and Christmas dinner we had turkey and mashed potatoes with all of the trimmings. At every table were small bottles of Lancers wine, enough for two sailors to split a bottle – enough for a pleasant buzz.

On the island, I learned the value of having a friend who was a cook. Every once in a while he’d show up at work or the barracks with a foil-wrapped steak sandwich and fries for me; a good fortune that I also experienced on my ships.

And those ships, unfortunately, were a whole different kettle of fish. Both of my ships – the DeHaven and the Higbee – were reserve training destroyers, and because of our second-rate status, we received supplies accordingly. Often we’d receive sour milk, rancid butter, moldy bread and rolls, rotted fruits and vegetables, and past-its-prime meat. The cooks did their best with what they had, but neither ship was a good feeder. The one thing that we could rely upon was the number ten cans of peanut butter and jelly that were available around the clock on the messdecks, so that we could always get by on PB&J sandwiches.

A long-standing rule in the Navy is that sailors may not cache food – no food in work spaces, no food in personal lockers – this was a punishable offense. Nonetheless, many sailors, me included, had a stash of emergency chow in their lockers; I had individual cans of pudding, Ritz crackers, and cheese in a can. It was just enough to tide me over during lean times on the ship.

The cooks tried hard, but it was an uphill struggle. One lunch, we were delighted to see that Higbee-burgers and fries were on the menu – burgers were always a morale booster. Our enthusiasm was tempered by the moldy buns. A shipmate sitting across from me even found a roach in the bun. Old hands insisted that the only thing holding that old ship together were the roaches holding hands.

Because of this, it seemed that the enlisted men were perpetually hungry. The officers and chiefs, however, had no such hardship as they purchased and stocked their own chow, of better quality than what the troops were eating.

It is no surprise that the morale of the troops on the ships suffered compared to that of the sailors on Guam or San Diego.

Sometimes, it better to eat with the lights off.

 

Hazing

There was a lot of hazing in my Navy.  None of it that I experienced—or participated in—was mean-spirited or cruel. It was always fun: hilarious for the perpetrators, and eventually funny for the victim. Once a sailor gets hazed suitably, he can join the ranks of the hazers—though no one is ever truly safe. Even experienced petty officers could find themselves set up.

A classic trick was sending a brand-new sailor to “go get fifty feet of water line.” Now, we know the waterline is simply where the sea meets the hull. But the new guy thinks it must be some sort of rope he has to fetch. “The bosun’s locker probably has a couple of spools of it. Di di mau, lad.” (Di di mau was a bastardized bit of Vietnamese you’d hear a lot in those days.)

The dutiful new guy scurries to the bosun’s locker, only to be laughingly told he needs to go to ship’s stores—but first he has to get a chit from his leading petty officer, who of course is in on the gag. The LPO solemnly writes the chit, to the smirks of all within earshot, and the hunt continues. Ship’s stores claim to be out of waterline and sends him to the tender, where he’s bounced from shop to shop. Hours later, he’s told to go back to his ship and ask his chief exactly what “water line” is. Everybody has a good laugh. It’s absolutely sophomoric, a waste of time, and a traditional pastime of bored, smart-ass sailors.

Even - late in my enlistment - I was a victim.  As a seasoned petty officer with only months left before discharge, I was told by my leading petty officer that he needed a carpenter’s level to install a shelf for classified publications. He suggested I start in the machine shop two decks below. They sent me to the bosun’s locker. The deck-ape there suggested that the only people with a level would be damage control: “Ask a shipfitter.” Eventually I was told to try the carpentry shop on the tender.

Getting to the tender meant crossing over two destroyers and climbing a long rope ladder up to the main deck of the USS Piedmont. Compared to a destroyer a tender is enormous—a labyrinth of shops and passageways. I finally found the carpenters’ shop, spacious and well-equipped, but deserted for lunch. After waiting half an hour, a carpenter’s mate wandered in, yawned, and asked what I wanted. When I explained, his face unfolded into a wide grin. “Ships are on the water. They rock. Levels would be useless. Get it? Sayonara, mate.” His laughter echoed down the passageway as I left.  I’d been had.

And then there was the “sea bat.” Supposedly, the mythical blue sea bat could fly for hundreds of miles and was drawn to the stack gas from a ship’s funnels (smokestacks). During mating season they would take up residence in the funnels. It was said that few sailors had ever viewed one, so catching a sea bat was seen as a milestone in any sailor’s career.

The setup was simple: a cardboard box with air holes and a group of sailors clustered around. “What’s in the box?” asks the new guy. “Shhh, pipe down lad, you’ll scare it.” He’s told it’s a sea bat. One sailor crouches down, peeking under the edge of the carton: “Yep, it’s a blue one.” Murmurs of approval all around. Finally, the rookie is allowed to kneel, rear end in the air, and carefully lift a corner of the box to catch a glimpse of the elusive creature. At that moment, he’s walloped in the backside with a soaking wet mop, to the uproar of the crowd. If he takes it in good humor, he’s awarded the mop and becomes part of the crew, ready to snare the next victim.

One sunny day at sea, I found myself ambling out to the torpedo deck with a perforated cardboard carton and a soaking-wet mop.

So began the fun.

Mike Sieve (top), Dave D’Amico (bottom). One couldn’t have asked for better shipmates.

Shipmates

I served out the last nine months of my four-year enlistment aboard the USS Higbee. Save for a trip to Victoria, British Columbia, and a return visit to Portland, it was an uneventful tour of duty. It did, however, provide me with two good friendships—RM1 Dave D’Amico and RM3 Mike Sieve.

Dave was the initially gruff, leading petty officer of the radio shack. He looked every inch the Italian: a magnificent Roman nose, dark complexion, and thick, wavy black hair. He also had a wracking cough that could nearly double him over. A native of Ohio, he had enlisted, as he put it, “in a burst of patriotic fever” at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis. He had seen the world and spent significant time in Vietnam. He may have been the best radioman in the squadron—a tough but fair boss, inclined to kindness.

He replaced good-natured RM1 Ed E. aboard the DeHaven, and the contrast was striking. Dave came on strong and stern, whipping us into what he demanded the radio crew be—competent, squared away, and cohesive. He thrived on country music, always keeping one of the R-390 receivers tuned to KSON (“You’re in KAY-SAN country!” twang, twang). He would sing along to Charley Pride, Porter Wagoner, Roy Acuff, or whoever else was on the air. He expected maximum effort and absolutely did not tolerate slacking off. Despite this, he was never mean-spirited —and he had a wonderful sense of humor.

A pipe-smoker from infancy, you could always tell when he was near by the aroma of his tobacco. He was never without that pipe. Before stepping into the shower, he’d tamp the bowl tight, turn it upside down, and continue smoking under the spray of water.

He was a superior leader, and I was relieved he would be cross-decking from DeHaven to the Higbee with me. He provided continuity and familiarity in the new radio shack among strangers.

Dave knew full well my lack of talent as a radioman, yet he guided me and cut me some slack. He knew I was very good at what I did at the Fleet Center on Guam, where radiomen had narrower, specialized duties. But a ship was more than teletypes and tape. A fleet radioman had to master every aspect of naval communications—from publications and antennas to transmitters, receivers, teletypes, crypto gear, and everything in between. Back at the Fleet Center on Guam, I was really good at my job as a “tape ape” but not so much as an all-purpose fleet radioman. Dave saw my struggle, and became my mentor, and did his best to help me improve my skills.

Had I met Dave earlier in my career, I’m certain I would have stayed in for twenty years and be collecting a Navy pension right now. He brought out the best in the service and always urged me to look past the “chicken-shit” that comprised so much of Navy life. He saw the bigger picture; he revered the nobility of service. Even now, more than fifty years later, I wish we could have met earlier.

Occasionally, Dave invited me to his apartment for an evening of homemade spaghetti, television, and country music. He was clearly trying to make me not just a better radioman, but a better man. He knew I was immature—really a kid in uniform. He may even have suspected that I was mentally discombobulated, and he did his best to keep me on track and looking for the positive side of each day.

After the Navy, I lost all track of Dave, and one of my few regrets is that I didn’t stay in touch. I’m sure he went on to become a great chief petty officer.

The other bright light on the Higbee was Mike Sieve. Mike was part of the ship’s original crew and had been aboard a couple of years. Unlike some in the radio shack, he was very welcoming—a hospitality that served him well when he later ran his family restaurant for decades.

Mike and I shared an affection for Disneyland and movies, and we both had a zany sense of humor. During one of my last evenings aboard, while in port, we went on a two-man rampage of hijinks that included a homemade paper admiral’s hat, pretending to command the ship, and launching a six-foot paper airplane off the fantail. We laughed ourselves silly that night; it cemented our friendship forever.

In addition to being funny, Mike could be surprisingly urbane. In a world of sailors lounging in their skivvies, he wore a thick, voluminous terrycloth bathrobe. Despite the incongruity, nobody batted an eye. Mike was well-liked and respected by all his shipmates. He had been aboard long enough to know nearly everyone and was widely regarded as the best radioman in the shack as well as a very classy guy. Where D’Amico tolerated my lack of skill, Mike often covered my back. When I struggled to tune a transmitter before sailing, he would swoop in, twist a few knobs, smack the side of the transmitter with satisfaction, and say, “You’re good to go!” He was always helping me out.

About twenty-five years after leaving the Navy, I was working at the public museum in Grand Rapids, Michigan. I was sent to Minneapolis for a conference and looked up Mike and another DeHaven radioman, both living in the Twin Cities. We arranged to meet one evening at my hotel lounge.

There’s a great old Dan Dailey movie titled It’s Always Fair Weather. The plot revolves around three Army buddies who reunite ten years after the war. It’s a disaster—they have nothing in common, find each other annoying, and can’t wait to leave. That’s what our reunion was like: uneasy conversation and frequent glances at wristwatches.

Finally, the DeHaven radioman—who’d gone on to work for the phone company after he had gotten out of the Navy—had had enough, excused himself with perfunctory handshakes, and beat it toward the door, leaving Mike and me to salvage what had been a dismal evening.

With his departure, the atmosphere changed immediately. Mike and I loosened up, and the conversation took a sharp upward turn. Before long we were laughing and sharing stories of the old days. What was particularly gratifying was that our Higbee days weren’t the sole focus. Each of us was keenly interested in the other’s post-Navy life—marriages, kids, careers, and interests. It was a warm and very welcome couple of hours. We said our goodbyes in the parking lot and promised to keep in touch—something that didn’t happen until the advent of Facebook, where we later chatted often.

Sadly, Mike died in the spring of 2025. His loss grieves me, and it saddens me that he didn’t live to see the publication of this book. I’ll always remember him as a bright spot in both my Navy career and my life.

Fair winds and following seas, Mike and Dave.

 

My Navy Playlist

To my daughter March.

 Music has always been just as important to me as it has been to you. This is a portion of the soundtrack from my Navy days—decades before you and I would listen to Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald. You’ll find some of these songs corny, some weird, but some might surprise you. They’re all available on YouTube, and perhaps this will pique your curiosity.

Music was the thing that kept us sailors connected to the real world. No matter where we were, we had the radio. Whether local stateside stations or Armed Forces Radio, we were pretty much always in touch with the outside world—and up to date musically.

My buddies had more current and sophisticated tastes than I did. I grew up on WKNX radio from small-town Saginaw, but many of my Navy buddies had gone to actual rock concerts—regularly. Many of my mates were musicians and often got together to jam. Beeler played bass. When we were flying out of Oakland to Guam, he’d forgotten it, and his dad drove all the way from Sacramento to drop it off at the airport. Aren’t fathers great, honey?

As I mentioned, I had pretty unsophisticated tastes, but the eleven weeks of radio silence in boot camp changed that. When we were finally allowed to listen to the radio, I realized that I was now in California, and the music scene was very different from Michigan—as you might imagine. I really liked what I was hearing and had some good guides among my buddies.

For my first two years in the Navy, music was everywhere—and most of it was good. Lots of psychedelic stuff was rolling through the airwaves. Other songs, like Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, remind me of specific moments on Guam, just as Paul McCartney’s Band on the Run reminds me of a day on the island when we just couldn’t seem to get a hitch and had to do a lot of walking to get back to the base. Hitchhiking was nearly a daily occurrence during our off-time. It was really the only transportation available for nearly all of us.

The locals who would give us rides, always had their radios blaring, often with Guamanian pop—Johnny Sablan was a homegrown semi-pop star on the island. Once in a while, one of the guys would buy a “Guam-bomb”—a fifth- or sixth-hand car that had been passed down from one sailor to another over the course of a decade until there was little left of it to run. Having an operating radio was always more of a priority than a reliable radiator. We had a communal VW Beetle in beat-up condition, but the radio worked. One of the guys overhauled the engine; unfortunately, he ended up with a lot of parts left over. I was in it when it caught fire. It may still be covered by jungle alongside the road it died on.

Radio and component stereo systems were a hallmark of life in the barracks, and the music scene up until 1972 was very dynamic. By the time I got back stateside, though, it seemed that music had gotten pretty homogeneous and bland.

Here are the tunes that still resonate with me—some bland, and others fairly hard-edged.

Boot Camp

During the eleven weeks of boot camp, we were allowed to listen to the radio only once—for thirty minutes. These are two of the tunes I heard. I ended up with a crush on both artists.

Linda Ronstadt – Long, Long Time

Karen Carpenter – We’ve Only Just Begun

“A” School

This was a revelatory time, as I was rooming with guys who had more sophisticated R&R tastes.

Eric Burdon – Spill the Wine

Chicago – 25 or 6 to 4

Edwin Starr – War

The Doors – Riders on the Storm

The Kinks – Lola

Country Joe and the Fish – Vietnam Song

Beeler had a little portable 8-track, and in our San Diego barracks room, he introduced me to The Doors. Guys would get high and listen to Jim Morrison, Santana, and others—sometimes for the entire smoky weekend… or so it seemed at the time.

Guam

The first song I recall on Guam was Proud Mary. I had only been on the island a couple of days and was not yet assigned to a division. While they were getting us new arrivals organized, they stuck us on assorted work details. My first was at the Chief’s Club.

It was early morning, so the place was empty—just a cook preparing for lunch and the Chief Master-at-Arms, who I was working for. He showed me where the utility closet was and assigned me to swab the deck. It was mindless work in pleasant surroundings, and it only took about an hour, after which he had me do some light miscellaneous work. Just before lunch, he asked if I’d like a burger. This was the only time I was ever served lunch by a chief—cheeseburger, crinkle fries, and a Coke. It remains the best burger I’ve ever had, likely owing to the setting and the circumstances. Ike and Tina were blasting forth, and I knew I was going to like it on the island.

Ike & Tina Turner – Proud Mary

Jethro Tull – Aqualung (which I hated)

Aqualung swept the barracks like food poisoning, blasting away at full volume from a dozen different stereo systems, all at the same time… repeatedly… for weeks. Jesus, I got tired of that song. My first wife insisted we go see Ian Anderson in concert—that should have been my clue the marriage wasn’t going to work.

Lou Reed – Walk on the Wild Side

Anne Murray – Snowbird

Carlos Santana – Black Magic Woman

Rod Stewart – Maggie May

DeHaven

David Bowie – Space Oddity

Another essay mentions this song. Others were Carly Simon’s You’re So Vain and Roberta Flack’s The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face. When we were in port, it was the duty radioman’s responsibility to pipe a radio station throughout the ship for the entertainment of the crew. I remember playing both of these on my watch.

When RM1 Dave D’Amico was on watch, it was met with groans as country and western twanged its way throughout the ship.

For a few months, two other radiomen and I got an apartment in Long Beach where we stayed while in port. Sadly, the only tunes I can recall from that period are a couple from Tony Orlando and Dawn—Tie a Yellow Ribbon, and some such claptrap, as well as Gladys Knight and the Pips – Midnight Train to Georgia.

Higbee

While on the Higbee, I became a nascent feminist. The wife of the leading petty officer in the radio shack was a committed feminist, and she and I had some long conversations. That was accompanied by Helen Reddy’s I Am Woman—corny, but an anthem nonetheless.

For two weeks, I was detached back to San Diego to build an antenna for the Higbee.  Noteworthy tunes from that period were Bill Withers’ Lean On Me, and the “Ooga chaka” version of Hooked on a Feeling by Blue Swede.

Finally came John Denver with Country Roads (Take Me Home). This was playing on the car radio when I was on my way to the airport after discharge. It was corny but timely, and it proved very poignant for the wife of the sailor who was giving me a lift—she misted up as everyone in the car connected the song to me, the man of the moment, as I was the one being taken home.

So there you have it. These are only a few, but they were standouts.

Rock on (as the old hippies say).

Your ever-lovin’ father,

Mannie

The “new uniform”

In the early 1970s, in an effort to make the Navy a more attractive career option for young people, Chief of Naval Operations, Elmo Zumwalt, made sweeping changes in the Navy. Most of those changes – beards, beer in the barracks, civilian clothes allowed to be stored in your locker for liberty, and “habitability” improvements – were met with wide approval among younger sailors. However, one of his innovations fell embarrassingly flat…”the new uniform.”

Up to that point, a sailor looked like a sailor – navy blue dress blues with bell-bottom trousers, thirteen-button fly, collar flap, 100% silk neckerchief, piping and stars on collar and cuffs, topped off with the iconic whitehat…the Crackerjack uniform that had been worn by American sailors for a century. The uniform was something that sailors were immensely proud of; indeed, many young men enlisted especially to wear that uniform. Then, in the early 1970s, everything changed.

We saw the handwriting on the wall in 1971 when the new working uniform was introduced. A dark blue “maternity” shirt and navy blue trousers slowly began to replace the classic light blue chambray shirt and blue denim bell-bottoms. We were all issued one free pair. On the DeHaven, I only ever saw two guys wearing this getup; I guess that the rest of us were traditionalists. One of the ideas behind this new outfit was that the shirt didn’t have to be tucked in…big deal.

The new dress uniform was called the “bus driver suit” – dark blue double-breasted six-button suit jacket with matching trousers, white shirt and tie, and a chief petty officer-style hat with visor and insignia. The result was that a sailor had lost his identity as an American sailor. One of the many downsides was that the shirt, jacket, and trousers had to be hung on a hanger, and most sailors had footlockers…no place to hang them. One of the advantages of the traditional dress blue uniform was that it was meant to be stored folded, and it never wrinkled.

The new uniform was introduced to the fleet about 1972, and became mandatory by 1975…I checked the calendar; I was just going to make the deadline. I was getting out in July of ’74. When the chief asked me why I wasn’t reenlisting, I said, “I want to go to college, and I won’t wear the new uniform.” He asked, “What’s wrong with the new uniform?” I responded:

“It doesn’t attract girls.”

A boy’s got to have priorities.

 

Mike and Mannie clowning around in the Higbee’s pilot house on a slow in-port evening.

One last thing: When the Fleet Got Hairy

Two phenomena occurred in the Navy in July of 1970—the arrival of me, and of Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, the new Chief of Naval Operations. And my, what a ruckus he caused—and how we loved him.

Vietnam-veteran Zumwalt was a very young officer; he zoomed (pun intended) up the promotion ladder based upon alacrity, enthusiasm, and merit. And he really shook things up.

Zumwalt realized that times were changing, and that the Navy had to change with those times. Life for young people on the outside was mod and groovy; young sailors, however, were expected and required to look like their fathers and grandfathers. Before Zumwalt, you could spot a sailor a mile away simply from his mandatory grooming standards. While our young civilian contemporaries were sporting longer locks and facial hair, we were still clean-shaven squares.

Zumwalt didn’t simply want to change with the fashion—he wanted to increase enlistments and retention of personnel. So, he made some sweeping changes with the goal of getting and keeping young sailors.

The new CNO started issuing what were termed “Z-grams”—121 in all. The focus of the Z-grams was to modernize the fleet, enhance readiness, improve habitability of ships and stations, and improve quality of life, especially for enlisted men. The changes were sweeping, and Z-gram 70 may have been the most notorious—the one that caused the most heartburn for the senior and chief petty officers, the arbiters of discipline.

The changes in Z-gram 70 were too numerous to mention, but they included things like improved living conditions, beer machines in the barracks, better food, and relaxed grooming standards. Certainly, we were not allowed to look like hippies, but we could have sideburns, facial hair, and longer hair—as long as it didn’t touch the ears or collar—something that I was usually in violation of.

I remember standing at morning muster early on at Radioman “A” School—about four months into my enlistment—when a chief appeared before us to make an announcement. “I don’t know what info you birds are operating under, but that scuttlebutt on the Today Show this morning was pure bullshit.” A muttered voice behind me spoke for all of us: “What the fuck is he talking about?” We found out a couple of hours later from someone who had watched the announcement on the Today Show and got the word on Z-gram 70.

The thing about the Z-grams was that they didn’t go through regular channels. They didn’t start with an admiral and then trickle down through all of the division and department heads—each putting their own spin on the message so that it was nearly unrecognizable when it got to the enlisted men. No—Zumwalt was delivering them directly to all personnel of the Navy at the same time. Both admiral and seaman apprentice knew what the skinny was at the same time.

The “Lifers” (senior enlisted) were in a scrambling frenzy trying to hold the line of the “Old Navy” by desperately, vociferously, and adamantly putting their own interpretation on Z-70. It was of no use. The tsunami of change swept across the Navy, and that change echoed for another decade.

For better or worse, the changes came. The worse may have been the despised “new uniform” and the beer machines in the barracks lounges. It was ironic, as this was the time when substance abuse—including alcohol—was becoming a concern in the Navy. In the midst of dealing with high rates of alcoholism, beer was made readily and cheaply available. Sailors didn’t have to go to the club or into town anymore to get hammered; they could simply drink themselves into oblivion while watching TV in the rec room.

At that time there was a very sharp divide, as well as some hostility, between the career sailors and the four-year enlisted men. And while guys my age were enthusiastic about the changes, those above us frequently weren’t. Generally, it was we four-year guys who started sprouting hair, myself included. I grew a mustache—which is still with me—my wildly curly hair was given free rein, and for a while I even grew an absolutely grotesque goatee.

At some commands, these relaxed standards often crept into uniform appearance as well. Many of us started showing up in pretty threadbare dungarees, often with pockets missing and only a contrasting patch of darker denim where the pocket used to be. Frankly, a lot of us were starting to look a little more like pirates rather than United States sailors.

This was due in part to the confusion among the powers that be regarding the scope of the changes. Some tried to hold the line, while others pretty much gave up, took a laissez-faire attitude, and counted the days until the end of their career.

Sadly for the Navy, and for us enlisted men, Zumwalt—while making our lives better—also further drove the wedge between junior and senior enlisted men. At the time, I loved it, but with the measured eye that time and age bring, I see that the benefits may not have been worth the eventual cost.

But it was fun while it lasted.

 

Epilogue

And just like that, four years, two months, and twenty-seven days later, I was a civilian again. Most veterans will say that they left home a boy and came home a man. I must honestly say that I left home a boy and came home only a slightly older boy. I remained a late-blooming late-bloomer who still had a lot to learn about life.

The Navy did give me a good foundation, as did the guys that I hung out with – Beeler, Sieve, D’Amico, Medford, Fountain, Empey, Crites, and others. These sailors were like older brothers to me, and they helped me navigate the rocks and shoals of Navy life. I’ll always be grateful for their friendship.

These essays represent much of the story; what I left out were the boring, the mundane, the aggravating, or the overly embarrassing bits. Although by the fourth year of my enlistment I was ready to get out, I was — and remain — very proud of my service, and of the path of volunteerism and public service that it set me on, a path reflected throughout my lifetime career as an educator.

 

Author’s note

After a short illness, Dan Beeler, the subject of so many of these essays, passed away in mid-November of 2025, mere days before the completion of this manuscript. Dan and I stayed in regular contact since our Navy days, and I am fortunate that, in what turned out to be his last weeks, I was able to get his blessing on these essays, indeed they brought him laughter when he needed it, and he assured me that my memory was accurate regarding our many adventures together.

There are the brothers we are born with, and the brothers that we choose.  Dan is the big brother that I chose, and he will always remain a part of me.

 

About the author

Mannie Gentile is a career-educator, artist, and a retired park ranger with the National Park Service.  A Michigander, transplanted to Maryland, Mannie spends his time collecting combat helmets (combathelmets.blogspot.com), playing with toy soldiers (toysoldiersforever.blogspot.com), and attending Hagerstown Community College, in Hagerstown Maryland.  He holds an A.A. in visual arts, a B.A. in history and an M.A. in military history.  He lives with his very talented author/writer wife Susan Fair, in the Cumberland Valley of Maryland, in the shadow of South Mountain, deep in Civil War country. And he is the father of March Kane, of whom he is very proud.

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This book is also available on Amazon

Fair winds, and following seas, shipmates.

Mannie