Reading this week:

• The Last Harmattan of Alusine Dunbar by Syl Cheney-Coker

So anyways my one good sea story. Though then again it probably isn’t that good. I know this because when I was but a young Midshipman we were on the submarine week of PROTRAMID. PROTRAMID stands for “Professional Training Midshipmen” (I like how the Navy abbreviates things by just eliminating chunks of words; it gives you a chance to actually figure out what the acronyms are supposed to stand for. So like the Commander of Submarines in the Pacific is COMSUBPAC, very straightforward, good system) and maybe I have mentioned it on this blog before but what you do on PROTRAMID is spend a week seeing what each of the major service assignments are like, namely aviation, Marines, surface ships, and most importantly submarines. Sub week was actually almost terminally boring. We were on the east coast, and so for the submarine portion we were at King’s Bay Naval Base. King’s Bay Naval Base was built where it was because land was cheap and land was cheap because it wasn’t close to anything except swamp (also handy to keep nuclear weapons away from people). So when we had downtime there was very nearly nothing at all to do, because you couldn’t go anywhere, I was too young to (legally) drink, and when you were tired to playing pool in the rec lounge you could I dunno read a book or some other lame-ass thing. This was a major hindrance because we had a lot of downtime during sub week. The submarine force has to try real hard to sell itself, so it tries to be the opposite of like Marine Week, where they have you do a bunch of stuff around the clock and give you very little free time and yell at you a lot. So submarine week they act real nice to you and give you lots of downtime, though that is also a function of there is just not a lot they can do for you for sub week. Submarines do like two things, which is tool around underwater and then occasionally shoot a torpedo. That’s about it, and once they put you in a simulator for each that’s two hours out of the week and then what else are you supposed to do? I wound up with the absolute worst hangover of my life during that week, but that’s a different story.

The point I was trying to make here is that the one thing they DO do on sub week is take you out to ride a submarine for 24 hours. That is a lot of fun actually. They bussed us down from King’s Bay to Cape Canaveral to board the boat there. This was my second time on a submarine, having ridden around a submarine the previous year, so I was like an expert. The biggest thing that annoyed me about the bus ride was hearing all my fellow midshipmen that didn’t want to ride the submarine. They weren’t claustrophobic or had any other good excuse, they just never imagined themselves becoming submariners and would have rather taken the one duty van we had access to back out into town so they could get drunk another night. As I just referenced I am as down as the next guy to get drunk (or I was then) but come on man, if you’re going to become a Marine or whatever there is no other time in your life that you are going to ride a submarine so you might as well take this chance and smoke 500 feet underwater, which I think is kind of neat even though it is bad for your health. There was a brief time when it seemed our sub ride might get cancelled and these guys were cheering, but we got to ride on the submarine so they had to suffer through 24 hours of air conditioning, pizza, and doing what few other people ever get to do! But not before we sat and waited in like a disused café or something, whatever that building was. This event was one of the more memorable of my life because it was there I met a Boatswain (pronounced “bosun;” my senior year at the Academy I was talking to this woman who was service assigned surface ships, which she had not expected. She was earnestly trying to catch up on all the boat lore that she had somehow missed in her four years at the Academy, and I was trying to help out by explaining words like “gunwale” where pronounced “gunnel” and the “forecastle” was pronounced “fo’c’sle” and the boatswain example above, after all of which she replied “are you sure your parents aren’t just from the south?”). You see at this point I was familiar with Boatswain’s Mates, but I hadn’t ever realized you could just have a Boatswain. It makes sense in retrospect (Boatswains, this one told me, are the Warrant Officer versions of Boatswain’s Mates, which I have never bothered to verify). When he told me he was a Boatswain I was like “oh man, I know all your friends!” (mates, get it?) Anyways, it was this man that told me “all good sea stories start with ‘so there I was in a bar…’”

To be continued…

Reading this week:

• The African American Odyssey of John Kizell by Kevin G. Lowther
• A Dirty War in West Africa by Lansana Gberie

Thinking back on my time in the Navy, I don’t have a lot of good sea stories. I think this is a nuke thing. I was of course nuclear-trained so I could serve as a submarine officer. I spent a lot of time back in the engineroom doing nuclear things, and the nuclear sea stories don’t really translate well for the general public. I remember telling a real hum-dinger of a story that had the whole crowd laughing (I promise) where the punchline was “and that’s why we have a non-vital bus!”

I think I can verify this nuclear lack of good sea stories thing via my parents. My dad was a nuke, and he barely has any sea stories. He’s told a couple that I later realized where just rehashes of things in Catch-22, which, come on man. His one other good one involved him frightening a young(er) Junior Officer on the bridge of his ship when my dad made the JO think that the captain had relieved him (my dad) for cause, leaving this poor JO alone on the bridge with an apparently angry and mercurial captain. I resonate with this story, because I spent a lot of time when I was OOD making people angry on purpose. My mom on the other hand, whoo boy. She was not a nuke, but was on conventional surface ships (she is so very much not a nuke… one time I asked her about steam generators, which her ship had, and she answered the question but said if I wanted to be sure of the details I should ask dad. Then, in the one time I have ever seen anger behind her eyes, she added “damn nukes never forget”). She’s got endless sea stories. A whole bunch of Hong Kong no-shitters, as the old-timers say. She was also in the Navy back in the day when you could, for example, have a crewmember nicknamed “Purple” as in “Purple Haze” because he was notorious for smoking weed. One of her stories is that while they were in port along with a whole bunch of sharks, Purple went overboard because he was this time very drunk instead of very high. So the ship’s doctor dove in after him and rescued him, which earned the ship’s doctor a severe tongue-lashing from the captain. The captain was much more interested in making sure that the ship’s doctor was safe from sharks than making sure that Purple was safe from sharks. Another time a mysterious light was lit on the ship’s mast. No one knew what it was. They looked it up and discovered it had to do with landing helicopters, which was weird because helicopters didn’t land on her ship. They then did more digging to figure out where the switch for the light was, and traced it to a compartment that had been sealed off (the compartment was for flight control but once they didn’t control any flights any more it was apparently just sealed off). Some of the crew figured out a way to get into that compartment and then proceeded to use it to smoke weed. There was apparently a lot of weed smoking back in the day in the Navy. Or there was another time that one of the other junior officers had made so many small corrections to the ship’s course that he was in fact sailing the ship in the exact wrong direction of which he was supposed to be going, which my mom discovered when she noticed that Australia was off the starboard side of the ship instead of the port side. Or another time when mom was standing OOD and one of her chiefs came through in full overboard gear and when she asked why he just asked if she was driving that night and when she replied in the affirmative he just nodded his head and walked off. And so on! And please remember these are just the stories she is willing to tell me.

To be continued…