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…