The Golden Rivet
For all Submariners
Program accumulated and designed by Ron Martini ex-EM1(SS) 
***The following were taken off various BBS's. Names have been removed to protect the innocent/or guilty. Any resemblance to the boat you were on is strictly coincidental. ***
Suggestions for the ex-submariner that misses "the good old days on the boat"
1. Sleep on the shelf in your closet. Replace the closet door with a curtain. Two to three hours after you fall asleep, have your wife whip open the curtain, shine a flashlight in your eyes, and mumble "Sorry, wrong rack".
2. Repeat back everything anyone says to you.
3. Spend as much time as possible indoors and avoid sun light. Only view the world through the peep hole on your front door.
4. Renovate your bathroom. Build a wall across the middle of your bathtub and move the shower head down to chest level. Shower once a week. Use no more than 2 gallons of water per shower.
5. Buy a trash compactor and use it once a week. Store garbage in the other side of your bathtub.
6. Sit in your car for six hours a day with your hands on the wheel and the motor running, but don't go anywhere. Install 200 extra oil temperature gauges. Take logs on all gages and indicators every 30 minutes.
7. Put lube oil in your humidifier instead of water and set it to "High".
8. Watch only unknown movies with no major stars on TV and then, only at night. Have your family vote on which movie to watch, then watch a different one.
9. Don't do your wash at home. Pick the most crowded laundromat you can find.
10. (Optional for Nukes and A-Div) Leave lawnmower running in your living room six hours a day for proper noise level.
11. Have the paperboy give you a haircut.
12. Take hourly readings on your electric and water meters.
14. Invite guests, but don't have enough food for them.
15. Buy a broken exercise bicycle and strap it down to the floor in your kitchen.
16. Eat only food that you get out of a can or have to add water to.
17. Wake up every night at midnight and have a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on stale bread. (Optional- cold beans and weenies, canned ravioli or soup).
18. Make up your family menu a week ahead of time without looking in your food cabinets or refrigerator.
19. Set your alarm clock to go off at random times during the night. When it goes off, jump out of bed and get dressed as fast as you can, then run to your kitchen with the garden hose while wearing a scuba mask.
20. Once a month take every major appliance completely apart and then put them back together. Ensure you have parts left over.
21. Use 18 scoops of coffee per pot and allow it to sit for 5 or 6 hours before drinking. Never wash any coffee cups.
22. Invite at least 85 people you don't really like to come and visit for a couple of months. Limit showers to weekly for all guests. (Unless they are interested in electronics....force those guests to shower three times daily and wear * bottle of stale cologne following each bathing).
23. Store your eggs in your garage for two months and then scramble a dozen each morning.
24. Have a fluorescent lamp installed on the bottom of your coffee table and lie under it to read books.
25. Check your refrigerator compressor for "sound shorts".
26. Put a complicated lock on your basement door and wear the key on a lanyard around your neck.
27. Lockwire the lugnuts on your car.
28. When making cakes, prop up one side of the pan while it is baking. Then spread icing really thick on one side to level off the top.
29. Every so often, yell "Emergency Deep", run into the kitchen, and sweep all pots/pans/dishes off of the counter onto the floor. Then, yell at your wife for not having the place "stowed for sea".
30. Put on the headphones from your stereo (don't plug them in). Go and stand in front of your stove. Say (to nobody in particular) "Stove manned and ready". Stand there for 3 or 4 hours. Say (once again to nobody in particular) "Stove secured". Roll up the headphone cord and put them away.
31.Tag out the steering wheel, gas pedal, brake pedal, transmission and cigarette lighter when you change the oil in your car.
32. Use kool aid on all your breakfast cereals for 2 months.
33. Fill laundry tubs with oil. Lay in them, on your back, and change the washers on the water spigots.
34. While doing laundry, replace liquid fabric softener with diesel Fuel... savor the aroma of AMR2LL.
35. Install more commodes in your bathroom. Serve many greasy meals and ensure the entire family goes to the
bathroom together.
36. Buy bunk beds (3 high type) and convert the narrowest hallway in your home into a bedroom.
37. Just for fun, rig 700 PSI air to the bottom of all toilets. Hold a lottery to determine who gets to control the air valves.
38. Knock a glass of water out of someone's hand and yell 'SPILL'. Shout at them the entire time they clean it up, tell them how worthless they are, then do it again.
39. Give your wife more free time. All the ironing goes under the mattress.
40. Ask for 'permission to enter' whenever you go into the kitchen.
41. At night, replace all lightbulbs in the livingroom with red bulbs.
42. Buy all food in cases and line the floor with them.
43. Replace all doorways with windows so that you have to step up AND duck to go through them.
44. Rope off a small area of your living room, turn off the AC, put on a suit made of garbage bags and mill around inside the roped off area for an hour with a zip lock bag tied securely around your head.
45. Whenever someone enters a room you're cleaning, shout "up and over" at them so they'll go through the attic to get to the kitchen.
46. Tell your kids to "go find me a can of relative bearing grease".
47. Whenever the mailman steps onto your porch, shout "Postmaster General - Arriving" so that everyone in the house can hear you.
48. Paint the windshield of your car black. Make your wife stand up through the sunroof and give you directions on where to drive. Drive through as many big puddles as possible.
49. Have your kids stand at attention everytime you enter the room and make them state quite loudly, "Attention on Deck"or "Make a Hole".
50. Start every story with "This is no-shit".
51. Order a dozen foxtails and tell your family that there will be no liberty until every thing in the house passes the white glove test.
52. Tell your kids there will be a pressure test in the garage next Monday night. Kid who can take the most turns in the vise will get to stay out later Friday night.
53. Hookup your air compressor to the sewer line to the house and blow a shit geyser ten feet in the air. Come in side and tell you wife "calmly" I forgot to shut the valve.
54. Make her and the kids clean up the mess.
55. Install a Furnace and Air Conditioner that blows directly on you while you are sleeping. Have the controls so they will cycle to hot and cold in a matter of seconds. Also install a multi-channel entertainment system over your rack that don't work.
56. Install the system above where it will cause a 6 inch vacuum in the bedroom.
57. Set a engine in the living room to run through all this. So when you secure from field day, run like a bat out of hell to shut down the engine.
58. Make you kids some Kool-Aid and add 5 times more sugar than normal and then set it out to get hot.
59. Raise hell with the old lady when she serves steak next time. When she says that the way it can from the store. You ask BURNT?
60. Hire about 20 drunks to come into you house about 1 in the morning and start cooking.
61. Just have someone eat your ass over nothing, daily.
62. Go to the market and buy 100 quarts of milk. Pour them into a large white trash bag and secure. Put the bag into the refrigerator and rename it "The Cow."
63. Remodel your house so as to rebuild your kitchen in the hall closet. Have your family meet there several times a day to walk around in the closet and bump into each other. Have someone shout "millaround in the after battery."
64. Post the Uniform Code of Military Justice on the wall across from your toilet. Highlight the parts that begin: "penetration however slight..."
65.Take the jack handle out of your trunk and install it in the ceiling over your stove. Several times a day, give it 112 turns and yell: "main induction secured."
66. Every Friday morning at 7:30, wake the whole house up and inform them someone is trying to steal
the car, then make them clean the whole house for 3 hours, then serve them lunch with consists
of 2 hamburgers that have enough grease in them to change the oil in the car for a year, buns that weigh more than a TDU weight, and french fries. Then run various drills in afternoon so that you have to burp into your scuba mask reliving the lunch.
67. Practice walking quickly with your back to the wall.
68. Rope off a small area of your living room, turn off the AC, put on a yellow suit and mill around inside the roped off area for an hour with a zip lock bag tied securely around your head. Insure the family critiques your actions afterwards.
69. Work at golf gourse maint so you can water golf cart battteries.
70. When your wife throws open the curtains in your closet make sure that the sewre vent is piped into your rack.
71. Cut a hole in the floor of your house and install some batteries. Go down there once a day and take specific gravities.
72. Cut a twin mattress in half and enclose three sides of your bed. Add a roof that prevents you from sitting up (about 10 inches is a good distance) then place it on a platform that is four feet off the floor. Place a small dead animal under the bed to simulate the smell of your bunkmate's sock.
73. Set your alarm to go off at 10 minute intervals for the first hour of sleep to simulate the various times the watchstanders and night crew bump around and wake you up. Place your bed on a rocking table to ensure you are tossed around the remaining three hours. Make use of a custom clock that randomly simulates fire alarms, police sirens, helicopter crash alarms, and a new wave rock band.
74. Have week old fruit and vegetables delivered to your garage and wait two weeks before eating them.
75. Prepare all meals blindfolded using all the spices you can grope for, or none at all. Remove the blindfold and eat everthing in three minutes.
76. Peridocally, shut off all power at the main circuit breaker and run around shouting "fire, fire, fire" and then restore power.
77. Remove all plants, pictures and decorations. Paint everything gray, white, or the shade of hospital smocks.
78. Buy 50 cases of toilet paper and lock up all but two rolls. Ensure one of these two rolls is wet at all times.
79. Smash your forehead or shins with a hammer every two days to simulate collision injuries sustained aboard Navy ships.
80. When making sandwiches, leave the bread out for six days, or until it is hard and stale.
81. Every 10 weeks, simulate a visit to another port. Go directly to the city slums wearing your best clothes. Find the worst looking place, a nd ask for the most expensive beer that they carry. Drink as many as you can in four hours. Take a cab home taking the longest possible route. Tip the cabby after he charges you double because you dress funny and don't speak right.
82. Use fresh milk for only two days after each port visit.
83. Keep the bedroom thermostat at 2 deg C and use only a thin blanket for warmth.
84. Ensure that the water heater is connected to a device that provides water at a flow rate that varies from a fast drip to a weak trickly, with the temperature alternating rapidly from 2 to 95 deg F.
85. Use only spoons which hold a minumum of 1/2 cup at a time.
86. Make sure every water valve in your home has two backups in line which must all be operated to obtain water.
87. Repaint the interior of your home every month, whether it needs it or not.
88. Every four hours, check all the fluid levels in your car and log the readings. Check the tire pressure and replace air lost from excessive pressure checks. Be sure to place red tags on ignition stating "DANGER: Do Not Operate" while you perform these checks. Inform your neighbor as to placement of the red tags, the results of the checks, and have him repeat the checks because he did not see you perform them.
89. Lock all friends and family outside. Your only means of communication should be with letters that your neighbors have held for at least three weeks, discarding two of five.
90. Surround yourself with 125 people that you don't really know or like: people who smoke, snore like Mack trucks going uphill, and use foul language.
91. Unplug all radios and TVs to completely cut yourself off from the outside world. Have a neighbor bring you a Time, Newsweek, or Naval Proceedings from five years ago to keep you abreast of current events.
92. Monitor all home appliances hourly, recording on log sheets all vital information (ie: plugged in, lights come one when doors open, etc).
93. Do not flush the toilet for five days to simulate the smell of 40 people using the same commode.
94. Lock the bathrooms twice a day for a four hour period.
95. Practice taking a shower with a quart of water.
96. Work in 19 hour cycles, sleeping only four hours at a time, to ensure that your body neither knows nor cares if it day or night.
97. Listen to your favorite CD 6 times/day for two weeks, then play music that causes acute nausea until you are glad to get back to your favorite CD.
98. Make your familiy's menu a week ahead without looking in the cabinets, cupboards, freezer or refrigerator.
99. When making cakes, prop one side of the pan while it is baking, then spread icing really thick on the thin side to make it level.
100. Wash your laundry in a detergent that could be used as an insecticide or sheep dip. Make sure you lose at least one sock and one pair underwear every other week.
101. Run a tube from your car's exhaust pipe into your living room, yell "prepare to snorkel", and start the car. You must breathe the fumes for one hour.
102. Stand on your roof once every four days for six hours in the winter and don't let anyone in your house.
103. Spend 3 or 4 hours waxing your floors to perfection. Then, just before they dry, invite the whole neighborhood over to walk across them. Then do it again.
104. Vent your septic into the house and yell "venting sanitaries inboard".
105. Shut off all the breakers in the house and yell "reactor scram', sit in the dark for at least an hour.
106. If any light bulbs should inadvertently go out (ie reactor scram above), make sure you hang danger tags on the light switch, fuse or breaker box, lamp plug or cord, home master breaker panel and also notify the local utility company (maneuvering) of what you are doing and demand their approval. Make sure both you and the wife sign the tags. Next tie a rope to yourself and have someone who just as soon see you dead hold the rope in case you get electrocuted while changing the bulb.
107. Ensure that no matter what kind of job you are working on, there is someone standing over your shoulder instructing you on how to do it better/faster even though they can't do it themselves.
108. Write a procedure in triplicate for every job you do around the house. Have a friend check your work and make a minimum of 5 changes. When finished and the new forms are ready, have your wife verify that the procedure is correct but make ten changes anyway.
109. Find out how long it will take to do a job. Give yourself half the time it should take, then have someone scream at you for not working fast enough.
110. Ensure that every room in your house is drastically different in temperature. If no condensation appears when you open a door, the temperature difference is not great enough. Make sure your bedroom only has two temperatures (100F or 20F) and nothing between. Make sure of hourly cycles throughout the night.
111. Paint all windows black and never go or think about looking outside.
112. Make sure all your personal belongings will fit in a 2'X2' space that has lots of cables running through it.
113. Mount as many sharp-cornered lockers as you can in all the most travelled halls of your house. Leave almost room to squeeze by.
114. Drills:
a. Yell "Torpedo Evasion" and run through the house knocking over everything that isn't bolted down.
b. Yell "Man Overboard" and throw the cat in the pool.
c. Overflow the bathtub and yell "Flooding in the bathroom".
d. Put your stereo headphone on (don't plug them in), stand in front of the stove and yell "Battle Stations Missile".
e. Install a fireman's pole and a ladder in your living room so you can practice yelling "Dive-Dive", while the wife slides down the pole while you time her.
115. One after after falling asleep, have your wife shine a flashlight (which costs $200) in your eyes and say "sorry, wrong rack."
116. Build a wall across the middle of your bathtub and move the shower head down to chest level or lower. Buy a trashcompactor (but don't use it) and store the trash in the other side of the bathtub.
117. Continuously pop your ears to simulate snorkeling.
118. Sit up from 1130 to 0530 in front of your stove to insure it doesn't turn on by accident.
***Rickover Area***
I served with a fellow who was Rickover's personal driver back in the early sixties. His name is C___ _____ and at the time he was driving the Admiral, C_____ was a CYN3. He used to tell the story that the Admiral required his driver to have the morning newspaper placed on the rear seat of the car such that when he entered the vehicle, he could simply lay his left hand next to his thigh and pick-up the paper without "reaching out". He also required his drivers to use specific lanes and be at specific intersections at exact times. Life as the Admiral's driver was not easy!
We heard that he was hoisted on a periscope under his foul weather jacket on the Jack--can any Jack sailors verify that?
Everyone officer has at least one or two Rickover stories, but here's one from the JAMES MONROE. Rickover came down to the boat while it was in Port Lauderdale. The National Serurity Advisor wanted to see a submarine and we were avaiable. While the boat was along side the pier they came back in to the engineering spaces. Needess to say the watch in Maneuvering had been stacked with senior people since we were expecting an unannounced scram, and we were right. The poles went in the holes and the watch started to do the usual casualty procedure. Rickover assessed the situation and say that the EOOW was a LT, and all of the 3 watchstanders were PO1s and apparently decided to show the National Security Advisor a thing or two. He told the EOOW and two of the three watchstanders that they were dead and ordered the reactor operator to do the recovery himself. The RO was a bit nervous, but proceeded to recover the reactor and correctly and safely.
On Whale and Los Angeles, we had to disconnect the phone ringers in his SR--don't know if this was usual practice.
On Whale he distributed some cigars to the crew.
On the Carter ride on Los Angeles, he left his briefcase in his car trunk, and the whole crew spent considerable time looking for it on the boat. On the same trip, press photos were taken of him and Carter at the SCP while we were still at the pier on Manuevering Watch, but they were said to be operating the LA at sea.
GRAPES: A famous story about Rickover was how much he loved a particular type of grapes and how he wouldn't ride a boat without them. Actually, this came about because of one of his aids. Like most powerful men, there are always those who try to do eveything possible to please them, so the Admiral's staff at NR wave put together a list that doesn't exist. Before the Admiral comes aboard, they have a secret meeting with the CO, XO and Navagator to discuss this list, which contain many do's and dont's. Do keep to the test schedule, don't blow shitters when the Admiral is sleeping, etc. I know this first hand because they came down to our boat in 1991 when we did alpha sea trials. Anyway, one time Rickover commented to a supply officer how good the grapes were and the pens came out to record what kind they were. From that point on, anytime Rickover stepped on a boat they had grapes falling out of the overhead. In fact, by old Skipper remembered Rickover getting ready to go ride a new construction sea trial and kind of muttering under his breath "I've got to eat those goddam grapes again." As a side note to this, when ADM Demars rode us, the night before underway we offered him a snack and he had three bowls of butter-pecan ice cream. After he went to bed our chop was swamped by all his aids wanting to know how and where he bought it, supply numbers, etc.
I have two stories,....the first is a second hand story told me by my Chief, (who was also an ordained minister). My Chief, who had just reported aboard as part of the pre-commisioning crew on the Permit, was asked by Adm. Rickover, who was making one of his inspection tours, if he had seen the Enginroom yet. My Chief said no and so off they went together. When they reached the after end of the enginroom some menn were working on some hydrolic pumps that sat just below deck level and the Adm. asked what they were doing. The men replied, seeing only my Fillipino Chief and a second pair of brown shoes, like there was two chiefs there, that they were reparing something or other and asked them to hand them some tools. So my Cheif and Adm. Rickover stood there and passed tools back and forth for about 10 minutes before some officer came looking for the Adm. and freaked out and began chewing the men working out for bothering the Adm.
1....The first time I ever saw the Adm was at EB while myself and a night watch from ther George Bancroft shared a "security desk" on the barge...doing the mid to 4AM watch.....the Adm, we had heard was sleeping in a berth next deck up and was going to ride a boat on sea trial early in the morning. I remember hearing foot steps on the steel stairs and a Cdr shout "Attention on Deck" The Adm,..a small man in stature wizzed passed as we both stood at attention scared Shitless...contact,...about 4 seconds........:-) 2...The Adm was riding the Flasher on her first sea trial, being Stewardsmate, and my Chief having met the Adm. before I was all primed with the grapes and other fruit we had to carry....The XO was kicked out of his cabin and a special buzzer had been installed from the XO's staterrom to the pantry. The Adm and I had limited contact but seened more pre-occupied that rude to me. The EO came into the Wardroom, having been kicked out of Manoeuvering Room...being told he was dead and to get foreward of frame 52. He was a bit rattled....The XO had also been removed from his normal seat at the wardroom table so everyone and to shift "down one"....the "O"s were being good little boys and talking about "work" at dinner when the Adm. piped up and said.".lets talk about baseball".....conversation shifted almost immediately.
The other story relates to the change of command at NR. After several attempts, they finally got rid of him. My old CO remembers Rickover coming back from a meeting on the Hill mad as all hell (not an uncommon event, as I understand). He went into his office, slammed the door and, a few minutes later left. The next day a man noone had ever seen before walked up to Rickover's office, slid the name plate out, dropped it in the trash and sat down at his desk. After a few minutes of confusion, the staff began filing in and giving this man the same morning reports Rickover always got and that was that. Rickover never said a word to ADM McKey.
Everyone officer has at least one or two Rickover stories, but here's one from the JAMES MONROE. Rickover came down to the boat while it was in Port Lauderdale. The National Serurity Advisor wanted to see a submarine and we were avaiable. While the boat was along side the pier they came back in to the engineering spaces. Needess to say the watch in Maneuvering had been stacked with senior people since we were expecting an unannounced scram, and we were right. The poles went in the holes and the watch started to do the usual casualty procedure. Rickover assessed the situation and say that the EOOW was a LT, and all of the 3 watchstanders were PO1s and apparently decided to show the National Security Advisor a thing or two. He told the EOOW and two of the three watchstanders that they were dead and ordered the reactor operator to do the recovery himself. The RO was a bit nervous, but proceeded to recover the reactor and correctly and safely.
I heard a story about Hymie and I have no direct proof that it's true, but it sounds plausible, so here goes...... Rickover was going to do an un-announced tour of one of "his" nukes, and walked abroad in civvies. The top side watch asked him for some ID and he refused and told the kid his name and headed for the hatch. The watch asked him again for ID, and Rickover replied he had already told him his name and what more did he want. Now the kid on watch was starting to sweat, and as Hymie was about to go below, so he pulled his .45, jammed a clip and jacked a round into the chamber. At this point he had Rickover's attention. Rickover waited topside while the watch announced Rickover to the DO. Well the DO called the Capt. and they both raced topside to find Rickover being held at gun point. The skipper promptly relieved the watch, and busted him for the way he treated Rickover. As the story goes, the skipper got chewed and the kid on watch got not only his stripe back, but Rickover gave him a promotion for having the guts to face him down. From all I have heard about Rickover I can believe that story as being true.........
****As a followup to the above story, this was received from the topside watch himself: "Was reading your humor posting about Rickover stories and wanted to send a note. The story of the topside watch stopping Rickover- I can personally attest that the basics are in fact true as I was the topside watch in question aboard the USS Flying Fish(SSN-673) in this incident. A few minor details- the clip was kept in the left hand and ready to lock&load never actually in the 45 per say(?), I was wrote up but never brought to mast, I was not promoted but did recieve a letter of commendation from Hymie for diligence in duty. As a non-nuc I had no idea who this person was and not a clue as to what he (HR) looked like. Naturally the evening of the incident there wasn't a nuke who would come topside when requested until the shit hit the fan. At the time it seemed somewhat less than humerous(as a topside watch I was still a nonqual) but it did earn this nonnuke some respect with the after boys in latter ops. " Now I never rode nukes, but I taught a few guys that did and they told me this story. Hymie was going to ride some nuke for trials of one sort or another and arrived unannounced, as was his policy (I guess), in the middle of the night. The boat wasn't going out until 0800, so "the man" looks for a spot to bunk out and ends up in either a barracks or barge, I don't recall how the story went, found an empty bunk and crawled in. (He also had a habit of dressing in either civvies or in unmarked uniform) this made it impossible for the bunk owner to determine who (obviously NOT Goldie Locks) was sleeping in his bunk when he returned slightly s--- faced. Deciding the occupant was no one he wanted to share his bunk with (ie Goldie Locks) he unceremoniously grabs the sleeping Hymie and heaves him out on the deck!! The story teller claims that Rickover, (once he truly woke up) realized that he'd been in the wrong and let the matter drop. Sounds possible, doesn't it?? I understand that he would not go to sea unless the boat was carrying green grapes in stores, any comments on the validity of that one??
This is a second hand no shitter so you know that this story is more that true. I served with a EN1 on the Trumpetfish SS-425 by the name of ___________. He told as a no shitter that he was on one of the nukie boats (boat unknown) that they were on sea trials with Rickover on board in Manv. room which him at the controls. Well every officer on board was try to kiss Rickover rear side ( well you guy know what I really mean) Well ______ was getting a lot of speed changes and direction and having a hell of time keeping up, when on of the officer grabbed one of the levers to help out old _______. Rickover grabbed a 18" crescent hammer and hit the officer across the knuckles and said " Leave _______ alone he is doing all right". I understand Rickover just didn't tap him but really screwed up his hand. If this is not a true story it should be, but tell everyone it is. Hell after 25 years off of the boat I don't remember the truth from the no shitters. Hell there all truth anymore.
I've got two stories. First, I was working in the yeoman's shack on the Sculpin. We typed up reports to Rickover on what was going on. One night, one of the nukes, an officer and his sidekick, took some shortcut while they were doing something on the reactor. I have no idea what it was. A mate of mine typed the report. The report went out about 1am. At muster the next morning both the officer and his pal were out of nuclear power. Done. Finito. Gone. It was that fast.
The second story is funnier. I was sitting in the barracks at Mare Island waiting to be separated from the Ronquil. So was my buddy R____. R____ and another mate were picked to pick Rickover up at the Naval Station and drive him to Mare Island. They picked up Rickover who was with two of his staff officers - both commanders, I believe. Now Rickover was so smart, he actually had read the DD214's of both R____ and his mate. Now R____ was a college grad who was enlisted. And his mate, _______ was close to a BA when he went in. Rickover asked them why they didn't go to OCS. There was a pause and R____, who had both guts and brains, said: "Well, Sir, I would have but the officer corps is so kiss ass I couldn't take it." Dead silence. The two staff officers were beet red. Suddenly, Rickover said: "You're absolutely right, son." And that was it. This is a true no shitter. Hope these help. Picture this... Chasn S.C. Naval ship yard... USS Haddo 1 year over due getting out of the ship yard, is in the water and has just loaded some weapons after seatrials.... It is a Sunday.. Rickover shows up checks to see how many men are on over time for the Haddo... there are supposed to be thirteen or so... Rickover attempts to find them... no luck, they are all home and getting paid for it... He calls the ship yard Commander to the shipyard, in the meantime, he goes down to the ship... shows his ID card to the topside watch ( the one with the picture of a monkey on it).. he gets on the ship. He speaks to the belowdecks watch... shows him the same ID card... goes into the torpedo room and attempts to get past the room watch.. the room watch says he is not on the access list so he is not going anyway in the room. The ship yard commander shows up... he is fired... the topside watch and the below decks watch both get Captains Masts.. and the room watch gets a citation. The entire ship yard gets shook up for months... It made it really hard to get any cumshaw done for a long long time.
Gentlemen, I believe we have blown off the CHICOM spy. Now for a little more mirth which, considering our noble sacrifices, we deserve. How about some Doc stories? These were some amazing guys and I think we owe it to them; hell, we owe it to history. I'll start: We were in Subic - in the summer no less. 110 in the shade. 110 at midnight. Now I'm not big on heat and I was getting a little sick of the "shows," so I went back to the boat and crashed in the forward room. I woke up up 2200 hours feeling very strange. Next to my rack was a box of mangos that someone had dragged down the forward hatch. Something very unfriendly also came aboard and decided to take a bite out of me. In short, I felt like hell and had, literally, blown up to
twice my size. I looked like the Michellin Man. I could barely move and I could barely make it through the hatches to control. Almost everyone was on the beach, so I just sat there, blowing up like the Macy's float, praying the Doc would get back. Sure enough, around midnight, he comes stumbling down the after battery hatch so drunk he could barely stand. I mean gone. Out. Finito. I turn him around and he takes one look at me and says very calmly: "Shit. Follow me." We stumble back into Hogan's Alley. As you know, it's pitch dark. He starts rumbling through a hugh case of pills. I can hear the plastic bottles being shuffled around. He's swaying and can barely stand. I say to myself: "He's going to kill me. He's going to give me the wrong stuff and I'm going to die here in Subic the size of the Hindenberg. Finally, after a very long 5 minutes, he pulls out one pill. Not a bottle, just one pill. "Take this," he says, and folds himself like a collapsing tent into his rack and he's out. I look at the pill, look at the guys who are looking at me like I'm from Mars and decide: "What the hell." I take the pill, crawl into my rack and wake up 24 hours later my normal size. No one woke me or bothered me. I couldn't believe it. I went looking for the Doc to thank him, but he was out drinking. Loved that guy.Gentlemen: What is it about "DOCS" that make them famous drinkers? Is it something they teach in corpsman school? My story is about "Doc" Myers on the USS Chivo. We happened to be doing daily ops out of Gitmo and this one particuliar day we had to rig the ship for impact as we were going to be a "target" for the "skimmers". To refresh your memories, when one is a target, the diesel boats have to install the depth charge dogs and the " Doubler Hatches".(Remember, those heavy SOBS the took four men and a boy to install?) The person that installed the "depth charge" dogs and the person the person that checked "rig ship for dive" missed the fact that the afterbattery hatch was closed on the regular dogs and then the "depth charge" dogs were installed and they were the only thing holding the hatch closed. This left about 2in. open space all around the hatch. The actuator for the hatch indicator was held closed by the depth charge dog. (hence, a "normal board") It was 0 dark thirty when we rigged ship so no light was visible around the open portion of the hatch. We go to sea and as "luck" would have it, we were instructed to loiter on the surface for the skimmers to show up.(Probably so they could get a visual Posit on us). We were not even able to make our trim dive. It was about 0700 when we finally got the word that we could dive, and that just happen to coinside with breakfast going down in crews mess. Doc Myers was there, hung over, trying to "choke" down some breakfast, when the diving alarm sounded. We dove and green water started coming into the "people" tank and Doc said " Some one pass the word, flooding in the afterbattery, get something to block the batteries, and let me know if you need help, I feel like hell" This was all done without missing a mouthful of his breakfast. Needless to say, that was another in a long line of "five alarm" dives that has gone down in the annals of Diesel Boat History. "That is no SH--!!
Anyway I can't remember where this event took place but somewhere in the Carribian. Mabey Gitmo? Did it ever bother you that while we pig boat sailors did all the hard time the skimmer officers lived the good life? Like for example, on a Navy base the base commander gets to have his own private yacht, called the captains gig. Since it was our last day in port our minds began to wander in areas of promiscuity. After all was it fair that this nice boat was tied up close to us and seldom used? Of course not. The worst thing you can do with a boat is not use it. We decided it was our naval duty to see that this boat was given some exersize. After dark and after a few bottles of Don Que, we made our move. What a beautiful night, soft breeze, stars shining and that strange light flashing in our eyes. AH HA! Some one said " Do you suppose that boat comming up on us fast, with the search light on, would like to speak to us? Well since our speach was somewhat garbeled we thought that conversation was not in the order of the day. Slow down to idle, just before jumping over the side push the throttle wide open . Neat trick. When we got under way the next morning the absence of the Capt"s. yacht was clearly noticed. Who would ever do such a thing?
How about the time I got picked up on tad orders to a SSN ( Big Black Never Come Back, type) for a "spec op" up north...the 'ol man was a stickler, for up all bunks, and as it was put to me, he would have "up all bunks" at least once a week until he only had a handful of items he could find.. then he would slack off. Well, on this particuliar trip he only found one glaring item... a partial bar of soap in the head. He took his will book out and put a note under the partial bar of soap that read " please move this soap", and he signed his name and rank and the date... So move, the soap did..and each person that moved the soap, would sign, date and their rank or attach a new piece of paper with the appropiate information affixed. We were gone for 73 days ( yes.. we were walking on boxes in the passageways), so one can imagine how many people took the oportunity to "move the soap"... the paper trail behind that partial bar of soap was at least 30' long... right up until some "rocket scientist" put it into the Old Mans stateroom. The up all Bunks, commenced the very next morning....imagine that?
Stories about the level torpedoman's smarts are common, also a shared trait for stoicism. We were on an op when one of the forwad room types came up with an abcessed front tooth. With in a couple of hours his head blew up like a pumpkin, eyes swollen almost shut. Doc said he had to lance his tooth below the gum line, and as the infection was above he neck, he could not use any of the pain killers aboard. After sterilizing a quarter inch bit, Doc had the kid hold his upper lip open, while two of us held the TM3's arms and shoulders. Doc drilled until a gusher of pus blew out of his front gum. The torpedoman never flinched. Some of us onlookers didn't feel so hot tho.
I saw a mess cook once get his arm caught underneath a TDU can and it sliced the artery open in his arm lengthwise about 5". Not enough time for a helovac, he started sewing him up. He admitted afterwards that he was never so scared because he thought he was going to lose him due to the stitches not holding and all the blood loss, but he got him all back together. Ugly scar, but the kid was sure damn glad to have him around.
On a lighter note, I had a pilonidal cyst once (the ugly ones at lower back), he decided instead of letting me go to hospital to have it done, he would do it up on the tender with the squadron doc. Well, it was Sunday, and when the doc got there, he had his little girl with him. I got up on the table and the docs started doing there thing when his girl asked if she could see what he was doing. Before I knew it, this kid was staring at the hole in my back right above my butt cheeks!! Even though I was out of it on pain pills, I still turned beet red! :)
Back in the 70's the qualified guys loved to sent the non-quals into the #6 torpedo tube to retreive the name plate data on the outer door! Once at the end of the tube they'd close the inner door and let one sweat for what seemed an eternity! Its dark and smelly in there!!!
This is a no shitter.... there once was a young electrician on the Seawolf that did everything he could to perpetuate a legend, about himself of course. I have another story about field day that I'll post one of these days. anyway... young bob was finally getting out of the navy, after a couple of years on the boat. by this time, anything that he did was relatively unsurprising, since he would do anything that he thought might, just might, tweak somebody. I was the shutdown rover, and as an elt, i had access to all of the lab equipment. young bob asked me for a 500 ml beaker, and i thought it was to mix chemicals for the dissolved oxygen analyzer (what a piece of technological junk that was). As it so happens, we had the same eng. duty officer that duty day that had accidentally kicked over a piss call coke can in maneuvering the duty day before. as expected, this caused him to prohibit any and all use of same. his orders to our section were to wake up a piss call relief (remember pcr's?) regardless of the time or how tired your shippy might be. Well, our young ltjg was late for his midnight tour, as usual. about 2 hours late. he finally stumble aft and reviews my logs on his way to maneuvering. he enters maneuvering to see the shutdown man. area watch kicked back with his feet up on the reactor control panel, legs spread wide, and this glass beaker between his legs, full of a yellow liquid and a nice foamy head. the jg goes ballistic, and tells young R____ to get rid of the contents, which prompted a hearty aye, aye, and a few rapid, deep swallows. I, of course, didn't know what was going on in maneuvering at the time. all i saw was the edo heading forward, hand over his mouth, with a chunky liquid squirting from between his fingers. last i saw of him that duty day. As you can imagine, this made our sailor an instant hero. of course we were all grossed out by the obviously bizarre act, but still, he did nuke the edo. it wasn't until a couple of months later, when he came out to the bay area to visit that he passed on at a party what had really happened. see, he thought that it would be a reallllly neat idea to crack a cold one, and have a swig on his last midwatch in the navy. of course, the can would be inappropriate, hence the beaker. ahh, midwatch stories. gotta love them. BUG JUICE STORIES: A COB on my boat the USS Nat Greene told me that it's bug juice because there is so much sugar in it the bugs flock around it like bubbleheads around the radio shack when family grams are coming in. We would invariably lose the bug juice cooler during angles and dangles to have it run down the hatch to the crews lounge and onto the battery compartment hatch. When I went in to do gravity's, the hatch was as sticky as an a-gangers rack! By the way, the correct term for grape bug juice was "purple durple". Hey guys, we used to use it full strength to shine brass. It did one heck of a job, especially the grape flavor. It also made an excellent mixer for gilly alcohol. Bug Juice was originally called Bugs Bunny!! In the 60's when powdered flavored drinks were first coming out, the company that made them put pictures of Bugs on the package, We got the same packages on the boats that shore side stores had and the picture named the nasty concoction that occurred when mixed with water. Over time, submarine cooks were no longer allowed to purchase stores from civilian sources and the same powder started coming in typical military brown paper wrapping. I think this is when "Bug" took over from "Bugs". I'll bet you didn't think there was a "Bug Juice" Naval historian available, did you? DBF!!! Don't know about the name but it was a powerful cleaning agent. During field day in the crews head we accidentally spilled some in a mixture of Spic N Span. A reaction started that formed those scrubbing bubbles. We would wet down the cans (can't say shitters on this site) then sprinkle with bug juice, lay on the spic n span and rinse. We never again used toothbrushes to scrub the heads. We locked the door and did nothing for the last 3 hours of field day. We were always commended for our work and nobody was the wiser. Pay off the A- ganger in the bilge below the head and all went easy. USS Vallejo 658 77-80 I donno diddly ( can we say diddley om this web site?) about field days, I was a diesel boat sailor. We used to clean our floor tiles with fuel oil, (honest! some idiot put white flooring in the Sailfish and we would have to clean it now and again, fuel oil dissolved a few microns of the surface and the results were, WOW a new deck!! I must admit, my knowledge of Bugs Bunny or Bug Juice as a cleaner is non-existent. You may have invented scrubbin' bubbles and not realized the market potential, bummer, I hate chances lost. Tomorrow is all fools day and it's snowing like there is no end of snow, yesterday was 65 in the shade, go figure! Thanks for the cleaning tip.
Reported to the Bream on 10 July 1957 out of Sub School. A few days later, a JG reports aboard from Sub School. He got to be regular pain in the ass about qualifing. Non-quals hated to stand look out when he had the bridge because he harped about qualifing. I qualified in April 1958, took my 7 months plus 2 months reprieve for messcooking, on the way back from WesPac to Pearl. The exec gave me my dolphins and I was hanging in the Conrol Room when we heard the nonqual JG coming. He came in from the fwd bat and I was leaning against athe bow planes wheel with my arms crossed covering my shiny new dolphins. Says I, hey Tom. Looks at me and oh no, says he. OOOHHH yeahhh, says me. OOOOO HHHH SSSHHHIIIIITTTT says he. We went in the yard and then returned to WesPac. He ws given reprieve from qualifing while in the yard. I was returning to the boat from C school and had just walked into the terminal at Tachikawa Air Base and heard someone call my name. Looked around and it was this JG. He showed me his shiny new dolphins (its been 18 months, not counting the yard time) and miracles never cease says I. Is that all you have to say says he. Yep says I. Glad he was never the Engineering Officer.
Starlight story for you. We were stuck in Yoko due to a blown main engine, (oops!) and down on our luck and out of money. We would go to the Club Alliance and buy magnums of Cold Duck which we dubbed "NONI-QUACK" (Don't ask me why, I haven't the faintest idea.) We discovered that if you shook up noni-quack before opening, (this was discovered by falling down while carrying a case of the bubbly brew) it would expel the cork with considerable force!! We were armed and dangerous!! Several Sailfish sailors would come to the door whenever a Shore Patrol announcement was made and fire corks at the approaching patrol, then retreat quickly inside. (The SP's had learned the hard way, probably via Ronquils crew, that entering the Starlight in small forces was not a wise move.) Ahh, the sound of "Fire One!!" followed by a deep "POW" and then shoving the bottle in your mouth and pressurizing your brains with cold noni-quack, those were the days.Anyway I can't remember where this event took place but somewhere in the Caribbean. Maybe Gitmo? Did it ever bother you that while we pig boat sailors did all the hard time the skimmer officers lived the good life? Like for example, on a Navy base the base commander gets to have his own private yacht, called the captains gig. Since it was our last day in port our minds began to wander in areas of promiscuity. After all was it fair that this nice boat was tied up close to us and seldom used? Of course not. The worst thing you can do with a boat is not use it. We decided it was our naval duty to see that this boat was given some exercise. After dark and after a few bottles of Don Que, we made our move. What a beautiful night, soft breeze, stars shining and that strange light flashing in our eyes. AH HA! Some one said " Do you suppose that boat coming up on us fast, with the search light on, would like to speak to us? Well since our speech was somewhat garbled we thought that conversation was not in the order of the day. Slow down to idle, just before jumping over the side push the throttle wide open . Neat trick. When we got under way the next morning the absence of the Capt"s. yacht was clearly noticed. Who would ever do such a thing?
Getting into this BBS has sure brought back alot of memories. As this was related to me second-hand it could be a "This ain't no s---" story. "Moose" ____, TM3(SS), was on the "Funny" Tunny in the late '50's. As the story goes, they were moored alongside a "Limey" escort. "Moose" was on duty at the time and there was some sort of verbal exchange between "Moose" and the "Limeys" that quickly progressed to family lineage or lack thereof. This escalated to a potato fight with the "Limeys" having the edge as the Tunny was much lower than the escort. As things became more heated, the escort began to train it's guns around, which of course was an exercise in futility, while "Moose" was coming up the conning tower hatch with the .50 caliber machine gun and an ammo belt. Fortunately both Duty Officers intervened before an international incident occurred.
Got another Starlight story for you. We were stuck in Yoko due to a blown main engine, (oops!) and down on our luck and out of money. We would go to the Club Alliance and buy magnums of Cold Duck which we dubbed "NONI-QUACK" (Don't ask me why, I haven't the faintest idea.) We discovered that if you shook up noni-quack before opening, (this was discovered by falling down while carrying a case of the bubbly brew) it would expell the cork with considerable force!! We were armed and dangerous!! Several Sailfish sailors would come to the door when eveSailfish sailors would come to the door when ever a Shore Patrol announcement was made and fire corks at the approaching patrol, then retreat quickly inside. (The SP's had learned the hard way, probably via Ronquils crew, that entering the Starlight in small forces was not a wise move.) Ahh, the sound of "Fire One!!" followed by a deep "POW" and then shoving the bottle in your mouth and pressurizing your brains with cold noni-quack, those were the days.
The boat was at PD at night and rigged for black. The FT of the watch, FT3 B____ ____requests permission to make a head call. The OOD denies him permission. A few minutes later Luck asks again and is again denied. The CO is on the conn and orders the OOD to take her deep. Every thing needed to be done at PD was done (yea right). The OOD orders the boat down and rigs for red. The CO looks over by the MK 113 Firecontrol console and there in all its glory is Lucks Torpedo shooting it's load. The CO asks "Luck what are you doing?" As if it wasn't obvious. He was then given his head call. A year and a half later, Luck and I share a barracks room and I ask him if the story was true. He said yes he did it cause the OOD wouldn't let him go to the head and it needed to be done!! He earned the nick name "THUMPER" and was proud of it.
We had this guy going through qualifications on the Catfish (1964) and he was getting checked out on blowing the AB crapper. A few minutes had gone by and nothing seemed to be happening - like there were no bubbles comimg up from the ball valve. The guy gets down on all fours and sticks his face in bowl so he can get a closer look. The next thing I know, he pulls back on the lever to crack the ball valve and 600# of air blows through the opening and the guy comes screaming out of the head with his face and hair plastered down looking like a paper machet puppet. He runs back into the engine room and some EM's stop him and squirt him down with pink lady to clean him up. His next move is to light up a smoke at which time he almost blows himself up. Anyhow we all survived and had a great laugh.
Boys this story is a no shitter, and let me tell you word ain't gona do no justice to this one. This is one you would have to seen. Billy ___ (EN1 SS at the time), had just came off of liberty and was totally shitfaced. Now when Billy was in home port he never drank that I knew of. (Something obout the old lady) But when we got in to another port old Billy would make up for lost time. Well, on the Trumpetfish (SS425) it was common for those on liberty to come back to the boat around midnight and cook up one hell of a mess. Old Billy had cooked him self one hell of egg sandwitch and had it greased up this mayo. He heading to the after torpedo room and I'm charging batterys in the after engine room. The engine ventilation door are open because we were finished ventilating the batteries. You had to walk very close to the engine air suction to get to the A.T.R..Billy, in a stuper state, walked by the veltilation box and at that moment in time the engine sucked the egg right out of that sandwitch and left him with two pieces of bread. It supriseing what 10,500 cubic feet of air per minute will do He never did notice what happened. He went back to the ATR and in a few seconds here he is back in the engine room going forward lookin for something. After a couple of trips throught the engine room and I'm of trying to keep my composure I ask Billy what he was looking for. He told me he lost is egg. I look around the engine room and told his I hadn't seen it. About 10 minutes later he up in the engine room and pissed. He said "G-----N you stole my egg did you"? I never did tell him what happen to that egg.
How about the time I got picked up on tad orders to a SSN ( Big Black Never Come Back, type) for a "spec op" up north...the 'ol man was a stickler, for up all bunks, and as it was put to me, he would have "up all bunks" at least once a week until he only had a handful of items he could find.. then he would slack off. Well, on this particular trip he only found one glaring item...a partial bar of soap in the head. He took his will book out and put a note under the partial bar of soap that read " please move this soap", and he signed his name and rank and the date... So move, the soap did..and each person that moved the soap, would sign, date and their rank or attach a new piece of paper with the appropriate information affixed. We were gone for 73 days ( yes.. we were walking on boxes in the passageways), so one can imagine how many people took the opportunity to "move the soap"... the paper trail behind that partial bar of soap was at least 30' long... right up until some "rocket scientist" put it into the Old Mans stateroom. The up all Bunks, commenced the very next morning....imagine that?
The engineroom had an X-1J sound powered phone. I know you t-hull and LA-la boys probably don't know how that system worked, so I'll give a mini-extra military instruction lecture here: the X-1J had around 16 stations that you could call by selecting the station and then turning a handle (the growler). the station being called would hear the growler, and thus would know to pick up the phone. the circuit was common, so that all stations could talk, and more importantly, listen to communications.
X-1J story #1: the handle on the growler was held on by the shaft being peened over the handle. a file, used most delicately, could file off the extra metal that held the handle on.....now all that is needed is to drill and tap a screw hole in the shaft so that the handle can be used as advertised, and still look like a normal growler. the skipper on the mid-watch would get an occasional growl from the phantom growler, and that was aggravating, because just a simple flick of the wrist yielded an obnoxious and loud whoop. now imagine what would happen if the handle was removed and a 10,000 RPM angle grinder was chucked to the growler shaft...Armageddon on a half shell?
X-1J story #2: For those of you who never served on boats, or worked in an engine room, there is a wonderful little compound called Prussian Blue. It's used for checking metal to metal fits, like valve disks to valve seat, and the like. Prussian Blue is a bitch to get out of your skin. Big time, no bout about it, a bitch. The below decks watch was an IC2 that the nucs had it in for either real or imagined cause. maybe it was just because he was a forward puke. i don't remember. he had the unfortunate luck to end up standing duty with the biggest bunch of jokers on the boat (coners were 5 section, and the nucs were of course in 3 section duty days). after the evening meal, during the flick, every X-1J phone except the skippers was blued in the earpiece and mouthpiece. of course, the shutdown roving watch aft had to get some readings from the below decks watch, with the expected results. After about 3 times, young p.o. jones finally gets a clue, and starts wiping off the earpieces and mouthpiece before putting the phone to his head. of course, he has gone to the weirdroom and sniveled as only a coner in 5 section duty can snivel, and threatened the nucs with dire and dastardly happenings. the OOD got so tired of hearing it, he came back aft, borrowed our tube of Prussian Blue, blued the phone in the weirdroom, and then went into control when the belowdecks watch went into the weirdroom on his rounds....and then he growled the phone next to the skippers seat at the table....it was great, we could hear him all of the way back in the engineroom.
Telephone hoho. a young MM1(SS) A-ganger stood watch a couple of times with us (section interface..3 section/5 section story again). One of the true jokers on the boat was a nuc MM named A____. he'd call the mess decks on the outside line, ask for a guy in the section, they'd growl aft to let that individual know he had a call on the outside line forward, and when he'd answer the phone, A____ would say that since "Joe" or whoever was forward, could he bring back a cup of fresh coffee? well, A____ would call the skippers landline on the midwatch, and ask for the C.O., letting the MM1 know that the caller was Admiral Rickover. Can you see what's coming? One night about 0330, the skippers line rings, Earl picks up the phone, the caller states that he is Admiral Rickover, and that he'd like to speak to the OOD or Captain if he's aboard.....the reply being "F*** YOU" with a prompt hangup. the captain didn't look too happy in his jammies and slippers when he stumbled on board about 5 minutes later to chew Earl a new one. ahhh...the good old days.
I did find the best way to get out of field day. Just stick your head into the engine room and say there weren't enough nukes on the boat that could tape you up. By the time they got me taped to the railing next to the reduction gears with a sponge in my hand and the engineer finding me there, field day was all over. Too bad couldn't do it again.
As Sonar's anti-nuke representative on the boat, comments like "Your job is to push my sonar sphere and tow my towed array to the op area" or "Shut up you whiny nuke, get back aft and push!" didn't make me a favorite among the "aft" crowd. .
I was an MT2 on the Willy R. I forget the circumstances of the initial incident, by one of the FTB ("F*ck the boys") ratted on us to WEPS for something. So everytime the snitch was on watch in the MCC, we would key the 31MC (0r was it the 35MC?-this MC circuit connected both the MCC and the Missile Compartment) and we would quite nasally and quickly say "whiterat! whiterat!" Did this for more than one patrol, if you boys know what I mean...
How many of you guys were standing by a 4MC just as the OD began to announce on the 1MC to "Commence Field Day" and key it, thus overriding the 1MC....all you would hear is "Comm.....". We did it about five times in a row one patrol...the old man went friggin nuts...he had all officers lay to the Wierdroom and gave them the word to give the white glove treatment....our boat was never so clean.
You know, the truth is that after all these years, one of the things I still value most is a good shower. However, being an old diesel boat sailor I don't panic if I can't get one. After the big L.A. earthquake a couple of years ago, we were without water for a few days. Went right back into diesel boat mode. Made it through no problem. But when the water came back on, I was a very happy sailor. It's one of the things I never take for granted. Have no problem voting for clean water bond issues. None at all. Millions for water. Fine with me.
Speaking of worthless pins, a couple of years ago they started giving out "SEABEE" pins. They look like something from a Cracker Jack Box! Honestly, it's some leafy shit with swords and that damn bee with the machine gun in the middle. I guess they have to shoot an M-16 and drive a bulldozer 100 yds. to get it. Even a young guy like me couldn't believe it. Add to that all the special Chop and Doc and even Dentist pins (another no-shitter) and there's too many to count. As far as I know, the only Chop in the US Navy that actually stands a watch and serves some useful purpose to his fellow man is on a submarine, therefore being the only one who deserves some recognition. A couple of years ago even the lawyers were bellyaching for a special pin. I thought they were supposed to be "warfare pins". Actually, there is a movement among the high brass to scale back the pin thing. More power to them. I don't recall exactly the first time I ever saw the so called "Surface Warfare" pin but it seems that that it was when I was on the Snook (592) out of San Diego. That would make it late 60s or early 70s. What I do remember clearly is what we all called them - "Cry Baby Dolphins" or CBD's, no doubt because the skimmers cried so much about the submarine sailors being set apart and being unique, which we were. So, they got their CBDs. I never knew what the qualification requirements were for that ugly pin nor did I care enough to learn. Can't be nearly as tough or demanding as submarine quals though.
When I was on the Trumpetfish SS-425 I wished no one would take a shower because I was one of the Engineroom Flangeheads that had to make the water and the air to blow the shit out. Now if never had to make water out of one those stills you missed and excercise in flustration. You make work a couple of hour get the damn thing up and running every thing set (they worked on vacuum and head). Then the old man would want dive the boat and snorkle a while. The diving office puke would dip the snorkle head a couple times and there went a couple of hour of work down the drain. Then you have to make air to blow the shitters. Comming out the Med. we were on special operation and the whole crew went 32 days with out a shower. Heck I wasn't going to dance with any of the boys anyway. Besides as and EN you had some much diesel fuel on you none of the non-quals want to dance any way. I know all of you diesel boat sailors know what a submarine shower is but for the rest it a "can or Right Guard held over your head at arms length and sprayed liberally. Jade East will cover anything, even diesel fuel. What a shame that you didn't enjoy what we did on the Diesel Boats. We called it "shower in a can", good old RightGuard Deodorant. We had one fellow from the "E" gang named "Hogbody" that believed it was also a breath freshener! Nothing like snorkeling for days on end in a nice, toasty maneuvering room to put on the "eau d' submarine". When I was aboard the Sealion, we had an amplified problem with water due to the additional SPECFOR people we deployed with. The fresh water stills seemed to work only when we were tied up to the tender. Underway we were rationed to 1 sinkful a day for drinking, shaving, and washing. Oh how I miss it ...
Ahh, one thing diesel boat guys get alot more than nuke guys do is fresh air, Nothing like sniffing the same mono-amine recycled air for 60 some odd days on end, but hey, nothing can compare to the smell of a seabag filled of clothes from the boat. Leave em stored like for a few days after pulling in and give em to your wife to clean and she'll hit the floor from the stink.
One of the Tm's on ss342 could tolerate the "eau de submarine, but having greasy hair sent him up the bulkhead. At some drug store he found a dry shampoo, some kind of powder you brushed through your hair called "mini-poo" What the hell, he thought, and tried it on our next patrol. Poor guy, he had clean hair, but immediately got the nickname "mini-poo" and some bonehead lt sent him for counselling to make sure he wasn't gay. Great encouragement for personal hygiene.
How many of you guys would wait until you were at sea and go down and wake someone up and tell him he had a call on the "outside" line in control......I found this worked best just after the first underway watch was set, and "he" had been asleep for a couple hours......It also worked really well on O-Gangers!
Another one that was popular on the Thomas Jefferson was to pull the foot rest on the con out and hand it to someone walking by and ask them to hold it while you were doing some un-necessary task. For those not on the TJ, the skippers foot rest was a chunk of CRES tubing cut and welded such that it had a 90 degree bend in it. It could be retracted by rotating it out of the way, hence the need for grease on it. The grease used on it was nearly clear, so the unsuspecting would take it, give it back and wander off with a slimey hand for troubles......It seemed that some people never learned.....
We had a NavET who came aboard with a "tri-corder" and "communicator" from the TV series Star Trek. We judged him as being a sandwich short of a picnic. Somebody thought it might be fun to put some TDU weights under his mattress and see how many were needed before he caught on.....So during his watch, a weight would be added to the collection......This went on for several watches......and a few more watches......in fact people were collecting in berthing when he got off, to watch him lift that bunk up.....Never did quite get it.....I think he just thought maybe he was getting weak from all that time underwater......That bunk must have weighed around a hundred pounds by the time we gave up on him........
How many of you guys had a Phantom "Growler" who would roam the decks on the midwatch and growl the JA phone circuit.......you'd pick up and hear......control, torp. room, sonar, radio, Capt........G*D D*mn it if I ever catch you........
A megger is a wonderful thing for those who you can't wake up for watch. Stinky Foot B____ an ET had a damn tough time of waking up for watch you know the kind you have to wake up about 4 or 5 times before he comes fully alive and them it doubtful. Well this got durn annoying on a long patrol so the IC'men got a megger and connected it up to old B____ on the foot and the other on the hand, which was always out in the isle. We lightly taped the leads on, this guy slept like a brass flange at the bottom of the sea. We got a crowd (I could have made money for this show) and cranked up the old megger for all she worth. Old Buckle jumped and gyrated around in the space he could, buy the time he hit the deck pissed was an understatement. I think all that electricity effected his mind because he wanted to kick-ass on the whole group, which was about 15 guys who were doubled over to bad to do much. I think it must have worked everytime someone shined a flashlight in his eyes he would hit the deck. I'm not so sure we didn't shoot to much juice to him, he never seem right after that.
Ah, those old diesel boats...real submarines they were..none of this scrubbed air for us, just diesel fumes, battery acid and body odor. Yeah, we had showers..the only problem was they were usually full of garbage bags..not to mention there wasn't much fresh water because one of the distillers was usually down. Remember the cockroach races? Remember when Doc would run around spraying who knows what in the overhead then for days we'd have roaches falling into the bug juice or onto our plates. I especially loved the blueberry pancakes...only problem was we didn't have blueberries..just some kind of fat bug larvae living in the flour. Damn good tho. Now, we called all of the new guys "Hazards" until they were qualified. We'd get wind of a Hazard coming aboard and meet him at the bottom of the after battery hatch. He'd come down the ladder and first thing he'd feel was hands on his legs and hear a bunch of guys whistling and telling him what a nice ass he had. Then we'd start fightin over who was going to get him first. Once in awhile they'd just shoot right back up the ladder and ask the topside watch what the hell was going on. Great fun...course, we didn't really "get" them later. Then we'd tell them that the Filipino stewards who slept in the "Bridal Suite" in the forward torpedo room were married and of course the stewards would put on a good show. Just pat each other on the butt and stuff. Hell, I read about some guy drinking some contact cleaning alcohol and getting wasted. We carried about a hundred gallons of grain alcohol which was torpedo fuel for Mk14's and 16's..called it Pink Lady..Strain a little of that through some bread, add a little bug juice and party down...course, we only did that in port.
When I first reported to the Seawolf as a nub 3rd class nuc, I didn't know what to expect, but I'd heard all of the stories during the two years in schools before hitting the fleet. You know, how the enlisted puke, wardroom division wasn't as pronounced as it was on the skimmers, how the crew stuck together, and those sorts of things. Well, I met the boat as she was coming in from a post overhaul run to San Diego. Meeting the boat involved getting on a bus at Mare Island, and riding down to Alameda N.A.S., where the boat pulled in for a while before heading up the channel to MINS. We get on board, go through the check in process and were then handed off to a couple of nucs who took us aft. My first exposure to the nucs was that it seemed everyone not on watch in the engineering spaces was clumped together in the stern room, wearing poopie suits and playing with yo-yos. One particularly large and hairy gent wearing brown shoes, khaki belt, and Lcdr. oak leaves on the collar of his poopie suit. He had a whistling yoyo, and the guys were really giving him hell, because he wasn't as proficient as most of the others. Many of the comments I heard told me that I wasn't in Kansas anymore, Toto. Most of them ran the gamut of "hey you fat F******, when are you going to get off of your ass and sign my qual card", or "damned horrible show you're putting on for the newbies, engineer". You get the idea. I knew that submariners were different, but for a third class to give the ship's engineer a red ass was too much to handle. Well, everybody that was anybody seemed to get leave as soon as the boat tied up along side the pier, so I didn't get my welcome aboard speeches from the Capt. or the Eng. for about two weeks. I have to admit a little stupidity on my part, because i saw the eng a couple of times on base, and sucking up to him like a good little newbie, I just didn't understand the look of pain (figured out that it was just an attempt to keep from laughing)that I saw on his face when I went up to say "hello, engineer". As you can guess, during my howdy new guy lecture from the wardroom types when they all came back from leave, I realized that some of the best jokes take a long time to mature.
Here is one that we probably all pulled. Those poor Midshipmen. Now and then when we drew school boat duty we would have to pick up some middies and take them on a day cruise. The nice white uniforms were to much of an attraction to be left in tact. Remember how to blow sanitary? Well midshipmen don't know anything about it. Right! A pressure in the tank can really do a job on those spotless white uniforms. Lots of spots (and toilet paper and yellow stains ect.)
So, Jan '76 we go up the Cooper River to load some dummies for a DASO. Some bright D.C. pukes decide to give us a couple of Middies. The CO gives orders that they are to get qualified as Diving Officers. These little girls are standing in control when the vents open and they look like deer caught in the headlights. Anyway, later in the patrol this one particularly snotty fuck is doing his periscope depth for quals. His trim is wacked and the planesmen are emptying the hydraulic pumps trying to keep from broaching. Finally we broach. This is another reason they call them boomers. Broach in heavy seas in a SSBN and the fairwaters slap down and the noise will rattle your web belt loose. So this snot reaches out and bitch slaps the sternplanesman across the back of the head blaming him for the broach. Well, the whole control room was suddenly quiet. The DO, a seasoned MMCS, grabbed his skinny arm and told him if he did that again he'd break it off and shove it up his ass. Then it was our turn....later we go to GQ for a fire drill. The dickhead was stationed at DC forward in the Torpedo Room. A quick call is made to the Engineer in Maneuvering and the word is passed on the sound powered phones to have middie lay aft to shaft alley. Of course, everyone is in EABs and you can only get so far before you have to stop and plug into another manifold to breath. Well, just so happens certain people were placed at strategic points and every manifold this puke plugged into was shut off. I'll never forget his eyes when he stopped at the QM desk and handed me his hose (he couldn't reach most of the manifolds). I plugged it in to a dead header and he went to take a breath.....heheheh.....nothing. I'd pull it out and plug in to the next hole and tell him ok...still nothing. Funniest thing I ever saw. He pulled his mask out to breath and the OD jumped his shit bigtime. And so it went all the way to shaft alley. They had to stand him in front of the aft O2 bleed after the drill to snap him out of it......Oh yea....get some dough from the stewburners and get it soaked through with prussian blu...then place it in the showerhead of the Midshipman's Watercloset.....I think he decided to be a pilot.....
How many of you bubbleheads send the new kid in search of the "Relative Bearing Grease". The old qual question was "Show me how to turn the head light off and on. How about a can of contact cleaning alcohol the EM's carried around. l can't think of a better drink after being at sea for 15 days than contact cleaning alcohol and grapefruit. One coffee cup was enough for me. The XO had a dim damn view of being shit faced at sea.
We liked the "key to the sea chest" alot.......did you guys have EAB races, and if so, how many of ya'l turned off the manifold valves before they started?? Don't ya miss the good old days?????? NOT!!
Anyone remember trim parties? Wait till a new officer is qualifying as diving officer, get about 20 guys together in the torpedo room and head for the engine room fast. Call control from maneuvering to find out where he's pumping water to compensate - when he's done, everyone head forward again. Now he thinks he's compensated too much and tries to correct by pumping aft and your "trim party" heads back aft to arrive at the same time. About four round trips usually got the CO furious.
Trim parties were a rite of passage on all the subs I was on. In every case it was organized by the skipper, who would quietly wake the entire off watch section, and have them muster in the engine room........the rest of the story is the same except on the last trip we all walked through control laughing. Trip parties were viewed on the subs I was on as a grand exercise in control......On one of the subs I was on, the Skipper was a "bridge" player, and one night he needed a fourth. He had the OD pass "alert one - Alert One" so the XO would have to get up......I think he had the same opinion of the XO the rest of the crew had....... Speaking of Alert One.......those who served abroad the 608 class remember how the CO and XO staterooms were adjacent to each other, and their doors swung at 90 degrees to each other......well one night when both the Skipper and the XO were down for the count we tied their door handles together with a short piece of string.....we got caught by the Nav, but he was cool, he went up to control and announced "alert one".....and ran back to the wardroom.....about the time the skipper opened his door the XO did the same pulling the door shut.....there was an un-controlled oscillation in those doors followed by cuss words some of which I'd never heard used that way before....(yes the Nav got his ass chewed, but he was a mustang and I think he felt it was worth it!)........
Onboard the USS Vallejo SSBN 658 we used to tell the guys that were ahead on their quals they had to know the location and function of the boats Fallopian Tubes. More than a few went in search of the answer.
The ST Gang on the Jefferson got chewed by the skipper for sending a striker looking for "radioactive fallopian tubes". Of course the first guy he asked was the skipper. We had a Div Officer who we managed to convince we were out of "sierra" numbers (for those unfamiliar, sierra is the prefix for a sonar contact just as "romeo" is the prefix for a radar contact). We thought the Weps would get a good chuckle out of it and that would be the end of it, but alas, we did such a good job of selling this story he ran directly to the Skipper......caught a bunch of S**T for that one too......We had a nuke on the Jefferson who stole the XO's door.....nothing new right?........but he stole it from the boat along side, and both the below decks and topside watches helped get it off "their" boat..........We collected a bunch of chaff from the paper tape punch the "NAV ET's" had, and put them in a coffee can......well a specially prepared can. We cut a false bottom and punched a hole in the center. We then tied a string to this new bottom, filled the can with the chaff, and then tied the string to the replaceable lid, gift wrapped it and left it for the "other" crew.......they opened it and the string pulled the false bottom out and dumped all those "dots" all over the sonar shack......I understand they are almost impossible to sweep up.......
Back in the Missile Compartment there was a series of valves called "Stripper Valves". They were missile tube drain valves that pointed straight up. We uncapped the valves an filled the shot piece of pipe with the Quacks Foot Powder. The first time the "other"crew tried to do a drying cycle on the tube the poor Missile Compartment roving patrol caught a face full of Foot powder. We thought nothing of it cause the bluies filled a couple of them with "Paper Hole Reinforcements". Needless to say, both launcher divisions of the TJ spent a few days cleaning each others messes. We did the same thing with the paper chaf only a wee bit different. We used a paper cup and cut the bottom out of it. We then put that cut out bottom back into the cup with a string attached to the bottom. Fill the cup with the chaf (Dit Dots) and stick it up into one of the ventilation outlets. Leaving the string to dangle we then cut the string off short so it barely showed. Some poor unsuspecting fool was sure to find it during a field day and pull the string. Then there was the fun things you could do with the flashbulbs from the BRT test set that 608 class boomers had........more of that later.
The Grampus was in the yards in Charleston SC about 1956. The yard birds were welding on deck so we had to post a fire watch. (Like the steel deck was going to catch fire.) Any way as always the boredom slowly turned to excitement when we decided to do a little bird hunting. If you unscrew off the cone on the CO2 extinguisher a welding rod fit just right in the hose. Now what kind of birds do you suppose there is to hunt in a ship yard from a sub? Right! Seagulls. Now this was great sport. Once we even had a rod bounce off a gull but as always is the case some do gooder yard officer was aghast at display of disrespect of this magnificent bird and proceeded to chew us out. After he finally realized that pig boat sailors don't pay much attention to any one not on the boats he called for our duty officer. Now OD happened to be an old mustang,(Youknow! Up through the ranks) who also didn't think highly of this shiney skimmer officer messing with his boys. He informed the yard officer that as Submariners we have special dispensation from the Secretary of the Navy to supplement our food supply any way we saw fit . He then suggested that he get off the boat or he might wind up on the next menu. Then our OD turned to us and said " Listen guys, if you have to play these games then at least wait til dark. That was great because now we had the added challenge of keeping the gulls in the search light beam.
As an ET on a diesel boat (USS Chivo 341) and the crew reduced to about 60 personnel, we ALL had to chip in a qualify on all the various watch stations so that we could continue to operate...I was standing Jr. Controllerman watches with a Sr. Controllerman that really didn't care for me( I know.. Hard to believe). He would send me down into the motorroom to "Prussian Blue" the shafts...at least every other day,and them he would proceed to "check his eyelids for light leaks"... After about the 10th time I found out what he was up to, and I "eased" up while he was doing this and paint his web belt with the "prussian blue" He would then proceed to get that shit all over everything, his rack, his watch station, the mess hall, the control room,...needless to say... I had to stand watches with someone else... he wanted to kill me. It was a standing joke when ever he entered a compartment, someone would ask to see his hands and ask him to wash up!! On the USS TRUMPETFISH (SS425) we had an officer that checked rig for dive in the forward engine room One of the check items was the forward engine air induction. With 4 engines running he would go up and trip the engine air induction. Now if you are a old engineman you know you were always listening for noises. So he was always tripping the engine air and it would cause the throttleman and oiler to jerk around to see what the noise was. It was damn annoying. We asked him sever times to just tell us when he was going to do it so we would know, and we would really appreciate it. Hell that didn't work. So we set him up. We had the forward door on the forward engine room shut and the aft door on the after engine room shut. The door between the engine rooms was open. This was normal underway set up. When we knew he was going to check for rig for dive. The after engine room call the chief of the watch in control and asked permission to shut the after engine air induction to grease the pivots and do general maintenance. We received permission, now all the air for 4 engines was coming through the forward engine air induction. You got it right, the officer tripped the forward engine air. A minute later the engines, all four, shut down on high vacuum. The next thing I know was the Old Man and Eng. Officer came through FER door wanting to know wanting to know why we were shut down. The throttleman explained the situation. The old man jumped on the officer and ate on his ass for a few minutes. Told him to get his ass out of the engine room and don't ever come back in there. Problem solved! Yes I remember his name.
We stole the door off the XO's stateroom during weapons ops and hid it in ERLL. When threatened with no liberty, the door re-appeared. However, we also left a few drops of silver nitrate in his soap dispenser. I was an aft line handler and after we tied up and the XO hit the beach the silver nitrate reacted to the sunlight and stained most of his exposed areas black. Cleaning that lube oil bilge was not fun, but I couldn't help but smile.
Talk about a way to remember the good times......I remember a corpsman who was a royal pain the butt.....and most of the crew really hated this guy....so one night (really late! - had to after the last movie) we collected in crews berthing with maybe 6 or 7 rolls of "EB green". We taped and taped until there wasn't but about a square inch of space left open.....air flow you know.....that poor bastard awoke with a 6th side to his bunk...it took him forever to get out...no one would help him.....He raised such a stink, we all started wearing a bit of tape on our collars to signify we were in on the scam....hell even the Capt. wore one.....Or how about the time we took on of the ET's pillows and soaked it in water and froze it......put it back on his bunk just before he hit the rack (literally!).....Our crew used to flush a dye marker into the #4 shit tank just before the paralleling of the watch.....it usually took several days before it would get blown overboard......by then we were safely back in Pearl! God, the admiral hated that green stain all around "his" tender...........
It was about 1955 or 56,( when you get old your memory goes.) and we were docked in Montie Carlo ( I didn't have to know how to spell to get through sub school) One of our old timers, left over from WW11 Was on the beach and ran out of money. Well that wouldn't do. He managed to con a couple of hookers into plying their trade aboard the boat. You guys remember the "Bridle suit"? The bunks hanging on chains in the after room? Well anyway He set a watch in the maneuvering room to collect $2.00 @ from the duty section until he had made enough money to spend another day on liberty. For at least that one glorious day while I was on duty I was very grateful for the room service.
Well, once upon a time in a galaxy far, far away....no wait, that's a movie. Amen....this is a no shitter..... We were hanging out in Bremerton following our refueling overhaul at Mare Island. You know, the typical weapons testing and sound trials and other such nonsense that submarines have to go through after being taken apart and then hopefully put back together (correctly) again. We had a real problem with the Jar-headed security group there. Seems that they would ambush Seawolf sailors coming from the EM club on their stumbling way to the barracks that we were put up in. And of course, there were some unnamed sailors that thought that stalking and beating the bejeezus out of some Marine was itself great sport. It got so bad that the COB and the Gunny from the Marine barracks got together and threatened a loss of liberty and life to the dumb bastards that attempted further mayhem if they got caught. Well, as anybody that has ever had any dealings with bubbleheads must know, there is always at least one other way to screw with people that nobody else thought of. It seems that the Marines had this white bulldog named Sergeant Mike. Sgt. Mike was of course a full member of the tac squad, with uniform and duties, such as standing full dress inspections with his squad. One night, Sgt. Mike just disappeared. As you can well imagine, this caused great consternation amongst the denizens of the Marine barracks. The boys were combing the greater Bangor Sub Base calling for their dog, at all times of the day and night. Meanwhile, the dog was living large. He had 24 hour attention, was looked after and loved and fed steaks from the galley on the boat to belly rubs and head scratches. That dog was indeed living the good dog life.
As all things must, our good times at Bangor were coming to an end. The last truck from the bus to the pier contained an odd assortment of sailors and one highly agitated seabag. What we hadn't anticipated was that the boomer parked next to us at the pier was offloading missiles, which meant Marines EVERYWHERE. And not just Marines, but ARMED AND DANGEROUS/PISSED OFF MARINES. The truck was driven slam bang into the pier, and everyone in the truck cab and bed hauled ass across the brow, with the last one out emptying the seabag. As everyone was dropping down the hatch, with the poor maneuvering watch slobs stuck topside to cast off lines, a grunt discovered Sgt. Mike wandering down the pier painted haze gray, with 575 masked out so that the white numbers were VERY visible. The skipper saw what was happening, and sped up the underway process by at least 4 warp factors. Why we didn't get at least several thousand rounds fired our direction is a testament to the iron disciple that the officers had instilled in their men. ahhhhh, sure was glad to get out of the navy before the boat went back to Bangor.
Now this is NO SHIT! Daniel Boone Happenings: 1964 Transportation 2 DB Navets steal a D6 Caterpillar tractor after one's car runs out of gas. They are captured by Vallejo police trying to drive it back to the base on Salano(sic) Blvd. 1964 Paint Job: Daniel Boone and John Adams were together at Port Canaveral for DASO missile shots. There was a 100 plus foot high water tower that had been a tempting target for submarines to paint there hull number on. We were warned that the cost to a boat that did this was $300.00 to have the tower repainted. One evening two NavETs partied hearty and decided to climb the tower and paint our hull number on the side of the tank at the top. Several people reminded them of the cost of doing this, but they went anyway. When the sun rose the next morning, there were the numbers 620 on the side of the tower. They had painted the Adam's hull number on the tank. They were leaving that day and their departure was delayed until their rec fund came up with the $300.00. I don't know if the Adams ever figured out who did them in.
1966 Heavy weight bag job: The blue crew always thought that the gold crew used more (read too many) TDU weights. So... at the end of patrol #5, the blue crew shot the last of 27,000 lbs of weights on the maneuvering watch heading into Guam. (One box of weights is 90.9 pounds). 1965 Rub-a-dub-dub clean up the sub (better, please) After returning to port after patrol #3 the blue crew radio men dumped a bag of marbles in the radio shack overhead. They felt that the gold crew was not doing a good enough job on field days. Chasing the marbles might be an incentive to get things cleaner. The marbles were quite annoying during angles and dangles I heard.
1965 Unclean sweep: It was customary for CSS15 and the gold crew wardroom and goat locker to meet the boat out in the harbor, prior to mooring. It was also customary to light off the diesel, on the maneuvering watch, just to check it out prior the mooring. The entourage had just gotten onto the missile deck from the tug when the nukes lite off the diesel. No problem, right. Wrong, the exhaust line drain valves had frozen shut and 8" x 200 feet of black, oily, shooty water was blown all over the nice tropical white uniforms. Not too many happy campers.
1965 In the stockade: All of the crew were berthed on the barracks on Ford Island. Rather than ride the liberty boat or ferry across the harbor many nights were spent in the Arizona Club. It was basically a beer garden with food available. One evening a number of the gold crew were enjoying themselves in the club. Somehow a disagreement broke out between them and a bunch of skimmers, off the Bryce Canyon a destroyer tender. As the skimmers tried to get back to their ship the gold crew followed. Eventually the OOD of the Bryce Canyon called the Naval Station and the Marines were called out. The gold crew CO, Captain C____, confined the lot of the Boone sailors to the barracks. This just made things worse as they called some local radio stations complaining that they were being held hostage. Eventually it all calmed down and they arrived to relieve us in Guam.
1965 Cigars: Captain S____ loved cigars. Captain C____ hated them. To improve relations between them most of the blue crew would be smoking cigars when the gold crew arrived. Even those people who did not smoke. Really pissed C____ off. 2 out of the first 3 crew transfers, blue to gold in Guam were done steaming the plant. In Jan 1966 a typhoon was bearing down on Guam. The tender and all the other boats were gone. The gold crew was at maneuvering watch stations when Capt. C____ said "I relieve you, sir" The XO, Cdr S___ passed the word "Gold crew say good-bye to your cigar smoking buddies". About that time all of the OOC reports started rolling in and the blue crew left. 1965 Primary spill, Machinery 2 upper level Admiral Rickover and his henchmen came out for the NR exam, forerunner to the ORSE boards. After it was all over Capt. S____ came on the 1MC and congratulated us for a job well done. As he was walking of the periscope stand the 4MC came alive with "Primary Spill, Machinery 2, Upper level". MM2(SS) "Tiny" W____ had been taking a sample and knocked the hose out of the bottle spilling primary coolant on the deck.
1966 Stupidest thing I ever heard: Capt. C____ had all Control Room and Attack Center personnel hide, in either the nav-center or behind the ships control panel. He had the doors to the Navcenter, Sonar shack and Radio room locked shut. He then had someone slam a door. Sticking his head out of his stateroom, he said "XO go find out who made that noise." When the XO arrived in the Attack Center he must have been stunned to find no one there. He handled it though, he sounded the general alarm and passed the word to man battle stations. Good thinking ended a dangerous, bad joke.
Other people and other boats: 1962 Being throw out of San Diego. On the way to Pudget Sound in the fall of 1962, Gudgeon was diverted to San Diego to take on a full load of weapons in response to the Cuban Missile Crisis. On noon the second day , after the weapons were loaded, the CO was buying beer for some of the crew in the Pump Room. After a long lunch, 2 TM's and an RM were coming back to the boat. The Sperry pier watch told them to square them selves away. They gave him a ration and then proceeded to try and tip over a delivery van on the pier. The OOD on the Sperry took all this in and sent his messenger to try and get them back to the boat, No luck. About this time the Squad Dog comes out of his sea cabin on about the O5 level of the tender and took all of this in. He made a beeline for the pier and when he got there he was red faced and panting. The people finally sobering up enough to realize they were in deep shit, headed for the boat. The Squad Dog came over and told the topside watch to pass the word "Captain lay topside". The CO came topside with the XO in hot pursuit. Seeing the highly pissed off Squad Dog, he turned to the XO and said "XO, station the maneuvering watch", which we did. After a half hour ass chewing, the CO returned and we got underway for Pudget Sound, which was where we wanted to go anyway.
1963 Clyde Clam: LTjg ____ was a J.O. on Sandlance during the overhaul prior to turning her over to Brazil. The crew was made up of qualified personnel from several decommissioned boats and a few others. He finally tired of people saying "On my last boat we would do ........ this way". At quarters one morning he announced "I don't care how you did it on the Clam." and became know as Clyde Clam.
1981 Taste test: A crew was waiting to offload equipment from a returning submarine at a pier at NAS Alameda. The pier was large and the only head was many hundreds of yards away. So...the crew took to relieving themselves between the semi-tractors dual rear wheels. Late in the evening, a fireman who was there to cover the weapons offload, spied the wet spot. He came over and looked at it, then stuck his finger in it and tried smelling it. Finally he put it up to his tongue and started tasting it, at which time all hands burst out laughing. He looked at us and said "It isn't" and we all replied "Yes it is!"
1970 Uniform regs: MM2(SS) did not like to wear skivy shirts with his dungarees. The XO dearly wanted D____ to wear one. This was quite a comic act for a while on Aspro in 1970. Finally we had a pre-westpac personnel inspection and D____ was in the dungaree group. He showed up with a skivy shirt on and the XO commented on it after the inspection. MM2(SS) gets the last laugh as we are dismissed, he tears his carefully constructed dickey off and stands there skivy shirtless once again. The crew loved it.
1962 Float test: LTjg L____ was the First Lt. on Gudgeon in the fall of 1962. He was sort of a pain in the butt toward his troops. Always on their case no matter how good they did their job. One night in Bellingham, one of the FTs had the midwatch below decks and L____ made the mistake of leaving his cover on the wardroom table. The FT collected it and brought it topside to perform a float test. Unfortunately, it failed.
I was a QM2(SS) on ARGOUNAUT (SS-475) in the early sixties. We were attached to SUBRON SIX in Norfolk and, when in port, we frequented a bar called Bells right outside the main gate at NOB. Remember, that was back in the days we would fight at the drop of a hat when a boat's honor was questioned, especially by skimmers. Well, we were all in Bells drinking and minding our own business when one of the tin can sailors made a lewd and licivious remark about ARGONAUT. So the fight began. After about five minutes, the head of the Norfolk Vice squad came in with a bunch of cops and announced to anyone who cared to listen that he was Lt R____ of the Norfolk Vice Squad. Someone, I don't remember who, responded with, "well fuck you Lt R____", and punched him out. The shore patrol and cops proceeded to take everyone out to the waiting paddy wagons. But they were only taking Argonaut sailors, no tin can boys got apprehended. Me and my sidekick "Lushwell" L____ (A former artificial inseminator (sp)) from Winchester VA, decided to do something about it. So, we very carefully made it out the front door and to the paddy wagons. No one was around, so we just opened the back doors and let everybody out. We all ran in 360 different directions and made it back to the DesSub piers where the boat was tied up. Everybody made it back, R____ had a beautiful shiner, and the duty officer told the shore patrol that no one had left or returned to the boat that night. Needless to say, we stayed away from Bells for a few weeks until the whole deal calmed down.
I Remember the bars in Yoko well. One in particular stays in my mind: called the Starlight. The matches from the bar had a map on one side that logged a course as follows: San Diego, Hawaii, Starlight. Well, one night after a long run in the Ronquil SS 396 - I think it was 1968, we repaired to the Starlight to spike the mainbrace as the Brits would say in the old sailing days. As fate would have it, there were some Brits with us off one of their black boats (they painted their boats jet black - no subtlety). So there we were drinking ourselves into oblivion and having a fine old time when some guys off the cruiser St Paul decided to walk in. Big mistake. Before long fists started flying. The fists were followed by chairs. I was standing with my back to the bar. Behind the bar, the liquor bottles were stacked up along a mirrored wall. I remember in my drunken stupor that watching this fight was like watching a Hollywood movie. Chairs were being cracked over heads, punches landed, kicking - I was just watching this, far too drunk to fight anyone. Suddenly, out of nowhere, a chair comes flying at my head. Like any drunken sailor in a Hollywood movie, I duck. The chair sails over my head and crashes into the mirrored wall behind the bar sending glass and bottles in all directions. Then, again just like a movie, came the sound of shore patrol whistles. In seconds, the bar was clear and we were running like rats through the allies of Yokosuka. I got back to the boat and crashed, not knowing what happened to my mates. In the morning, when we were assembled, the skipper said something about a fight in town with a smile and the matter was dropped. The next night, we all went back to the Starlight. The mirror was replaced. The bottles were back up. It looked as if nothing had ever happened.
Boy oh boy, the Starlight Lounge. I still have a brass estuscion (sp) from the heavy plastic wall covering. I used it in my black beret as a sign of rank. (We all wore black berets on the Sailfish's 1969-1970 WestPac, per order of the old man. We had the marines at the gate in Sasebo convinced we were a detachment of special ops. That lasted for two days, once they found out the truth we had a hard time getting off the base, or on for that matter.) Anyway, one night we were in the Starlight, being morose because we blew number 1 engine leaving Kobe and the Navy decided to replace it in Yokosuka. We had already been at sea for nine months and were hoping to return to Pearl. Back to the story, in walks two guys in civies, got to be boat sailors right? Wrong!! Real short hair%at sailors right? Wrong!! Real short hair!! I volunteered to determine who they were and found them to be tow jar heads on R&R from Nam. (Don't ask me why in hell anyone would go on R&R in Yoko, they were Marines, remember?) We invited them over to our table and commenced to feed them their favorite libation. In short order both were to wasted to remain upright and soon ended up stripped. We actually burned their skivveys in the middle of the floor!! Then one of the guys dragged the best endowed one around the bar by his (Boy it's hard to tell these stories in a clean manner isn't it??) Well, you know what, so as to display his endowment to the "ladies" present, who giggled appropriately and averted their eyes. After redressing these bozos we walked the alleys ways arms locked over shoulders and knocked any skimmers encounted into the benjo ditch. Eventually the marines could no lw them into the benjo ditch as well. Guess what!! Next morning (late) they show up on base at the boat and want to re-enlist in the Navy and become sub sailors!! You can't kill marines! More stories, more stories!! DBF!!
Seawolf lived at the south end of the industrial area on Mare Island when not at sea or in the dry docks. This presented many an opportunity to let our idle minds wander into prankish lands. We had an ST1(SS) who was really into black powder weapons. I mean really into black powder weapons. He decided things were entirely too boring at berth 19, so he devised the caliber "D" cannon. This little toy was a CO2 bottle with the horn removed, and a piece of schedule 40 PVC pipe taped over the end of the hose. The inner diameter of the pipe was just a skosh bigger than a d cell battery. We would sit on the forward deck of the living barge, and fire d cell batteries out into the middle of the Mare Island channel. One night, we decided that that wasn't enough fun, so the ammo and oilers pulled into the finger piers south of us presented just too darned inviting of "targets". After a couple of duty nights, bouncing batteries off of the weather deck of the skimmer was by far and beyond the most fun most of us had on duty nights, because they (the skimmers) started calling battle stations every time one of these ended up on their boat. The ship closest to us was of course our number one target, and they were bombarded using the attack scope on the boat and walkie talkies for communication to us on the barge for range and angle. The boys on the skimmers were getting more and more agitated with what was happening (imagine that), and they were blaming the other skimmers tied up next to them (HEHEHEHE). As all good things must eventually get a visit from Mister Murphy, he visited our firing station one night on the midwatch. A battery went zinging over water, and damned if it didn't hit the bridge. Not just the bridge, but a glass window on the bridge. Well, it didn't take a rocket scientist to figure out the trajectory of that ballistic missile, and the next thing we knew, the entire duty section on the skimmer was manning the rails, heavy gun and grapefruits in hand. By the time they were done shooting grapefruits at us, our barge looked like the salad bar fruit bowl. ahhhhh, in port hi-jinks. sure miss that stuff.
When we were in the yards in Philadelphia on ARGONAUT (SS-475), our great fun came in interesting escapades. On the mid-watch, we would use chalk to describe interesting patterns on the sail and superstructure, accompanied by the words "cut here" When the day shift came on, they would dutifully cut the holes. The sail looked like swiss cheese, triangles, squares, parallelograms, and circles.
We also would use oxygen bottles as torpedoes. Just open the valve all the way and throw the thing in the water. They went crazy, just like a balloon let loose, except in the water.
Every now and then, we would gain access to a cutting torch or welding rig. It was great fun to cut the balls off the yard workers ball peen hammers or weld their toolboxes to the deck.
"Ah the old sanitary overboard through the bridge horn huh ?? Everyone on the dbf's was put to this one at one time or another (even yours truly blowing sanitaries during the below decks midwatch - lookout topside)... the bottom line was that since L.P. air was used to blow both, you had to devise something much more devious (no not H.P. air either). The "ONLY" way that I ever saw it done, first hand, was through trickery i.e. sly, cunning and idiots that were bored at the time. Minor repiping, small sealed and piped container, together with the use of a CO2 bottle (horn removed). Let your mind wander a minute here and truly absorb the skull-duggery involved.
Hey... any of you Diesel Boat guys... ever hear the Quals question.. how would one go about configuring the boat to blow S--T out of the whistle??? The Duty section on board the Chivo( SS-340) actually did it one week end. What a mess.... We did this on a Sunday... and we got under way on Monday morning with "riders" for Sublant. Needless to say.... It cost me $50.00 as well and every other qualified man in the duty section. The duty officer got put in "hack" and had to eat with the crew for a month.
I hadn't heard that one for a long time. I remember having to describe how to do it. Always thought it would be fun to actually try. Can imagine the mess. Another messy trick is to blow sanitaries inport with about 75 psi while the duty officer is making his rounds topside. Worst thing I eversaw was the drydock in Yoko when belowdecks blew them with too much air and the discharge hose painted the drydock. He had to wash it down the next day.
My first boat (USS Trigger SS564) used to use this exact situation as one of the final Qual Questions for Qualification in Submarines. We were in Charleston and when the question came up we were actually to line up the systems to do it (blow S--- Thru the Ships Whistle). During the time when I was qualing, one of the boats tied up next to us actually did blow the Whistle(so to speak), I don't remember which boat did it but almost immediately, the word came down that from that point in time on the immediately the actual lining up of the system was not to be done and the question was an verbal one only.
I do remember that many times on the Trigger when I was mess cooking, I had to clean out the ice machine of the little brown spots the came up from the drain!!!!!!!!!
I don't remember exactly how it was done, but I remember something about over riding the reducer on Ships Service air to the Sanitary Tanks and increasing the pressure in the tanks. then securing the supply to ss air and then when the whistle is tested the sanitary tank pressure is used (also the sanitary tanks level had to be a certain height)the pressure in the tank would supply the ss air and the shit would flow. I don't think it was exactly that simple, but what do you want after thirty years!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Gitmo Hilton: Spent quite a bit of time across the pier at the Hilton. Served up beer at a quarter a can and ran all the movies. We saw the majority of the base down at our "after hours" joint. Couldn't be beat. Was there earlier than you in the late 60's on board the Threadfin (SS410). Ever eat up at the base and have Charlie the iguana stand up at your table ? That damn Charlie was great at stealing your food when your back was turned... Great days all...
OK, boys, there's nothing like a dink suitin' up for the mail buoy!
One time, during refit in Holy Loch, we sent this one guy over to the George C. Marshall to borrow their Philip O'Peanne tube tester.
We had a nub route a chit thru the whole gammit for 50 feet of fallopian tube, also on the same order he was requested to get 20 feet of umbilical cord to tie off the tube.
A striker for the TM's was requested to order 10 more water slugs, he filled out the paper work but could not find the part #. The TM3 who instigated this filled in the phony # any had him route it up the COC. The only fault that the TM3 made was that he filled in a price tag that exceeded the normal limits and had to be signed by the captain who happened to be sleeping. The OOD relayed the request to the captain without reading the chit thoroughly. After several minutes the captain came storming into Control (in his underwear) yelling that the type of water slugs ordered were not the correct size !!!! Needless to say the rest of control was in tears when the captain departed.
Another time I was standing SRO when a nub requested to enter maneuvering. I of course requested for what reason. He stated that He was sent back to blow the DCA for quals. My jaw dropped of course I had to call the Roving watch to help him perform this, he having performed this on numerous occasions. When the roving watch arrived he nearly busted a gut, I stated that he should perform this first to show the "Non-qual" how to do this and how easy it was. He of course deferred to my expertise. The "Non-qual" just stood there absorbing all of this without a clue. The DCA who happened to be the EDO happened to stop in on his tour at this time . I told the "Non-qual" to again state his request. The DCA motioned for him to proceed at which time the "Non-qual" caught on.
I was on the 622 blue (7th or 9th patrol) when some of the nucs who were body builders, talked one of the fresh ensigns who himself was one of those huffers and puffers, into the belief that the weakest part of a pull-up is the hand grip. Yes, the guy ended up with his hands taped (eb green) to a high pipe in amr2 and when he finished doing pull-ups, lo and behold there twas no one about!!! About ten minutes later the eng and the rest of the wardroom took notice and came to inspect the spaces. If I remember right, he stayed up there for about twenty minutes ( under the C.O.'s direct belly laughing observation and especially the eng's) and was let down.
We used to send guys up to the control room to take portable air samples with a trash bag. Then the ELT would note that he didn't date stamp it and make them do it again.
I remember someone running around during a field day once looking for Baffle Contact Cleaner. He made it thru the LPO, COB, and the Doc till he got the XO to sign his chit for an atmosphere contaminant. It fell apart at the supply dept. but I can't imagine where they could have taken it.
I seem to remember sending a striker over to the USS Can-O-Piss in Holy Loch to get a bucket of voltage drops.....and a week later he went to supply with a requisition for ten feet of chow line......(heheheheh)
Ah yes, the old messing with the boys. well gents, the nucs (we were a crafty lot) on Seawolf were always looking for a good one. The list is waaaaay too long for one reply, but I'll pass a few on over the next couple of days just to kick this cycle into gear.
Two guys on our boat were laying in wait for one of the goofiest occifers we ever had assigned to the boat. This pup wanted to be one of the guys in the worst way. Academy puke and all, and I'm sure that is enough of a description for you. Well, they see this unsuspecting lad traipsing through the reactor compartment on his way to maneuvering in the engine room. Diesel-dirt stuck his thumbs in the vise, and ____ put the torque wrench and valve handwheel adapter on the vise handle. With the expected historonics, ____told ____to give him a couple of foot-lbs. ____kept tweeking (holding the handle so that he really wasn't adding any torque). "What are you guys doing?" "Oh sir, this is just how we're testing to see who is the toughest. It's between me and Mike." "Can I try?" "Oh no sir, we don't want to get into any trouble if we hurt you. This can be pretty dangerous, and the Captain would be pissed if we hurt one of his officers." The fly was drifting down stream, and the fish was rising! "Hey, don't worry about that. I'm pretty tough myself, you know" our fish said with perfect solemnity. So, they cleared the vise, and our hapless ens. put his thumbs in the vise. After a few tweeks until it was juuuuust starting to hurt, he admitted that he couldn't pull his thumbs out. Whoos, down came his trousers and skivies, and on went about 1 1/2 lbs of blue rotentium grease, the nastiest, most horrible, water-proof grease ever invented. The engineer came through about 5 minutes later, looking at me kind of weird, because I was sitting on the discharge filter laughing my ass off. He saw his young pup, and gave him a "Great Navy day, eh ensign?" as he passed on his way to the maneuvering room. Of course the SRO reports that the eng almost laughed out a lung once he got out of range. He called the W.R. and asked the Capt. to come aft. The skipper sees me dying, figures out that something was up, and stepped into the engine room. Seeing the young ens., the skipper gave him a "Great Navy day" and walked back to the maneuvering room, where he and the eng laughed themselves silly. They walked forward, ignoring the by now almost pitiful wimpers, telling me as they passed that it was about time for the roving watch to tour aft, didn't I think? Well, that was just about the last time that young pup even spoke to us nucs. Trying to get Mike and Greg written up for their "dastardly act" got the ensign a lesson in being an officer from the Capt. If he was dumb enough to fall for that, he deserved everything he got, or a close approximation to that direct quote.
1: field day...old story, probably every boat sailor heard of someone doing this, i was there with a clipboard writing down hits....As every sailor in the world has done, young bob, the GREAT RIZOOLIE, was tasked with cleaning the heads for field day. We were having a zone inspection, so it was up all bunks in the after berthing area, and E div. had the area sparkling. Since the Nucleonics lab was in after berthing on the seawolf, i was stuck writing down the zone hits when the skipper did his inspection. Young bob had the stainless steel thrones absolutely stainless. he defended the two crappers with his life until after the inspection was over. understandable, but a bit excessive. the skipper shows up, and we began the inspection tour. first, the wascomatic washing machines. i don't know about other boats, but e div had their work cut out for them when those machines broke down, since the tech manuals were still in the original swedish. next came the heads. the C.O. was pretty pleased with their appearance, until he noticed a brown, fecal type material under the lip of the throne. an obvious gig, and one that he told me to write down. well, young bob was standing by his cleaning area, heard the hit and said "wait a minute, i'll take care of it right now". which he did. by running his finger over the material, wiping it off of the steel, and then promptly popping it in his mouth. The captain was pretty cool about it...i was about ready to throw up. "Young Bob, since you so obviously love peanut butter so much, i want you to repeat this performance after every watch for the next 5 days" was all the captain said. he was a lot smarter than most of us gave him credit for. by the way, that was probably the cleanest those crappers were since the day they were built.
BO, I love the Great Rizoolie stories! Better than Uncle Remus! Somebody posted something about blowin' sanitaries through the fog horn. Reminded me about a guy we all called "Sh-tter Van" (He was an Aux man from surface craft!) His name was Van ______. Anyway, he never could do a proper line-up to blow sanitaries. One 4 to 8 he forgot to close the valve on the Gaylord hood!! He was still cleaning crap off the grill at 0730 when "Vinny the Ginny" (cook) showed up! Usually Van was the only one effected by his lack of understanding basic plumbing, but eggs over easy weren't the same for a long, long time!! Vent inboard!! Ram Jet. (Breathe deep the gathering gloom!)
Flasher had spent so much time in new construction our "corpman" ended up being a Senior Master Chief. Bugby was his name. ...anyway...we're at sea somewhere in the Pacific when I get woke up and a battle lantern shoved into my hand and I'm told th "Hold This....shine it right there"....Seems one of the sonarman working on his Qual walk thriugh with the "O"ended up falling through a deck hatch in the AMS..(Aux Machinery Space for those who wheren't around before the name change)...this was a square hatch.. as he was falling through he caught his buttock on the corner and tore a hugh hole in his ass. He was carried to his bunk which was across from mine and down one. I became the surgical lamp holder...Doc cut the guys poopysuit off him and his skivies...bloody mess everywhere. Doc cleans him up and the guy is not having fun with the alcohol but doing his best to not wake the off duty crew. turns out to be an "L" shaped tear just to the side of the guys asshole about 2" away.....all the time Doc is muttering to himself something about not having done any suturing since Korea, which is making the guy feel real good you can bet. Well, Doc pulls out the novacane and begins to inject around the wound. The guy is wimpering by this time because schock has worn off and pain is setting in. Finally the wound gets numb and Doc pulles out his sterial pre-packaged sutures with the great curved needles...the guy doesn't look to good seeing the needles. Doc grabs forceps and locks them on to the needle and begins to sew. The human skin is very tough I learned because it was all Doc could do to poke the needle through the skin and pull the two halves together and tie the knots. As Doc is sewing the guy farts..!!..Doc fans the air and tells him to knock it off or he'll sew that one up too.... I forget how many stiches were needed but 3 to 4 seems about right. The guy gets a few days in his bunk and a postponement on his quals while recouperating.
I, sat on the SS_______. IN THAT TIME, DOC took care of My arm. We were in the goat locker and I had splitt my big toe. By the time I got back to the BOAT, it had started to swell up. I let it go for another hour and then , I went to DOC "S_______" Hell, I didn't have to go far. We were both in first class berthing together. He took one look at it and told two big men to hold me down. He then proceeded to scrub it with a nail brush. I could've killed him. He told the three guys holding me down not to let me up untill I had calmed down. At the time, I thought it would take my whole life to calm down. Well, the long and short of it is, that his treatment worked, and my toe healed.
Our "DOC" was a real sadistic SOB! Our cook caught the clap in Portland during the Rose festival. Instead of
having "S_____" report to medical he'd wait unit the evening meal was served, order S____ to report to "tubes aft" and then march through the crews' mess with two huge syringes filled with penicillian. Dead silence through-out the space! Doc would just smile and tell us "play and you'll pay". This went on for the entire week and believe me Doc made his point!
My last cruise to the med and near east took place in Oct.'63-Feb.'64. While their I mysteriously cme down with a case of the dreaded crabs, and of course the purple salve didn't work! As I mentioned this to Doc Woods he looked at me and said, "boy your gonna have to shave that sucker bare." I gotta tell you I was shocked. How could I possibly put something as sharp as a razor near that area??? Then I had to find a plce to shave. The torpedomen didn't want me in their rooms, Ithought the wardroom would be appropriate but was convinced I'd do bread and water for trying a stunt like that. So I figured ince i worked in the forward engine room that where I would shave! However I was forced down into the lower flats with my bucket
of hot water and can of shaving cream. You would have thought a five star movie was playing. The throttleman on watch cranked up every room on the phone and the next thing I new I was starring in a first run Navy training film on how to shave your private parts very carefully! I did not live that one down for the rest of the cruise. It's a good thing my tour of duty with the Navy was up and I was discharged as soonas we returned to the good ol USA. I don't know how long that story would have followed me around!!
One big diffrence about us that wear the fish and the guys that wear the wings. Navy regulations prohibit a pilot from flying a $8 million fighter with no less than 8hrs sleep time, while there is nothing wrong with a submariner operating the reactor on a $700 million submarine who has gone without sleep for 36 hrs.
We had a new non-qual jg ordering stores for patrol. He asked the cook how much garlic he should order. Well, the cook comes back that 50 should do just fine, so the jg orders exactly that 50. Now if you remember the order forms, it didn't matter what you said you wanted, it all depended on the FSN. So "garlic, 50" were ordered. It turned out, garlic came in ten lb. bags. We had 500 lbs. of garlic to deal with. The boat probably still had leftovers when it was decommissioned.
Speaking of which, I remember one QMSN came into Manouvring (I always used the British spelling in my logs just to piss off the XO) to set and wind the clock. He opens the glass, carefully winds it, looks at a piece of paper in his hand and then sets the clock by it. We waited until we were sure he was done on the whole boat and then called the QM stand to let the QMOW know how his sea pup had set all the boat's clocks to whatever time it was when he wrote it on that paper.
I heard about the Battle Of ST Croix many times. There was a great deal of talk about drunken sailors, rented motorcycles, and jumping the motorcycles from the pier, over the boat, and into the water. When I was on SS____ there was a standing order that no crewman would be allowed to rent a motorcycle during a port call. Apparently the boat had to pay out a lot of money in damages.
On my last patrol in the navy I was the LPO of the sonar girls, and we had a reverse raffle, where you could "vote" for the mess cook of your choice, and he would be a mess cook during the festivities and clean-up. I had this 2nd class who I'd inadvertantly P*ssed off (gee I think, don't remember what about tho) who decided to "vote" me in to the gang of 5 mess cooks selected by popular vote. Now each "vote" cost a quarter, and the proceeds went to the "flower" fund so it was a reasonably good use for the money. The way this worked was the election results were compiled in control on the JA circuit. Anyone could monitor the progress of the election (or vote) .......The XO, COB and a few others were the high profile canidates, and there were the usual collection of LPO's, Div Officers, JO's and some special designated "Dark Horses", where the person was registered, but went un-named in the actual voting. It turned out I was a dark horse, and this clown told my best friend (smart move bucwheat), who told me......So I very quietly started a new dark horse, and it was this 2nd class who worked for me. He was completely in the dark until the reading of the "winners" (he was in his rack, and they had to wake him!), and oh man was he PO'd. This kid was torqued to the max, I got the extreme silent treatment, and I was just being soooooo nice to him the entire night (he was a bit of a delicate flower)......I think that was probably the last time he tried that (but I wasn't there for a repeat, civlant ya know)........Seems like I was well over $200 in debt by the end of the voting, and he was somewhere close, because he just about singlehandly kept me in the top finishers! I try take it as well as I give it.....and he got it that night much to his displeasure!
Ahh, sounds like a "training" exercise we went on and held halfway night. The OOD for my watch section was the Navigator who was clueless as can be about Sonar, and was constantly calling over 27MC "Sonar, Conn, is your tracker tracking off?" "Conn, Sonar no it is not". He would do this anytime he didn't believe the solution from fire control so I decided I would get my revenge on halfway night. The CO, XO, COB got their usual pies, and the bidding on the last one was for the Navigator orone of the engineering LPO's. Well, the rest of the shack wanted no part of it, so I started bidding myself. The engineering guys gave up at $85 so I won and had the great pleasure of giving him the pie in eye. We were on watch when this was going on and the relief for the Navigator as OOD was more than happy to see him go as he was constantly harassed by the navigator underway.
Speaking of the beauty contest, I'll give you a story about the Halfway Night that never was. We'd gotten this new MT3 on theSS____ and he was one of the most butt-ugly individuals I'd ever seen. Naturally, the second he steps aboard the whole weapons department tell him he's got to enter the Miss Vallejo contest on half-way night. He doesn't object, but slowly it becomes apparent he's not quite all there. The clincher was on sea trials, when he decided he had trouble breathing (all the O2 was being used up) and wore an EAB continuously for the last two days underway. We pulled in, transferred him to squadron and shipped him off the psych boys. We go out and after a standard patrol come back. A couple of weeks into off-crew I'm the duty officer and I get a phone call from the Chas. police dept asking about Petty Officer so-and-so. Turns out he was picked up on Spruill Ave. with a bunch of "working girls" dressed as a lady and when he was arrested he told them he was "practicing for half-way night on the Vallejo." I don't know if it was harder trying to explain that comment to the police or just picturing this fellow in drag.
On theSS____, one of the officers slept through dinner and missed the spaghetti dinner the rest of the crew had. Well, he shows up in the Ward Room and starts telling the steward that he's hungry and wanted his meal. The steward comes into the galley and asks the cook if he's got any of that spaghetti left. The cook says no he just threw it out. There it was, the pasta in one garbage can and the sauce in another. Not wanting to make his officer feel bad, the steward reaches into the garbage cans and ladles out the noodles and the sauce into a pan and runs back to the wardroom pantry and heats it up. About a half-hour later the LCDR comes into the galley and announces that that was the best spaghetti he's ever had, just like mother used to make. I always wondered what other cooking habits his mother had.
Heck on the old pig boat I was on we had reactors a bunch of them. Then nuc boys ain't got nothing on us. We had under reactors that didn't give a durn what happened they were happy as as a hog in poop. We had over reactors that possibly drank to much coffee and would fly of the handle like a wrench on the main engine suction cooling valve. Then we had just the old reactors that would just blow of steam every once in a while. When we had a reactor go critical now we are talking about the big blow.
: From an old Pig boat sailor, Whats a reactor?
It was the equipment back after that was specifically placed there by Hymie to ensure his nuc's didn't get too much sleep on patrol.......
: Upon reporting to SS____ in Charlston, I found out that I was the only West coast dude on board. The rest of the crew were either from Ohio or Flordia! Of course being the new kid on the block and newest non-qual I caught hell! I reported aboard during the evening meal, stowed my sea bag in manuvering and grabbed a bite to eat, : I sat next to one of the biggest guys I ever layed eyes on and he was a Torpedoman to boot! Scotty was serving "sliders" that night. The mess crank placed the plate in front of me, I picked up the ketchup bottle, squirted a generous amount on the berger and started reading the back of the bottle. Well this ape takes my plate, shoves it in my face and screams at me that I don't read anything but a qual book and I was the friggin scum of the earth! At the time I was 145# and 5'7" and this guy scared the crap out of me! Everyone started laughing, I looked at the Cheifs hoping they'd do something but like I was told... I was the bilge crap of the boat! The following day I recieved my bunk assignment, yep right under the ape along side the port : rudder ram, good bunk but I didn't sleep very well with the ape above me! : During our transit to San Diego and home port change the ape and I became pretty good friends but I had a habit of teasing the other guys that I had my wife and family waiting for me when we pulled in! I really rubbed it in, became a real pain in the ass to everyone. Nothing happened to me until we reach 1 SD. While getting ready to pull in to SD several guys grabbed my naked ass : threw me on my rack and there hovering over me was the Ape. He yelled at me " now you little bastard, we put up with your "I have someone waiting for me and you guys don't crap" for over a month now! The ape put hickies all over my neck, chest,and belly! I mean the big nasty looking ones! Now he yelled : lets see what your wife has to say about those! Hell I didn't know what to do. I tried hiding the hickys, didn't work, so off I went to meet my wife Nancy and son. : She took one look at my hickys and fire came to her eyes. I can explain I told her, yeah right I thought, the guys gave me these!!!! about that time G____the ape walks by, I grab him and plead with him to tell my wife that he did it in order to get back at me. He looks at me, than at Nancy and shrugs his shoulders. Now Nancy is totally pissed, making a scene and about that time all the guys walk up : stand next to the ape and bust out laughing. They explained to her why they did it and that I learned my lesson! I qual'ed within 5 months!
Hate to tell this one on myself, but...... I had been standing the Auxiliary Electrician Aft (AEA) on the 4 to 8s for the better part of the patrol. However, I had gotten my schedule set so that I would hit the rack after breakfast, get up in the afternoon and stand the 1600 watch. Then I'd stay up until the 0400 watch. Well, the XO decides he'd going to hold an "ALL HANDS" field day. I told my Div. Officer that it wouldn't work for me.....If I held the field day, I'd be dragging my ass come 1600. He was of no support or comfort....all hands was all hands... I made it through the field day and relieved the watch at 15:45. I made my rounds and about 1655 I was really dragging. I found a spot outboard the switchboards in AMSUL and sat down on the deck. I remember looking at my watch too! A few minutes later, I opened my eyes, looked at my watch to check the time, and it was just about on the hour---had to go into Maneuvering to take readings. However, as I looked at my watch, I noticed someone had written "AEA SUX" in grease pencil on one arm and something equally insulting on the other arm. I was really stunned. I couldn;t have been "out" for more than a few minutes, but I had no recollection of anything. I quickly rubbed the remarks off my arms and grabbed my clipboard and headed aft for Manuevering. As I walked into the Man. Rm., I was greeted by laughter from my shipmates on the EPCP, SPCP, and RPCP, but only got a cold stare from the EOOW (who was a gung-ho lifer---are your reading this, Mister HarborMaster??). He asked if I had been sleeping? I gave him my best innocent look and said, "Who? Me? Of course not!" He told me to go back and wash my face with cold water. When I got to the after head and looked in the mirror, the same wag who had written on my arms had also written all over my face and forehead. To this day, I can't believe someone could have written all that in a space of 5 minutes and me not ever have woken up for it. To top that off, my Div. Officer chewed me out the next morning in spite of the fact I had warned him I wouldn't be up to par if I had to hold field day!
Never had "half-way" nights that I can remember, but one of the posts reminded me of a "beauty contest" we held at sea. Each gang had to submit a contestant and luckily, "Old Weird Harold" stood sonar, radar and ECM watches with us. I say luckily, because Harold was not a pretty man. We assumed this would put him halfway to being a beautiful woman! We made him a wig from cotton string, (like clothes stops, what was the name of that stuff?) and a skirt from that tarred hemp, whoes name also eludes me at the moment. But the 'piece-de-resistance' was the blinking red light we made up for him that was stuck in his amply deep navel. He cut quite a figure swayin' his hips with a blinkin' belly button, now I'll tell you!
We had a cook on the SS____ who was a mess cook's cook. I came aboard when the boat came into CNSY right after a Med Cruise around May of '64. We left in October and headed north to New London for crew quals & a little school boat. Naturally I was a Mess Cook. Our first night out, the North Atlantic was cranking up a little and most of the crew was a little queasy. The IC Electrician on watch in Control was standing his watch while carrying a bucket. Somehow I was holding up OK. The After Battery was full of guys sipping water and eating soda crackers, staying pretty quiet and taking up space. It was time to set up for evening meal and Gene called me over to the Galley and said, "Let's clear this place out." He was serving Liver & Onions that night and was getting it ready. I went over to start a pot of coffee and G____ came out with a liver that must have weighed 10 pounds. He was rolling it back and forth in his hands and as everyone saw him, he said, "Hey D____, what do you think of this?" and tossed it to me. I caught it, and gave it the once over and tossed it back. "Looks pretty good to me, G____." The AB emptied like the XO had come through looking for a stores loading party and I could get the tables cleaned off and set without interference. We didn't get many people for dinner that night.
Reported in to Engineman C school at Great Lakes late on night. Drew the upper bunk in one of the 2 man roomettes. Had the forward starboard lower skid rack in the ATR on the SS____. When the revelle alarm went off the next morning, I rolled to port to get out of the bunk on my hands and knees and haul ass to the FER for battlestations. Fell 4 feet to the deck and nearly broke my neck. Looked up to see 2 of my "shipmates" from the SS____ laughing their asses off. They had put in an early wakeup to watch me fall out of my damn rack when the alarm went off. It was the same as the GQ alarm on the boat.
Anyway, this is another SS______ story. The gold crew had a kid who had a serious drinking problem, and he would go out in florida like the rest of us and drink until the bars closed and head back to the boat. The bars closed at 4am and we were stationing the manuevering watch at 5am (0500 for you sailor types). Well this kid gets back just in time to assume his watch in the doghouse just below the bridge....seems like he was the JS phonetalker. Well he's the only guy up there, and they are trying real hard to raise him on the phone circuit, so they send the messenger to the bridge and he finds him passed out with the phones on.....sitting on the handle used to pull ones self through the hatch. So the messenger shakes him and when it appears he is awake, he tells them they want him in control.....to talk to them on the JS circuit of course. Well our very tired friend stands up and makes a 180 turn right down the hatch.....It was the most perfectly executed dive of a hatch ever recorded on theSS____......he didn't touch a thing all the way to the bottom.....except he ran out of phone cord when his feet were a couple feet from the bear trap.....WHUMP! He landed in a heap.....good thing nobody was under the hatch....he'd have killed them....well the aux forward hollered to the Chief of the Watch......"JOHNSON Down!" (not his real name).....The amazing part of this story, he fell 20-25 feet, only needed a few stiches in his knee, and the skipper restricted him to the boat for 60 days, and they were leaving for the west coast within the week.......I heard they wrote him up for leaving his post without proper relief because the skipper told him if he was drunk on duty one more time he'd boot him out of this man's navy!!
SS___ was on a "northern patrol" somewhere off Kamchatka and I suppose we were to observe the Russians and their war games. I was asleep in the bow compartment when I woke to the sound of 4 "clicks", the sound of 4 detenators for depth charges making contact. I will never forget that sound or the 4 explosions that happened just after. I'm told I jumped from my bunk and put my boots on then my pants and grabbed my shirt and ran from the compartment. All this time more explosions. I truely wake up in control. I'm heading for my battlestation. I'm trying to button my shirt an the conning officer asks what I was doing in control. I mumble something about not being able to button my shirt. More explosions. I'm asked again what I was doing there....I respond, "Battlestations...!" The Conning officer replies that "no one has called Battlestations"....I replied .."Why the hell not..".more explosions. I'm told to go down to the crewsmess and have a cup of coffee and relax.....Right Relax as the loudest sounds I have ever heard are going off around me.....Anyway I go sit in the crewsmess and I know for a fact I was the scaredest I have ever been in my whole life.......The Russians keep rolling on us and we go deep and away and come back later and then they roll on us...this keeps up for over a week......at the end the responses to the explosins is to turn up the sound on the movie projector so we could hear the movies....Ho Hum........The human animal can adapt to anything....
I was fortunate enough to attend the '67 Submarine Ball in Naples, Italy. I was aboard the SS____we HAD been headed for Palma, but we had to come back to Naples for the Ball. It wasn't that we didn't want to go, just that we didn't want to miss Palma! So, what do you do when your best plans are laid to waste? Retaliate!! Our first plan was to "engage" some of Naples finer females to accompany us to the "Ball", knowing full well what sort of debauchery that would turn into!! Thus teaching the "Powers-That-Be" a lesson, "Don't spoil our liberty plans!" Well, that didn't work, when the word got out, they just didn't pay us! No money, no honey! So we went,---- in a bus yet! Ahhh, memories of the "Ball"! I recall some officer%ries of the "Ball"! I recall some officer on the stage announcing that shore staff personnel would be attending with their spouses and that there was to be no kissing or fanny patting!! No sh*t, he said that!! He should not have~!! I remember long lines of boat sailors passing ice cubes from one guys mouth to the next to see how far it got before it melted!! I remember a "spouse" all dressed in a silver lame' (I can't spell it) dress that several of the guys took a fancy to. We also ate a whole potted tree, except the trunk. And all the flower arrangements except the white lillys which were hotter than hell! The band left early when we filled the tuba with swedish meat balls! (Thrown from the audience!) The crowning moment of the evening came when it was re crews from three boats present.) We were crews from three boats present.) We were now all fast friends and quite unwilling to board our respective bus and leave our new found friends! Sooo, we all piled into ONE bus and wouldn't budge out! This driver slowly returned to the base, for whenever the cry went out, "female" starboard side!! The bus would nearly capsize when all hands fell over to it's right side. After being discharged at the gate to the base it was decided that we would confiscate some ship capable of getting us to Palma. (All the guys who had been told us tales of what we had missed!) Our first effort was some small yard oiler (Italian). We had 8 or 10 enginemen there but they couldn't start the thing up! (I think it had a boiler in it or something) Our next idea was to board an Italian frigate, (it was already going, we could see smit was filled with Italians. It took several minutes for them to get up (after the topside watch sounded general what-ever) but they were really pissed once they were up!! Most of us spent a long cold night in some brig until members of our crew came to get us, assuring our captors that we would be drawn and quartered once back aboard our boats! (We were heros! we almost stole a frigate!) What a night!
The XO / Navigator on the SS____ had been an enlisted Marine in an earlier life. He even had the U.S.M.C. tatoo on his chest to prove it, but he tried like hell to keep his shirt on. I think it was because of his association with Marines that he acted like a "hard ass" sometimes. Sometimes it drew a response. The forward head was OOC for awhile and the officers had to use the crew's head. Two of our TM's were cycling aft and see a pair of brown shoes under the door and find out that it's the XO. One of them holds the door, while the other reaches under, graps a handful of pants, and strip him bare-ass. There was a long moment of silence from the head..nothing..while he figured his next move. After a while he's shouting to anyone that could hear him, to call a steward and have a fresh set of drawers brought to him. Of course the word never gets to the Forward Battery. By this time the whole crew knows about the incident and as many as could be fit in, are packed into the crew's mess as he makes his way forward. A loud cheer, cat-calls, clapping erupts as he paraded before us. There were rumors that two weeks basket leave was offered for info leading to the arrest and conviction of the guilty. No way !!
This is just so much fun......another SSBN____story.....We had just come out of the yards in Mare Is. and we had made the transit to the east coast for DASO. After a few trips in and out they put supports for the tallest mast I'd ever seen on the side of the sail. Big tubes 8-10" across and bolted top and bottom to the sail. We went to sea, and ran a days worth of drills and were headed back when I got off watch and headed to the mess decks. There wasn't a contact for many miles around us. I had just been served a bowl of food when the hull started getting hammered as if we'd been hit by another ship. Hell, I was turn counting that noise, and I wondered how I could have missed such a big ship....Shortly after this noise started, the collision alarm sounded. We rigged for flooding, slowed the boat and what ever we hit was behind us or somewhere.....sonar was swearing there wasn't a contact for miles......We surfaced, sent guys topside.....there wasn't any sign of damage....none....not ah......I can't remember being any more scared in my life, as I was when it happened....Well, it turned out it didn't get passed to the OOD that we had a 12 knot speed restriction because of those mast mounts, and they went into resonance at about 19 knots......beat the hellout of the sail, and scared a couple hundred guys with in an inch of their life. Looking back on it, it was funny as hell, but I am hear to tell you it was a frightful few moments.......
This is a Diesel Boats Forever Story. It's "67 and I report aboard the S____. She's just back from God knows where but it's been a long one, no one is talking about it, and the boat is going into the yards at Bremerton. Not only am I a non-qual, but this crew is very tight and I'm not part of it and there ain't no way I'm gonna be. So I'm sitting there in the yeoman's shack, typing up reports for Rickover - they put me there because I was a college graduate and they figured I could type - which was wrong. Now this is not what I had expected or wanted. I went into submarines wanting one thing: "Run Silent Run Deep." I wanted the "Bungo Straits." I hadn't expected nuclear power. I hadn't expected everything to be so clean. So I'm doing my work and one night I get the four to eight topside watch. I'm standing there and the sun comes up and there across the harbor is the most beautiful submarine I'd ever seen. A Balao class with a nice new sail. One of the older guys, a chief I believe, brings me some coffee, points at the boat and says: "she's going on a WestPac in about a week." At this point he tells me about swapping - something I didn't know. So I get off watch, head over to the Ronquil, and the topside watch informs me that he lives in Bremerton and has a girlfriend there. We agree to swap. Same time in, same time left, everything's right. Both skippers are happy. The deal's done. I pick up my seabag, head over to the Ronquil and drop down through the forward hatch. There standing in front of me are 3 of the biggest, dirtiest guys I had ever seen, working on one of the fish. They look at me and say, almost in unison: "What the ____ do you want?" "I'm home", I said. A few months later, I'm heading aft through control and there on the chart table is a chart that says across the bottom: Bungo Straits. Man, that was great!
When we were in the Med. Ivan was all over our ass. It was like we had a trowler magnet on the sail. They tried to work is into the coast line. We ran into a Russkie fleet and played sneeky pete with them a while. A couple of hours later we go to test depth and stay there for what seem like a hell of a long time. We were taking on water and the bilge pumps were not keeping up. Not a major flood but water was comming in. It was reported on the XJA the pumps wer not keeping up. The next thing I know we go to silent running and then a half hour later we go to battle stations. My battle station was in the Forward Torpedo Room even though I was a EN. (No Jeffery I was not a non-qual then) I was late getting relived from the engineroom. So I head forward and step in the FTR just when they are loading live torpedos in to the tubes, especially the big green mother. The first thing that go thru my mind is "OH SHIT WE'RE AT WAR". We had been at test depth longer than we had ever been. We were at silent running and Ivan is pissed and we are going to counter with a fish. Now I'm wating for the fireworks Our boat fired a couple of fish, and secured from Battle Stations. I thought that strange no explosions no nothing. I found out later that we were on excercise with a Limey Can. The tubes had already been loaded with dummys, and they were loading the live round in the tubes to get them out of the way. I think I had been out to sea to long that time. Hell I had WWIII already started.
The SSBN_____was my first experience on a boat, and when I reported aboard, I was like any non-qual, scarred sh*tless! Well, it wasn't long after I reported I was down in berthing cleaning the head, when this huge a-ganger comes in to blow the sanitaries. Well, I stood there with a can of brasso in my hand watching and trying to learn how in hell this operation worked.....So from a distance (5 feet) I am watching intently at how he lined up to blow. I could tell a few minutes later that something wasn't quite right as he was tapping the gage repeatedly, and bleeding more air into the tanks......tapping some more.....more air......tap tap tap......more air.....has this really puzzled look on his face when the loudest noise I'd ever heard went off right there in front of me.....Now you got to understand....I hadn't been on that boat for more than a couple days, never went to subschool......I was as green as green gets.....I remember booking out of the head round the corner, up the ladder, round the corner up the ladder.....I mean I was taking them stairs three at a time......I knew the boat had blown up, and I wasn't sinking with it......well, come to find out (long after I even understood) the gage stops were closed, and he just kept pressurizing that tank until the relief lifted....You know the really funny part about this story is I found brasso in the strangest places in the head afterwards! It took me a couple hours to clean up all the brasso and my shorts out! That was the way the TJ welcomed me to the submarine service!
On the SS_____, shortly after I got on board there was a cook by the name of Catfish. (yes Jeffery I was a non-qual at that time). Old catfish had be around since boats were run on gasoline. Any way we were having steak that day. Catfish handout a platter of streaks and the COB Suppy Campbell looks at the platter and send them back in to the cook, and tell him those steaks are all messed up and get something out here we can eat. I remember Catfish sticking his head out the window and telling "Suppy" that is the way we got the steaks from the supply. Suppys reply was "We didn't the G-- D--- thing from supply burnt". I fell in love with the boats at that time.
There was this cook on the SS____. He wasn't there too long. Taught me a lot about how to bake fast. Like, why bother gently piercing the top of the pie dough with a fork when you could just as well shove two fingers in it. Had a major gambling problem. The games went day and night in the crew's mess until this guy lost so much money the Captain had to call a stop to the games. Not only was he a bad gambler, he wasn't too bright. I remember being sent on a movie run with him.. This was '68. I picked up a film called "A Thousand Clowns." It was in black and white - a no no on the SS____ where films were judged first by whether or not they were in color. But the title sounded all right to my boss. So one night we're at sea and the movie comes on. I'm working on Quals so I'm not watching it. About the time the movie ends, I'm heading into the AB for some coffee. This guy is shouting up a storm about what a terrible movie it was. "A Thousand Clowns! A Thousand Clowns," he shouts as he storms out of the crew's mess, "why there wern't even ONE clown in the damn movie!" I was never allowed to go on a movie run after that.(All right, not a great story, but the narrative isn't bad).
I remember a chief cook named "Bubba". Bubba wore his shoes without the heels! I don't know why. Bubba claimed he was so "tight" he couldn't pass strawberry seeds! Bubba would feed us hot dogs and beans for two months before a yard period so he could build up a store of canned hams and coffee to cumshaw with! Vinny the Ginny, great cook! He held the first ever ashtray contest. (The Cobbler was out of ashtrays, and hell, everybody smoked back then) There was a prize for the biggest, the smallest and the most unique! The biggest, (yea, you guessed it, one of those huge sand filled affairs from some hotel lobby, sand and all) weairs from some hotel lobby, sand and all) went to some engineman. The most unique wasn't an ashtray at all, it was a candle in a glass, from some restaurant that somebody had snuffed a butt out in. The smallest prize went to Capt'n Gleason who brought back a tiny cup no bigger than a half dollar with chewing gum stuck to the handle and a butt with lipstick on the filter stuck in it! Vinny was the cook when Shi*ter Van blew sanitaries through the Gaylord hood all over the grill. Van had to clean it up, no help. (Van was an ex-skimmer and a non-qual, you think YOU had it rough!!) One of the boats I was on had a grill affair made from one half of a barrel mounted in a frame work between the teak decking and the pressure hull. We would break it out during swim calls and have a cook-out! Those were the days!! One mess cook sto0AHe was older than dirt and had more time crappin' in the manuverin' room head of the old boats while backin' down, than anyone else had just in the Navy, (and he would gladly tell you about it.) Well, TL had a bad habit of coming back to the boat late, drunk, and tried. To tired to bother to hit the head before hitting his rack, (which was in what we called the goat locker or tem man room. It had been the radar room when Sailfish was a radar picket.) An open hatchway was right in front of the doorway to this room and that is where TL would relieve himself before turning in. Well, this mess cook was the one that had to clean up the mess and after a while he took exception to this job. Returning a bit cranked one night, (before TL returned) he marched into the ten man room, lifted TL's pillow and soaked it down. Tl never pissed down into dry stores again!! Last call to the evening meal!!
The chop came back to the Wardroom after a routing sanitary inspection of crew's mess ready to bust. Everything was perfectly spotless and clean, until they observed a non-rate crank's routine for cutting cake slices. Like a robot, it was:?
1. cut the cake
2. put it on the knife
3. use the right index finger to slide it to the plate
4. lick the finger clean
5. repeat as necessary
This is not a cook story in the real sense but a cook did it and that good enough to fit here. A cook was scheduled to blow the after battery sanitaries around 6 in the morning at sea. He shuts all of the valves except one which is the sink in the galley, which can't be seen where the 225 lbs air valve is located. He lays the air to the tank and unbeknownst to him he is blowing a big shit gyser in the galley. No one was in the galley at the time and he keep on blowing. Finally someone wakes up from a dead sleep in the AFB after all the smell and tell him to shut the ______ air off. About that time I wake up from the smell and it is the only time I couldn't make a decision of what to do in an emergency. 1. Do I try to get out of the AFB and wade thru ankle deep turd punch. 2. Lay in my rack and try to gag it out. 3. Go back to sleep and hope it was a bad dream. God I'll never forget that wave of shit flowing back and forth as we rolled at sea. Hell you could have surfed on the wave. What really pissed me off is everybody in the AFB had to help clean it up.
I can sympathize. In another post I mention this cook who wasn't too bright and who didn't stay on the ball. One of his best moves was to let a mess cook blow sanitaries without proper supervision. We had just departed on a run and the "showers" were filled with all of our fresh vegatables. We called them the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. If I can recall correctly, he left the inboard vent valves in the shower open and blew the sanitaries. Not only did we - mostly I - have to clean up the mess, but all of our fresh produce was lost. Why the skipper didn't blow that second class out the forward tubes I'll never know.
This isn't exactly a stewburner story, but since it affected them, I'll tell it. In '76 Seawolf had just departed on a spec op. We were so loaded down with consumables that if we didn't keep some way on, even with every tank blown dry, we would start going deep. The crew (enlisted only, not those members of the Vacuum Locker) had to walk stooped over because dry foodstuffs were stacked in the passageways with plywood separators. Anyway, about the 3rd week out the ice cream machine broke!! Our noble A-gangers were unable to repair it. Capt _____, not wanting to declare a CasRep situation because of "no @#$%. ice cream again?!?" ordered all o n e h u n d r e d 15 gal cans of powdered ice cream mix to be dumped. . This consisted of over 72 hours of continuous GDU ops. Every messcrank became extremely intimate with that lovely device just forward of the Goat Locker. So the recipe for the world's largest milk shake is: 1500 gal powdered ice cream mix, a large quantity of sea water (the Pacific Ocean was available) and a twin-screwed agitating device. Since Seapuppy was twin-screwed (two screws are better than one!) we just dumped the mix, gave LT _______ the conn (which ensured a circular course would be maintained), and let nature take its course. Thanks for reading! Tom.
We had a chief cook on the Seawolf in '58/'59 by the name of "Hamburger" R__ ____. I was new to the fleet, non-rated & non-qualified, so naturally I was assigned to mess-cook for him._____ would make up the menus with all these exotically named meals but it was still hamburger. I never to this day knew anyone who could cook hamburger so many different ways. This was long before "Hamburger Helper". He had a specially designed hinged board that you dropped a scoop of hamburger into, closed it & the finished product was a ready to cook "salsbury steak". Rumor hads it that he was trying to hold his commissary budget down, for what ever reason, but he was known as "Hamburger" long before I reported aboard. He also did the underarm burger making for anyone he thought he could get to. He constantly ate raw hamburger as he worked with it saying it was the only way that he could tell if it was seasoned properly, besides, it did wonders for his sex life!
On the Lincoln we had a CS2 called "T____", he checked in at somewhere between 200 and 300 lbs. One day he had his gang of mess cooks together and they were all making hamburgers...a real assembly line. One guy was first loader with an ice cream scoom, placing the meat on a piece of waxed paper, T____hitting it with a #10 can and another taking the patty and stacking it. Anyway, a young non-qual comes into crew's mess and asks T____ what he's doing. T____looks at him, picks up the ball of meat, puts it in his armpit and flattens it. He then calmly looks at the kid and says, "Making hamburgers. Come back this afternoon, we're making donuts." I don't think that gut had anything to eat the rest of the patrol.
Bob.... Firstly.... BITE ME We were all non quals. I have a story about a cook whose name was Sam . He was called Sam Bass the "runner". Hell of a cook, great guy, but he wnet over the hill more times than anyone could count. Boast pulls into a port... Sam is gone. The Boats used to have to send search parties out for him... Anyway... We were doing "Northern Ops" and we were "detected " by a surface craft that was not too please that we were where we were and they commenced to drop a little "ordinance" on us... we were already rigged for "quiet" and we had the double hatches up.. all non essential personel were in their ranks and every compartment was on sound powered phones. Sam was preparing sandwitches for the duty section. All of a sudden a hell of a racket broke out and a TM berthing in afterbattery... flipped out...all he kept saying was... "let the brown baggers off the ship"... he was yelling this and started back aft. got into the Fwd Engine Roon and the captain passed the word to "subdue" the individual... the engineers missed his and he started forward. Enter Sam the Runner", this TM bangs around the after battery all the time making a "hell" of a racket, all the while hollering, "let the brown baggers off the ship" This guy is really making a hell of a racket, and now everyone can hear him... the captain orders him subdued.... As he attempts to open the WT door into the control room, he has to bend down and open the dogs.... Sam hit that SOB with one of those Huge soup ladles... cold cocked the TM... Dropped him like a rock....and then, Sam proceeded to open the WT Door and step over the TM with the tray of sandwitches and go forward to hand out his "creations". The captain askes if the person that was making the noise has been subdued, and Sam says... "yep", all the while the TM is crumpled inthe passageway in the afterbattery. I hope this story came out all right... maybe you had to be there
Any nuc in the fleet dreads shiftwork, because it is really the pits when the rest of the world operates on a regular schedule. One of our biggest bitches was that we never got a chance to eat if we were on the midshift. One time we were actually pitied by the engineer, and he sniveled to the skipper until he gave in and got us a cook for mid-rats. Well, maybe not a cook, but at least he was a striker for cook. That's good enough isn't it? The young lad, my barracks roomie, was in the galley fixing us soup and grilled cheese and ham sandwiches while we were going through our preshift brief in the crews mess. One of the nucs in my section was called "Big", mainly because he was about 7 feet tall and 7 feet around and over 300 pounds of hairy hungry nuc machinest mate. Joel was cooking his butt off, getting the grub ready so that we could eat as soon as the brief was over, but miscalculated. We finished before he did, prompting our hero Big to roar into the galley, grab a sandwich off of the top of the stack on the platter, and scarf it down in one bite, yelling all the while for Joel to get his butt in gear because there were a bunch of hungry nucs that had to go back and relieve the watch. On his way out of the galley, Big grabs a second sandwich, and is about halfway through it when he gets to the tables. He got a really funny look on his face, like he'd just discovered that that golden brown pair of bread slices with melted cheese oozing out the sides was actually a warmed up dog turd. Back into the galley he went, only this time the entire watch section is following, to find out why our food wasn't ready, or edible. What we saw was my roomie pouring the cooking oil on the grill to keep the bread from sticking like he was supposed to, out of the one gallon metal can......that read "NON IONIC AIRCRAFT SOAP (CONCENTRATE)". It took Big 3 days to get out of the crapper, and Joel never did get out of the shits. His only physical salvation was that he screwed up often enough that they shitcanned him to a skimmer. And I don't think I ever saw Big take a bite of food bigger than a teaspoon ever again, or swallow that bite until it was complety chewed and tasted. Mid rats are now being served in the crews dinette.
Hey Alex, if you were a real cook you'd be dishing it out first! Well, here goes...we had a mess cook on the Jefferson who managed to mess up the chilli for midrats. We maybe thats a bit harsh, he mis-read the recipe, and used 4 parts red pepper and 1 part black pepper.....just exactly backwards.....was the one and only time there weren't leftovers of chilli after midrats.....man did it have a bite.....the air in that boat was a fowl as I'd ever been exposed to! I dragged the meanest SBD through control, it was the kind where the paint peeled right off the walls.....man what a night! It wouldn't have been so funny if he had been trying to make it that way, but he was sure the crew was going to kill him......Hell it was the best chilli of patrol!! I always thought it wasn't sporting if it didn't bite back.....But this is even one better. We had a cook who would catch a bunch of crap at the end of every patrol about running out of eggs. So the next patrol he ordered twice as many eggs, and to make room for the extra he took the dividers out between the flats. It must have been after halfway night when a strang odor emminated from the Torpedo room......yep you guessed......the worst batch of rotten eggs you can possibly imagine! He and two mess cooks suited up in a canary suits complete with EAB's and went about cleaning that mess up! Wow and you thought venting inboard was bad!!
Well Rick, I am a real cook - still am, but the truth is I can't top the stories I've read so far - can't even come close. We had a Second Class boss, who had tried for first class for 20 years or something like that and kept failing the exam. He really didn't care about cooking much. So there were basically two of us who ran the show, myself, a striker for a while, and my mate Carter, also a striker. I quickly specialized in night baking. Carter was a genius at breakfast - a genius. I mean it. Today, he's one of the biggest banquet managers in the country. Knows his stuff. Both of us were very dedicated. The truth is that the galley ran like clockwork. I do remember a couple of things: the Skipper was very happy because I was the first cook he ever had that understood that roast beef should be rare in the middle. And served without ketchup. This was a major breakthrough in Ronquil culinary history. As was garlic. I made sure we had enough of it.The weak spot was spaghetti. Now I was the only Jewish guy on the boat. (Of course, I didn't take any razing about that. Not from submarine sailors!) Anyway, I knew the spaghetti sucked. So I worked on it one day until, I had to admit, it was pretty good. Well, we had this chief. He was tough as nails. A good man. Wore the combat ensignia from WWII. The spaghetti is served, everyone seems to like it and the chief finishes, heads forward to control and stops at the bulkhead and says in a loud voice of congradulation: "It figures that it would take a Jew to make decent spaghetti on this boat!" That became a mantrum of sorts. But all was not glory. One night I decided "enough of this baking mix. My boys deserve a cake baked from scratch." So I decide to make a prune cake. I mix everything up: flour, sugar, milk, everything. I head aft to the forward engine room and there, outboard of one of the rock crushers is a nice can of prunes marked: "prunes." I put the prunes into the Hobart, mix it up, bake it and wait for dinner. In comes the crew - out goes the cake. I'm standing there in the galley having a cigarette and suddenly everybody starts screaming - in pain! The can should have said "prunes, pitted." I mean, there aren't a lot of places on a Balao class submarine you could hide, but I think I found one. It's the only reason I'm alive today. I had to bring sticky buns to the mid-watch for a week to get some slack on that one.
Got to tell another "Old Weird Harold" story here! _____ _____ was the corpsman on the S_____ and he certainly qualified for weird!! We were dumping trash and garbage one night and the QM in the conn was in the line below the conning tower hatch, when the guy up in the nav level dropped a GDU can. It hit the QM on the head and laid his scalp wide open. We lugged him down to the after battery and someone went and woke up Old Weird Harold. Harold appeared with kit in hand, wearing cut-off dungrees, no shirt and a cluster of chicken bones and feathers tied around his neck!! We ST's fed the QM 190 proof to steady his nerves while Harold shaved his head and sewed him back together! Sewing was interspersed with voo- doo chants and dances. It was a festive occasion, all and all! The QM lived and his hair grew back by the end of the cruise.
What is it about "DOCS" that make them famous drinkers? Is it something they teach in corpsman school? My story is about "Doc" _____ on the USS C____. We happened to be doing daily ops out of Gitmo and this one particuliar day we had to rig the ship for impact as we were going to be a "target" for the "skimmers". To refresh your memories, when one is a target, the diesel boats have to install the depth charge dogs and the " Doubler Hatches".(Remember, those heavy SOBS the took four men and a boy to install?) The person that installed the "depth charge" dogs and the person the person that checked "rig ship for dive" missed the fact that the afterbattery hatch was closed on the regular dogs and then the "depth charge" dogs were installed and they were the only thing holding the hatch closed. This left about 2in. open space all around the hatch. The actuator for the hatch indicator was held closed by the depth charge dog. (hence, a "normal board") It was 0 dark thirty when we rigged ship so no light was visible around the open portion of the hatch. We go to sea and as "luck" would have it, we were instructed to loiter on the surface for the skimmers to show up. (Probably so they could get a visual Posit on us). We were not even able to make our trim dive. It was about 0700 when we finally got the word that we could dive, and that just happen to coinside with breakfast going down in crews mess. Doc Myers was there, hung over, trying to "choke" down some breakfast, when the diving alarm sounded. We dove and green water started coming into the "people" tank and Doc said " Some one pass the word, flooding in the afterbattery, get something to block the batteries, and let me know if you need help, I feel like hell" This was all done without missing a mouthful of his breakfast. Needless to say, that was another in a long line of "five alarm" dives that has gone down in the annals of Diesel Boat History. "That is no SH--!!
Well, I'll give you a story of courage...........We were standing-off the coast due to a hurricane blowing through, and on a diesel boat, that meant not cruising around under 200 feet of waterwith manufactured air like our "nut-less nuke" brothers, but 1/3 bell on both screws, steering into the swells on the surface with main engines cranking through the snorkle, since the main induction was sucking so much water that the bildge pump couldn't keep up with it. The conning tower hatch was closed and dogged with two lookouts in the periscope shears ( platforms between the exposed housings for the periscopes, ECM Mast, Radar mast, and Snorkle mast ) that the lucky lookouts stood on. Needless to say, they were wearing "safety" harnesses secured to the shears. These were required so that when the boat submerged into a wave ( and it did every 45 seconds or so ) the lookouts wouldn't be washed overboard. To this day I don't understand what in the hell they could have seen or reported if they had seen something, because the O.D. was on periscope watch inside the conning tower ! Those of us who were required to stand lookout watch were convinced that the "safety" belts were meant to ensure that once we had drowned, they wouldn't have to go very far to locate the bodies. If we timed the waves correctly, we had just enough time to: shout a continuous stream of descriptive adjectives and expletives describing the O.D.'s mentality, and take several breaths before being submerged again for what seemed to be a minute or more, but in reality was only 45 seconds. Needless to say, we stood full watches and were exhausted when we came below (timed beautifully so that the maximum amount of water would flood down the hatch onto the helmsman and the O.D. ) and headed directly to the galley. We stripped bare and were promptly were given "medicinal" brandy by the pecker-checker to ward-off any evil that may befall us, as if drowning wasn't evil enough. This is when the courage I was speaking about occurs. We both dove into a plate the cooks had prepared us of pork chops, mashed potatoes and gravy. This wonderful, greasy smell was making everyone sick or queasy, but since we had enough fresh air for the past four hours, it didn't seem to bother us and we promptly wolfed it down. A Radioman who got seasick just going beyond the sea bouy walked aft through the messdecks, going to the can to puke again and saw us naked, eating what was making him throw his guts up (he was truely the first person I've ever seen that was GREEN) and he did what I've only seen in movies. Projection Puking. Shot a mouthfull through the after battery door into the sleeping quarters dousing several people and still had the presence of mind to tell us we were very perverted people. Doc was laughing so hard he was crying..... Now that Radioman was brave ! He got off of the boats as soon as we pulled back into port.
"THAT'S NICE THAT THE ELECTRICIAN AND A-GANGERS WORKED ALL NIGHT TO DET THE DIESEL GENERATOR READY, BUT WE'RE NOT GETTING UNDERWAY UNTIL EVERY TOASTER IN THE WARDROOM PANTRY IS WORKING" quoted during Tautog's DustPac '85-86 Deployment %~(
We had about 45 Non Quals who always managed to be the first one in the chow line. The first and only ones to take a hot shower. The Ones always "Smokin' & Jokin'" and keeping the crew up. The Ones who always got out of Field Day and shipboard drills. The Ones that were always the first off the Boat in Port. Of course I am talking about SEAL TEAM 2. That's the way it was onboard the USS John Marshall SSN-611. And always the first for "Swim Call" of course we did have two Seal Delivery Vehicles onboard. What else could they do when not playing "Super Squid"? Respect the rest of the crew? Nah....
We did our overhauls at Mare Island. The barges there did not have, and did not deserve, the designation: "living." Naturally, most of us had to stand "fire watches." This was something I never quite understood because, looking around, there never seemed that there was anything that would burn. But the barges themselves - pure hell. I don't know if they were ever cleaned. I'm sure that the berthing quarters of 18th century English frigates were cleaner. I recall trying to sleep in one of the "racks" when I pulled the duty and felt bugs and cockroaches crawling all over me. Literally. So, I gave it up. But overhauls at Mare Island had its upside. Almost everyday I would put in that my gang was having a "situation conference" and we would split to San Francisco. I had a girlfriend there up on Twin Peaks. No one seemed to care about anything. Back at the "barge" one morning at muster, the skipper said: "Listen men, I know you guys have trouble with saluting. But would you try not to wave to the captain of the destroyer (in dry dock near us) and say "how you doin?" Next to being out, overhauls were the next best thing.
I also did an overhaul in Mare Is. It was a wonderful place, and even better once I got a place in Napa to live. The barges were the pits, but the duty was OK, we also stood fire watches, and I guess I taught myself how to weld there....just by watching them welders for so long......We had a funny incident one night, a narrow gauge crane was going to pick up a DI water tank that was sitting topside aft, and I guess he really didn't have the reach, as he simply winched the crane down on the boat. Just before it reach the point of no return the door on the back of the crane swung open and the operator did a less than graceful swan dive out the door.....nobody hurt, and in an hour, it was all cleaned up, but seeing the look of terror on the operator face as he jumped for his life was funny in retrospect (it could have killed him had the crane fallen to the bottom of the dock). I spent a fun year and a half in Mare Is. was some of the best duty I had......
I'am looking at a picture of the Motel /Hotel that you were talking about. Just below the place is an open air bar where many and I mean many of a sud has been downed. My old throttleman did a head dive into the rocks off of that bar. Damn near killed him. Never been in the hotel but I loved St Thomas. You could always lay a sucker story on people of the cruise ship and they would buy you drinks until you pissed a Planter Punch. If the mule that packing my scanner ever get in I'll send you this picture. I got to throw in this St. Thomas no shitter. One of the EM on the T-Fish had the XXX movie which everybody on the boat has seen. Well he decides to show it again in S.T. so they throw up a sheet on the sail, and run a cord to the projector. ITS MOVIE TIME! When we started there was about 10 to 15 of the crew on the pier watching the movie. When the movie went off I turned around there must have been 60 to 70 people on the pier watching. They came out of the wood works.
On S___ [SS-___] we didn't take showers while at sea, period. But that was 1943-44. The stills we had could only make enough water for the battteries and drinking. Someone mentioned the old book BLOW NEGATIVE. I had it several years ago. One unforgettable scene was this submariner, who was the main character in the book. He is having dinner with his fiance at a swanky New York resturaunt. All through the meal he is making love talk and she keeps asking "What's that funny smell?". He replys "What smell, I don't smell anything." Only a DB sailor would understand, the humor was so suttle, I about split a rib. PS. WE did wash down in mineral spirits or alchohol. Wasn't any big deal because everyone smelled alike and we did have more important things to do.
We did a 34 day NATO exercise once..no stills, no showers..wartime simulation..all that stuff. This was in the mid 60's. Our first port was Portsmouth England. A bunch of us are topside on the forward deck as we're steaming in. Some on the flangeheads had not seen daylight for over a month. We're all wearing sunglasses because of the brightness and I make some comment like "I've never neen to England before, but this place really stinks". After a brief moment, reality set in.
Then there was P___. All the stewards, andother cook, an EM, and an EN would all gather up in the mess hall and play Mah Jong and speak their mother tounge. Not P___. Always spoke English. His version of English, anyway. Got a new Steward. We were on a living barge in the yard at Pearl. Big galley. Kid comes in and asks P___ for more biscuits and gravy for the ward room, in Phillipino. P___ ignored him. Kid asks again, louder. Same result. Kid got real loud and pulled P___'s shirt sleeve. P___ grabbed a butcher knife, swung it around rattling off piping and stuff and yell at the top of his lungs "you gonna talk to me you gonna talk in English, you Pillipino sumamabich. Kid hauled it to the ward room. Supply Officer (they weren't chops back then) came down, got the buscuits and gravy and told P___ to settle the ___ down, he was scaring the help.
We had a cook named/called G___ on the SS___. We loved it when he took night baker duty. He made special pizzas and pastries for the mid-watch. Threatened to "cut your _____fingers off" when an 8-12er reached for the pastry while playing poker one night. Anyway, ol' G___ liked his booze and ladies and let it keep him on the beach in Yokosuka a couple of times. First time, the captain restricted him to the boat for a week. Week doesn't go by and he's gone again. This time, captain tells him to stay below decks because the top-side watch will have orders to shoot if he even makes a move toward the brow. After a couple of days, he can't take any more. He starts up the After Battery hatch after breakfast. Meanwhile, the hungover EM striker relieving the top-side watch pulls the 45 out of the holster, ejects the clip, pulls the slide, REPLACES the clip, drops the slide, and squeezes one off. The gun goes bang just as G___ gets his head above the hatch rim. He screams like a dog and falls in a heap on the deck at the foot of the After Battery ladder. But the boy never went AWOL again.
Here's 1 of a hundred stories. I was an EM on the boats. I never was interested in standing watch on the sticks in manuvering. To boaring. I stood the IC watch, which ment I would just have to check all compartments once every hour to see if anything was wrong with electrical gear. When on the surface the OD would always ask me to bring him up a cup of coffee. That ment climbing a 14ft. ladder with cup in hand. Needless to say a lot of coffee was left on the ladder. You know, pitching sea and such? Well once I delivered to him a full cup. He was delighted. When asked how I managed to get it up to him full I said " It was easy. When I was at the bottom of the ladder I took a big mouthfull of your coffee and when I got to the top I spit it back into your cup. The cup and coffee made a deep 6 and he always requested someone else to bring him coffee from then on.
During the mid-watch one night the ICman of the watch this nut job decides to make sanwiches for anyone who wanted one in the contrlo room....He took the orders, but the COB who is a _____________or something like that dosen't eat pork. Well L____ make the COB a Pork Chop sandwich. Brings them up to control hands them out and slowly starts out of the room towards aft. battery, when the COB screams out SOB Jinks I'll kill you!! I could not believe how successful a man could be in trying to avoid someone who is looking for him on a deisel boat. L____ stayed out of the COBs' way for about 2 days until he calmed down....He was really pissed at L____.
On T_____in the mid 80s it was oncoming section with the head-of-the-line privleges and everyone else was first come first served with chiefs cutting in as they felt even if they weren't oncoming. Most of the chiefs would wait except for that little Napoleanic TMC from Texas. I recall an occasional PO1 that was new onboard trying to get to the head of the line because that was how it was on his last boat. Sorry bub, back of the line and go down and under to get there! I tend to remember other stories of how on some boats the cranks would actually take the chiefs orders and serve them. How was it on your boats?
During breakfasts we would write our order on a scrap of paper and give it to the cook and then take a seat. My roommate was generally the breakfast cook so all I had to do was call out a code word and then pick up my breakfast ahead of everyone else and most of the time no one would know.
Once we had LTJG M_____ wait in line with us because he wanted to avoid the CO because of what happened in port the previous weekend and he kept refusing to take head of the line. ENG found out about it and made him stop and go back into the Wardrooom. Too bad. That guy was fun to be around.
While in Pearl in '60 I was on the M______ SS___. It was my first boat so after several months of hard k I earned my Dolphins. Now being the red blooded boat sailor that I was, it was necessary that I follow with tradition and head to Hotel street so that I may consume my dolphins in the traditional way, out of a BIG glass filled with any booze found in the bar. Now about ten or so of my shipmates made sure that I was able to down my dolphins in one big gulp. Well, needless to say, we had a very good time and then decided to cruise the strip and see if any young ladies needed to be saved from surface targets. Before we were able to navigate very far down the strip the good old H.A.S.P. spotted us and decided that crawling down the sidewalk was not the normal mode for sailors to make any headway. (shows you how little they understood about Boat Sailors). So being the kind souls that they were they gave us (four guys) a ride to their headquarters in a patty wagon. Well the first mistake was they did not stop along the way to allow us to relieve ourselves. So without proper facilities we decided to use the back of the patty wagon. On arrival the HASP opened the door to let us out and found the strange odor coming from the back of the wagon. Upon discovering this they wanted to know who the culprit was that made the mess. Not having very good memory we could not decide what had happened or who might have done it. We also stated that it must have been that way before we got in. Not believing us they decided that one of us had to hose out the back of the wagon and handed the hose to one of the guys with orders to clean it out. Not wanting to miss any of the mess he promptly hosed down the SP gang and then we were in big trouble. They locked us up and required a representative of the Captain would have to come and get us out and they would figure out the charges later. Well they sent the duty chief down to get us and the SP was not very pleased that was all that they could send to get us was a Chief. So they pissed the chief off over this whole affair and he hauled us back to the boat and told us to sober up before we went back on the beach. Nothing ever came of the whole thing and we went on our merry way.
When I was stationed in Charleston in the '60's, I was requested to stand shore patrol duty. I really didn't want to because I believed it was counter productive to harass sailors for what sailors do. Well, we went to every bar on the strip looking for drunk Navy personell. I am happy to report that I never found a boat sailor who had so much to drink that he had to have his liberty cancelled. As a matter of fact, if some other SP claimed a boat sailor was drunk and arrested him, I waited for my first opportunity, tested the alleged offender, discovered that my counterpart had erred, and released the person with a strong apology and a hint to stay hidden for a few hours. Needless to say, when the higher ups found out about my summary dispositions, I was never put on SP duty again.
Good submariner liberty Frog. Glad to see the tradition carried on. During WWII it was standing orders in the Pacific Fleet, from no less than Nimitz himself that all boat sailors could not be held in a brig more than one night and must be returned to their boats by the next morning. Too many were figureing that if they could get into enough trouble they would miss the next run, so they would deliberately screw up and stay AWOL. You must understand that we always felt that the next run would be the "last" one. It was normal to see the Shore Patrol wagon pull up on the dock, alongside the boat, usualy as we were having "Quarters". As the COB called out the names from his little black book he would go over to the pile of humanity and check it out, identifying bodies as it were. When he finished he would turn to the Captain, salute and report," All hands present or accounted for sir". The skipper would respond "Very well. Carry On." He never even glanced at the body pile. Each room would collect their bodies and sober them up to turn to. Nobody ever "Missed the boat."
While innocently walking back to the Boat in New Orleans during Mardis Gras, three of us were suddently pounced on by not shore patrol but some king of "unified military police", mostly air force weinies, for "being in a trouble zone." After three hours in the back of a paddie wagon, we were hauled off to North Rampart St. Jail where we were reunited with most of our crew. The Skipper retrieved us about dawn. Back at sea,we had "abandon ship drill." The skipper said traditionally someone had to go over the side, but since it was so cold, we would make a symbolic gesture, and threw all our arrest records in the water.
When I was on the S________('59-'62) in Pearl we used to ride broncs and bulls at Saddle City in Wiamanalo. I had a Harley"74" at the time & "Shorty" Knight & I decided to take in the action on Hotel St. after the rodeo one week-end. I think we'd won a little money & were in a partying mood(as most of us were, the infrequent times we hit port). We partied hardy & were heading back to the base on the Nimitz by the pineapple factory when a local cop on a three wheeler began to give chase. He took exception to the fact that we were raising hell with some "skimmers" in a convertable. I told "Shorty" to hang on as no three wheeler was going to catch us & away we went. We were doing ok until we got up by Tripler(trying to lose him) and hung a left, the street was wet & down we went. I was just getting the bike back up & hollering to "Shorty" to jump back on when a hand reached over my shoulder & turned the key off. Needless to say, we were turned over to the HASP & spent the night in the cooler. The next morning we were headed for WestPac and the bike got sold.
When we were in the shipyard in Charleston, 1964, the local police busted up a painting contracting ring which consisted of CSNY yardbird painters who got all their paint from the yard, had it forklifted over the fence onto trucks and loaded in warehouses in town. Makes the low bid a little easier attain. A shipmate of mine watched 2 yardbirds trying to figure out how to get a 30 foot extension ladder off the base. Finally, one of them lashed it up under his car with about 6-8 feet sticking out under his back bumper. The second one then pulled his car up behind and pushed the first one, faking car trouble, up to the main gate. The marines just waved him through.
One of my favorite photos from the Vallejo was during an extended refit period (ERP), when our ship's photographer get a great shot of a bubba racked out in the torpedo tube mud tank, wedged in between the two upper tubes. During New Construction on the J_________ we had a fire outboard the starboard torpedo tubes when bubba caught some lagging on fire. Seems there was a pipe holder they forgot to put in before all the tube hardware went in, so he had his welding rod taped to the end of a broom handle and was trying to snake that back in amongst the pipes to get the job done. The shift sup's response? "Well, sometimes they gotta do that." Like I told my A-gangers, bubba may build the boat, but bubba doesn't get underway.L
I remember one time in the yards at EB (Nautilus getting a reduction gear change) a yard bird came through the Reactor Compartment and had a bucket with three paint brushes in it. I thought he was here to paint a little lead paint in the hot spots. Guess what? He bragged to me that he had used the same bucket for 9 years. I believed him ..... the paint was rock hard and the brushes had been there a verrrry long time.
Mine was a jarhead. And did those SPs get pissed when they handed the OD the papers that said they had me for being D&D and he looked at me and said were you disorderly and I responded no sir, I beat the s*** out of a jarhead and he said that's ok, are you drunk and I said not anymore these a**h**** have had me locked up too long and he says go back over and I asked the SPs for a ride to the gate.
Your paint story reminds me of a time when the Jefferson was in Pearl, don't remember why, but she was tied up at the sub piers, and the Sea Dragon was tied up just in front of us. The Sea Dragon was called the "Shore Dragon" as she always broke on Sea Trials and spent another month getting ready for the next attempt. Some of the deck gang had been out scrounging paint and had come across some epoxy yellow paint and being sailors, they stole it figuring that there would be some kind of use for it before we left. Well a couple guys got the bright idea that the Sea Dragon was a lemon and what better way to tell the world than a Big yellow Lemon painted on the rudder. So as the plan progressed, they realized if they simply painted it on, it would get painted over then next day, so they went down to a art store and bought several large containers of black poster paint. As night settled in, some of the deck gang went over to distract the Sea Dragon topside watch while a couple guys already in a skiff mixed the Yellow paint with it's hardener, in fact they mixed it quite "hot" so it would set up really fast. Then they paddled over to the Sea Dragon's rudder and painted a huge yellow lemon. Because they mixed that paint so hot, it didn't take very long before it was cured enought to paint the black poster paint over it......Took a bunch coats, but finally it looked like it did before. We quietly paddled back, and then we just waited until she sailed.......as it turned out, she sailed after we left, and we only heard about the RAGE the skipper of the Dragon had when he saw that big lemon on "his" rudder upon surfacing and looking back after a full rudder order! I would love to have been a fly on the wardroom wall that day!
That was hilarious! It reminds me of when we arrived in Charleston to decomm, we were sitting along side the tender and someone left a chipping hammer topside. Well, the topside watch being ever vigilant in his duties, pick up said hammer before someone tripped on it. But since he was bored, he decided to do something with it. The CO was not amused when he came in the next morning and there was "FOR SALE, CHEEP" chipped out on the side of the sail.
In a lighter vein, maybe some of you have some specific memories of the kinds of fun that innocent submarine sailors used to have in Hong Kong. Here's one example: When I was on TUNNY, one of my shipmates was the legendary Don O'Shea. Don had somehow acquired a large amount of cash ($7,000 sticks in my mind -- that was a lot of money in 1968). He made a vow to spend it all on our upcoming visit to Hong Kong, but to spend it only on "services." Submarine sailors having notoriously dirty minds, we thought he meant hostitutes, but (in addition) he also engaged a helicopter to lift him off the boat to start his liberty, a chauffered limousine, and hired a three-piece Chinese "marching band" to go down the main street of Wan Chai, right in front of the Ocean Bar, playing their own renditions of "Stars and Stripes Forever," "Anchors Aweigh," etc. Six days later, Don came back to the boat broke and happy.
A few post down, i noticed someone used the term "BOHICA", which as I am sure we all know is navy for bend over, here it comes again. This brought to mind several other naval acronyms, such as "WETSU", "DILLIGAFF", "SNAFU" and "FUBAR". Can anyone think of any others?
I'm so short I can sit on a dime and my feet won't touch the deck. I'm so short I need a parachute to get outta my rack...and I'm in the bottom rack.
On my last run I sat down with a calendar and calculated how many hours I had left in the navy and wrote it on each day remaining on that calendar. In fact I wrote it in 4 increments so when ever I got up to go on watch, I'd just look at the calender and note the appropriate line and Hell even I could do the math for 6 hours.....I really P*SSED OFF my division, because I would just say "hell I don't have time to do that, I only have 3548 and 16 minutes left in this man's Navy......". Oh it would wind them up! Built stamina and moral.....their stamina, and my moral!
I was standing the midnight to 0400 topside watch on the T_________ in Charleston S.C. one of those hot : night where not much was going as usual. We were on a remote pier away from pier November if I : remember right. I didn't think the commies were going to sneak up on me at anytime soon so boredom set : in at about 0015 that is when the fatal mistake started to take shape. Now if you have been in Charleston : in the summer time you know the mosquitoes are a problem and this night was no exception. Well those : damn thing keep working on my hide, and I just couldn't let this pass without making a entry into the : topside watch log. 0032: mosquito problem heavy tonight, but I couldn't leave it there no, old Cool Bob : had to make a few more entries into the log about the bug war that was being waged there on the topside. : When I say a few more entries I mean just a few more like 2 1/2 pages in the topside log. It sounded like : the Battle of Pearl Harbor was be waged topside. Most of the entries were in the form of: : 0056:Large Mosquito bearing 283, 3 O'clock high : 0114: broadside hit. : 0123: fish in the water : 0146: Second wave of Squadron Delta incomming : 0221: Man battle stations Bug warfare : 0247: Casualty taken : 0332: Direct hit to the sail by B-52 bug : This went on for the whole four hours until I was relived at 0400 and I turned in to my rack. That : morning I was setting the after battery eating breakfast when a QM1 can in and told me the XO wanted : right now. By the look on his face I could see that there was some urgency to the situation and I should go : forward as soon as possible. When I went into the XOs compartment and sit down he handed me the : topside log open up to my entries of the night. G** D**** are these you entries. All of a sudden I was : getting a grip on the why I was there and the gravity of the situation. Well I won't bother you with the : details because it was quite lengthy in nature but it mostly revolved around the fact that the Topside Log is : a part of the ship log and how in the hell is this going to look and something to the effect about the : responsibility of the watch and my irresponsibility. Oh yes there were a few questions to me about having : my head up one of the chosen body orifices, which I readily agreed was the condition in question. Well : this little talking to lasted almost 30 minutes which seemed like a lot longer (I mean one hell of lot : longer) than the usual 30 minutes. The last part was I was telling the OX you'll never catch me doing that : again, NO SIR, I'M GOING TO BE ONE SQUARED AWAY SAILOR YOU CAN BET ON THAT. I : will all way remember his last words. "G** D*** Berry that was funny but it was stupid but funny, now go back to the engineroom and turn to. But I had the last word "YES SIR"
During the first WestPac I made on the S____ we had an XO that we called "The Fly". He got that nickname because he always wore those one-way mirrored, wrap-around sunglasses. Plus he was kind of short and squatty, so he looked like an insect. We were up in Korea and took on a platoon of ROC marines to do some manuvers. These guys were really into trading and brought a lot of lighters, patches, etc. to trade. They also put on a martial arts show in the galley, breaking boards and bricks. After the mission was over and we took these guys back to port, a lot of stuff started to turn up missing. Turns out these guys had gone through the boat and had stollen everything they could before they left. One of the things they took was the XOs new 35mm. He had a fit, screaming and yelling at everyone to find his camera. Had the whole ship searched. Never found it.
The following is a list of tools that can probably be found in any M-div toolbox on any boat. See if you have or remember these (add to to list!): A wire brush with all the bristles bent back rendering unusable unless you turn it on its side. Three or more wrench roll sets, missing the 7/16", 1/2", 9/16", and 3/4" wrenches, but boy do we have a bunch of 11/16" and 13/16" wrenches available. A socket set missing the same sizes as mentioned for the wrenches. When a 9/16" socket is found, it is a 1/2" drive and the only working ratchet is 3/8". Of course, there is an adapter to go from 1/2" to 3/8", but none vice versa. A wrench modified by being cut in half, leaving a 2" handle. Wouldn't do any good anyway, someone used it as a slugging wrench. A ball peen hammer with a broken handle. If the handle isn't broken, it's cracked and held together with duct tape. A four pound sledge on a short handle. Used to "calibrate" them valves. Affectionately call "Thor", "Hey, go hand me Thor, this handwheel is stuck" A dried up bottle of graphite suspended in isopropanol (aka Neolube). A tube of prussian blue, with the crimped end blown open so every tool on the bottom of the toolbox has a greasy blue coating. Stainless steel pipe caps (FME or foreign material exclusion covers). Some still have useful Grade "A" stickers with the QA guys initials on them, covers your butt on those 2 AM repair jobs when NR comes to visit. Three broken ratchets. Various size ferrules from those Swagelok fittings we weren't suppose to use. Most are bent, some are still connected to a cut off piece of tubing with the hopes that we "may need a 1-1/2" section of tubing with the ferrules still on it" Special tools that no one seems to know what they are or how they work. For example, the funky spanner used to take the bottom of the DeLaval purifier bowl off. The cradle of the SSTG shaft lifting device, no one knows where the rest of it is. A hacksaw blade with a big wad of HP tape wrapped around one end as a handle. Had to use the HP tape, the hacksaw handle is missing the little tabs that normally hold the blade. A piece of string. A wad of Kimwipes that were once used in an attempt to clean the prussian blue off the bottom of the tool box. A few QA 5 tags A primary valve cap vent screw, source unknown, must have been free released, its been here since I came aboard! A few slightly crushed primary valve cap O-rings, see previous comment. Speaking of O-rings, there are a few of them in opened packages, the cure date was removed when the package was opened. A few deck plate screws, some are cross-threaded. A roll of RadCon tape. A light dusting of tri-sodium phosphate from the ELTs weighing chemicals on the M-div workbench. An impact wrench, brand new, never used because it won't fit anywhere you need to use it. Pea grinder wrenches, taped together. A few Yarway steam trap parts, including a steam cut cap. A FME cover formerly used as a mixing bowl for that messy red lead, graphite and mineral oil anti-sieze. A pair of lockwire pliers with the jaws damaged. Lots of little pieces of lockwire. A bunch of swaged fittings assembled to make a little piping system by the CNTP (Chief of Naval Tinkering and Puttering) One of those long bladed screwdrivers that was stolen from the E-div toolbox. The shaft is bent from use as a pry bar, what the hey, its not ours! Nut drivers, also stolen from E-div toolbox in revenge for them losing the only functional ratchet. A 1/2" wrench that spent three months between frames 54 and 55 in the engineroom bilge, corrosion has rendered it useless except for training on chloride pitting corrosion. A shackle that hasn't been load tested since the boat was commisioned in 1974 (1956 if you were on my boat) A large chunk of lead, used to hammel the bejesus out of the gasket material with those dull gasket punches, also in the bottom of the tool box. Zincs, enough said A dried up tube of that non-hardening gasket sealant. A 15 inch strap wrench with a 6 inch strap. 19/32 " wrench. One large bastard file with HP tape on the handle. A glass cutter. Packing pullers with the end broken off. You had a strap on your strap wrench? Most of ours were missing the straps! We had a crescent wrench, but it was too big to put in the tool box. The damn thing was 48" long and wieghed 40 lbs. It was mounted next to our diesel gageboard. No one ever new why we had it, but it kind of set the tone that the engineroom belonged to M-div. I used it once during a repel boarders drill. The specwar guy who managed to infiltrate the engineroom one night on the midwatch laughed his butt off when I confronted him with it. During the critique, it was pointed out that there probably wasn't enough room in ERLL to swing the damn thing! We also kept a special roll of HP tape for playing "Bowling for Lower Level Watches." The ERUL watch would call to ERLL and ask him to come to the aft ladder. From the other end of the ER, we would bowl the roll of tape just as the first strands of ERLL watch hair poked out of the hatch. If you put the right spin on the tape, it would bean the ERLL right between the eyes! Those guys never learned, we did this to the same guys two or three times a watch! Then there was the Drill Index that is missing all the small bits in the front row (lost in the prussian blue), the medium size bits are all dull, and the large size are all in the index upside down with burrs on their shanks, except the 1/2" which is in the condensate bay bilge. I remember that screwdriver. The big yellow screwdriver, with the handle that someone had used a visegrip (registered trademark) or a pair of pliers on the handle, raising sharp bits of plastice so that it hurt when you tried to put some torque on it. Usually remedied by copius quantities of duct tape. This is a no s##ter. One patrol when things were boring ,duke was the helmsman. He decided to try and make a circle without being caught. He was about 190 degrees off course when the CO. entered control. The CO. looked at the compass , looked up at OOD, then back at duke and said "duke what are you doing 180 degrees off course?". Duke very comley looked at the CO. and said "coming back from 170 degrees off course, sir.". With that the CO. looked at the DO. and the OOD. shook his head and left control. Needless to say this became a skectch for our mid patrol follies. Duke was never punished, and we always got alot laughs about it. And that's a no s##ter!
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