Chapter Five
So you’re out on the forward catwalk[58] hanging out fifty feet above the water with a life jacket and a helmet on, after the chief came down and got your ass out of your rack which is a little seven-foot by three-foot box they stick you in when they’re done with you for the day, yours is a bottom rack you got when the third class who had it finally got off the boat and out of the Navy and he told you that day was like taking the biggest shit of his life it felt so good[59].
Anyways it’ll be another two years and nine months before your enlistment is up, so you have all that time to enjoy the bottom rack, which is a pretty good deal because you just have to roll out of there in the morning, but the guys who rack above you step on your sheets all the time, especially the guy in the top rack whenever he needs to get anything out of his coffin locker which is the space below your mattress that flips up and has a little drawer.
You have that, which is about eight inches deep, and a stand-up locker if you’re lucky, and that’s all the space they give you on this 600-foot long boat, but when you pull your curtains it’s all yours, you have a little light in there and a three-inch deep mattress and a scratchy wool blanket that you’ve gotten used to, and you lay in there rolling back and forth when the ship is rocking big and wonder what it would be like if it one time kept going all the way over and the water would rush in to the compartment and that’s where you’d die.
There’s a hole in the hull, a long crack in the wall of the head where the tug hit the boat the day you pulled out of Morehead City and if you sit outboard to take a dump you can look through it and watch the water run by about ten feet below only don’t sit there when the seas are big because the water sprays in and gets you all wet[60].
The crack runs forward about ten feet from the shitters and into the shower and that’s a good thing when the seas are up because the sea water is really pretty refreshing, especially when you are on water hours and have to take Navy showers where you turn on the water and get yourself wet and then turn it off and soap up and then turn it back on to rinse off and you can use the sea water to rinse yourself off some before you hit the spray again.
You heard that in the old days the toilets were just long troughs with salt water running down them and a big hole at the end and the guys would kind of squat down on them to take their dumps and every so often a wise ass would light a bunch of toilet paper and sail it down from the high end singeing all those hairy asses a chief told you that one morning as you swabbing out the head and bitching about the hole in the hull.
He told you that these old boats were built cheap out of aluminum that burns if it gets hot enough and engines from a World War Two battleship and the only armor is around DC Central where the guys sit and plot out the damage to the boat if you get hit and that’s why a fucking tug can put a hole in you not to mention a Exocet and then he left and you stood there leaning on your swab and thinking about that.
Like the one that hit the Stark[61] that you watched videos of the damage one night on SITE-TV while the DCA[62] explained just how much it would suck if you got hit by one of them and how we all have to watch our asses and practice damage control, and no one laughed much or even talked in the whole dark berthing while you were watching it especially when you could see a sneaker from one of the guys who got killed and you remember when you had sneakers like that – Nike high tops.
So anyways you are out on the sponson and it’s dark because it’s 0330 and the water is slick with barely any waves, but it’s foggy as hell and you can’t see shit as the bow cuts through the soft water, and the rushing sound makes you need to pee and you tell the guy that you are on low vis. detail with that you got to pee and he says whiz over the side and so while he watches out for the first class, you whip it out and take a long pee fifty feet down off the catwalk into the ocean, your pee breaking up and scattering all over the ocean and the hull, and you zip it up just as the first class comes out of the flight deck shelter hatch to come down to you guys to tell you that they are securing the low vis watch, and the Skipper is pissed at the booter ensign who called the watch out and now you spent two hours out on the catwalk, listening to nothing and seeing less, and reveille is at 0600, and by the time you get back to your rack you’ll have only two hours more to sleep tonight and there’s a GQ[63] this morning at 0800.
And a dogging wrench is a big honking steel wrench a foot and a half long that weighs about ten pounds you use to turn the nuts on watertight doors, and when you get back to Deck berthing to crawl into your rack to try to get some goddamn sleep before you got to get back up in about an hour, there’s a bunch of guys around your rack and one of them is holding his head with blood on his fingers and another guy you know is holding a dogging wrench and he is telling the first class that this is the third time that fucking faggot tried to crawl into his rack and so he whacked him.
The lights are all off except the red night lights and the first class and everybody else looks at the guy with his head all bloody with the blood black in the light and you all know that it’s true and the first class looks around and says that the guy must have tripped going up the stairs[64] and knocked his head and he looks around at every body and you all decide, even the guy with the bloody head, that’s true too and the bloody guy goes up the ladder to Med to get his head patched up and you all go back to your racks and the guy you know is telling everybody that he warned the poor fucker for the last time and then you all crawl into your racks and try to get some sleep.
And while you’re lying there in your rack and waiting to go to sleep you think about all the homos on the boat, because everyone knows who they are, and most guys except for some of the chiefs don’t give a shit what anyone does off the boat to whoever they want to do it to however they want to do it, just stay the fuck away from me on the boat[65], and that the gay guy in electronics is probably the best ET on the boat and no one gives a shit, and then you remember the big white bird that floated in out of the fog and landed on the flight deck on the bow just about thirty feet from you when you were out on low vis and stood there in the dark, lit red from the port side bow light while you and that other guy watched and didn’t say a thing, and then he flapped his wings and took off, and you wonder where the hell he came from and where the hell he went and then you fall asleep.
You Are Free Page 5