Sink or Swim

by Steve Watkins

  “Guess not,” he said. “Got my exam before, when I first come in to enlist. They didn’t do that for you?”

  “Oh yeah,” I said, covering. “I just didn’t know if we’d get another one here.”

  “All right, all right, all right!” A navy officer stormed into the room just then and barked at us. “We’re still waiting on a couple of stragglers. The rest of you hit the head out back, and then line up outside and get on the bus, and keep your yaps shut while you’re doing it.”

  I’d been on enough boats in my life to know that the head was the bathroom, so I got in line to take care of business and then spent the next three hours just sitting on the bus outside the recruitment office, not going anywhere, and nobody telling us why. When I finally said something about it to the guy sitting next to me—the same guy as before—he replied, “I heard it was gonna be like this. Hurry up and wait. I guess it’s our official welcome to the navy.”

  I nodded like I knew what he was talking about.

  “Name’s Woody Hudson, by the way,” he said.

  “Colt—” I started to say before I caught myself. “I mean, Danny.”

  Woody gave me a funny look, and I was nervous I’d already blown it and we hadn’t even left Raleigh yet. “I go by Danny,” I tried to clarify.

  “All right, Danny it is,” Woody said with a laugh. “Where you from anyway, Danny?”

  “Outer Banks. What about you?”

  He said he was from Kinston, which was a farming town east of Raleigh I’d heard of. Then he leaned in close. “I ain’t but fifteen,” he said. “And I ain’t never been out of Kinston before, neither. I thought they’d know when I come over last month to the recruitment office, but they just let me sign up. My ma, she signed the papers. She didn’t care I wasn’t seventeen yet and didn’t mind telling them I was, neither. The way I see it, the navy’s gonna put some money in my pocket and I can do what I want from now on.”

  I said that seemed like a funny way to think about it, since you had to follow orders in the navy, but he just laughed again. “Ain’t you never heard of liberty? That’s when you get a pass and they let you off the ship or off the base or wherever you’re at, and you can go out and drink and watch movies and see if you can find you a girl. All kinds of things you can do if you got money.”

  Woody had sandy hair and was a couple of inches taller than me—I was five foot six on tiptoes and had a thick mop of black hair like Danny and Dad. Woody was also a big talker. Once he finished up with all the wild stuff he was going to do when he had that money in his pocket and was on liberty, he started in on everything anybody might ever want to know about growing and cropping and curing tobacco. Then after that he told me all about his high school and the teachers there, and the sports teams he’d been on, and all the girls who did or didn’t talk to him, and who he would or wouldn’t go out on a date with, and who was or wasn’t pretty enough for him. Woody kept on talking for a good half hour. The best I could figure out, Woody hadn’t ever actually been out with a girl, but he did have a lot of big plans.

  I didn’t mind him going on and on like that, though. I didn’t want anybody asking me any questions, and listening to Woody helped keep my mind off all the things I was worrying about—like Danny and Mama and getting caught.

  Without us noticing, the stragglers must have shown up, because right about the time I was going to ask if I could get off and use the head again, the doors slammed shut and the bus jerked into gear and off we went up the highway for the twenty-hour drive to the boot camp at Great Lakes, where they would turn us all into proper sailors before sending us off to war.

  * * *

  Anybody on the bus who’d brought food shared it with the rest of us, which was a good thing for me because I hadn’t eaten anything since leaving Ocracoke except that sandwich and pickle and cup of coffee the preacher had bought me. Somebody had fried chicken. Somebody else had a hard salami that he cut into slices with his knife and passed around. Somebody else even had a jar of moonshine that he offered around, but I passed on that. I hadn’t ever had liquor before and didn’t think Mama would like it if I drank some, even though there wouldn’t be a way for her to find out.

  Woody took a big long drink of it, like it was no big deal, but his eyes started watering and his face got all red and he couldn’t speak for about five minutes because he was gasping for air. All the older guys got a good laugh out of that, and the more they drank the more they were yelling and carrying on until the officer in charge of the bus turned on the lights and stomped up and down the aisle ordering us to pipe down or we’d regret it once we got to Great Lakes.

  Once the jar was empty they passed it around again for guys to pee in, then dump it out the window and pass it to the next fellow. Somebody must have spilled some, though, or maybe the wind blew some back in the windows, because it got to smelling like pee so bad on the bus that I got a headache.

  “You think this is bad,” Woody said. “I heard that once you’re on a ship, down below deck where the crew sleeps, it stinks to high heaven from nobody ever taking a bath and it’s worse than getting seasick. More guys throw up on account of the smell than they do from their ship getting bounced around in a big storm.”

  “I think I’ll be all right there,” I said, trying to sound more confident than I actually felt. “I’ve been out in some rough ocean before, since I was a little kid, and never once got seasick.”

  “Always a first time,” Woody said.

  * * *

  The first thing they did when we got to Great Lakes was divide up all us North Carolina boys and assign us to different companies, so we were mixed up with guys who’d come from other places all around the country—though Woody and I somehow ended up in the same company. Then they lined us up and gave us buzz cuts, so right away everybody started looking the same, which I guess was the point. The barber took one look at me after he lifted Dad’s cap off my head and laughed. “You come in with your papa?”

  I scowled at him with what I hoped was my meanest grown-up face, but that just made him laugh more. “Don’t wet your pants, son,” he said. “I just cut hair. I don’t check IDs.”

  A minute later he was done with me and I looked just like everybody else, only apparently a lot younger. After haircuts they ordered us to strip out of the clothes we came in wearing, which we did, but then we had to stand there naked, the whole bunch of us, shivering from the Illinois cold. I found my way to a corner and covered myself up as best I could with my hands, turning away like I needed to study something on the wall behind me. Nobody seemed to notice. They were all mumbling to one another, shivering, complaining, until finally they started calling names off the recruit list. One by one we made our way to the counter where they issued us our whites and blues—the two different color uniforms we’d be wearing every day, all the way down to boots and socks and underwear, which they called skivvies. They said we could box up our civilian clothes and mail them home, but I left mine on a bench since I didn’t have anywhere to send them.

  I was just glad to finally be dressed again.

  Next they issued us our sea bags—big canvas bags, one for each of us, that we’d use to carry everything they gave us: hammock and mattress and two mattress covers that somebody called a fart sack (I later understood why). Also one pillow and two pillow covers and a couple of blankets. A peacoat. Underwear and uniforms and not much else.

  The petty officer demonstrated how we were expected to lay all our bedding items and clothes in a particular order before rolling them in the mattress so they wouldn’t take up much room when we strapped it all to our sea bag. He kept calling us boots the whole time.

  “All right, boots,” he yelled. “That’s how it’s done and that’s how you’ll do it from now on. It’s navy regulation. And everything in your life from this minute forward will be done according to navy regulations. When you eat, pee, poop, wipe yourself, tie your shoe, stand in line, even when you complain you will do it according to navy regula
tions. You understand me?”

  “Yes, sir,” I said, before I could stop myself. But I’d always been raised to say “Yes, sir” and “No, sir,” so it was just a habit. No one else had spoken, though, and I realized it wasn’t the sort of question that we were supposed to answer.

  The petty officer glared at me but let it go. It was the last time anybody would let anything go for the next six weeks.

  I’d slept some on the bus, though not as much as I’d have liked, with Woody yakking away most of the time, and all the other guys carrying on, even after the officer stormed around and ordered them to knock it off. So when my head hit my pillow that night at Great Lakes I didn’t have time to be homesick or anything—I just conked right out. I would have stayed asleep for a week, except that at five in the morning somebody came into our barracks hammering on a metal trash can lid and yelling: “You have five minutes to square your bunk, get into your blues, hit the head, and assemble! Five minutes!”

  It took me forever to untangle myself from my blankets and then not step on anybody below me as I dropped to the floor and scrambled to get dressed. Woody didn’t budge, so I shook him and told him to get up before he got in trouble, but he just rolled over and pulled a blanket over his head.

  I was late getting to the head so there was already a line of guys waiting to pee standing shoulder to shoulder into a long trough. There wasn’t any privacy between the toilets, either, for those guys needing to do their business sitting down, so I skipped that, even though I had to go.

  Two minutes later, we were standing at attention in a line at the foot of our bunks. Chief Petty Officer Merkel, our company commander—who we were just supposed to call Chief—was fuming. He yelled at Woody and then dumped him on the floor. He even kicked Woody in the butt, which made Woody cry.

  “Are you crying, boot?” Chief yelled. “There’s no crying in the navy! Who told you you could cry in my navy?”

  Woody stood up and wiped his eyes and his nose and mumbled something, but Chief wasn’t happy about any of it. “Did I tell you you could wipe the snot off your face? No, I did not. The navy owns that snot, and it is not up to you to decide when and where and how to wipe it. Now put it back!”

  Woody blinked.

  “I said put it back!” Chief yelled again.

  Woody sort of reverse wiped his face, and Chief moved on to yell at somebody else for something else. Then he dumped all our sea bags on the floor and bellowed at us to redo everything and this time to do it according to those navy regulations. He kept yelling that we better know what navy regulations were since they had been explained to us last night, plus they were in our Bluejackets’ Manual, which was this kind of navy bible they’d given us that they said had everything we would need to know to go from being a boot to being a trained sailor.

  We repacked our sea bags twice more before Chief was satisfied, and then he ordered us out of the barracks and over to the Grinder, double time. Nobody knew what the Grinder was until he led us there, most of us already out of breath because double time was the same thing as running, and our lungs hurt from the below-freezing temperature. When we got there—the Grinder turned out to be a drill field—Chief ordered us to keep running around the perimeter. Other companies were running, too, and he pointed about a hundred yards ahead of us and said if we ever wanted to so much as smell breakfast we were going to pick up the pace and pass that sorry bunch.

  It was hard getting enough traction on the icy ground to go much faster, and when several guys somehow managed to surge ahead, Chief barked at them to come back. “This company is only as fast as the slowest man here,” he yelled, and for some reason he was looking at me when he said it, like he thought I’d be the slowest runner just because I was the shortest guy on the Grinder.

  He kept yelling at us to “Move it, move it, move it!” and we all picked up the pace as best we could, but as hard as we moved it, moved it, moved it we couldn’t gain any ground on the company in front of us. Every time it seemed as if we were making progress, Chief ordered us to wait for the stragglers—which I was thankful didn’t include me. Some of the guys were obviously in pretty terrible shape, but I wasn’t one of them.

  We ran for an hour, long after the other company had peeled off and headed to the mess hall for breakfast. Continuing on was torture. I couldn’t feel my fingers or toes. My nose was running the navy’s snot all down my face. And every time a lap around the Grinder took us near the mess hall we could smell the bacon and eggs and coffee and toast. Our stomachs rumbled as loud as our boots on the frozen drill field.

  Finally, Chief took mercy on us, or got sick of seeing us drag around the Grinder so slow, and ordered us to stop. But he kept yelling at us. “The problem as I see it is that I must have done something wrong somewhere along the way, and as punishment the navy gave me you dirtballs to train. How I’m supposed to do that is a mystery for the ages, because if you took all the brains from all the skulls in this company, they wouldn’t add up to one whole entire brain. And how God Almighty was able to make a group of men—excuse me, a group of boys—capable of moving so ever-loving slow is another mystery for the ages.”

  He spit on the ground to indicate how disgusted he was with us—I bet it froze immediately—then told us to head over to the mess hall in case there was anything left, and he hoped there wasn’t because as far as he was concerned we didn’t deserve to eat, as pathetic a job as we’d done so far of becoming navy men.

  I had the feeling that this was how Chief would be talking to us all during boot camp from now on, and the best thing I could do was follow every order and otherwise make myself invisible.

  Easier said than done, of course.

  * * *

  The rest of the day was a blur of doing calisthenics until we couldn’t stand up anymore; lying and kneeling and standing to shoot during target practice; holding our rifles over our heads while we stood at attention until we couldn’t feel our arms, but every time somebody lowered their arms we had to start over. Unfortunately, it kept being me who couldn’t hold my gun up—three times—and guys started giving me dirty looks and cursing at me under their breath. I felt terrible—and weak—and gritted my teeth the fourth time and told myself I would die or my arms would have to break off before I let my rifle down, and that time I was able to hold on.

  After that we loaded heavy shells into a 5" cannon, then emptied the shells, then loaded them in again, over and over and over until it was automatic. I thought that would be about it for the day, but we seemed to just be getting started, because the next thing I knew we were marching over to an indoor pool the size of a small ocean and swimming back and forth across it with our clothes on—and dragging, or being dragged by, another guy.

  Fortunately, it was sunny outside, because our clothes were only partly dry when we were ordered back to the Grinder for more marching drills—and getting yelled at by Chief whenever anybody wasn’t in step. Which was often, especially for Woody. He didn’t seem to know his right from his left, so the guys on either side of him started punching him on one arm or the other to let him know. I felt bad for him but was glad they hadn’t done that to me earlier when I had a hard time holding up my rifle.

  Finally, late in the afternoon, after Woody had screwed up yet again, even with the guys pounding on his arms—or maybe because of that—Chief ordered us to halt, and we were so tired that half the company marched into the other half before they stopped. I nearly fell down but somebody—a guy who was probably twice my size—grabbed my arm and held me up.

  “Hate for a boy like you to get yourself trampled out here in the Grinder,” he said.

  I was going to thank him for helping me, but when he called me a boy I just scowled at him—though once again, my mean grown-up face just made somebody laugh.

  Once the company got itself sorted out, Chief launched into a round of loud cursing that went on for a good five minutes before he ran out of either cusswords or breath or both. “I’m going to list all the things you
do not know and it will not be a comprehensive list because that would take too long, but I have to start somewhere,” he shouted. Then he barked out dozens of nautical terms and ranks and regulations while we just stood there at attention and listened and tried to remember them but, of course, couldn’t because there were too many.

  Chief knew we were struggling, and he stopped reciting the list so he could yell at us some more about how dumb we were. “The reason you boots don’t know any of this is because the B in B Company must stand for babies. There isn’t a man among you, and to even call you boys is an insult to boys everywhere, so you must be babies and ought to be wearing diapers. If I had my way, I would requisition a hundred diapers right here and now and make you wear them so you didn’t poop in your skivvies because you don’t have enough sense to even go to the head by yourselves.”

  Only poop wasn’t the word he used.

  “All right, you sorry boots,” Chief continued. “One more thing that I am absolutely certain of is that half of you don’t even know how to tie your own shoelaces, which might help explain why you keep tripping over one another and over your own two feet. But it’s my job to teach you how to tie knots, and you will learn to tie knots—nautical knots—starting with the most fundamental and important knot of all, the bowline. It is my belief that not only can none of you tie a bowline, but that none of you even knows what a bowline is!”

  Chief stopped yelling and stared at us for a second, as if he was expecting an answer. And stupid me, I raised my hand.

  Chief glared at me, and I knew I’d made a mistake. I quickly took my hand down, but it was too late.

  “Is your arm a balloon, boot?” he demanded.

  “What, Chief?” I said.

  “You heard me. I don’t mumble. Now is it? Is your arm a balloon, and that’s why it just lifted up from your side and went up into the air like that—because your arm is a balloon?”

  “No, Chief,” I whispered.