I think Mom and Dad were about to shit a brick, from the look on their faces.
Finally, Dad responded, “Finish your dinner. We will talk about this later.”
Not a word was spoken for the rest of the meal. It wasn’t a golden silence as I could mentally hear everyone’s thoughts ticking away.
Mom was probably thinking we should have told him sooner. Dad was probably having a hissy from the way I found out. And my sisters were probably wondering about the birds and the bees.
After dinner, Dad took me out to the front porch.
“Well, son, this kid, Mike’s his name, jest so happens to be your half-brother.”
Dad explained how this had come to be. Mike was the son of my birth mother and her current husband, the man she supposedly ran off with when she left me at Grandpa’s. But he was a bad kid, Dad explained, and I wasn’t to have anything to do with him.
...Oh the wayward wind, is a restless wind, a restless wind that yearns to warder. And I was born the next to kin, to a wayward wind...
Wow! I had a brother there for a minute, and then I was back to having no brother the next. That’s all he would tell me that night. I began to wonder just how many more relatives might pop out of the woodshed. These days, with the milkman going door to door, you didn’t know who your siblings were anymore.
*****
It wasn’t until my sophomore year of High School that I started to notice the difference between boys and girls. Johanna would walk down the sidewalk, on the other side of the street, towards my house. She was so pretty with short cropped brown hair and big sparkling brown eyes that made my heart beat faster than a race horse. I would get goose bumps at the very sight or thought of her. Her chest made all the other girls in our class look so much younger.
I dove for the bushes because it was an excellent vantage point from which to watch her pass without being seen. She lived up the street and would pass our house on the way to the grocery store. I would watch her every move until she vanished from sight.
I never got the courage to even say “hi” to her. If only I’d had a cell phone, I could have at least texted her. No telling how that would have changed our relationship. But then, probably not, because after our sophomore year, her family moved out of town. I never saw or heard of her again. She never knew how much of an effect she had on me. I reckon you could say she was my first puppy love.
...And they called it puppy love. Oh I guess they’ll never know, how a young heart really feels...
As you can see, I was extremely shy around girls and would be too embarrassed to hold much of a worthy conversation with one.
What could be so embarrassing? After all, weren’t they God’s little creations of sugar, spice, and everything nice?
Perhaps it was a combination of a few zits and my eyeglass ugly duckling geek look that gave me such low self-esteem that made me feel so insecure in my teens. Can you believe that I graduated from high school having never been kissed and still a virgin?
All in all, I had a simple life, in simpler times. My parents didn’t have to worry about drive-by shootings or drugs. My biggest worry was that a baseball game might get rained out.
But my life was about to drastically change. My childhood games would soon be replaced with grown-up games. Life was about to get a bit more complicated.
CHAPTER THREE
The Transformation
It was right after the mysterious car accident that my life took a major turn. Previously in school, my grades had barely gotten me to the next level. But my last semester in high school, I made the Honor Roll, much to the surprise of my parents, my teachers, and even me. After that incident, my abilities, confidence and self-esteem would jump to another level. Most amazingly, my eyesight improved so that I didn’t need glasses anymore. Only it would be several more years before I would become fully aware as to why these improvements had suddenly occurred.
After high school, I was restless to spread my wings and fly the coup, so I enlisted in the U.S. Navy. Their slogan “Join the Navy and See the World” intrigued me. They sent me to San Diego for nine weeks of Boot Camp. Boy, was that ever an eye opener into another world.
...Bend me, shape me, anyway you want me...
“WHAT THE FUCK YOU LOOKIN’ AT, YOU PUSSY? YOU THINK I’M PRETTY? LINE UP! ASSHOLE TO BELLYBUTTON! DROP YOUR COCK AND GRAB YOUR SOCKS!”
“SIR, YES SIR!”
“HUT TWO THREE FOUR. YOUR LEFT, YOUR LEFT RIGHT LEFT.
YOUR OTHER LEFT, YOU MORON! STRAIGHTEN THAT LINE!”
Boot camp instructors started shouting at me as soon as I departed the bus. They knew only to yell and curse. I had never heard such foul language. My parents would have washed my mouth out with soap for using such words. I was ready to jump back on the bus and get the hell back to Clinton. But I only had a one-way ticket.
I had no idea why the instructors were so pissed off with me. It didn’t take me long to discover that there was absolutely nothing I could do that would ever pacify them. (And I had thought Mom was always mad at me for no reason. She had nothing on these guys.) I learned real fast to keep my mouth shut and to never volunteer for anything. Nothing I had ever experienced could have prepared me for the next nine weeks.
The San Diego Naval Base was gigantic, bigger than the whole town of Clinton. There were hundreds of recruits there trying to make the miraculous transformation from civilian to U.S. Navy sailor. It was a drastic metamorphosis, both mentally and physically. Every week about thirty raw recruits, fresh out of high school, from various states, and thinking they could conquer the world, were thrown together to form a company. The company ate, slept, worked, marched, and trained together for the next nine weeks. The company needed to learn to function as a unit. If one person screwed up, the whole company suffered the consequences.
In the first week, they instilled in us three words that have been with me and every recruit since: Honor, Courage, and Commitment. This is the U.S. Navy motto, and these were the core values that immediately became the ideals we lived by. I remember to this day an instructor telling us: What you make of this experience is what will make you as a person.
In the second week, we went through the confidence course. This was designed to simulate emergency conditions aboard a warship. The instructors taught us to be sharp, to be self-reliant, and above all, to make key decisions upon which our shipmates might depend. Teamwork dominates and infiltrates every aspect of a sailor’s life.
Week three put us onboard a land-bound training ship. We learned the name of nearly every working part of the ship. They taught us first-aid techniques and how to signal from ship to ship using flags. We spent a lot of time in the classroom learning Navy customs and courtesies, the law of armed conflict, shipboard communications, ship and aircraft identification, and basic seamanship. All this interspersed with physical training, including sit-ups, sit-reaches, and push-ups. Lots of push-ups!
During week four we got some weaponry training with the M14 rifle. We had to carry that sucker everywhere we went, including the head (bathroom). My hunting skills came in handy, as I was classified a sharpshooter.
The firefighting and shipboard damage control course came next. Everyone learned how to extinguish fires, escape smoke-filled compartments, open and close water-tight doors, operate the oxygen breathing apparatus, and move and store fire hoses. It was during this training that I thought I might have met my Waterloo. During an exercise simulating a compartment fire, the lead man on the hose panicked, dropped his position, and disappeared. I was in the second position and felt the hose start to sway. I could barely see my hand in front of my face through the smoke. My lungs were quickly filling with smoke and I heard the guys behind me choking too. I knew if we didn’t get the fire out, we would have to try it again. No way did I want to do that. Somehow, I managed to grab the front hose position and extinguish the fire.
The following week, the training exercise involved the confidence chamber. The whole company was put in a
gas chamber with our gas masks on. The instructor then unleashed a tear-gas tablet. Everyone was ordered to remove his mask and recite his name and serial number. This exercise was repeated until everyone got it right. I got it right the first time. Hey, if there’s no crying in baseball, there certainly is no crying in the U.S. Navy.
During the last week of training, everyone had to jump off a one-hundred-foot platform into the water and tread water for at least thirty minutes. It was surprising how many recruits joined the Navy and didn’t know how to swim. They learned that day, or they were gone the next.
All recruits are tested, both physically and in aptitude. Physically, I discovered that my eye-to-hand coordination had improved immensely, since my childhood days. I could now do physical activities I never dreamed of doing before. My aptitude tests revealed that I had skills I never knew existed.
I went from 135 pounds soaking wet to 175 pounds of lean mean fighting machine. I gave most of the credit to the Navy chow and exercise, since I had no reason to think otherwise.
On the way to graduation, I passed a mirror and almost didn’t recognize the handsome dude staring back at me. I had found within myself a confidence and pride I had never known existed. For the first time in my life, I felt proud of myself. I had developed a completely different personality. Tommy boy had become a man.
After surviving Boot Camp, I was sent to Radioman ‘A’ school. My Navy tests determined that I had an unusual ability to learn Morse Code. I graduated top in my class, achieving the fastest words per minute than anyone in all the years before me. Unbeknown to me, my abductors were quite pleased with their protégé.
After graduating Radioman School, I received orders to join the aircraft carrier, USS Hancock. At the time, she was on station in the Far East. The history of ships bearing the name “Hancock” is as long and dramatic as the history of the U.S. Navy itself. During the period from 1775 through today, the national ensign has flown from three successive “Hancock’s.” Through the Revolutionary War and both world wars, a “Hancock” was in action.
The intrepid spirit of “Hancock” has inspired the present “Hancock” since her commissioning during World War II. Nicknamed the “Fighting Hannah” for her battle prowess, during the war she destroyed more than 730 enemy planes and 17 Japanese warships, 31 merchant ships, and 51 railroad trains. Fighting back after kamikaze hits, she won the Navy unit commendation.
In 1961, the USS Hancock still strived to keep the peace she’d fought so hard to win and I was so proud to serve onboard her. Modernized with an angled wooden deck, the first steam catapults ever used on an American carrier, and mirror landing systems, she alternated every six months between pilot qualifications on the West Coast and deployments in the Far East as a member of the Seventh Fleet.
During my Navy stint, I visited many places and met many women from various cultures. In Japan, I visited Kobe, Yokosuka, Yokohama, Tokyo, and Hiroshima. Yokohama was the place where I finally lost my virginity. We passed through Yokohama as the ship was heading back to our home base in Alameda, California, shortly after I had boarded the ship in Subic Bay.
Seagoing sailors had havoc-wreaked love lives. We were never in one port long enough to establish any kind of meaningful relationship. We had enough time ashore only to whoop it up and to get laid. The native girls knew this and willingly provided their hospitality—for a few Yen, of course.
In a Yokohama nightclub, I ran across one such temptation.
...Like a virgin, touched for the very first time...
Konnichiwa! (Hello), she said, with eyes that could steal a sailor from the sea. I don’t recall her name, but she was a Japanese Geisha, schooled in the art of pleasing a man. She also was willing to teach me how a man can please a woman. I figured that if I was new at something, I might as well learn from a pro. She spoke no English, but communication proved to be no problem. She taught me well. I was never to be shy around the opposite sex again. She taught me a rather simple technique: look the girl in the eye, smile, and say hello! Now, why hadn’t I ever thought of that?
I was so fascinated with her teachings that I lost track of time. When I saw the rising sun peeking through the bedroom window I realized I was AWOL. In foreign ports our liberty expired at midnight. To make matters worse, there were anti-American protesters outside the base chanting “Yankee go home.” I arrived a minute before the ship’s gang plank rose and was immediately put on report. My punishment was galley duty; peeling potatoes for a week. I didn’t mind though, cause now I knew all about the ‘birds and bees’.
*****
...Why does my heart skip a crazy beat. Tell me why, oh why do fools fall in love...
“Hey, G.I. Joe, you want girlfriend? My name is Dolly,” shouted a drop dead gorgeous Barbie doll. Her big sinful smile and electric bedroom eyes lit up both me and the bar room! She was a bombshell and a brick house, wrapped in one enticing package! I completely lost my cool when she stepped into the room. My heart skipped a crazy beat and this crazy fool fell in love (lust).
“Hello, Doll...Dolly, I stuttered.
I quickly regained my composure and added, “my name is Tom and heaven must be missing an angel.”
I was on my third and last cruise when I met Dolly. The ship was in the Philippines and I was on liberty, searching for a good time, just running my game. Love was the furthest emotion from my mind. By then I had no problem relating to women. I had had many opportunities to practice the Japanese geisha’s teachings. But Dolly really rang my bell. Of course, it also might have had something to do with the see-through blouse and painted-on jeans. All heads turned ‘cause she was a queen in a sailors dream.
How could I not surrender to her charms and discover ‘love at first sight’, from the condition of the condition I was in?
The long stretches at sea might have been taking a toll on my sensibility. Forty-five days at sea, attacking North Vietnam day and night, would wear a Marvel superhero down. Especially with only three days’ liberty (always in Subic Bay, Philippines) and right back out for another forty-five days. This went on nonstop for nine months.
Every time the ship would come to port, Dolly would be on the dock, waiting to comfort my weary body and soul. I often wondered how she knew when the ship was coming to port. All naval operations were supposed to be top secret.
On the ship’s last visit before returning to the States, she told me she was pregnant with my child. Of course, being the fine gentleman that I am, I wanted to do the proper thing and marry her.
The ship’s captain had to approve all marriages to foreigners, so I requested a hearing with him. During our conversation, the captain pointed out some facts that my blind love may have kept me from seeing. He informed me that it was common for foreign girls to want to marry a U.S. sailor. It was their free ticket to the States.
“Oh, no sir!” I said. “Not my Dolly. She is different.”
The captain rolled his eyes and strongly suggested I take her to a doctor, to confirm the pregnancy.
Well I’ll be darned, she wasn’t pregnant after all. During the examination, the doctor also discovered something she had failed to mention. She had the clap (gonorrhea).
Now how in the world can the clap be mistook for being pregnant?
I set sail to America a bit wiser about the facts of life and with my manhood dripping, leaving Dolly to search for another lonely sailor to take her to the great land of opportunity. Who could blame her for trying? Certainly not a naive and weary sailor.
*****
Later, while on the same cruise, I experienced another abduction, only it wasn’t me who got abducted this time.
I was on the flight deck one night, doing my routine star gazing when I saw something that looked familiar. I can’t really explain why it seemed so familiar, it just did. Almost immediately, I felt a slight tingling sensation cloak my body, as the hair on my arms came to life and began to dance about. It was the same sensation I had experienced that night on the country road outsi
de Clinton.
In the night sky, I quickly noticed the same type of lights, in the same formation, appear about ten miles away, on the horizon. A beam of light suddenly shot from the lights in the sky and moved downward toward the ocean surface. Then the beam disappeared as suddenly as it had appeared. In a flash, the three lights rose in the sky and vanished into the universe. The hair on my arms returned to normal and the tingling sensation stopped. I can’t explain how, but I suspected what might have happened.
“Radioman Hay, report to the radio room on the double,” I heard over the ship’s intercom. I had the Con (duty) that night and had just taken a smoke break. I could feel the excited tension in the radio room as soon as I stepped through the door.
“We just received an S.O.S.,” shouted the radioman who had been monitoring the emergency band. A ship was in danger. It turned out to be a Russian trawler. American fleets were always shadowed by these suspicious fishing boats. They were constantly snooping and spying on U.S. fleets. We knew who they were and what they were doing, and they knew we knew. It was a cat and mouse game since we couldn’t do anything about it in international waters. However, international law required us to respond to an S.O.S., so we took advantage of the opportunity to board their vessel.
The Abduction Chronicles Page 3