Cap'n Fatso

by Daniel V Gallery

  Everyone around the table squirmed uncomfortably and studied his fingertips as if the Secretary had accidentally let out a sonorous belch. “Atomic war” is an obscene expression seldom used at Security Council meetings.

  “That couldn’t happen unless we and the Russians are both crazy,” said the President. “If it comes to a showdown between letting the Jews and the Arabs tear each other up or having a ... er ... confrontation with Russia, we don’t have to hold any Gallup poll to find out what to do.”

  Then, fixing his eye on Mr Goldberg, he continued: “Can’t the UN do something about this? After all, that’s what they are for - to prevent wars, big or little.”

  “Yes, indeed,” said the Ambassador. “I can get the Security Council or the Assembly to appoint a commission to ...”

  “The UN can’t do a damn thing in a crisis like this,” interrupted the Secretary of State. “Except provide a forum for wild-eyed oratory where nations most of us never heard of before can threaten to throw their weight one way or the other. The UN brought on this crisis by suddenly pulling out of the Gaza Strip, where their forces had kept an uneasy peace for ten years. They won’t get back in the picture again till it’s all settled. Meantime, we and the Russians have got to work things out between us and then tell the Israelis, the Arabs, and the UN - this is the way it is. You’ve got to take it and like it. Then the UN can go back to cutting out paper dolls again.”

  Ambassador Goldberg rumbled and cleared his throat, hut before he could speak, the President asked the Secretary of State, “Do you think it’s possible for us to agree with Russia on a thing of this kind?”

  “It has to be,” said the Secretary. “The Russians don’t want to blow the world apart any more than we do.. That’s what can happen if we don’t agree.”

  On that comforting note, the meeting adjourned.

  Chapter Five

  High Level Snafu

  The night before LCU 1124 got back to Crete, the Armed Forces Radio broadcast said that although the situation in the Near East was still critical, the State Department was now confident that there would be no war.

  “Hoo boy,” said the Professor. “Here we go again. I’ll bet it busts out tomorrow morning.”

  “The Security Council of the UN,” continued the broadcast, “today passed a resolution urging both sides to remain calm.”

  “By gawd that’ll make ‘em stop and think,” observed the Judge.

  “Both sides are fully mobilized now,” the broadcast went on; “and Nasser today warned the Israelis that if they make a false move, retaliation will be swift and terrible.”

  “Hah!” snorted Ginsberg. “The Arabs are going to get beat worse this time than they did the last time.”

  “Look, Abie,” said the Professor; “last time they were only fighting Egypt. Now they got the whole Arab world lined up against them and the Russians besides. Hell, they haven’t got a chance.”

  Next morning, as they neared Crete, all hands were on deck. The absence of air activity was noticeable, and the cruisers were not in their usual place. A spit of land obscured the beach where the amphibs had been moored. But it never occurred to anyone that their ship wasn’t behind it.

  As they cleared the headland and the beach came in. sight, all hands got an eye-popping surprise. Except for a couple of Greek fishermen, the bay was as empty as a vacant lot.

  “Well, I’ll be dipped in lukewarm gook,” observed Scuttlebutt. “They ain’t here!”

  “That’s exactly where they ain’t,” conceded Fatso.

  “They musta gone somewhere else,” declared Scuttlebutt, after a moment’s thought.

  “I’ll betcha that’s right where they went,” said Fatso. “But you’d think they might of left a note for us, or something.”

  “Yeah,” said Scuttlebutt. “Maybe they put it in a bottle and thrun it overboard,” he added - coming closer to the truth than he knew.

  “We-e-e-ll,” said Fatso. “The last thing the skipper told me was that they were going to Athens from here. So, ... I guess the smart thing for us to do is go up there.”

  That evening, during the acey-deucey game, one of the lads at the table was reading a copy of the Navy Times he had picked up in Malta. Suddenly he let out a whoop and held up the paper, pointing to a headline: “Snafu in the Army.”

  “Hey! Look at this,” he said.

  “What’s so funny about that?” demanded another. “Things are always screwed up in the Army.”

  “But not as good as this,” said the reader. “This guy finishes boot camp and is sent home on leave to await orders. Somehow or another, they got his records fouled up and forgot about him. He had an allotment, so his pay kept coming home. He sits around for two years, waiting for orders, and then he goes to the nearest Army post, tells them his time is up, and he wants his discharge.”

  “Well - what’s the matter with that?” demanded Webfoot. “If they hadn’t of lost track of him they would of had him sitting on his ass in some Army post for two years. He sits on it at home instead, and I don’t see nothing wrong with that. It saved the gummint the cost of feeding him.”

  “Yeah. But the paper says the Army don’t know what the hell to do about the guy, now. Some of their legal beagles say they gotta discharge him and some claim he still owes them two years, and others want to court martial him. The Joint Chiefs of Staff will prob’ly have to settle it. Anyway - that’s something that couldn’t happen in the Navy. We keep track of things better than that.”

  “Oh yeah?” said Fatso. “When I was on the Enterprise, we had a guy who was lost on board ship for three weeks.”

  “How the hell could that happen?”

  “He was just out of boot camp too and came aboard with a big draft of new men just before we sailed for the Med. He didn’t hear his name called when they were mustering the draft in on the hangar deck. When the draft fell out, he wasn’t assigned to any division, so he just took his bag and wandered around till he found an empty bunk back in the messboys’ compartment, and moved in there. The ship reported him missing from the draft and sent his records back to boot camp. We sailed for the Med next day, and there he was, not assigned to any division, no battle station ... nothing. He had sense enough to find his way from the chow line to the head and back to his bunk again, and for three weeks he was just a sightseeing tourist on board. Might of made the whole cruise that way, except he tried to go on liberty in Naples, and they nailed him for not having a liberty card.”

  “What did they do to him?” asked the Judge.

  “They brought him up to mast with a string of charges a mile long. But the Old Man wouldn’t have it. He said if the Master at Arms force had been on the job they would of found the guy in a day or two. He made the kid his orderly, because he’d done so much rubbernecking he knew his way around on the ship better than lots of other guys who had been aboard working in the same place the whole cruise ... So don’t kid yourself. We can get things screwed up just as bad as the Army.”

  “Yeah,” said Scuttlebutt. “We lost a whole big ship for quite a while at the end of the war. The Indianapolis. She was sunk and all her guys were in the water for damn near a week before anybody missed her.”

  When Fatso and the boys gathered around the mess table at lunch that day, the Armed Forces Radio Newscast came on. It said Washington was gravely concerned over the possibility of war in the Middle East. It said the U.S. was calling for an emergency session of the UN because a war in which the Israelis were overwhelmed could easily produce a confrontation between the U.S. and Russia.

  “Nuts,” observed Fatso. “This raises hell with my ops plans for the next couple of weeks. I was going to visit Beirut, Tel Aviv, and Alexandria if we don’t find the Alamo in Athens. But now we can’t.”

  “If war does break out, it’ll be over in a couple of weeks at the most,” observed Scuttlebutt. “The Israelis can’t possibly hold out any longer than that against all them Arabs.”

  Ginsberg did not concur with t
his Estimate of the Situation. “The hell you say,” he observed. “You guys just watch. Them crummy Arabs are going to find out they tangled with a buzz saw. The Israelis will give them the bum’s rush right into the Red Sea.”

  “Abie,” said Fatso tolerantly, “we all know how you feel. And we’d all like to see the Israelis clobber the Ayrabs, too. I was talking to Izzy Goldberg on the Alamo. He spent a month in Israel last year, and he says they’ve got a nice little country started there, with a good army and even a pretty good little air force. But hell, there’s just too damn many Ayrabs. They wouldn’t have a chance. Too bad.”

  All heads around the table nodded grave agreement.

  “You just wait and see,” said Ginsberg. “They beat the hell out of the Arabs a few years ago. They can do it again.”

  “Okay, Abie,” said Fatso, tolerantly. “But while we’re waiting for that to happen, we gotta figure out something to do. I think maybe we can have some fun getting in the Russians hair.”

  Next morning, LCU 1124 anchored in Piraeus, the seaport of Athens. The only American warship present was the USS Pillsbury, a destroyer. No sign of the Alamo. This posed a problem for Fatso. What should he do now?

  Fatso prided himself on being able to carry out any orders he received from higher authority without having to break out the Regulations Book to find out how. But now he found himself without any orders and apparently abandoned by higher authority.

  Had Fatso been a graduate of the Naval War College, he would, of course, have made an Estimate of the Situation. Starting from the Navy’s major mission of controlling the seas, and, making due allowance for all local conditions, he could then have derived a logical Course of Action for himself. But Fatso’s knowledge of global strategy and tactics had been acquired in waterfront barrooms, and did not include how to make a formal Estimate of the Situation.

  So he and Scuttlebutt thumbed through the regulations till they came to the article about the Senior Officer Present Afloat. This article, a leftover from the pre-radio days of sail, confers far-reaching powers upon the SOPA. This officer, whatever his rank, represents the Navy Department to all juniors within visual signal distance. When problems come up which they can’t settle, they simply refer them to him. Since SOPA, in Piraeus at the moment was the Pillsbury, Fatso put on his best blue uniform, put the Commodore’s gig in the water, and went over to the Pillsbury to call officially on SOPA and present his problem.

  This stirred up quite a flap aboard the Pillsbury. When the young Ensign OOD saw the Commodore’s gig approaching, he hit the panic button and got the skipper - a Lieutenant Commander - up on deck to greet the visiting VIP at the head of the gangway. This was a bad goof. It was aggravated by the fact that the skipper was recovering from a hard week at sea and an even harder night ashore among the fleshpots of Athens, and the young Ensign’s alarm about a visiting flag officer had routed him out of his bunk.

  When the bleary-eyed skipper saw a rather portly First Class Petty Officer disembark from the gig and come up the gangway, he thought for a moment that perhaps he was still asleep and having strange dreams from that last nightcap. When Fatso saluted and said, “Boatswains Mate First Class Gioninni coming aboard to report to the Senior Officer Present Afloat,” he found himself confronting a rather irate SOPA.

  There is no need to repeat here what the skipper said to the red-faced Ensign before turning on his heel and marching back to his cabin, leaving Fatso with his mouth agape and his troubles untold.

  Back on LCU 1124, Fatso and Scuttlebutt held another council of war. They decided that Fatso had carried out the orders of his own skipper, had complied with the regulations by reporting to SOPA when those orders ran out, and was now his own boss and could write his own ticket. The first item on the ticket was to put the Commodore’s car ashore so the two of them would have proper transportation while showing the flag and representing the United States in Athens. That afternoon, LCU 1124 moved in to the beach, let down the bow ramp, and the car was driven ashore by Satchmo, with Fatso and Scuttlebutt ensconced in the stern sheets, all wearing their best liberty blues and grins like three cats full of canaries.

  They made the Grand Tour of Athens that afternoon, during which they picked up Sparky Wright, Radioman 1/C from the Pillsbury and an old pal of Fatso’s and Scuttlebutt’s. From him they learned of the Alamo’s hasty departure for Vietnam before Nasser closed the Canal.

  “Vietnam, for gawd’s sake,” said Fatso. “With the canal closed, my thirty years would be up before we could make it out there. That sort of leaves me on detached duty - almost like being marooned. What the hell am I supposed to do now?”

  “If I was you I’d report to SOPA and let him figure it out,” said Sparky.

  “I did that this morning,” said Fatso. “He gave your young OOD an earful of good advice, but he didn’t seem interested in hearing about my problems ... I wonder if Alamo sent any radio dispatches about us. We don’t keep a regular radio watch.”

  “No,” said Sparky. “We copy everything on the FOX schedule, and I have to check the log every day. There’s been nothing about you in the past week. They probably sent your records and stuff by mail to ComSixthFleet in Naples. You’ll most likely hear from him when his staff gets around to it.”

  “Well, look,” said Fatso. “You guard the Sixth Fleet FOX circuit, so if they put out anything about me, you’ll copy it. won’t you?”

  “Sure. We copy the whole FOX schedule.”

  “Okay. After we leave Athens, suppose I give you a call each day at noon on 2580 KC’S. If you’ve heard anything for me, you can pass it on to me then.”

  “Sure. We can do that.”

  “So - until I hear from you, I’m on my own. It’s okay with me if it takes them a couple of months to get out orders. I can think of lots of things to do while I’m waiting.”

  Later that afternoon, while they were sightseeing around the Acropolis, a furtive character sidled up to them, looked both ways and said, “You like to see dirty post cards, meestaire?”

  Fatso leered back at him and said, “Sure. What have you got?”

  The peddler produced a pack of a dozen post cards and handed them to Fatso. They were a typical batch of uninhibited waterfront art, showing men, women, and animals engaging in various unorthodox practices. I doubt if even the most long-haired liberals could have said they possessed artistic merit, social significance, or conformed to community standards - except, of course, the Supreme Court.

  Fatso inspected them casually and handed them back.

  “You no like?” asked the peddler.

  “Sure - they’re very good,” said Fatso. “But I don’t want any.”

  “Whatsa matter?” demanded the art dealer.

  “I want something special from Athens to send my grandmother,” said Fatso, “and she’s got all those.”

  The peddler shrugged as if to say, “Americans are funny.” He put the cards back in his pocket, leered sociably, and said, “You like to meet my seestaire?”

  “Maybe,” said Fatso. “What does she do?”

  “Anything you want, sir,” said the young man eagerly. “She ees very nice.”

  “With a brother like you she must be,” observed Fatso. He bent over and touched the ground with his fingertips. Then he bent his knees till he was squatting on his heels and straightened up again a couple of times, keeping his fingertips on the ground, “How about that?” asked Fatso. “Can she do that?”

  The young man looked puzzled, but said “Certain-ly. She can do eet that way - if you like.”

  “Whoops,” said Scuttlebutt, “You can learn something new every day in this part of the world. I’d like to see it done that way.”

  “How about my friends here,” asked Fatso, indicating Scuttlebutt, Sparky, and Satchmo.

  The young man said, “But of course. She take care of all of you.”

  “Can she sew buttons on?” asked Fatso.

  Their friend cocked his head to one side and said, “Soubu
ddonson? ... I never heard of before ... Ees a new way, maybe?” Fatso went through the motions of threading a needle and sewing a button on his sleeve.

  A light seemed to dawn on the young man. He put two fingers of his right hand on his left wrist and pumped his thumb as if giving himself a shot in the arm. “Yes, SIR,” he said. “I can get for you.”

  “This guy ought to go out to Berkeley,” observed Scuttlebutt. “They might even make him a college professor out there.”

  “No-o-o,” said Fatso, judiciously. “He’d be just a square out there. I don’t think it’s more than a week since he had a bath.”

  Later that afternoon they struck up an acquaintance with a wooden-legged seafaring gentleman who was trying to get drunk in a waterfront barroom.

  When strangers make friends in waterfront barrooms, the first thing they do is explain their wooden legs.

  “I was on sob-marine during the war,” said the stranger. “We came up to shoot at merchant ship and our gun blow up.”

  “You were a U-boat sailor?” asked Fatso.

  The stranger spat contemptuously on the floor. “Nyet,” he said. “I was Rawshun Navy.”

  “Oh! A Russian,” said Fatso. “Why did your gun blow up?”

  “The Lieutenant was a zvoloch. He forgot to take out the mozzie plug.”

  “That’ll do it, every time,” observed Scuttlebutt.

  “What ship are you from?” asked the Russian.

  “The George Washington,” said Fatso.

  “What kind of ship is that?”

  “It’s one of our new Polaris submarines. You know what they are?” asked Fatso.

  “Yass,” said the Russian, beginning to sit up and take notice. “We have the same thing. Maybe better.”