CHAPTER FOURTEEN: THE FLIGHT
November 9th – 10th, 1988
I left Laramie in below-zero weather with wind and snow
flurries. A typical early November
Wyoming day. Dad, Mom, my brother and I
loaded in the Ram and drove to Denver to get on my flight to the “real
Navy”. I was more than a little nervous
about my flight. According to my tickets
and my orders, I was to get on a plane in Denver, fly to L.A., then sit and
wait for six hours. I was then to get on
another plane and fly to Honolulu, where I would transfer to yet another plane,
which would take me on to Guam, and then finally, the Philippines. According to the times printed on my tickets,
it was going to be a 20-hour trip. I had
never been on that long of a flight, and the thought of spending most of my
time in the air over the open ocean scared the crap out of me. There was no time like the present, however,
as my flight to LA began to board. I
kissed my family goodbye, grabbed my garment bag, and loaded on to my first
plane of the day.
The flight from Denver to L.A. was smooth, with the
exception of a little turbulence over the Rockies. Once we touched down at LAX, I was officially
on my own. I had NO idea where I was
supposed to go, and nobody to ask. LAX
was a huge airport, and the international flights were in a completely
different section than the domestic flights.
I ran around like a head with my chicken cut off for a while, until I
realized my flight wouldn’t leave for six more hours. I calmed down a little, asked someone at the
counter for directions, and then found my way to the international
terminal. There, I met a lot of other
military guys headed overseas, and we swapped some stories, and I got to hear
more stories about the glories of the party life in the Philippines. I got some names of some good bars to go to and
was starting to look forward to getting there.
I ate at an airport restaurant, called home again, read and re-read my orders, and then sat and waited until they finally called our flight number, and we boarded the
plane to Hawaii. It was a long, but
comfortable, flight and we landed in Hawaii sometime in the middle of the
night. I’m not sure exactly what time it
was, just that it was very dark out, so I didn’t get to see much of the
scenery. We had a short (3 hour) layover
in Honolulu, then it was onto a Hawaiian Airlines jet for our flight to Guam
and then finally the Philippines. The
plane was also headed to Diego Garcia after the Philippines, but that was a
little past my stop. I felt sorry for
those guys who were going to Diego Garcia (affectionately known as “The Rock”)
- it was another four-hour flight past Manila.
That was WAY too long of a flight for anyone. The jet we were on was a commercial airliner but
was chartered to the US military. It was
completely full of military personnel from all branches, Navy, Army, Air Force
and Marines. We were all in good spirits
as we took off but, in a few short hours, our moods would turn decidedly more
serious.
More serious because somewhere after our third
nasty airline meal, and after watching the same movie for the second time,
something happened. The plane let loose
with a huge “thud”, and then the lights flickered. We felt the plane nose down. The lack of engine noise was deafening. This was it – we were going down! All I could think of was that we were in the
middle of the ocean, over the Marianas Trench (the deepest part of the ocean on
earth), and we were going to die! We all
sat in stunned silence for a moment, and then the lights flickered again. We heard an engine sound again, but it seemed
much quieter than before. Then the
captain came over the intercom,
“Gentlemen, this is your captain. We have experienced some sort of mechanical
malfunction, and temporarily lost power.
We’ve got some of it back now, and we think we’re within gliding distance
of Guam. With luck, we’ll have enough
power to make it over the mountain and onto the runway when we get there. Please review the emergency water crash
procedures on the card in the pocket of the seat in front of you in case of
water landing. Thank you, and good
luck.”
With that, he shut the intercom off, and we all looked at
each other. Then the panic hit.
WE WERE GOING TO DIE!
Right here, right now – in an airplane crash at sea! I didn’t join the Navy for this! Hell, I joined to earn a little money for
college, not to die in an airplane over the Pacific!! We were all dealing with
this fact in our own way, when some Marine Corps Captain started walking up and
down the aisle screaming in his best Gunny Sergeant voice
“Alright men, this is it!
This is why you enlisted! Die for
your country! Die like a man!”
Friggin’ idiot. All
he managed to do was work us up into an imminent death-inspired frenzy. Guys were crying, guys were cussing, guys
were writing letters home, and guys were ripping their seat cushions up and
putting on their life vests, when one of them yelled,
“Hey – I can see the island out here!”
Sure enough, there it was – a little dot in the middle of a
huge blue expanse. Guam – our
savior. Now the only question was, did
we have enough power to make it over the mountain and onto the runway? The plane kept getting lower, and the island
closer as we held our collective breath.
Soon we were completely over land, and close enough to the trees to tell
what color birds were in them – white, as I recall. We saw the mountain looming – it was going to
be close. I closed my eyes as we neared
it, and then – nothing! We made it. Suddenly we were landing on the runway like
nothing had ever happened. A great cheer
of relief went up from the passengers as the captain rolled her to a stop in
front of the terminal. They rolled out
the steps, and opened the door, and we damn near created a stampede as we tried
to get off this airborne deathtrap! On
our way out the door, a stewardess handed (or at least tried to) each of us a
small piece of macadamia nut fudge wrapped in foil and said,
“Thank you for flying”.
At least they didn’t forget proper customer service in a
situation like this!
The first thing I noticed when I walked off the plane was
the oppressive heat and humidity. I had
never experienced anything like it. In
Wyoming, if the humidity was 5%, it was a high humidity day. Not in Guam!
To make matters worse, I was still wearing the wool dress uniform and
carrying the peacoat I had been wearing when I left Denver, as they herded us off the plane and into the terminal. Once inside, they
told our group that the airport bar was open for all of us who had been on that
flight. We wasted no time in availing
ourselves to the liquid refreshments found inside. After a drink or two, the rumors started to
circulate. Some of the guys said that we
had been hit by a rocket from a U.S. helicopter by mistake, and others said
that it was a bomb that had gone off in the baggage compartment. Calmer heads soon prevailed as we accepted
the “mechanical malfunction” excuse.
Then came the rumors about what they were going to do with us. The plane was supposed to have landed in Guam
long enough to unload the guys who were to be stationed there, refuel, and then
get back into the air for the rest of the trip to the Philippines, then on to
Diego Garcia Now, with a broken plane,
we weren’t sure what they were going to do with us. Some said that the airline would put us
up in a hotel, while others said that the military would take us over to the
Navy base and put us up in the barracks while we waited for a replacement
plane. No matter which theory you heard,
the consensus was that we were stuck on Guam for at least 24 hours. Resigned to this fate, we took to the task at
hand – drinking the airport bar dry. We
were about three hours into our mission, and beginning to wonder why no one had
come to officially inform us of where we were to go, when an airport official
walked in.
“Gentlemen” he announced, “We have repairs to your plane
almost completed. We will begin the re-boarding
process in about fifteen minutes. Please
finish up your drinks and assemble by the gate.”
We looked at each other in complete disbelief. “You mean to tell me that they’re gonna put
us back on that SAME damn plane again?!”
But, like the dutiful military members we were, we ordered
another round, slammed it down, and shuffled off to the gate.
None of us wanted to get back on that plane again – but
being the good order-followers we were, we all filed on the thing and took our
seats. It was a very quiet and somber
cabin as we taxied for take off. All of
us expected the worst, just sure that we would slam into that mountain as we took
off. We held our breath as the plane
picked up speed and then lurched skyward.
And that was that – we were airborne once again. During the next four-hour
leg to Manila, I think you could have counted the words spoken on one
hand. The stress and booze took effect
as we flew, and most tried unsuccessfully to get some sleep. I know I didn’t feel comfortable until I saw
the sun illuminate the islands on the horizon as we neared the
Philippines. Even then, I was still a
bit shaky. About a half hour later,
below us, we saw the island we were headed to, and Clark Air Base. The plane made a couple of slow circles and
then began its descent onto the runway.
It was not until the tires touched ground that I felt completely at
ease. A huge cheer rose from the
passengers once again as we taxied up to the terminal. They rolled out the stairs, and we filed off
the plane one last time (no fudge this time).
We were in the Philippines. We
had made it. My “real Navy” career was
about to begin. Once again, as I stepped
off the plane, I was hit smack in the face with the heat and humidity – this
tropical island thing was definitely going to take some getting used to. As I set foot on the ground, I swore I would
never fly again.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN: CLARK AIR BASE TO SUBIC BAY NAVAL BASE
I had absolutely no idea what to expect or where I was
supposed to go once I walked inside the terminal. I just kind of followed the crowd of guys
from my flight into the reception area.
The area looked like a big warehouse full of various military types
would inspect our baggage, review our orders and send us off in the direction
we needed to go. There were hundreds of
men going through this process, so I just got in one of the lines. About a half hour later, I made it to the
front of the line. The First Class
sailor in charge at the front of the line just looked at me.
“What the Hell are you doing, recruit?”
“Excuse me?”
“Your uniform. Why
are you wearing your winter dress uniform?”
“Because it’s November.”
“Well, get your ass back to the head and change. Here in the P.I. it’s summer uniforms year-round. NEXT!”
I stood and looked at him in disbelief. Until the guy behind me pushed me out of the
way. I looked around me and realized
that all of the other guys I had flown in with must have known this little fact
already, because they had their summer uniforms on, and were laughing at
me. I chalked this one up to experience,
grabbed my seabag and garment bag, and trudged off to the head to change clothes.
The head at Clark Air Base was the busiest changing room I'd
ever seen. There were guys everywhere
changing out of their winter uniforms and into their summer "trops" (Tropical Uniforms). The fact that I may possibly need my summer
uniforms in November had never crossed my mind, and I knew that my summer
uniforms were crumpled in a big ball at the very bottom of my seabag. I hadn’t thought that I would need them until
at least May, so they were the last of my worries. Wrong.
I dug down through all of my stuff and found my trops. They were covered in “summer” wrinkles –
“some’er here, and some’er there”. I
neatly folded my winter uniform and put it into my seabag and walked back to
the line with my 100 pounds of luggage once again. Everyone was staring at the new booter in his
wrinkle-covered uniforms drenched in sweat, and I’m sure I gave them all a good
chuckle. I finally made it to the front
of the line again, and they looked through my bag and then at my orders.
“Subic Bay – a new squid headin’ out to the fleet. Good luck!
Go over to that desk and find out which bus to get on.”
And with that, I was through the reception line.
I walked over to the transportation desk and presented my
orders to the guy standing there.
“Subic Bay – you want to go out these doors and get on one
of those buses.”
I looked out of the window and saw two buses and a big Ryder
truck waiting. I picked up my seabag and
headed for the door.
“Hold it, recruit.
Where you going?”
“To the bus, sir”
“Uh-uh, not in uniform.”
“What?”
“They’re havin’ a little trouble with the rebels on the
island – they have a tendency to take potshots at buses full of American
military. You have to go change into
your civvies before you can get on the bus”
I couldn’t believe this!
I lugged all my gear back into the head and dug down into the bottom of
my seabag once again and drug out some wrinkly civilian clothes. This time, I was smart, however, I put my
trops on the top of my seabag – just in case.
I walked back past the transportation desk on my way out to the bus and
the First Class there just smiled and said,
“Good Luck, and welcome to the P.I., recruit”
I stepped out into the blazing afternoon tropical sun and looked at the scene in front of me. There were two tour buses parked there, and a
bunch of military guys in civilian clothes waiting to get on them. The Ryder truck had it’s back door open, and
some Filipino locals were eagerly grabbing our seabags and throwing them
in. I figured this must be a service the
Navy provided, so I surrendered my bag, and gave the man a dollar for tossing
it into the truck. I wasn’t sure which
bus to get on, and then I saw one of the guys from my airplane, so I asked,
“Hey man – is this the one going to Subic Bay?”
“Sure is – where’s your seabag?”
“I gave it to the guy who put it on the truck for me”
“Oh crap – you better go get it, that truck is going to the
Marine Air Station – nowhere near the Naval Base.”
Shit! I looked over
at the truck and saw what looked like hundreds of identical seabags piled into
it. A wave of complete frustration swept
over me as I jumped up into the back of the truck and started to sort through
them to find my bag. The Filipino locals
looked at me like I was crazy, as I started to feel the panic set in, and began
to hurl seabags across the truck. The
bus I was to take to the base started it’s engine, and I knew I was almost out
of time. Then suddenly, I turned around
and there was my seabag! I grabbed it,
jumped out of the truck and sprinted for the bus. I threw my bags under the bus and climbed on
board just as the driver closed the door and pulled away from the sidewalk. I took my seat, and collapsed – exhausted,
drenched in sweat and completely overcome with frustration and apprehension, as
we began our two-hour drive across the island to Subic Bay Naval Station.
The drive from Manila to Olongapo City and Subic Naval Base,
was the most eye-opening thing I had ever done.
My first thought was that the rebels were going to know we were Americans
and shoot at us anyway. I mean, sure we
weren’t in uniform, but it’s not like you could mistake 20 white guys with
short haircuts and polished shoes for anything but American
military. My fear was soon replaced with
wonderment as I watched the country go by out the window. It was such a completely different world than
I’d ever seen. There were palm trees and
jungle everywhere. The farther away from
Manila we got, the more rural the scenery became. I distinctly remember at one point of our
trip, as we passed a little thatched-roof hut and a guy standing in the
shin-deep water of his rice paddy with an ox hooked to a plow, thinking
“Holy Shit – National Geographic is right!”
I had seen pictures of scenes like this for years, but you
really don’t think it exists until you’re right in the middle of it. It all fascinated me, and in spite of my
complete exhaustion, I stayed wide awake, just drinking in everything I
saw. It was absolutely captivating. Then, much too soon, we reached our destination
– Olongapo City and Subic Bay Naval Station.
Olongapo City sat just outside the gates of the Naval
Station and was a collection of slums and shanties connected to a street full
of bars, souvenir shops and massage parlors.
Most of the guys on the bus had been here before, and they delighted in
telling the new booter the best places to go to get what I wanted. I didn’t tell them that I was still a virgin,
and that I really didn’t party too much, but it was good information
nonetheless.
As the bus pulled up to the gates of the base, an MP came on
board and checked all of our orders.
Once he had checked us all out, he waved us through the gate and on to
the receiving and processing building.
The bus pulled up in front of our final destination, and we all
unloaded. We grabbed our bags and headed
inside. One-by-one we were
processed. Most of the guys were to meet
ships that hadn’t pulled into port yet, so they were sent to a barracks on base
to await their ships. I was kind of
looking forward to getting to the barracks and getting some sleep before I had
to go to my ship, so I handed my orders to the guy behind the counter. He looked them over and said,
“The Fresno, huh?
Somebody hates you!”
I had no idea what he was talking about, but I would soon
discover the ultimate truth in his words.
He looked over my orders and then looked at his arrival board and said,
“You’re in luck – they’re in port. Pier 9 – just down that road about a
mile. If you hurry, you can still make
it in time for chow.”
I was too tired to think about eating, but I knew I needed
sleep, so I grabbed my seabag, and headed for the door.
“Where you going, recruit?”
“What?”
“You’re reporting to your permanent duty station – you have
to be in the uniform of the day.”
“What’s that?”
“Summer Dress Whites – you can change in the head”.
I couldn’t believe I had to change again. I had left my trop whites on the top of my
seabag, but I had to wear my dress whites. Once again, I dug down to the bottom of my
seabag and pulled them out. They were
wrinkled, but not nearly as bad as my trops had been. I got dressed, stashed my civvies, grabbed my
100 pounds of gear and set off down the road to Pier 9.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN: THE USS FRESNO – WELCOME TO THE JUNGLE
As I walked down the road toting my gear, several cars and
trucks drove by and honked their horns at me.
I figured it must be one of those “new guy initiation” things and kept
my head down and walked towards Pier 9.
By the time I finally got there, I was absolutely soaked in
sweat, and dog tired. I showed my ID
card to the pier sentry and stepped onto Pier 9. As I looked around me, I saw huge ships
docked on either side of the pier. I
didn’t know what type of ships they were, so I just looked for the hull number
of 1182 as I made my way down the pier.
Most of the ships were big and clean, and looked fairly
decent. My mind raced, wondering what to
expect, when loud rock and roll music broke my chain of thought. I looked over to my left and about halfway
down the pier I saw a small, rusty, run-down looking ship. There were rusty trucks with broken-out
windows tied down all over her decks, and grease and rust ran in rivulets down
her sides.
“Please, don’t let this be the Fresno” I thought to myself.
But the closer I got, the better I could read the hull
numbers – 1…1…8…2. 1182, The USS
Fresno. Shit.
USS Fresno (LST-1182) pierside - Subic Bay Naval Station, Subic Bay Philippines - 10NOV88
I looked again, thinking it couldn’t possibly be as bad as I
thought it was, and I saw a guy hanging over the side, sitting on a ratty
looking 1x6 plank, with a paint brush in his hand and a cigarette dangling out
of his lips, painting over the rust.
Above his head, on a rope, was an old beat-up radio blaring Guns-N-Roses
at max volume. I stood back and stared,
mouth agape, when two guys stuck their heads over the side and looked down at
me.
“Hey – bootcamp!”
“yeah?”
“You on the Fresno?”
“Yes, sir!”
“Well, Welcome To The Jungle, baby!”
And with that, they went back to work and left me to find my
way on board. The full meaning of that exchange
would reveal itself to me soon enough, but for now, it was time to find meet my
new home. I wandered down to the
gangplank and walked up it. I remembered
my boot camp lessons and turned and saluted the flag at the rear of the ship,
and then saluted the officer of the deck.
“Permission to come aboard, sir”
“Permission granted, boot camp – let me see your fuckin’
orders”.
What a welcome! I was
more than a little worried about what the next two years had in store for me –
and for good reason.
The Officer of the Deck looked my orders over and said,
“Oh great, another deck ape”, then called to one of the
sailors walking by -
“Stevie! Take this guy down to First Division Berthing and
get him a bunk”
He then turned to me and said “Welcome To The Jungle,
baby.”
It was the second time I had heard this phrase, and the
quizzical look on my face must have been evident, so the sailor who was leading
me to the berthing area explained to me as we walked that “Welcome To The
Jungle” by Guns-N-Roses was the ship’s theme song, and all of her sailors
believed in it absolutely. The Fresno
was the jungle, and the rest of the Navy was just a pleasure cruise as far as
her sailors were concerned. My tour
guide showed me down to First Division berthing, and pointed toward a bunk (on
the ship, they were called “racks”).
“You can put your shit up there for now – we’ll get you a
locker tomorrow, now let’s go meet Stans.”
I had no idea who “Stans” was, but I threw my bags up on the
rack he'd pointed to, and followed the guy back up to the main deck. We went into the deck office and sitting
behind a desk was a big-bellied First Class Boatswain’s Mate, BM1 Stansbarret,
or “Stans”. Stans was actually a really
nice guy. He shook my hand and introduced
me to a couple of the other guys in the office, and then asked me if I’d eaten
yet.
“No, sir” I told him.
“Don’t call me ‘sir’ son, I work for a living! Call me Stans.”
“Okay. No Stans, I haven’t, but I’m really too tired to
worry about it – I’ve been traveling for the better part of 30 hours”
“Well, we’ll put you into a duty section tomorrow. Just go on down to the berthing area and get
some sleep. You sure you want to go to
sleep? You could go out on town and
check it out if you wanted”
I had no desire to go sightseeing in a town in a foreign
country where I didn’t know anything or anybody, so I politely declined, and my
tour guide took me back to the berthing area.
“There you go man, I’ll go get you some linens”.
With that, he took off and left me to survey my new home.
First Division
berthing was a space about 20'x40' (if that) where 33 men and all of their gear
lived. The racks were stacked three
high. The bottom two racks had lockers underneath the mattresses, while the top
racks, like the one I’d been assigned, had no locker. They were just a 2-inch piece of closed cell
foam in a mattress cover, on top of a steel bunk. Not the most comfortable bed, but it served
it’s purpose. The guy returned with my
sheets and a blanket, and I made my bed, sat my seabags underneath the stairs
(called a “ladderback”), and crawled up into bed. It was barely dinner time, but I had just
spent the past 30+ hours in various forms of travel, going from ten below and
snow to 100 degrees in the tropics. I
had survived a near-crash in a jumbo jet, frostbite, heatstroke, and airline
food. I was a fleet sailor now – I would
discover the rest of my new world in the morning. With that, I slipped off into a deep, deep
sleep.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: MY NEW HOME GIVES ME STITCHES
November 11th
Reveille came at about 6:30 the next morning. I awoke to the sights and sounds of 30
strangers getting dressed for work and wondering who the hell I was.
“Mornin’ booter – better get dressed and come on up.”
It took me a minute
to figure out how the hell to get out of my rack. It was a good six feet off the ground, and
there were no steps to get up or down.
“Just grab the pipes and swing off” somebody yelled, so
that’s just what I did.
I grabbed one of the pipes in the ceiling (overhead) and
swung down. I wove my way in between the
guys getting dressed and found my seabag.
The uniform of the day on board ship was dungarees, so I dug down and
got mine out. Once properly attired, I
followed the guys up to the galley for breakfast. The food wasn’t too bad, but I was really too
hungry to notice, or care. I hadn’t
eaten a proper meal in over two days, so I wolfed it down like a champ.
Once that was done, I followed the guys out onto the main
deck.
“You in deck department, booter?”
“Yup”
“First Division?”
“I think so”
“Then follow me”
I followed the guy out onto the forecastle where fifty other
guys stood.
“Boot Camp!!”
“Fresh Meat!”
The cheers and jeers began the instant I stepped out onto
the deck.
“Cut it out guys!
This is Seaman Apprentice Peterson – he’s our new guy.
Treat him well, and teach him what you know” BM1 Stansbarret snapped at the guys.
“Welcome To The Jungle, baby”
I must have heard that phrase from every guy in the
department at one time or another. It
was just their way of welcoming the new guy.
A couple of days later, another booter came on board and I joined in with
the rest of the guys in giving him shit.
It was just a rite of passage.
As we stood in formation at what they called “quarters” that
morning, I learned that Deck Department was split into three divisions – First
and Second divisions were the Boatswain’s Mates and Seamen who handled all of
the basic Deck operations, while Third Division was made up of Gunner’s Mates who took
care of the guns and armament. I was
assigned to First Division. We stood
there for a couple of minutes as Stans gave us a rundown of the day’s
activities. He told us what jobs we had
to do and assigned guys to do each one of them.
I was assigned to the paint crew and we were to finish painting the
sides of the ship. After Stans was
finished, our Division Officer, LTjg Smits, came down to talk to us. He gave us more of the same rundown and told
us that we’d be pulling out of port in a few days to head to Japan. I was ecstatic – Japan! How cool.
Maybe this Navy thing wouldn’t be so bad after all.
After quarters was over, I followed Stans and BM2 Dailey
into the deck office. Dailey was from
Jamaica or Trinidad or somewhere, and the guys affectionately called him
“Coconut”. He was a great guy as well,
and I thought I wouldn’t mind working for them at all. They then gave me a quick introduction to
deck department and shipboard life. They
told me that each new sailor had to spend a couple months as a “mess
crank”. A mess crank was basically a
glorified dishwasher. They were the ones
who worked in the galley and assisted the Mess Specialists in feeding the
crew. Every new sailor had to serve time
as a crank, and they told me that I wouldn’t have to go “cranking” until I had
been on board awhile. They then
explained that the ship was split into three duty sections while we were in
port. They put me into duty section
three, then told me that my section had duty that night, so I’d have to stay on
board when they passed Liberty Call. I
didn’t really mind, I figured it would give me more time to meet some of the
guys and figure out what things were all about before they threw me to the
wolves out on town.
With that, Stans and Coconut sent me out to join my work
detail. I met the guys I was to be
working with – Seamen Powell and Haulin were new guys like me. They had been there about a month longer than
I had. Seamen Cravens and Ford were the
“old dogs” they had been with the Fresno during her entire six month WestPac
cruise. They told me that the ship was
about a month away from home, after spending the past five months touring the
Pacific. They had already been to
Australia, Thailand, and about a half dozen other ports. But everyone was getting itchy to get
home. I was fresh from the US, so I
filled them in on all the latest happenings stateside while we got to
work. It was hotter than hell out that
day, and I was sweating profusely. We
had been painting about two hours when we ran out of paint. They decided that someone had to go down into
the paint locker to get another can.
Since I was the new guy, I was elected.
The paint locker was a small, secured space underneath the
forecastle. To get to it, you had to
climb down one ladder, then use a wrench to undo the bolts to release a hatch
and then climb down another ladder to get to the paint. The guys would drop a rope down to me, which
I’d then tie onto the paint bucket, and they’d hoist it up to the main
deck. That was the plan, anyway.
I made it down the first ladder with no problems and undid
all of the nuts holding down the hatch.
I opened the hatch, crawled down the second ladder and turned to my
right to find the paint.
- BANG!! -
My head hit something big and heavy, and hit it hard. So hard, it fact, that I saw stars, and it
dropped me on my backside. I sat there
and tried to regain my faculties, as I looked up to see what I’d run into. It was the corner of a big, steel beam which stuck
out of the wall (bulkhead) about two feet.
I had run my head directly into it!
I shook my head and stood up, being careful to avoid the beam this time. I walked over and found the paint we needed,
tied the rope around it, and yelled for the guys to pull it up. It was like an oven in the paint locker, and
I was sweating like a whore in church. I quickly climbed out and secured the
hatch. I then climbed up to the main
deck and jumped out of the hatch. The
guys just stared at me.
“What? What are you
looking at?”
Ford just looked at me and pointed - “Holy Shit, you okay, man?”
“What’s wrong?”
And with that, I reached up to wipe away some of the sweat
that was pouring down my face. I looked
down at my hand and saw that the sweat was odd – it was red! Then I realized that I was bleeding – like a
stuck pig! I had blood all over my face
and all over my shirt. Evidently, I had
cut my head open when I had hit the beam.
“Oh shit! Now what do
I do?”
Ford and Cravens escorted me down to sick bay and told Doc
Johnson what had happened.
HM3 Johnson and HM1 Mina give me stitches in sick bay. 11NOV88
The doc chuckled at the new booter, then laid me down, and
whipped out his suture kit. He must have
done this a hundred times, because he never once missed a beat in his
conversation with the other Corpsman who was sitting there with him. While I was getting stitched up, someone
walked into sick bay and took a picture of me on the table. As it turned out, that was the only picture
of me that turned up in the cruise book from WestPac ’88. The cruise book was like a high school
yearbook, and every deployment you went on, you made a cruise book. Having stitches put into my scalp was my
claim to fame in this one. After I was
suitably sewn up, the doc gave me a small bottle of Motrin, and sent me back to
work. Ten minutes later, I was sweating
in the sun again as I slathered haze gray paint all over the side of the
Fresno. Amphib sailors don’t have time
to be hurt – we were tough guys!
Dragging gripes through the wind tunnel of the Fresno - 1988
Lunch time came and went, and most of the guys didn’t bother
to eat. They just laid down in the shade
of the “wind tunnel” (the space that ran through the superstructure from fore
to aft). It was the one cool, shady spot
on the ship, and at lunch time, It looked like “Jonestown – the morning
after”. Guys slept where they fell and
it was a mass of snoring humanity trying to sleep off the effects of the
previous night’s activities. I actually
went and ate a little bit, then I took a catnap. “Turn to”, the call to go back to work, came
at 1:00, and it was back to where we had left off – painting.
The five of us, Haulin, Powell, Cravens, Ford and I, got
along fairly well. Since all of them had
already been in the PI (Philippine Islands) for awhile, they regaled in telling
me stories of bars, booze and hookers.
They told me how every night was a party, and how much fun they had out
on town. They couldn’t believe that I’d
stayed on board ship last night instead of going out, and they promised to take
me out that night and show me the time of my life. I told them I had duty that night, but I’d be
more than ready the next. With that, the
plans were made. SA Peterson was about
to be indoctrinated into the PI lifestyle!
I was excited, but still a bit hesitant.
From the sounds of it, these guys were all hardcore partiers, and I was
still just a pup. Guess I’d have to
learn quickly.
Soon, it was 4:00, and they passed the word over the 1MC
(intercom) that it was time to “knock off ship’s work” and time for liberty
call. The guys who had been dragging
around all day, suddenly perked up, ran down to their berthing areas, showered,
changed clothes, ran off the ship, and out towards town. It was pretty amazing to watch,
actually. I stayed on board and talked
with some of my new shipmates until dinnertime.
After chow, I headed back down to my berthing area, and put my uniforms
away in the locker I’d been issued. The
guys who had to stay on board because they had duty promptly parked themselves
in front of the TV in the berthing area and turned on some movies. There were two channels going – one had Top
Gun, and the other had some old John Wayne movie showing. I learned later that the ship had a “Site TV”
system – basically a closed-circuit affair, with a Master Control down in
Engineering that played the movies that were piped out to all of the berthing
areas on the ship. When we were in port
in Long Beach, they told me, we had regular TV, but on deployment, it was just
the same selection of movies they sent to the ship day after day. Top Gun was #1 in the rotation list – they had
all seen it a hundred times, and by the time I left the Fresno, I had watched
it a hundred times, too.
Sitting in the berthing area that night, I learned yet
another of my Booter Lessons – the Lesson Of Flying and Buying. Evidently, there were soda machines on the
ship – I vaguely recalled seeing them somewhere by the deck office. And evidently, guys who watched movies in
their berthing areas after dinner liked to drink soda. The problem at hand was that the sodas they
liked to drink were on the OTHER side of the ship and required an effort to
acquire. This was where the booters came
in. Our job was to get the other guys
their sodas – but for a price, I discovered.
I found out after Stansbarret looked over at me and said
“Hey booter – you fly, I’ll buy.”
The absolutely blank stare on my face told him that I had NO
idea what in the Hell he was talking about.
“Sodas…you go get them and I’ll buy one for you.”
“Oh. Sure.”
He gave me a handful of change and I got set to make the run
over to the vending machine. But before
I could get very far, I was besieged with guys handing me change to get them a
soda as well. I ended up with a pocket
full of quarters and a list of more than a dozen sodas I was to carry
back. I climbed the ladder up and out of
the berthing area, but I had no idea where the machine was. I went back down and asked, and Stans told me
that it was over by the Post Office – through the wind tunnel to the port side,
just inside the door – Main Deck Level.
I walked up the ladderback and out into the p-way trying to decipher the
directions he’d just given me. I
remembered from my instructor days in Apprentice Training that “port side”
meant the left side and that the Main Deck was the level where you walked on
board the ship. I figured out that the
wind tunnel was the big hole that ran lengthways through the superstructure
where they had the trucks parked. I
figured that the Post Office must be there because there were only two doors on
the port side of the wind tunnel. Following
my best instincts, I found my way up to the wind tunnel, and went through the
first door. Lo and behold – there was
the Post Office and two soda machines!
I’d found it!
A real sense of accomplishment for my first full day on the
Fresno. I put in the change, filled the
orders and headed back to the berthing area with both hands, arms and pockets
full of cans of ice-cold soda. It was
only after I had made it all the way back that I realized I had forgotten to
buy myself one! I passed out the sodas,
then made a quick trip back to the machines to get myself one. I had just figured out the lesson of “Fly and
Buy”. They’d buy it, if I’d fly for
it. I really didn’t mind going for
sodas, and I figured I’d never have to pay for another one again. I didn’t realize that just a few short weeks
later, I’D be the one telling the booters,
“Hey – you fly, I’ll buy”, as the general after-dinner malaise would
sink in to me as well.
After my evening lesson was complete, I went up to the head
and showered, being careful not to disturb my newly-acquired stitches, then jumped up into my rack and wrote a letter home to my
folks. I also wrote a letter to Anna,
apologizing for “compromising her morals” and “making her go too far”. I had decided that it pretty much was
my fault that night, and I let her know so.
I figured that if she saw that, she’d have to forgive me, and I’d be
home free next time I came back on leave.
I finished my letters, put them in envelopes, stamped them and put them
under my mattress to mail the next morning.
With that, I closed my eyes and so ended my first full day as a fleet
sailor on board the USS Fresno.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: DAY TWO AND THE DECK PARTY
November 12th
The next morning was more of the same. Reveille, breakfast, quarters and on to
work. My newfound friends, Haulin, Powell,
Cravens and Ford were looking a little worse for wear, as they had really tied
one on the night before. We made it
through the morning, and at lunch time, the wind tunnel quickly filled up with
sleeping sailors. I wandered around the
ship, conducting a self-guided tour of my new home until it was time to go
back to work. That afternoon, the guys
in Deck Department began to get ready for their big Deck Party that night. They told me that they had rented a bar in
Olongapo City for the party, and it was their big bash for this six month
deployment - WestPac ’88. I was excited
because I got to be a part of it.
“You know how to party, Peterson?”
“Sure – I’m a big partier!” I lied.
That night, when liberty call went down, I joined the rest
of the herd in showering, getting dressed in my civvies, running down the
gangplank, onto the pier, and across the base to the gate that led out into
town.
When you stepped through the base gates, you found yourself
on a bridge across a small waterway. The
guys all called this “Shit River”, because, supposedly, there was raw sewage
pumped into it. I'm not sure how true
that was, but it sure smelled horrible.
There were tall fences built along either side of the bridge, so you
couldn't see the river (or fall into it), but you definitely knew it was
there. Through the gates, and across the
bridge, you were then standing on Magsaysay Boulevard in downtown Olongapo
City.
I had driven through Olongapo on the bus when I came in from
Manila three days earlier, but this was my first time on foot, and I was shocked. This city seemed to be nothing more than a
collection of hastily-constructed bars and stores that looked like they were in
imminent danger of collapsing. The
sights, the sounds and most importantly, the smells, were something that I will
never forget. Everywhere I looked, there
were people. Locals trying to make a buck, and sailors trying to spend a
buck. The streets were jammed with
motorcycles with sidecars, and what looked like open-air Jeep Wagoneers, all brightly
painted and festooned with lights and chrome.
(I was to learn later that the motorcycles were called “trikes” and the
Wagoneers were called “jeepneys”. These were the local form of taxi.) The air was full of the sounds of people
talking, shopkeepers and hucksters selling their wares, backfiring motorcycles,
unmuffled jeepney engines and the bass-driven thud-thuds of a thousand
different bar sound systems wreaking audio havoc up and down this mile-long
strip of insanity affectionately known simply as “Magsaysay” (Mag-sai-sai).
The smell was something indescribably horrific, yet at the
same time unbelievably delicious. It was the smell of raw sewage, diesel fumes,
stale beer and cheap perfume. It was
also the smell of thousands of bite-sized pieces of unidentified mystery meat
being grilled over the charcoal fires of a hundred different roadside barbecue
stands. It was the smell of lumpia,
fried rice and San Miguel beer, and the intoxicating odor of an impending
party. The place had an electricity and
a vibrancy that I had never before, or have ever since, experienced. This was Magsaysay Boulevard – a street known
to sailors the world over as THE place to get anything you needed. Anything you needed done for or to you, could
be found on Magsaysay. The second I
stepped onto its worn, dirty asphalt, I was hooked. The bars, clubs, stores and people of
Magsaysay instantly became my home-away-from-home, my family-away-from-family.
I will never forget the times I had on this legendary piece of Filipino real
estate. My True Filipino Experience
begins here:
On this, my first ever trip onto Magsaysay Boulevard, and
into Olongapo City, I was in a complete state of sensory-induced overload. I tried to soak it all in at once, as we were
descended upon by groups of Filipino locals, all trying to get us to go into
their bar, or give them money, or come with them for a “great massage”. Unbeknownst to me, most of them were con
artists, and one of the other new guys, Seaman Darkbull, and I, took the bait. No sooner had we made it past the gate, and
over the Shit River bridge, than a cute little Filipina told us that we should
follow her. She said that they were
giving away free beers at an area just outside the gate. Being the completely naïve (and very thirsty)
booters we were, we went.
She led us to an abandoned lot, just yards from the Main
Gate, where there were a bunch of tables and tents set up. Pretty girls were giving sailors manicures as
the sailors drank a beer they’d been given by yet another pretty girl. I had never had a manicure before, so I sat
down, and Darkbull sat beside me. As was
the standard procedure, a pretty girl started giving us a manicure, and another
brought us a beer. We quickly finished
our beers, and they brought us two more.
All the while, a Filipino man kept telling us about some bar down the
street we needed to go to. About twenty
minutes and three beers into our manicures, I began to sense that something was
wrong. I decided to leave and told
Darkbull that we’d better go. As we
stood up, the guy started telling us that we owed him 1000 pesos for the
manicure and another 100 pesos apiece for the beers. I told him that the lady told us the beer was
free, and that no one had asked if we wanted a manicure. I told him I wouldn’t pay him, and he started
screaming about getting the MP’s and having us arrested. For some reason I decided to call his bluff –
maybe the San Diego cabbie incident had taught me something.
“Go ahead and call a damn MP – maybe I’ll have you
arrested for trying to scam sailors!”
The guy just looked at me in disbelief –
“You go now – leave! Get out!”
Realizing that his scam was blown, he wanted to get me out
of there before I alerted anyone. I
grabbed Darkbull by the sleeve, and we high-tailed it out of the tent, and back
to the main drag. Later I found out that
these scams had been part of the Olongapo City scene since the port had
opened. The locals had figured out how to
tell the new booters from the guys who had been there before, and would target
the newbies for these scams, knowing that they had no idea it was just a rip
off. The current exchange rate was 24
pesos to the dollar, and a beer in the bar cost about 10 pesos. So the guy’s claim that a beer was 100 pesos
was way out of line! Don’t know how I
figured out it was a scam, but I was feeling very sure of myself as I walked to
the bar where the Deck Party was to be held.
I don’t remember the name of the bar where we had the party,
but it was upstairs in a building about a block north of Magsaysay
Boulevard. By the time we got there, the
sun had started to go down, and the neon lights were coming on. At night, Olongapo looked like any other big
city. Full of bright lights, and the
hustle and bustle of thousands of partiers.
Every night. It was actually a
pretty fun town to hang out in. When we
made it to the bar, Darkbull and I walked in to the sight of bikini-clad girls
dancing to loud American Top 40 dance music.
I guess I hadn’t expected to be hearing American music here, but they
tried to make us feel as at home as they could.
Ford, Cravens and Sorby (who was a seaman in Second Division) welcomed
us, and handed us a beer. We talked and
drank for awhile, then drank and talked.
About 9:00 that night, the Fresno’s CO and XO, CDR Peppard and LtCDR
Molley., walked into the bar.
I was shocked to see
my ship’s captain at a party with us enlisted guys, but they told me that
“Captain Wilbur” did it all the time.
The guys all loved CDR Peppard.
Everyone that I talked to just called him “Captain Wilbur”. They thought
it was a term of endearment. It was only
YEARS later than I found out he HATED his real name – “Wilbur”, and preferred
to be called “Dan”. Some of the officers I talked to years after my Fresno
time, were shocked to discover that CDR Peppard was known as “Captain Wilbur”
to his crew. Had we known how much he
disliked the name, we’d have never called him “Wilbur” – oh well, you live and
you learn, I guess. The story about CDR
Peppard I was told was that he had been stationed at the Pentagon for a long
time in the Intel department. He had
finally reached as far as he could go, promotion- wise, until he took a tour on
a line ship in the fleet. For some
reason, they sent him to the Fresno. The
funny thing about CDR Peppard was that he outranked most of the CO’s from the
bigger ships. When our battle group
pulled into port, the ships got to dock according to their CO’s rank. The higher the rank, the closer to the front
of the pier you went. The Fresno got to
dock up front most of the time – a fact that I’m sure rankled the gizzards of
many a “real” ship CO, and many a base CO who had to see our dilapidated old
rust-bucket sitting pier side in all her glory.
Captain Wilbur loved it, and he fit right in with his crew.
Deck Department in full P.I. Party Mode - 12NOV88
The Deck party just got bigger and wilder from there. The dancing girls had taken to performing acts
with some of the crowd in the corners, and the alcohol flowed freely. I was enjoying the local beer, San Miguel,
with gusto. San Miguel was the staple
beer in the Philippines (which I had now learned was simply referred to as “The
P.I.”. It wasn’t the best tasting brew
ever, and there wasn’t much quality control in their brewing methods. They used formaldehyde to keep it from
spoiling, which gave it a very interesting flavor. One night you could drink a dozen of them and
not feel a thing, and the next night you could have two and be so drunk you
couldn’t remember your name. But San
Miguel was about half the price of Budweiser in the bars, so it became our
favorite. In addition to the San Miguel,
the bars also offered Mojo and Bullfrog.
Mojo was a deadly concoction of booze, fruit juice, booze, ice and more
booze. It tasted like Hawaiian Punch,
and definitely ended up kicking your ass.
Bullfrog was much the same, but instead of tasting like punch and being a
deathly red color, it was more citrus-y and a very unappealing shade of yellow/green. If you were smart, you avoided
either of these, or you would be faced with the most violent hangover you’d
ever felt the next morning. Aside from
these concoctions, the most popular drink was the old standard, Rum and
Coke. You could get a glass of Rum and
Coke the size of a 7-11 Big Gulp for about 50 cents. The rum was cheap and nasty, but the coke and
the miniature limes they put in it helped hide that fact. I became very fond of rum and cokes during my
time in the P.I.
During the course of the evening, I met three other seamen
from my ship who were also on the Sea College Program, Mike Derkins from
Michigan, Matt Munderson from Montana, and Mitch Barris from Georgia. The three of us hit it off and started
talking about how badly we’d been screwed when they sent us to the “Frez”. They had been there a couple of weeks longer
than I had, and we were all looking forward to our EAOS (End Of Active
Obligated Service). Mine was July 11th,
1990 – I was already counting down the days.
The four of us soon formed a “drinking coalition” at one of the tables
and started downing them with gusto. I
was trying to keep up with the big dogs, but it soon became painfully obvious
that I wasn’t going to make it much further.
As I staggered back up to the bar to get another drink, I
made my first big mistake as a Fresno crewman.
I noticed a group of Fresno guys standing by the bar in cowboy
hats. They were all from Second
Division, so I hadn’t met them yet. I
didn’t really know who they were, but I saw the cowboy hats and figured they
couldn’t be all bad. I was feeling a
little homesick, so I asked them where they were from. One of the guys, BM3 Hickersham, (whom
everyone just called “Hick”) snarled at me and said
“Ohio”.
I turned toward him and said, “Ohio?! Then what’s with the hat?”
2nd Division Cowboys - WestPac '88
I didn’t know it then, but those guys were pretty proud of
their hats, and they really imagined themselves to be cowboys. Being from Wyoming, I didn’t realize that
Midwest rednecks liked to call themselves cowboys as well, so I started making
fun of him for being an “Ohio Cowboy”.
Several of the other guys standing around me tried to stop me and I
guess Hick was about to plant a size twelve boot in my ass by the time they
finally got me to shut up and walk away.
From that point on, all of the Second Division guys pretty much hated
me. All I had done was call what I
thought was a wannabe a wannabe…how was I supposed to know that the truth would
cause such an uproar! My full Naval
education had begun – there was a lot to learn that they never covered in boot
camp!
Just as I was avoiding a very painful (but well-deserved)
butt kicking, a large commotion came from the other side of the bar. The bar exploded in a momentous cheer, and
someone yelled that the XO had just puked on the CO! In all the merriment of the evening LtCDR
Molley had over-extended his limits of indulgence, and the resulting
regurgitation took place all over the table that he and the CO had been sitting
at! He got a huge round of applause and
Captain Wilbur laughed and helped to get his drunken XO out of the bar and back
to the ship. This was a story we’d tell
and re-tell for years! Once the
commotion had died down, we resumed the party at full speed.
I was feeling a little worse for wear, and I knew I wasn’t
far behind the XO. As I drained the last
of my umpteenth beer/rum and coke, I felt the engines start to reverse. I quickly looked around and spotted the
restroom and made a beeline. The last
thing I wanted was to prove to these guys that I was the boot camp candy-ass
they all thought I was! I made it to the
head, and I was glad to see that there was one stool in the room. It was surrounded by two free-standing walls
which were bolted into the floor. There
were no solid walls and no door, just those two free-standing partitions. I was in no shape to argue architecture, so I
grasped the top of one wall with my right hand, and the top of the other wall
with my left and aimed down at the stool.
I vomited with a velocity so severe, that water splashed up onto the
ceiling! I had never thrown up that much
in my life! I kept spewing and spewing,
and there was no end in sight. My
stomach muscles were on fire as the heaves kept coming! Luckily, there was no one else in the
bathroom to witness my finest moment, and I could do my thing in peace. And then, with one final, mighty hurl, I
passed out and hit the floor. When I
did, however, I forgot to let go of the walls of the stall, and I ripped them
both out of their anchors. I ended up in
a heap on the floor, covered with the partitions that had previously hidden the
stool.
The noise must have finally alerted the guys in the bar, as
they came in to find the new booter lying there in his own filth.
“Jesus Christ, Peterson – you weak little pussy”
With that, they pulled the walls off of me, and stood me at
the sink. After splashing copious
quantities of water on me to wash off some of the puke, they led/carried me
back to the party. Chants of “Booter,
Booter” followed me as they took me to a table.
Stans told them,
“Get his drunk ass back to the ship – Now!”.
One of the other BM’s decided that Matt Munderson should be
the one to get me back to the Fresno.
“Take him all the way back so he doesn’t get lost,
get him in his rack, and then come back to the party”
Matt wanted no part in losing an hour’s worth of party time,
so he did what any of them would have done, truth be known. He walked me downstairs, and out to the
street, where he flagged down a trike and told the driver to take me back to
the base. Once he had done that, he went
back to the party.
The next day, I found out that nobody used the trikes
in Olongapo. Trikes were basically just
motorcycles with fancy sidecars that they used like taxis. The problem with the trikes was that, more
often than not, the driver wouldn’t take you to where you wanted to go –
instead he’d take you to a dark alley where four of his friends were waiting to
beat the crap out of your drunk ass and take your money. All of the ships in port were told to warn
their sailors about the dangers of trikes, and for the most part we did avoid
them. Unless, of course, it was the
fastest way to get our drunk shipmate back to the base so we could get back to
the bar for more drinks.
Luckily, the trike that Munderson had put me in was driven
by one of the good guys, and he took me straight to the main gate. From there on, however, it was up to me to
get back to the ship. I had only walked
from the ship to the gate once, and I wasn’t exactly sure how to get back, not
to mention the fact that I was absolutely hammered! Again, fate stepped in, and one of the guys
from my ship who had happened to be on shore patrol that night recognized me,
and he escorted me back. He helped me
get on board, then down to my rack, where I immediately passed out. That was one thing you could say about the
Fresno – when one of your shipmates needed help, everyone was always willing to
pitch in and take care of business. We
were a pretty tight family in that regard.
I vaguely remember waking up once or twice during the night, and
thinking that I was going to hurl again, but the feeling passed, and I went
back to sleep.
When reveille came the next morning, I discovered that the
feeling had NOT, indeed, passed. I had puked in my sleep and not just on
myself, but all over the two racks below mine.
Lucky for me, those two guys had spent the night out on town and weren’t
sleeping in them when I puked, but I still felt awfully low for doing it. I cleaned everything up and changed their
sheets, but not before they came back to the ship and saw it. Everyone was pissed at me, but they just
shook their heads and called me a “booter” and said I’d better learn how to
party, or I’d be dead before we made it back to the States.
November 13th
Work the next morning was difficult, to say the least. It felt like it was about 120 degrees
outside, and they had us on top of the big bow ramp, chipping paint and busting
rust in the sun. The bow ramp was a big
steel ramp which sat on the forecastle of the Fresno and was what the ship had
been built for. LST stood for Landing
Ship Tank, and what the ship did in an assault was to actually go up onto the
beach, open her bow doors and then this big ramp would drop down onto the
beach. Then all of the tanks below decks
and the trucks on the main deck would drive off of the ramp and onto the beach. Once we had unloaded our cargo, they winched the
ship off the beach with our stern anchor, and we steamed back into the open sea
– providing, of course, that the enemy artillery guys weren’t very good shots
and didn’t leave us a flaming, smoking mess as they usually did to LST’s.
Our ship also carried a complement of nearly 500 Marines, as
they were the ones who drove the trucks and tanks onto the beach. The Marines stayed in troop berthing, where
their racks were just pieces of canvas lashed to an aluminum frame and stacked five
high. As bad as I thought our
accommodations were, the Marines definitely had it worse than us. Anyway – back to the story at hand. After struggling through the morning, it was
almost lunch time. I was definitely
looking forward to that nap in the wind tunnel and had finally grasped the
reason it was such a popular spot. Just
as I had found my spot to catch 20 winks, a couple of the guys from Deck
Department came up to me and told me that they’d heard about my episode last
night, and they wanted to take me out and show me the real way to party
after liberty call that night. I was
still too hung over to do much more than nod in agreement. As they walked away, I began to wonder what I
had put myself in for – but it was not the time to worry about that now, it was
lunch time, and time for my daily wind tunnel nap.
CHAPTER NINETEEN: BALUT, HONEY AND THE CHERRY BOY
During the course of the afternoon, word circulated
throughout the Deck Department that tonight was the night the new booter would
get his “P.I. Cherry” broken. It
happened every time a new guy came to the Philippines for the first time. Some of the older guys took it upon
themselves to show the new booters around and let them see some of the more
“exotic” activities that the P.I. had to offer.
Before we were set to leave the ship that day, the guys filled me in on
what to expect.
They told me that in the P.I., there were three main towns
to party in. The first, Olongapo City,
was the one right outside the base gates.
I had already experienced Olongapo, and a little of what it had to
offer. The next city was a little bit
farther out in the jungle, and it was called Barrio Baretto. Barrio was much smaller, and more rustic than
Olongapo was. It was basically just a
bunch of bars lining both sides of a road.
Barrio wasn’t nearly as refined as Olongapo, if you can call Olongapo
refined, but it was a bit cheaper.
Barrio was a favorite haunt of the guys who had been to the Philippines
before, and were tired of the constant scams and hucksters of Olongapo. The third city was Subic City. Subic was a couple of miles past Barrio
Baretto, and farther out into the jungle.
Much like Barrio, Subic was just a line of bars along a two-lane
highway. Only the really hardcore guys
hung out in Subic City. Subic was a lot
rougher and less developed than either of the other towns and made Olongapo
look like New York City by comparison.
It really came as no surprise to me to find out that Subic was a
favorite haunt of many guys in Deck Department.
After my quick geography lesson, Seaman Quintana told me that he was in
charge of the festivities that night, and he was going to take me to all three
towns. I was excited but wondering how
the hell I was going to make it on a hangover and three hours’ sleep.
And then, 4:00 came, and they passed the word for liberty
call. I immediately forgot my hangover
and my lack of sleep and dashed to the berthing area to shower and change
clothes. Clean, dressed, and ready, I
met up with Quintana, and we headed out.
As we walked off the ship, Doc Johnson stopped us on the
quarterdeck.
“You guys got your rubbers?”
he asked us.
“Ummm…”
“Here – take a package.
No one gets off the ship without a box.”
This was a new rule I was learning. Enough of the Fresno guys had caught VD since
we’d been in port, that they were now requiring us to prove we had a
package of condoms with us before they’d let us off the ship. We all grabbed a box and headed down the
gangway to the pier. There were five of
us in this initial group, Quintana, myself, Fireman Sosario, Seaman Darkbull
and Seaman Derkins.
We walked the mile or so to the main gate, and then out into
Olongapo City once again. We walked into
the first bar we found and ordered up a beer.
While we were drinking up, Quintana walked over to me, motioned towards
the girls dancing on stage and said,
“See anything you like?”
“What do you mean?”
“Son, those are whores – you can have any one of them you
want.”
“They are?!
Wow!”
This was the first time I had ever seen a real prostitute
before, and I was shocked. The innocent
Eagle Scout from Wyoming slipped yet another layer behind the new persona that
I was developing.
I asked Quintana (whom everyone just called “Q”) how you
went about getting one of the girls, and he replied,
“You just pay her barfine”
“Barfine? What’s
that?”
“It’s the money you pay the bar to take the girl home –
see?”
He pointed to the menu that hung on the wall behind the
bar. The menu listed the drinks you
could get – beer, mojo, bullfrog, rum and coke….and down at the bottom, in big
neon letters was “Barfine – 250/500”
Damn – he was right! There it was
in black and white, well actually black and neon pink, but there it was
nonetheless.
“What does the 250/500 thing mean?”
“250 pesos for a short time, and 500 pesos for a long
time”.
“What’s the difference ?”
“A short time is when you go, do your business and then come
back to the bar. A long time is when you
take the girl for the whole night. You
really are a booter, aren’t you?”
He had no idea how “booter” I was when it came to sex. I nodded in agreement, and then started to
size up the girls on the dance floor, trying to make my choice. Quintana grabbed me before I could decide,
and said
“C’mon, let’s go!”
They dragged me out of that bar, and on to another one a
little farther down the road. This scene
was repeated a half dozen times, until I was feeling no pain. By then, our group had shrunk to just myself,
Q and Sosario. Q then decided it was
time to go to Barrio Baretto.
“How do we get there?”
“Easy, boot camp – we just hop on a jeepney.”
“A jeepney?”
“Yeah, come on, follow me.”
We walked out of the bar and out onto Magsaysay
Boulevard.
“That, my friend, is a jeepney.”
I looked where he was pointing and saw one of the brightly painted,
chrome-festooned open-air Jeep Wagoneers that were everywhere on the
street.
“Those are the taxis around here. For two pesos, they’ll take us to Barrio, and
then out to Subic City for another two”
We jumped in the back of the first one we could grab, gave
the driver our money and we were off.
It’s a good thing that I’d had enough booze to dull my senses, because
the way the driver flew through the traffic and pedestrians would have made me
shit my pants had I been sober. It was a
wild, crazy ride that wound through the backstreets of Olongapo City. I made a note to myself to make sure to take
this trip during the daytime next time to see some of the local flavor.
In no time, we were out of the town and flying down the
highway toward the jungle. It was a
windy, two-lane highway with a cliff straight up on one side, and a drop-off to
the beach below on the other. There were
about ten of us crammed in the seats that ran along the sides in the back of
the jeepney, and there were no safety devices.
No seatbelts, no handles, nothing.
You just sat tight and hoped. The
driver’s assistant had a cooler under his seat and was selling beers to us as
we made our way towards Barrio Baretto.
It was about a twenty-minute ride through the outskirts of
Olongapo, and into the jungle to Barrio.
When we got there, I was amazed.
I had expected a busy, semi-modern city like Olongapo, but what I found
was completely the opposite. Barrio
Baretto was a collection of bars lining both sides of the highway. They looked fairly clean, but were definitely
a step or two behind the glitz and glamor of Olongapo. We got off the jeepney there, and made our
way into the “Muff Diver’s Bar”. A
couple more drinks later, I was feeling right at home. As I eyed yet another empty beer bottle, a
Filipino man walked into the bar carrying a basket and hollering something that
sounded like
“Baloooooo!….Baloooooo!”
I looked at Q questioningly, and he told me
“Balut. He’s selling
Balut.”
“What the Hell is Balut?”
“Try one – you’ll like it”
I didn’t know any better, so I motioned to the man to come
over. I held up my index finger to
indicate that I wanted one of whatever the Hell “balut” was. He just smiled and reached in his basket and
pulled out what looked like a big egg.
“20 pesos” he said.
I paid him, and turned back to the bar with my egg.
“Okay, Q, what the hell is this thing? It looks like an egg. What am I supposed to do with it now?”
“It is an egg, man, just peel the shell off of it, and suck
the insides down. It’s a …ummm…special
egg.”
Trusting him, and wondering why everyone in the bar was
suddenly quiet and watching me, I broke the shell off of the egg, and tipped it
up to my lips. I was greeted by the
sickest, most disgusting flavor I had ever tasted.
“Quick – suck it down!” they all yelled at me.
I held back my gag reflex as I quickly sucked the contents
of the egg into my mouth. The
consistency of the egg was even more disgusting than the taste. It was at once, slimy, crunchy, chewy and
oily. I chewed quickly – just enough to
get it down my gullet, then swallowed hard.
The taste in my mouth was indescribable.
It was like I had just eaten an ashtray full of fresh monkey dung. It was all I could do to keep from puking
right then and there. Q handed me a
beer, and I slammed it – anything to keep that taste out of my mouth. Once the beer was down, and my mouth empty,
there arose a huge cheer from the room.
They were cheering for me – I couldn’t believe it!
“Do you know what you just ate, man?”
“No – what was that?”
“Dude, balut is a Filipino delicacy. What they do is take a half-developed chicken
embryo, and bury it in the sand until it gets really good and rotten. Then they dig it up and suck the half-formed
chick out of it and chew it up. It’s
like caviar here!”
My face turned
ghostly white as I felt my stomach turn itself inside out. I couldn’t believe I’d just eaten a rotten,
half-formed chicken embryo! Ugh! Q
handed me another drink, and we left the bar, looking for a jeepney to take us
to Subic City.
It took about ten minutes for one to come down the road, and
we flagged it down. We jumped in back
and gave the driver our money. He tore
off down the road through the jungle at breakneck speeds like our first
driver. I just sat back and enjoyed the
ride with my mouth open, hoping the wind would blow away some of the remaining
“balut breath” that I was now carrying.
It took another fifteen minutes or so for us to get to Subic. When the jeepney finally stopped, and Q and I
got out, I was shocked. I thought that
Barrio was bad – Subic City made Barrio look like positively metropolitan! Subic was waaay out in the jungle and was
definitely a place for only the most dedicated party animals, or so I had
heard. Needless to say, I was more than
a little nervous.
Our first stop for the night was a bar called “Smiles”. Q was sure I would love it. I asked him what the big deal was, and he
just smiled and said
“Come on, boot, let’s go”.
We walked in the door of the bar, and the first thing I
noticed was a big round table in the center of the room. There were about ten guys sitting around it,
and it looked like they were all trying not to laugh. I didn’t quite get it at first, and then Q
explained it to me.
“They’re playing Smiles” he said. “What you do is, you sit down at one of the
chairs, and have some buds sit at the other chairs. You all order a pitcher of beer, and then one
of the bar girls goes under the table.
The first person to smile has to buy the next pitcher.”
“Why would you smile?”
I asked.
Q just looked at me as if to say, “Are you serious?”.
“Because, boot camp” he replied, “The girl under the table
is playing with you. Doing whatever it
takes to make you smile.”
And then it dawned on me.
The guys at the table were all being felt up by the girl under the table
and the guy who was being played with was trying not to smile! What a great game, I thought. Unfortunately, there just wasn’t time for us
to wait around for an open spot at the Smiles table, so we drank a quick beer
and then Quintana grabbed me and took me into a bar called the “Sea Lord”. I swore I’d be back, though.
As walked up the steps to the Sea Lord, Q said,
“C’mon Pete, this is a great place – we hang here all the
time.”
The fact that he had just called me something besides
“booter” for the first time, was lost in the fact that I couldn’t stop
wondering why anybody would willingly hang out in this bar when we walked
in.
The Sea Lord was a small place with room for maybe 20 people
in it. It was fairly busy that night – a
fact you’d have never known looking from the outside. Q and I walked in and found a table. The waitress came over and took our orders. A beer for me, and a rum and coke for Q. We were about halfway through our drinks when
Q looked at me and said,
“Well, you’ve made it this far – are you ready?”
“Ready for what”
“It’s time for you to lose your P.I. cherry, man – time for
you to pick a woman!”
I kind of squirmed in my seat and hemmed and hawed a
bit.
“What – what’s wrong?
Don’t you want one?”
“No, it’s not that, man, it’s just that…that…that…well, I’m
a virgin man. For real. I’ve never been with a woman.”
“WHAT?! You’re an Honest-to-God Cherry Boy?”
“Uh, yeah, I guess so.”
“Holy….hang on!”
Q stood up on his chair and yelled for the entire bar to
hear:
“HEY, EVERYBODY! THIS
GUY HERE IS A CHERRY BOY!”
I tried to sink underneath the table as the bar began to
chant
“Cherry boy…Cherry boy…”
The bartender started ringing a bell hanging on the wall, as
the girls all ran over to our table. I
was mortified. The girls all stood
around our table, and one of them said,
“You pick one. We
give you first time for free. Which one
you want?”
I looked at Q, and he just said, “C’mon man, pick one of
them – they’ll only offer once.”
I closed my eyes and pointed towards one….
”Ummm, you, I guess”.
I felt a hand grab mine, and I looked up at the gal who was
about to take my virginity. She was
20-ish, and so heavily made up that I couldn’t tell if she was good looking or
not. She just led me through a doorway,
and into the back area of the bar, which housed lots of small rooms. We opened the door to one of these rooms and
stepped inside. This was it – my life
was about to change forever.
The room was small – just barely big enough for a bed and a
small dresser. I could tell that this
wasn’t just where she took her clients for a little fun, but this was where she
lived. There were pictures of her family
on her walls, and a hotplate on top of the dresser. A single bare bulb hung from a wire above the
bed, and that was about it. I wasn’t
sure what to do next, but Quintana’s last words to me kept echoing through my
head -
“Remember to wear your rubber!”
The girl told me her name was Honey, and she sat down on the
edge of her bed and motioned for me to sit next to her. I looked at the bed and saw an empty rubber
package lying next to her. She saw it
about the same time I did, and quickly brushed it to the floor. I sat down next to her, and looked over at
her, wondering what to do next. My mind
raced through every issue of Playboy and every half-scrambled cable skin flick
I’d ever seen trying to find some shred of a clue as to what went where, when
we heard the door to the room next to us open and close. Honey put her finger to her lips and said
“Shhh – you listen.
She cherry girl – her first night. Listen!”
I couldn’t believe what was happening – the hooker in the
room next to us was new to the business, and this was her first night. Good thing I hadn’t picked her instead, who
knows what would have happened! Honey
laid on the bed and motioned for me to lay next to her as we listened in on the
action next door. The walls of the rooms
were thin, ¼ inch plywood, so it was like listening through gauze. You could tell that the guy she was with was
a black guy by his husky voice,
“You ready for me, bitch?” he growled.
We then heard a zipper go down, followed by a female voice
saying,
“Nooo – it too big, it too big!”
The guy just laughed and told her to “brace herself”. We then heard him grunt and heard her let out
the most pain-filled, bloodcurdling scream I had ever heard! It sounded like she was being ripped wide
open. I looked over at Honey, and she
was laughing like a hyena!
“Oho – she no cherry girl no more!”
“yeah, no shit” I thought to myself. I was a little worried now – was this going
to hurt? I had no idea what to expect.
And then, it was time. Honey reached up and switched off the
light. I then felt her hand go to my
zipper and undo it. The light from the
bar filtered in over the top of her plywood wall, and I could watch her as she
undid my pants and slid them down my legs.
I took my shirt off, and she did the same. Soon, we were both naked, and Honey just
pushed me back onto the pillow as she put her head in my lap and started into
it. I closed my eyes and concentrated on
how damn good it felt. Meanwhile, the
thought,
“Don’t forget your rubber man….Don’t forget your rubber,
man…”
kept echoing through my head. I knew I had to put it on before the
situation got any more involved, but I was too busy enjoying the sensation of
the moment to really care. Suddenly, I
noticed that she had stopped what she had been doing. I slowly opened my eyes, just in time to see
her guide my manhood into her, as she sat down on my lap.
“Oh shit” I thought.
“Oh well, no turning back now!”
and with that, I sat up, flipped her on her back and went to town.
It was my first time, but I went at it like I was an old
pro. The booze inside me had dulled my
senses enough to keep me from exploding immediately, and I was evidently taking
a little longer than she would have liked.
“You take too long – you no cherry boy!”
“Sure I am, now shut up and let me finish”
“No – you pay now.
You take too long!”
I quickly finished my business, then jumped off her and
started to get dressed.
“I’m sorry – I like you.
You come back and see Honey again – here’s my picture so you never
forget me”
Honey - Sea Lord in Subic City, Philippines 13NOV88
I looked at her quizzically, as she handed me a snapshot of
herself. I put the picture in my back
pocket and left the room, feeling like a real man for the first time in my life. As I rounded the corner on my way back to the
bar, I ran into the black guy who had been in the room next to mine. He was huge – well over 6’5” and easily 250
pounds. I could only imagine how big his
“equipment” must have been, and how much that girl must have been hurting at
the moment. He and I exchanged
high-fives and then walked through the curtain and back into the bar. Cheers rose from the crowd as I walked into
the room and raised my fists in the air in victory. Free drink after free drink came to our
table, and Q and I ended up getting completely shitfaced before we stumbled out
of the Sea Lord a little after 2 o’clock in the morning.
The only problem with partying in Subic City is that the
jeepneys basically stop running around midnight, and by then you’re ten miles
out in the jungle, and there is no way to get back to the base. If you are lucky enough to flag down a
jeepney, you’ll be shocked to discover that your 4 peso ride to Subic just
became a 100 peso ride back to Olongapo.
Such was the case with Q and I.
After we finally flagged down a jeepney, the guy wanted 100 pesos to
take us back to base. Q told him to go
to hell, and that we’d find another jeepney.
Now, we’d been standing out there for a half hour, and this was the
first jeepney we’d seen, so I wasn’t quite as anxious to let it slip away. After all, 100 pesos was less than five
dollars in “real” money anyway. Q
refused to get in the jeepney, so I ended up literally dragging him into the
damn thing. We finally got back to
Olongapo, and I paid the guy his “outrageous” five dollar fare.
By the time we managed to get back to base and stumble to
Pier 9, and walk on board the Fresno, it was 5:30 in the morning. Reveille was in an hour! We walked down to the berthing area, changed
out of our civvies, and into our dungarees and fell asleep in a couple of the
chairs, knowing that the guys would wake us up on their way to quarters when it
was time. It worked like a charm, and
two hours later, I was standing in the blazing sun, paintbrush in hand,
enjoying my first no-sleep, still-drunk, feel-like-shit day at work. It was only the first of many – they had
managed to break my P.I. Cherry in every possible way that night. From then on, I was just one of the crew, and
very rarely did I ever hear the term “booter” used to describe me. I silently thanked God that it was my duty
day, and somehow managed to slough my way through the morning, looking forward
to that noontime wind tunnel nap that would come to be my daily savior. Yes, it was official – I was now a
full-fledged sailor. All that was left
was to catch the clap and get a tattoo!
Unfortunately, one of those two happened a lot sooner than I had
planned!
CHAPTER TWENTY: THE BROWN BAG OF SHAME
November 14th
As I drug my way through the day’s work, I noticed that
every once in a while, the guys would see some person walking down the pier,
and they’d all lean over the bulwark and start clapping for him. I wasn’t exactly sure what this was for, I
just figured it was another of their dumb initiation things. The one thing I did notice, however, was that
every one of the guys who got the ovation was carrying a little brown paper bag
in their hand. I didn’t give it much
thought at the time, and I went back to my work, just waiting to hear the word
passed to “knock off ship’s work” so I could get some sleep.
When 4:00 finally came, I headed straight down to the
berthing area, stripped down to my boxers and climbed up into my rack. I had just started to slip off when I felt
someone tapping my shoulder.
“Peterson – what the hell are you doing?”
“Unnnh – what?”
“You’re supposed to be on watch –get your ass up and get
dressed”
“What?!”
“Didn’t you read the
P.O.D.? You’re the messenger of the watch
on the 4 to 8, get your whites on and get your ass up to the quarterdeck”
One of the things about being in the duty section that I
didn’t realize was that you had to stand watches. Standing a watch in port basically consisted
of standing at the quarterdeck with the Officer of The Deck, and watching guys
leave the ship, and come back on. It was
pretty boring stuff, actually. I also
learned that the P.O.D. was the “Plan Of The Day”, a daily newsletter that the
ship put out that listed who would be standing watches and who had duty that
day. Until this moment, I had ignored
the POD – unfortunately, it was not the last time that I failed to read
it. Tired, grumpy, and pissed off that I
couldn’t go to sleep, I got up and put my whites on, and walked up to the quarterdeck
for watch.
I was to be the Messenger of the Watch – basically, the guy
who runs and gets whoever or whatever the OOD needs. I also was to man the phones and stand there
and look important for the next four hours.
It was a definite struggle this night, but somehow I made it to eight
o’clock. When my watch relief finally
came, I was more than ready to stumble down to my berthing area and climb into
bed, but before I could get too far, the officer who was getting off of watch
at the same time I was said,
“Hey, Boot Camp – come here.”
I had no idea what he wanted, so I walked over to where he
was standing.
“Yes, Sir?”.
“Come with me”
He walked me to the rear of the ship (the “fantail”) and
told me to look up. I did, and the sight
I saw took my breath away. Not only was it a beautiful Philippine twilit
evening, but there suddenly appeared a pair of Navy F-14 Tomcats, in full
flight, with twin afterburners blasting, screaming right over our heads and
into the distance! It was amazing! It was “Top Gun” in the flesh! I had goosebumps. No sooner had they disappeared over the
horizon, than two more appeared from behind us, and did the same thing – over
and over for almost an hour. It was
absolutely amazing. Neither the officer
nor I said a word until the sun had completely set, and the last jets were
gone. He looked at me and said –
“Makes you damn proud to be an American, doesn’t it? Welcome to the Navy son.” And he turned and walked away.
It was at that precise moment that I knew I had made the
right choice. I had never been prouder
to be a U.S. serviceman, and knew that, if called, I would give my life for my
country. The transformation was complete
– that shy, insecure band geek from Wyoming was now a sailor. A proud defender of the United States of
America. My feelings of pride and duty
helped alleviate the fact that my much-anticipated fourteen hours of sleep had
just been whittled down to ten. My head
was awash with newfound purpose and pride, as I climbed into my rack, closed my
eyes and prepared myself for the next year and a half of Active Duty.
November 15th
I woke up with reveille the next morning and headed up the
ladder and into the head. My newfound
purpose and duty as a sailor was quickly forgotten, because, as I was joking
with the guy at the urinal next to me about how hung over he looked, I tried to pee. I have never felt pain like that in my
life! It felt like I was pissing
fire! I screamed, grabbed ahold of the
flush handle and pounded my forehead against the bulkhead!
“HOLY SHIT!!”
I screamed. I was
sure that my penis was going to fall off.
The guys in the head all stared at me, then started laughing!
“Oh man – you caught the clap!”
“The what?”
“You got VD man – that whore gave you the clap! You better go see doc”.
I quickly put it back in my boxers, went down to berthing
and got dressed. I headed up for
quarters, and as soon as that was over, I excused myself and headed down to
sick bay. As I walked in the door, the
doc turned and looked at me –
“cut yourself open again, booter?”
“No man, this morning when I tried to take a leak, it felt
like I was pissin’ fire! I think there’s
something wrong with my….my….well, you know.”
“Have you had sex recently?”
“Yeah, a couple of nights ago.”
“Did you use a rubber?”
“umm- no.”
“Then I’d say you've got VD. She gave you the clap. Here’s a medical relief chit – go over to the
clinic on base and they’ll take care of you”
“Thanks doc” I said, and I turned to leave.
As I walked out of sick bay, I heard him call out
“And try not to stick your dick in anything before you get
there!”
Ha ha – very funny. I
walked off the ship and headed towards the clinic.
The medical clinic was about a mile and a half away from the
pier, right next door to the receiving office I’d reported to just a few days
earlier. Funny – it seemed like that was
months ago – time sure flies when you’re having fun. It was already 90 degrees outside, but
without the 100 pounds of gear I’d been carrying the last time I’d made this
walk, it didn’t seem quite so bad. I
walked into the clinic and signed in.
The doc from the Fresno had already called ahead, so they knew I was
coming. I sat in their waiting room
until they called me into the doctor’s office.
I walked in and sat down, and the doctor turned to me,
“So, what seems to be the problem?”
“Well, this morning, when I got up and went to take a leak,
it felt like I was peeing fire”
“I see – and let me guess, you had sex without a rubber a
couple of nights ago, didn’t you? “
“yeah”
“Okay, well, drop your trousers and grab ahold of the corner
of my desk”
I looked down at the corner of his desk, and saw that it was
all splintered and chewed up. I couldn’t
imagine what he was going to do, but he was the doc, so I dropped trou and
grabbed ahold of his desk. The doc was
sitting in a swivel chair, and had his back to me, arranging some
supplies. When he turned around to face
me, he had what looked like a hypodermic needle in his hand. When I looked a little closer, I saw that the
needle part had a small cotton swab on the end of it. He looked up at me and said,
“Ready?”
“Sure, go ahead”
I didn’t know what to expect, and still didn’t know why I
was holding onto his desk, when he grabbed my penis and jammed the swab down
the hole in the tip. Now, I only thought
that I had felt pain before! This was
the most excruciating thing I had ever felt.
It felt like I had caught my unit in my zipper, but about two inches
down into it! I grabbed his desk with
all my strength and felt my fingernails dig into the wood as he swabbed away at
my infected member. I added my mark to the scars already embedded in the corner of the desk until he finally pulled
the swab out, and wiped the sample on his petri dish, He then handed me a urine
specimen cup and told me to go to the head and fill it up. I zipped up my dungarees and walked,
bow-legged, down the hall and into the head to fill the cup.
At that time, the U.S. Navy was still accepting Filipino
Nationals as recruits. Any Filipino who
qualified came down to the Subic Bay Naval Base to take their physicals, just
like I had done at the M.E.P.S. center in Denver. Part of their physical was a urine test, and
that’s what they were in the middle of when I walked into the head. There were about 30 guys trying to fill their
own little specimen cups when I walked in and pushed my way through to an open
urinal. I was the only “real” sailor
there, and I was feeling like the big dog, just knowing that they all wished
they were sailors like me. I strode up
to the urinal, unzipped, and whipped it out.
I aimed for the cup, and let it fly.
Suddenly, that swab that had been the most painful thing I had ever
felt, became the SECOND most painful thing I had ever felt! I am firmly convinced that the first piss
after the swab was the single most excruciating thing a man can go through in
his life. A scream ripped from my
throat, and I collapsed onto my knees on the floor. 30 Filipino Navy hopefuls suddenly became 30
terrified Filipinos wondering what the Hell they were trying to get into!
I regained my composure enough to fill the cup about
halfway, put a lid on it, then zip up my pants, get to my feet and walk to the
sink to clean up. I didn’t hear a single
word from any of the guys in that head from the moment I screamed until the
moment I walked out the door. I’ve got a
feeling that the Navy suddenly lost 30 very promising new recruits that
morning! On shaky knees, I walked my sample back to the
doc’s office and handed it to him, then I sat down in the lobby to cry and wait
for the results.
About twenty minutes later, they called my back into the
office, and the doc told me,
“Congratulations, booter – you caught Chlamydia….The
Clap. On your first time, even. Good Job.”
“Gee, thanks, I think…”
“Now drop trou and turn around.”
I had noticed the rather large hypodermic needle in his hand
and guessed that this was it.
“You allergic to Penicillin?”
“Not that I know of”
“Good”
With that, he took haphazard aim and buried the needle in my
backside. The liquid inside was cold and
flowed very slowly. It seemed like he
had that needle buried in my butt cheek for an hour. He finally pulled it out and told me to get
dressed. He then handed me a
prescription for some pills.
“These will help knock out that crap. You can go down to the dispensary here and
get this filled. And don’t let my catch
you in here again! “
“No problem man – you don’t have to worry about me”. I meant every word I said.
I left his office and walked down the hall to the
dispensary. I gave them my prescription,
and the pharmacist just looked at me and smiled.
“Have a little too
much fun, did we?”
“Yeah, something like that”
“Have a seat over there, it’ll only take a couple of
minutes”
I walked over and sat down in one of the chairs. I had no more than sat down when he called
“Here you go – make sure you follow the directions on the
bottle and take them all.”
He pushed a small, brown paper bag across the counter
towards me. I grabbed it and walked out
the door. I was about a hundred yards
away from the clinic when I realized what was in my hand – a small, brown paper
bag. Right then, it dawned on me – I had
just caught The Clap. Every one of those
guys who had walked past the ship that the Deck Department had clapped for had
been carrying a small, brown paper bag.
Oh – I get it! The fact that I
still had a mile and a half to walk, and some ten ships to walk past let me
know that I was to perform my first “walk of shame”. I sucked it up and took it like a man – head
held high, brown bag carried proudly in my hand. Every ship I walked past it was the same
thing – Clap, Clap, Clap, Clap.
“Good job, man!”
“Way to go!”
“Don’t forget your rubbers, dude!”
and so on, and so on.
By the time I finally got to where the Fresno was moored, I was glad to
take the ribbing from my friends.
“Way to go, booter!”
“Good job, Pete!”
I made it onboard, and down to my locker where I put the
pills in a safe place. I swore then,
that I would never again have unprotected sex with a prostitute in a foreign
country. Not exactly something every man
has to worry about, but with us sailors it was pretty much an occupational
hazard. Scary world we live in, ain’t
it?
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE: WEEKEND LIBERTY
November 16th
We got word later that day that we would be pulling out of
the Philippines on Monday morning, headed for Japan. I was immediately excited – I had never been
out to sea before, and I was getting a little tired of the scene in the
Philippines. Being as it was Friday,
that meant that the next two days, our last in the P.I., would be a liberty
weekend. The duty sections alternated
weekends, and my section had this one off.
That meant we would have two full days of wild, crazy P.I. party time
before we pulled out of port. I was kind
of excited about that, but not quite as intrigued as I had been a week
earlier. We finished work that day, and
everyone was busily making plans for the big weekend. Some guys were going over to Grande Island –
kind of an on-base resort in the middle of the harbor, and others were going to
get hotel rooms and throw big parties. I
decided to spend Saturday checking out Olongapo by myself, knowing I’d run into
some of the guys out there and I’d just let things go from there.
First, however, I had to deal with Friday night. I got dressed with the rest of the guys, then
headed out for the gate. We had been
paid earlier that afternoon, and I had a roll in my pocket of about $400.00. My first stop was the money exchange
booth. You learned quickly that if you
exchanged your American dollars for Filipino pesos on base, they only gave you
21 pesos to the dollar, but if you waited to do it off base, you could find
places where the exchange rate was as good as 27 to 1. Hell, that extra 6 pesos was a beer – two if
you knew the right bar! I had been in
town for a week, so I was an “old dog”, and knew the places to go. I found a place where I got 25 pesos to the
dollar, exchanged $100.00 and headed down the block to a little bar where some
of the guys from our Engineering department were hanging out.
The bar was a little open-air joint, that was sunken down to
about street level. You had to step down
three stairs to get to the main floor. I
walked in, and ordered a beer, then went over and sat down with some of the
Fresno sailors I recognized. They were
all sitting in the front row, nearest the sidewalk, which was about eye-level
with us as we sat. The guys all had a
big stack of two-peso coins in front of them.
I wasn’t really sure what they were doing with them, but it soon came
clear to me. The guys were taking the
coins and tossing them out onto the sidewalk for the beggars to pick up. Once they had attracted a fair-sized group of
beggars, they began to throw the pesos a little farther out toward the traffic. The beggars would chase them down and come
running back for more. The more we
drank, the farther out the pesos went, until, finally, we were throwing the
coins out into the middle of the street, then taking bets on which beggar would
be the first to get hit by a speeding jeepney or trike. We thought it was great fun. But then again, we were drunken sailors –
just about anything was funny to us!
After an hour or so of this, I started feeling more hungry
than entertained, so I set out to find some food. There weren’t a whole lot of restaurants on
the strip, but there were lots of barbecue vendors. These vendors were all similar – they had a
small portable cart (akin to the hot dog carts in New York City) that featured
a large, charcoal-fired grill in the center.
They sold what looked like small pieces of meat, skewered onto small
wooden shiskebab stakes, and smothered in what tasted like a combination of barbecue sauce and
Tabasco. Years later, I found out the secret was actually 'banana catsup'. Whatever it was, it was sweet, spicy and delicious. You’d buy a handful of skewers
at a peso apiece, and they’d put them into a small brown paper sack for you to
carry off to the next bar with you. The
guys all called it Monkey-On-A-Stick, and I’m not sure anyone really knew what
kind of meat it was. Could have been
beef, could have been pork, could have been cat, dog or monkey…who knew? But when you were three sheets to the wind,
they were the best damn thing you’d ever tasted, and at a peso apiece, who
could say no? During my time in the
P.I., I ate countless brown bags full of barbecue. But this night I was feeling
rich, and in the mood for something more than monkey on a stick. I thought my search might be in vain, until I
looked up and saw that familiar yellow circle with red script – “Hard Rock
Café”! I couldn’t believe it – a Hard
Rock in Olongapo! I ran across the
street and bolted up the stairs into the completely empty restaurant. The hostess looked surprised that someone had
entered her establishment so eagerly, and of their own volition even. She showed me to the best seat in the house,
gave me a menu and went to get me a beer.
I perused their board of fare, then decided at last on the
perfect standby – a good old American hamburger. Big mistake.
I was about to learn what a corporate imposter was. Unbeknownst to me at the time, the “Olongapo
Hard Rock Café” had about as much in common with a real Hard Rock Café as I had
in common with a real world traveler.
The truth came crashing in on me about the second bite of my
“burger”. The hamburger they brought me
was the worst-tasting thing I had ever put in my mouth. (well, second worst if
you counted the balut from a couple of nights earlier!) I spit it out, chugged the rest of my beer
and headed for the door. I slapped a ten
peso bill on the counter as I left and tried to keep from throwing up as I made
it down the stairs and out onto the street.
As I walked out of the door, I ran into one of the officers from the
Fresno.
“What the Hell you doin’, booter? You didn’t just eat in there, did you?”
“Yes, sir – big mistake”
“Yeah, no shit – they serve dog in there, didn’t you know
that?”
“Dog? Are you
serious?!”
“Yeah – it’s on the off-limits list. Start readin’ your P.O.D. booter.”
And with that he was gone.
This was the second time I had been caught not reading the P.O.D., and
after this little incident, I at least pretended to read the P.O.D.’s a little
more thoroughly. And in case you ever
wondered – dog tastes bad. Really,
really bad.
I started to walk down Magsaysay Boulevard after that, just
looking at all the shops. You could have
anything you wanted made there; imitations of Gucci sweat suits, British
Knights gear, Nikes- anything. You could
get bootlegs of any tape you wanted, audio or video. The big thing that most of the sailors got in
the P.I. was a West Pac Jacket. A West
Pac Jacket was our tour souvenir. It was
usually a black satin jacket, adorned with the flags of all the countries the
ship had visited during it’s six month deployment, and had any other design the
customer wanted on it. Since I was only
on the last month of the Fresno’s West Pac, I hadn’t earned the right to have a
full-fledged West Pac Jacket, but I knew that when I came back the next time,
if I got back, I was going to get an awesome one. The cool thing about all of this stuff was
that you could get it for little of nothing.
A fully embroidered and customized jacket would run you about 50
bucks. Leather shoes were around 10
dollars, and tapes were just a couple of bucks apiece. It was a cheap place to buy. Nothing really tempted me, until I walked
past the snakeskin shop, and saw the custom cowboy boots in the window. Now those were cool!
I walked in and asked the guy how much the boots were.
“Fifty dollars American” he said.
“Cool – what sizes do you have?”
“No sizes – we make for you”
“Make for me? What do
you mean?”
“Take shoes off and
put feet here – have boots ready tomorrow”
He pointed to a large pad of white paper and motioned for me
to step onto it. Fifty bucks for a
custom fit pair of python skin boots was too good to pass up, so I took my
shoes off and let him trace my feet. He
wrote my name and ship on the paper, took my $50.00 and told me to come back
tomorrow. I was happy with my purchase,
and walked back onto the street.
Suddenly an awful thought hit me – did I just get ripped off? I turned around to go get my money back when
I saw two Marines walk out of the same shop with a couple of pairs of beautiful
python skin boots. I decided to trust
the guy, and walked on up the street.
A block or so later, I heard country music coming from one
of the bars. This struck me as unusual,
because the majority of the bars were playing either loud rock and roll, or
deafening dance music. Suddenly, I felt
a twinge of homesickness, so I went upstairs to see what kind of country bar I
could find in the Philippines. When I
walked in, I saw a Filipino band, complete with hats, boots and big belt
buckles doing their best George Strait impersonation. They had lost a little something in the
translation from English to Tagalog and back, and “Oceanfront Property” became
“Underground Property”. But allowing for
a little poetic license, it wasn’t too bad, so I grabbed a stool at the bar and
just tried to imagine myself back home.
Five or six beers later, I was feelin’ pretty homey and really starting
to enjoy myself. One of the bar girls
was getting awfully friendly with me and started trying to get me to buy her a
“girl drink”. This was one of the
favorite scams in the bars. The girls
would come and sit by you, and flirt with you until you were ready to pay their
barfine and take them home. After they
had sat with you for ten minutes or so, they’d tell you they were thirsty and
ask you to buy them a drink. Now the
scam was, that your glass of Mojo cost you 10 pesos, while their “girl
drinks” cost you about 10 dollars!
Only booters bought girl drinks, but they sure tried hard to get the
rest of us to fall for it. I’m proud to
say that I never bought a single girl drink on my first visit to the
Philippines. Thanks to the old dawgs of
the Fresno for helping me avoid that little pitfall.
I soon had my fill of the country bar and set out to find
some of my other friends on the strip. I
found a bunch of them at an open-air pool hall on the corner. I walked in and watched them lose their ass
to a bunch of the bar girls. We all
laughed and had a good time, and when I told one of the guys about my
experience at the Hard Rock Cafe he just laughed, and asked if I was still
hungry. I told him I was, but not for
monkey-on-a-stick. Once again he laughed,
and motioned for the mama-san to come over.
The mama-san was the one in charge of all the girls. She was usually the oldest, and too old to be
a productive working girl anymore. I
guess when prostitutes get too old to hook, they get promoted to upper management! Anyway, the mama san nodded and told me,
“50 pesos”.
I handed her the money, and she motioned to one of her
girls, who took the money and ran off. I
wasn’t exactly sure what I’d just paid for, but my bud said,
“Relax, you’ll love this”.
I hadn’t exactly loved everything I’d experienced so far,
but I was of open mind, so I sat back and waited.
About five minutes later, the girl reappeared with a large
foil-covered plate in her hand. She sat
it on the table in front of me and went and got me a fork and a napkin. I took the foil off to see about a dozen
little egg-roll looking things on top of a pile of rice. I must say, I wasn’t too excited about egg
rolls and rice. My bud said,
“There ya go Pete – a P.I. delicacy, Fried Rice and
Lumpia”.
“Lumpia? They look
like egg rolls”
“They may look like egg rolls, but trust me – they
taste much, MUCH better!”
“What the hell” I thought, and dug in.
It was one of the best tasting things I have ever
eaten! Lumpia are incredible. They are very similar to egg rolls, but the
taste is unlike anything I had ever experienced. And the fried rice was different than
anything I’d eaten stateside. I devoured
the plate like I hadn’t eaten in a week, and then Mama-San asked if I wanted
more.
“Maybe later” I replied, and handed her an American five
dollar bill.
“What this for?”
“For you – just a way to say thank you.”
The Mama-San hugged me and said “You come to my place
anytime. I give you free drink every
time you come.”
And she was right.
Even a year and half later, when the Fresno came back to the P.I.,
Mama-San recognized me and gave me a free beer.
She proved to me that there are wonderful people all over the world, no
matter what their station in life.
That night was more of the same, I wandered from bar to bar
and met up with Fresno guys in most of them.
I’d stay long enough to have a couple of beers, then move along to the
next one. It was a very enjoyable
evening, and I ended up drunker than a skunk.
Not as drunk as the deck party night, and I avoided the bar girls, but I
had a blast nonetheless. I met up with a
bunch of guys headed back to the ship, and we all walked back together at about
two in the morning. I would consider
this my first successful night of liberty, and I had done it myself. I also managed to feel a little more
comfortable in my surroundings outside of the base, and was ready to tackle my
first full day of P.I. liberty! I hit my
rack that night, and slept in until the glorious hour of nine o’clock. Sleeping in is a definite luxury in the Navy,
and we all took advantage of it when we could.
November 17th
Saturday was to be my first big day out on my own. I decided to check out the base first, to see
the base exchange, the PX, and the E-club.
I got dressed, and was headed out when I ran into a couple of the other
new guys from deck department. We
figured we’d go check out the base
together. Steve Haulin, Bob Powell and
myself walked over to the base exchange to see what it was all about. It was like a low-cost Wal-Mart with
everything you could imagine. Clothes,
dishes, stereos, music, magazines…all the stuff you couldn’t find off base. The prices were great, and we all bought a
little something. Then we went over to
the PX, where we found things like beer, shampoo, beer, dirty magazines, beer,
snacks and beer. We picked up some
toiletries, a bag of cookies and a twelve pack of Budweiser. We sat and drank the beer and ate the
cookies, and called it breakfast. We
then found the bowling alley, the ball fields and finally, the E-club. The E-club was the on-base bar and dance
club. It was nowhere near as wild as the
off base bars were, but it was a nice change of pace for a quiet mid-morning
beer – or three. A six pack apiece
later, the three of us headed back to the ship to stow our purchases and get
ready to go out on town. We had a good
beer buzz going, and were anxious to get out and start the serious
partying. We made it back quickly, put
our stuff in our lockers, then met up on the quarterdeck and headed off base to
see what kind of trouble we could get into.
Most of the rest of that day, we spent going from bar to
bar, just checking out what there was to see.
We hit some bars off the strip, and ended up working ourselves into a
fairly good drunk. About three o’clock
that afternoon, we found a bar called D’Office.
When we walked in, it was like walking into quarters in the morning –
all of deck department was there!
“Hey – there they are!
Booters – you found us!”
Turns out that D’Office was the official/unofficial Deck
Department gathering spot. Most of the
liberty days started off with drinks at D’Office, and we had just wandered into
Saturday’s gathering. We sat down and
ordered up the house specialty – 50-cent Big Gulp-sized Rum and Cokes. After a few of these, we were ready for
anything. The consensus was to go play a
little pool, then head up to Bogart’s for a while, then jump on a jeepney and
head out to Barrio, and maybe up to Subic.
Sounded like fun to me. I had no
idea what Bogart’s was, but I was up for any adventure by this point in
time. With that in mind, we finished our
drinks, and lit out for the pool hall.
When we walked outside, I was shocked to see that it was
almost dark outside. Somehow, I had lost
a few hours. In my mind, it was noon
when I went into D’Office, and I had only been in there for a couple of
hours. In reality, it was three by the
time we got there, and we had spent a good four or five hours at the bar
getting primed for the night’s activities.
This was my first experience with P.I. Time, which seemed to be on
entirely different wavelength than U.S. Time.
P.I. time turned hours into minutes and made the night time seem to last
forever. I loved P.I. Time. Truth be known, P.I. time was probably more
due to mixing San Miguel with Rum and Coke, than some warp in the space/time
continuum, but I was in no shape to argue existential physics at this
point. What I was in shape for, however,
was stumbling across the street, and into our favorite little pool hall.
The Mama-San who had introduced me to lumpia and fried rice
the night before, recognized me, and brought me a free beer. We immediately
proceeded to lose every game of pool we played against her bar girls. After an hour or so of getting completely
humiliated by the girls, we left and headed to Bogart’s. Bogart’s was something else. It’s full name was “Bogart’s Bull Pen”, and
the big attraction was the mechanical bull in the center of the club. I had absolutely no intention of
getting on this death-trap, but once the guys found out I was from Wyoming,
they decided that I was “super cowboy”, and I had to ride the thing. I told them I would in a while, but they
better get me good and drunk first. With
that small little comment, the booze started flowing.
Guys were buying me drinks left and right, and I was trying
to oblige them all. Just as riding the
bull started sounding like a good idea, Captain Wilbur and the XO walked
in! The guys all cheered, and Captain Wilbur
sat down at a table right next to the edge of the bullpen. The bullpen was the pit where the mechanical
bull sat. It was mounted in the center
of a 20x20 square sunk into the floor.
The area around the pit was lined with a wooden barrier to keep people
at the tables from falling in and getting hit by the bodies being flung from
the bull. The floor of the pit was
covered about a foot deep by large chunks of foam padding that had the nasty
habit of moving out of the way when you landed on them so that your head would
bounce against the wood underneath them.
It would definitely have been shut down by the authorities in the U.S.,
but this was the P.I. and anything goes!
After a couple more drinks, and some cheers and taunts, I took my place
in line to ride the bull.
A bar girl jumped on the thing right before I did, and she
rode the Hell out of it. They had her
turned up to almost full speed, and they couldn’t throw her. She finally had them stop it, and she climbed
off and thumbed her nose at me as a challenge.
I wasn’t one to be beaten by a girl, so I grabbed the glove and climbed
up on the bull. I wasn’t quite sober
enough to figure out that the girl probably rode the thing fifty times a day and
had done so for a year. I was just mad
that a girl thought she could ride better than “super cowboy”! I grabbed the leather glove, jammed my right
hand into it, grabbed the rope with my left hand and got ready to nod to the
operator to turn it on….at this point, I
realized that I had put the wrong hand in the rope. I quickly changed hands, put my gloved
hand in the handle of the bull rope, set my feet, and nodded to the
operator. He turned her on to speed “1”
and I laughed. I sat up there and felt
like the King Of The World. All of the
Fresno guys were cheering for me, and the Captain and the XO were yelling as
well. The operator turned it up to “2”,
and I still sat there and even tried to spur the damn thing! The cheers got louder as we went up to “3”
and then “4”. By the time we got to “5”,
the cheers were deafening, and the XO was even leaning out over the wooden
barrier clapping and hollering for me!
Unfortunately for me, the 50 or so drinks I had put down in the previous
ten hours were beginning to affect my sense of balance, and I felt myself
beginning to slip. The operator decided
I had been on the bull long enough, so he skipped “6” and “7” and threw her
right up into “8” and sat back to watch the show. This was all it took to remove the rest of my
already precarious sense of balance. I
became instantaneously airborne and realized that I was headed directly towards
our XO, who was draped across the railing, screaming his head off. The soles of my shoes missed his head by a
scant two inches, and the look of surprise on his face matched mine as my head
struck the bare wooden floor beneath the foam padding. I laid there for a minute, trying to feel my
fingers and toes and when I realized I was still in one piece, I got up and
made my way out of the pit. The cheers
continued, and a fresh round of free drinks awaited me, as I was presented with
my “I Rode The Bull At Bogart’s” T-shirt.
Years later, as I was watching some terrible sit-com on NBC, I noticed
that hanging on the wall of the lead character’s apartment was a “Bogart’s Bull
Pen” sign. I have often wondered which
one of their set dressers was in the Navy, and if he had been in the audience
to see the Amazing Flying Cowboy perform that night.
T-shirt from Bogart's Bull Pen - Olongapo City, Philippines 17NOV88
The rest of the guys then decided to leave Bogart’s and head
out to Barrio, but I knew I had seen enough for one night. I begged off and headed down the street
toward the base. As I walked past one of
the shops, the owner came out and grabbed me.
I was surprised at first, and a little angry, until I realized that this
was the shop that had made my boots.
“Your boots ready – come put them on”.
I had forgotten completely about my python-skin cowboy
boots, but there they were! I slipped my
feet into them, and they fit like a glove!
They felt like they had been made for my feet – which, as it would turn
out, they had! I was overjoyed. I thanked the man, shook his hand, and turned
to walk out.
“You pay now!” he shouted.
“I already paid” I told him.
“NO! You pay part –
you pay all now!”
“What the hell are you talking about? I gave you fifty bucks, that’s how much they
cost.”
“NO, you give tip now.
You give tip!”
“Tip? Go to hell, I
ain’t givin’ you no tip!”
“You no give tip, I call MP’s!”
I had heard this little trick before, so I told him
“Go ahead – call the MP’s!”
Before he could say any more, a couple of Shore Patrol guys
walked by. SP’s didn’t have the
authority that MP’s did, but most of the locals didn’t know that. In their minds, there wasn’t any
difference. I grabbed the SP’s and told
them that the guy was trying to make me pay him a tip for something I’d already
paid for.
“Don’t worry about it, we’ll take care of it”
I walked out of the shop to the sounds of an irate
shopkeeper and two pissed off shore patrollers screaming at each other. I just kept walking and headed for the base
in my new python-skin boots with my tennis shoes around my neck. I made it back to the ship around midnight,
stowed my shoes and boots, climbed into bed and crashed. Only one more day of liberty weekend, and
then we’d be out to sea. I was excited,
but not so excited that I couldn’t sleep.
And sleep I did.
November 18th
I woke up at the crack of noon on Sunday, feeling a bit hung
over, but not nearly as bad as I would have had I stayed out all night with
the rest of the guys. I got up,
showered, got dressed and made my way up to the mess decks for some lunch. After eating, I actually felt pretty good,
and since this would be my last day in the P.I., I left the ship and headed out
to see what kind of fun I could drum up.
I walked over to the base club first, and had a couple of beers, then I
set out for the gate. In the Philippines,
there really wasn’t much to do until the sun went down. The bars were open, but
the bargirls weren’t working, the bands weren't playing, and most of the guys
were still on base sleeping off the previous night’s hangovers. I spent the majority of the early afternoon
wandering around Olongapo and checking out the shops, tattoo parlors and clubs,
just waiting for sundown. I ran into a
few of my fellow Frez sailors, and they were doing pretty much the same as me,
just wasting time waiting for something to happen. Finally, somebody made the suggestion that we
all hop on a jeepney and head out to Barrio Baretto. I had wanted to make the trip during
daylight hours, so I readily agreed.
There were about five of us in our group, so we jumped in a jeepney and
headed out into the jungle.
The trip was pretty amazing.
The jeepney wound through the streets of Olongapo, and I was absolutely
amazed to see what the Filipino people lived like. The buildings all looked like they were just
thrown-together collections of corrugated tin and old billboards, and people
were dumping their dirty dishwater and who knows what else in the gutters in
front of their houses. There were
vendors everywhere, trying to sell everything from homemade food to clothing to
sex. I guess the big shock to me, since
I had never been outside of the U.S., was the total lack of sanitation and
regulation in their food sales. I don’t
know why it struck me as so weird, and I understood the complete difference in
the cultures, but for some reason, that is the one thing that stuck in my head
–
“Man, the Health Department should shut these people
down”.
I didn’t know if they even had something like the
Health Department in the P.I.. After
about twenty minutes of winding through Olongapo, we broke out onto a small,
two-lane highway and headed into the jungle.
The houses outside of the city weren’t much better than the ones in the
city, but there was a bit more cinderblock and other sturdy material used in
their construction. The highway followed
the coastline for the most part, and the ocean was the bluest blue that I’d
ever seen. As the road wound up the
hills outside of Olongapo, the tree cover became much denser, and the air
became much more humid. There were
colorful birds and the smells and sounds became completely different. I guess I hadn’t noticed this at night (well,
that and the fact that I was mostly sober this time), and I really enjoyed
seeing this new type of landscape. It
sure was different than Wyoming! About
ten minutes later, we arrived in Barrio Baretto.
Barrio Baretto was actually not a bad-looking little
town. The bars were fairly clean, and
there were a couple of big resort hotels in the area. There were even a couple of decent
restaurants (decent by P.I. standards, still pretty substandard to US
ideals). We piled off the jeepney, and
headed into one of the bars on the main drag.
This bar, like a lot of them in Barrio, was open-air. It was basically like a beach cabana – a big
square bar covered by a thatched roof, with a three-foot high wall surrounding
the tables and chairs. The floors of
some of the bars were sand, but this one had a wooden floor. The big attraction at this bar was the cage
in the back with a pet monkey in it. We
spent the remainder of the afternoon drinking beer, playing darts, shooting
pool and annoying the monkey. Barrio was
bustling with action. It seemed that
most of the experienced P.I. sailors liked to hang in Barrio during the
afternoon, then go hit Olongapo at night (unless they were really
hardcore, in which case they’d go to Subic City). It was a lot of fun that day – it was a lot
more like what I thought I’d be doing overseas when I joined the Navy. I got to see and experience a completely
different culture and hang out with some friends in a foreign country. I guess I never really expected to see the
world from the inside of a bar, but that’s the way it had been turning
out. My experience that day taught me
that if I wanted to get more out of my travels than a hangover, I had to make
my own time to do it. This was a lesson
that I learned, but not necessarily one I always heeded.
By the time the sun went down, we were getting pretty
hungry. We sent one of the bar girls out
for fried rice and lumpia, which was quickly becoming the staple of our
off-base diet. After eating, and tossing
back a few more drinks, we decided to head back to Olongapo for our last night
in port. The jeepney ride back was
nowhere near as interesting as the ride to Barrio had been, due in part to the
fact that it was dark, and the fact that I was pretty drunk by now. We got off on Magsaysay Boulevard and started
our usual pattern of barhopping. We hit
all of our favorites, D’Office and Bogart’s, and even found a new favorite
called The Firehouse. The Firehouse’s
big claim to fame was their fishbowl drinks.
They were actual goldfish-sized fishbowls full of Rum and Coke that cost
about 75 cents. You had to use both
hands to drink them, and you had to be careful with the turned-under rim of the
bowl, or you’d end up with Rum and Coke down the front of your shirt. After three or four of them though, you
didn’t really care about the stains anymore.
We hit bars like The Body Shop, Cal Jams, Metallica, Playboy and many
others too numerous to mention. We ended
up drunker than skunks, and finally made our way back to the base around 2 that
morning. I still hadn’t messed with any
of the bar girls since my little “experience” with Honey, and to tell the
truth, I was still a little scared of what had happened. I was just looking forward to getting back to
the States, and my new home in Long Beach, where the Fresno was homeported, where
I knew the girls would be fast and easy (but clean). I was such a naïve booter! We all hit our racks that night in
anticipation of pulling out of port in the morning and heading off to Japan. I was excited to finally get out to sea and
become a “real” sailor. The excitement
quickly gave way to the alcohol-induced exhaustion, and I passed out in a
violent fit of snoring.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO: GOODBYE, P.I. AND OUT TO SEA
November 19th - 25th, 1988
When reveille went down on Monday morning, it was probably
the first, and only, time in my Naval career that I was excited to get up and
go to quarters. I couldn’t wait to get
out to sea. I got dressed, went up and
ate breakfast, then made my way out onto the forecastle for quarters. LTjg Smits, our Division Officer, came down
and told us that we’d be getting underway at 09:00, so we had better get all of
our preparations made. The next two
hours were the busiest I had spent yet in my Navy career. We had to make sure all of the trucks on deck
were tied down firmly and tighten all of their securing cables, or
“gripes”. Then we had to get all of the
big mooring lines ready to be pulled back up onto the deck and wound onto the
reels. Spaces had to be secured, and
everything had to be fastened down and made ready to take to sea. It was all kind of a blur that morning. We ran from space to space checking our
readiness and making any last-minute adjustments we needed to. Finally, around 09:00, two tugboats pulled up
on the starboard side of the ship. We
sent them down lines, which they tied onto their decks, and then we went over
to the port side, where groups of sailors from the base and other ships were
waiting to untie us. A big crane lifted
the gangplank off the ship, and they disconnected our shore power cables and
our potable water connections from the pier.
They then engaged the capstan on the main deck, and hoisted the anchor
back into it’s housing. The tugs nudged us in toward the pier to give us slack
in our lines, the pier gangs pulled the lines off the mooring posts on the pier
and we were free! Each line was manned
by about five of us, and as soon as it was free from the pier, we heaved with
everything we had. We pulled the heavy
braided nylon lines, which ranged in size from three to eight inches in
diameter, depending on their location on the ship (fore or aft). First Division was responsible for the lines
on the forecastle, and for the anchor.
We quickly pulled the lines on board and got them wound onto the reels,
which stowed them up off the deck. We then covered them with big custom-made
tarps to keep the seawater from eroding them.
I didn’t have much time to enjoy the actual pulling-out-of-port part, as
we had so much work to do, but suddenly I looked up, and we were pointed toward
the edge of the harbor and out onto the open sea!
The tugs gave us a short toot on their whistles, and we ran
over and heaved the tug lines back on board as they untied us and sent us on
our way. As we left the edge of the
harbor, or the “breakwater”, I looked out ahead of the ship. This was the first time I had ever seen the
open ocean, and I was curious to see what it was like. There it was – miles and miles of
nothing. Just flat and blue as far as
the eye could see – it was beautiful! It
didn’t take long for the Fresno to steam far enough away from the P.I. for land
to disappear, and then the vastness of the ocean really hit me. We were all alone as far as the eye could see
– no land, no other ships, no nothing.
Just wide open deep blue ocean below us, and wide open bright blue sky
above us. I sat and marveled at it for a
short time, until Stans yelled at me to get my lazy ass back to work. Well, this was it – I was a real, genuine
sailor now…and only 21 more months to go!
We were supposed to spend twelve days or so steaming up to
Japan, where we’d meet the rest of our Battle Group (the ships we sailed with)
for some exercises, before we pulled into port for a liberty call in
Yokosuka. Then, after a couple of days
there, it was on to Hawaii and then home!
You could feel the excitement beginning to rise in the crew, as they
began to sense the end of the deployment.
What I didn’t know until we got out to sea was the fact that they were
calling this particular deployment the “Typhoon Tour”. Evidently the Fresno had run into three or
four big storms already, and they were really beginning to take their toll on
the ship. The Fresno was fairly old –
her keel was laid in ’67, and she was commissioned in ’69. She had served in Vietnam, and had seen some
hard living in her day. The constant
pounding by the storms was beginning to be a little more than she could take,
and the C.O. was concerned (and rightfully so) about hitting another. The time of year we were out there was prime
season for storms in the Pacific, so all eyes were on the weather forecasts as
we steamed on towards Japan.
I was to spend the first couple of days out of port in an
indoctrination class, learning all about the Fresno, and what I was supposed to
do for General Quarters, how to stand Underway Watch, and all the basic sailor
stuff they expected me to know. There
were five or six of us new guys that would be in the class, and as soon as we
had everything stowed and secured from pulling out of port, they mustered us on
the mess decks for class. By this time,
I was starting to get used to the constant rolling of the ship and being out on
the deck with the wind in my face and the smell of the sea. I began to really enjoy being topside. But something about sitting in the mess decks
watching those walls go up and down and smelling them cooking lunch made my
stomach reverse gears. I never did get
officially seasick, but I sure had the hot-sour spits for a few hours. I didn’t eat much that first couple of days,
but I didn’t puke, either.
During our indoc class, we learned about things like
underway watch. Underway Watch for the
Deck Department meant that we went up onto the bridge and steered the ship,
sent orders to the engine room, and kept an eye out for other ships, airplanes
and men overboard. The two Deck Department
Divisions were split into four watch sections, and the sections rotated through
the eight watches : 8am-Noon, Noon-4pm, 4pm-6pm, 6pm-8pm,
8pm-Midnight, Midnight-4am and finally 4am-8am.
Each day you would stand at least two watches. While you were on watch, you rotated to one
of seven stations. You could be the
helmsman, who actually steered the ship with the big wheel on the bridge, or
you could be the throttleman who sent the Officer Of The Deck’s (O.O.D.) speed
orders down to the engine rooms via a couple of handles on the control
panel. There was also the Messenger Of
The Watch who ran messages from the O.O.D and the Boatswain’s Mate Of The Watch
(B.M.O.W.) to whoever needed to get the message. Then there was the guy who maintained the
contact board – he’s the one who wrote the heading and speed of any other ship
or contact on the plexiglass status board on the wall. He was responsible for updating all of the
movements the contacts made via information they gave him from CIC (Combat
Information Central). The other three
positions were the lookouts. There was a
lookout on both bridge wings - port and starboard, and one on the stern. The lookouts on the bridge wings spent their
time looking at the ocean through binoculars, looking for ships and other
contacts, while the guy on the stern sat on the back of the ship, mainly
watching for men who had fallen overboard.
Stern watch was the most boring watch on the ship, especially in the
middle of the night when it was pitch black out. There was only a small chance that you could
see a man overboard at noon through all of the whitewater the screws churned up
behind the ship, but at midnight, with no moon or starlight to help you, there
was NO chance of seeing someone. But
nonetheless, there we sat, in the dark, bored and trying our damndest not to
fall asleep.
While you were on watch, you rotated positions every
hour. When you came back on watch, you
picked up at the position you were to have rotated to next. It gave you something to look forward to when
you were sitting on the stern – just knowing that you got to go back up into
the warm, dry bridge next station change to be the Messenger Of The Watch.
The other things that our indoc class taught us about was
General Quarters. General Quarters was
what they called in case of any emergency, be it an enemy attack, or a fire in
the engine rooms. Everybody on the ship
was split up into different teams for GQ, from fire hose teams, gun crews,
patch and repair crews, ship handling crews, etc. Everyone had a specific job. I, along with most of the other new guys, was
put onto a hose team. My job during GQ,
was to run down to my station, put on a firefighting outfit with an OBA (oxygen
breathing apparatus) and get on a hose team to fight fires. My firefighting training had consisted of an
hour’s worth of lecture followed by fifteen minute’s worth of hose handling in
boot camp, so I guess I was qualified.
What I really wanted to do was to be on the gun crew, but you had to pay
your dues before you could get into that.
Eventually, I would be in charge of a gun crew, but I still had a long
way to go and a lot of dues to pay and lessons to learn before I got
there.
In general, the indoc classes were pretty helpful. They taught us the way to do things onboard
ship, proper decorum and the chain of command we needed to follow if we had an
issue. We were shown all of the
necessary things like where the barber shop was, where the ship’s store was,
how to get to the Chief’s berthing and how to get to Officer’s Country. We got a complete ship tour, and learned
where all of the fire fighting stations were and where all of the ship’s
equipment was. When our two days of
classes were done, they expected us to know everything about our new home, so
we took it pretty seriously. That,
coupled with the fact that a fire at sea was the most terrifying thing I could
imagine led to my extreme interest in learning everything they wanted to teach
me.
The first couple of days at sea flew by. Between my classes, and standing watch, the
days all began to kind of lump together into one. I soon got used to the constant motion of the
ship, and the fact that our berthing area was directly over the engine rooms. There was the noise and clatter from the
engines combined with the smell of diesel fuel and exhaust pervading our living
quarters 24/7 while we were at sea, but it soon became just a part of my
world. Chow was pretty similar to what
we ate in port, but they added another meal – sort of. The mess decks served what was called
“midrats” (short for Midnight Rations)
every night around midnight for the guys going onto and getting off of
watch. It was never much of anything –
chips and hot dogs, usually, but since there was no fridge to raid onboard
ship, it was a nice option. You soon
learned that time at sea was just a series of watches and that was how you kept
track of the days. It was an odd idea to
get used to, but once you did, time really went by quickly.
After our indoc class was over, we rejoined the rest of our
departments and began to get in with the flow of our daily work/watch/eat/sleep
schedule. The first week at sea was over
before I knew it. I spent the majority
of my time helping perform P.M.S. (Preventive Maintenance System) checks on our
gear and learning where all of our spaces were.
We spent a lot of time on preservation and painting, and I became close,
intimate friends with a needlegun and a bucket of paint. I learned that my favorite watch station was
the helm, because there was actually something to do. You had to keep an eye on the heading
indicator all the time to make sure you were steering in the right
direction. All of the other watch
stations were pretty much just exercises in extreme boredom. They were definitely needed, and an important
part of the ship’s operation, but they were really, really boring. There was nothing like being awakened at
midnight to go sit on the stern of a ship in the middle of the ocean in the
middle of the night to stare at the blackness for an hour. It was all becoming old hand quickly, and I
hoped that something exciting would happen soon. My wishes were granted the next day, as the
rain began to fall.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE: THE TYPHOON
The rain began one morning, and became steadily heavier as the
day wore on. I didn’t think much about
it at the time – just a rainstorm. But
somewhere around midnight, when the winds began to kick in and the swells in
the ocean began to really toss our ship around, I knew we were in for a
ride. The Fresno was at a pretty
distinct disadvantage when it came to heavy seas. While most ships had 20 to 60 foot of draft,
and a bulbous keel, to help minimize the rolling and tossing that heavy seas
caused, the Fresno – since it was a Tank Lander and actually went up onto the
beach, had a flat bottom, and only pulled 15 feet of draft when fully loaded,
12 foot when empty. We were about
half-loaded at the time we ran into this storm, and our flat bottom was really
giving us a heck of a time as wave after wave buffeted us.
The Fresno hits a wave - WestPac 88
Every ship has a so-called “point of no return” – the
maximum degree of a roll the ship can take before it capsizes and sinks. What had been explained to me was that the
Fresno was designed so when we hit our point of no return, our superstructure –
which housed the bridge, Officer’s Country, the Chief’s quarters and the mess
decks – would snap off and fall into the ocean, leaving the rest of the ship
upright and still floating. Our supposed
point of no return was a little over 50 degrees. Anything greater than that would cause massive
panic and mayhem in our world. As the
storm got more and more powerful throughout the night, and into the next day,
we began to record rolls of 40 and 45 degrees.
Guys were tossed out of their racks as they slept, and you had a
tendency to walk on the bulkheads (walls) as much as you walked on the decks
(floors) of the passageways (halls).
Eating was an experience – you had to hold your tray down with one hand,
eat with the other, and use your legs to hook yourself onto your chair. Needless to say, nobody ate much while we
were in the middle of the storm. Captain
Wilbur was starting to get a little worried and was about to order us to turn
around and head back to the P.I., when we hit the big one – a 51 degree
roll!! We went right up to our point of
no return! We all held our breath as the
Frez seemed to hover for a minute, then fell back onto her keel and stayed
upright.
The Fresno hits a BIGGER wave - WestPac 88
The ship fell into an almost instant state of disarray as we
all picked ourselves up off the deck. I
had been on watch when it hit, and when the ship tipped over that far, I could
have sworn that all I had to do to touch the water was to reach out of the door
of the bridge. It was one of the
scariest moments of my life! In the
moments following the roll, we took a quick assessment of damage to the
Frez. We found that the derrick arms –
the big steel structures that stuck out from the front of the ship and
supported the bow ramp when it went out onto the beach – were twisted, and the
superstructure had actually started to separate from the rest of the ship. There was a six-inch gap in the steel skin of
the ship where the superstructure connected to the main body, and if you stood
in the scullery (where we washed the galley’s pots and pans) you could watch
the ocean go by outside through the hole.
But the big problem, we soon discovered, was that the bow doors, which
opened to let the ramp down onto the beach, had twisted, and we were taking on
water! After a bit more examination, it
was determined that one of the big steel hinges that held the doors closed had
twisted under the strain and was allowing the doors to hang open a couple of
inches. Because of this, every time we
hit a wave straight on, we got water into our tank deck. We weren’t taking water on very fast, but we
were taking it on, and the pumps were doing their damndest to keep up with the
flow. Commander Peppard decided to turn
the Fresno around and head for the nearest port. Unfortunately for us, the nearest port was
neither the Philippines, or Japan, but the small island of Guam. The Captain gave the orders, we turned her
around, cut our speed to a crawl and limped towards Guam and the Naval Repair
Facility there.
The next few days kept us busy, and I learned a lot about
damage control as we tried to keep the flow of water at a standstill. We tried patching the holes in the bow doors,
and we tried rigging portable pumps, but the water was still finding its way
into our tank deck. Luckily, most of our
Marine contingent had left the Fresno, and there were only a few of their
amphibious tanks (or “tracks”) still onboard.
We weren’t in imminent danger of sinking, but the rising water level was
still a major concern for the crew. Some
of the guys decided to make the best of a bad situation, and broke out their
boogie boards and headed for the tank deck.
There was two feet or so of standing water on the deck, and every time
we took a roll, a nice little wave would run the length of the deck, just about
the right size to catch a boogie board ride on.
The guys were having a lot of fun, until Master Chief Cooksey caught
them. Master Chief Cooksey was the
oldest, most senior enlisted man on the ship.
He was probably 55, and had been in the Navy for over 30 years. He was originally from Texas, or so the rumor
went (I don’t think anyone had the courage to actually ask him) and he looked
like your stereotypical old salt sailor.
His face was weatherbeaten and the color of tanned leather, and he
talked in a rough, gravelly voice that demanded respect. You tried your best not to cross his path,
and woe to the one who did. The Captain
asked him for advice about things, and everyone respected his
authority. The one thing Master Chief
did not like was disrespect for him, for his ship, or for his Navy. I guess he decided that boogie boarding in
the flooded tank deck of his crippled ship should be construed as a major
violation of his “no disrespect” policy, and he let them have it with both barrels. Needless to say, no one tried to boogie board
in the tank deck again. Ever.
Years later, a review of the timeline said that during this transit period, we sailed through Thanksgiving (Nov. 24th). I think it's interesting that there was no mention of it anywhere in my journal, and with the crazy state of the seas and the condition of the ship, there wasn't much of a celebration of the holiday. Thanksgiving of 1988 was pretty much just another Thursday for us.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR: GUAM
November 26th - 27th
Our four day steam to Japan turned into a week-long trek to
Guam. With the ship in dire need of
repair, and only able to make a few knots’ speed, we were sitting ducks in the
middle of the Pacific. Luckily, the
storm passed in a couple of days leaving us to ride out the trip in relative
calm. By the time we reached Guam, we
were behind schedule for our return to the U.S.. Our battle group was in Japan, and would soon
be on their way to Pearl Harbor, where we were to try to catch up with them for
our return stateside. With this in mind,
the C.O. came over the 1MC (intercom) the day before we reached Guam and told
us that we would be pulling into port the next morning, and staying only long
enough to finish repairs to the bow doors.
He told us that he didn’t want to give anyone liberty while we were
there, but after surviving the fifth typhoon of the deployment, he didn’t want to
risk a mass mutiny, so everyone could have liberty on-base when we pulled in -
with the exception of duty section three.
I was in duty section three. It
was my duty section’s responsibility to assist the shipyard workers in making
all of the repairs to the Fresno to get her seaworthy again. There were more than a few angry Duty Section
Three members amongst the ship’s company when we pulled into Guam the next day.
By the time we had hit the breakwater, then reached pier
side in Guam, it was about noon. I found
it kind of weird to be back in Guam again so soon, but since I had only seen
the airport on my first visit, I didn't mind seeing a different view this
time. Once we were tied up, the C.O. came
over the loudspeakers once again and told everyone that had liberty that he
wanted them back on the ship by 8:00 that night. That being said, they lowered the gangplank
into place, and two-thirds of the ship’s crew ran off of the Fresno and
descended on the base like a pack of rabid wolves. I was not so lucky.
I spent the next few hours assigned to help the welding crew
on the bow doors and stand fire watch.
My job was to stand at the bottom of their scaffolding with a CO2 fire
extinguisher and put out any stray fires that they might start. I wondered a little – it was a solid steel
ship. Floating in water. What could they possibly start on
fire? Then it dawned on me about the
time it happened – themselves! These guys could start themselves on
fire. No sooner had I thought of it than
one of the welders set the sleeve of his shirt on fire. A quick shot with an extinguisher, and he
went right back to work without missing a beat.
My heart was beating through my chest, but the welder acted like it was
something that happened every day. I
guess we all live in our own little worlds and have our own little problems to
deal with – this was his.
In the meantime, while we were putting in hours frantically
working to get the Frez ready to go back to sea, the rest of our shipmates were
creating somewhat of a ruckus on base.
The first inkling any of us had that there may be a problem was when
they passed the word for Duty Section Three’s shore patrol detachment to
assemble on the quarterdeck. This was an
eight-hour on-base port visit – there should have been no reason for Shore
Patrol. We were all a bit curious, and
became even more so when they passed the word about an hour later for any
Shore Patrol qualified personnel in Duty Section Three to muster on the quarter
deck. Then it was anyone E-4 and above,
and finally all non-essential personnel on board the Fresno muster on
the quarterdeck. I went up to the
quarterdeck to see if I was needed, but as an E2 and an “essential” firewatch
person, I was told to go back to my workstation. I hung around long enough to hear the order
given,
“Alright guys” the Officer Of The Deck barked, “We’ve got a
little problem at the base club. Seems
some of your shipmates are having a little too much fun, and they need us to go
get them and bring them home NOW. So get
over there and roust them out and get ‘em back here as soon as you can. Dismissed!”
I was a little concerned and very intrigued, but I headed
back to my work station to watch about twenty other guys accompanied by five or
six base MP’s head toward the club. One
of my shipmates who went, told me the story later. In his words:
“Nothing could have prepared me for the sight I saw as I
walked in the doors of that club.
It was like a scene out of a bad movie. A really bad movie. There were guys drinking and puking and
throwing glasses everywhere. The Shore
Patrol we had sent after them had instead, joined them and were getting drunk
right along side the rest of the crew.
There were a couple of the Fresno’s Chief Petty Officers behind the bar
serving up drinks while the real bartenders, a couple of Guamanian locals,
cowered on the floor in the corner of the bar.
There were guys slamming pitchers of beer and having puke-for-distance
contests on the dance floor, and guys racing each other across the floor on
their chairs, pretending they were riding bulls or something. It was a wild sight. We waded into the middle of it and with the
help of the base MP’s we got everyone out the door and headed back up the pier
toward the Fresno. I was one of the last
out of the club, and I did manage to creatively requisition a drink or two
before I made it back outside, but nothing like those guys had done.”
On my next West Pac a year and a half later I ran into a guy
in Subic Bay that I had gone to Apprentice Training with. He was stationed on a ship that was based in
Guam and he told me that the morning after our little “party” at the base club,
they had mustered working parties from all of the ships in port to go over and
assist in the clean up of the club. He
told me that they estimated the damage we did, conservatively, at $25,000! Like I said, it was a helluva party.
When the crew got back to the Fresno, they passed the word
that repairs had been completed and we were to make preparations to leave port
immediately. This was completely out of
the ordinary, and we were shocked, but we started doing what we had to do to
carry out the order. About twenty
minutes later, they told us to stand fast, and that we would leave at 0700 the
next morning. As we found out much
later, word was that the C.O. of the base in Guam was so pissed at our crew
that he told Captain Wilbur to get his “blankety-blank” ship out of Guam
immediately. I think that once the
Captain realized that ¾ of his crew was too drunk to stand up, calmer heads
prevailed and they let us sleep it off a bit.
Bright and early the next morning, we pulled out of port under orders to
“never come back to Guam unless it’s wartime, or you are in immediate
danger of sinking!” It was but another
black eye in the checkered history of the USS Fresno.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE: PEARL HARBOR
After our little debacle in Guam, we made max speed for
Pearl Harbor in hopes of catching up with the rest of our battle group. The seas cooperated, and with the help of
fair winds and following seas, we made it into Pearl Harbor just in time to
catch a couple of days’ liberty before the whole group pulled out for Long
Beach and home. By this time, our
shipboard routines while we were at sea had become pretty much habit for
me. I was settling into my new
surroundings quite nicely and was really starting to feel like a part of the
Fresno Crew. I was getting quite wrapped
up in the excitement of the end of the deployment as well, and I could feel my
impatience to get home grow with every passing day. As we neared Hawaii, you could almost reach
out and touch the anticipation. After Hawaii, the mainland U.S. was only a ten day sail away!
December 6th
Probably my most vivid memory of pulling into Pearl Harbor,
aside from sailing past the U.S.S. Arizona memorial, was of a kid who had come
on board the Fresno after I had, just before we left P.I.. His name was Willy Jo Greatshouse, and he was
a freak. Greatshouse had a problem with
his voicebox and he spoke with the weirdest gravelly, lispy, cracking
voice. His personality fit his voice
perfectly. He was a pathological liar, a
trait we discovered as we were pulling into port in Hawaii. We were standing on the forecastle, getting
the lines faked down and ready to send to the pier when we pulled in, when
Greatshouse told us that he used to live in Hawaii when he was a kid.
“Oh really, which town?”
“Umm…Honolulu. It
will be great to see my old house again.”
Something told me that he was lying, so I started pushing
the issue.
“Really, Honolulu?
You realize of course, that Honolulu isn’t on this island – it’s on the
Big Island”
“Really?” he replied as he furrowed his brow – “Oh yeah,
that’s right – it’s on the big island.
Well maybe I’ll call my uncle – he owns a chopper service and I’ll have
him fly me over to Honolulu to visit.”
It was at this point, as we sailed past the skyline of the
city of Honolulu, that we realized he was completely out of his mind. From that moment forward, Greatshouse was
shunned by the rest of Deck Department, and he ended up being an even bigger
freak than we thought he was then – but more on that later. I was excited to get pier side in Pearl
Harbor for a couple of reasons – first, I could call my folks, who I hadn’t
talked to in over a month, and second – my sister and her husband (who was a
Staff Sergeant in the Marine Corps) were stationed on the island, and I hadn’t
seen her in almost six years.
When we passed the breakwater, and made our way into Pearl
Harbor itself, we manned the rails, and all stood at attention and saluted as
we sailed past the USS Arizona memorial.
It sent shivers down my spine to see the memorial and think back to what
had happened on this very spot 47 years and one day before we were there. It was humbling and awe-inspiring.
After a slow, silent push past the memorial, we made our way
pier side in Pearl. As soon as we got
the Frez moored up and anchored, I made a beeline for the berthing area and
changed clothes. I dashed off the ship
and headed toward the phone exchange on base.
The base phone exchange was just a big building with tons of phone
booths in it, where you could call home.
The front desk would keep track of your time and then you’d pay them for
your call as you left. The prices
weren’t outrageous, but at that point, you’d have paid just about anything to talk
to your family again. I stood in line
with the other hundred guys with the same idea, waiting for an open phone. I finally got one and called home to talk to
my folks. It was so great to hear a
familiar voice again! I only had about a
ten minute call window, so I jammed in as much as I could in ten minutes, and
tried to catch up on all the latest from home.
After my call, I was just that much more anxious to get back Stateside.
Before I had left home, my Dad had bet me ten bucks that I
would catch some kind of disease when I was overseas. Our conversation basically started with,
“Hey Dad – how are you?”
“Great. Do you owe me
some money?”
“Yup – ten bucks”
“Ha! I told you! Tell me about it…”
and so it went. No
secrets for me. After I talked to the
folks I called my sister, Laura and she agreed to come to the base and pick me
up. I hung up the phone and walked to
the gate to wait for her.
My sister Laura and her husband Andy - Kanoehe Bay Marine Base, Hawaii 06DEC88
About an hour later, Laura finally showed up. I hugged her hello, then we jumped in the car
for the trip across the island to the Kaneohe Bay Marine Camp, where her
husband, Andy, was stationed. It was a
great visit – we talked and laughed and Andy grilled some of the biggest,
juiciest steaks I had seen in months!
Andy makes steaks - 06DEC88
Somewhere around our second 12 pack of Bud, Andy and I decided it would
be fun to go rent some scooters and tear around the base on them, so that’s
what we did. Of course, no trip to the
scooter rental shop would be complete without a trip at the base liquor store,
so we did that as well.
Bonded Jim Beam - 06DEC88
Now freshly
stocked with a case of Budweiser and a fifth of Bonded Jim Beam (only place
I’ve ever seen Black Label Bonded Jim Beam), and riding two rented scooters, we
headed back to their base apartment.
About two hours of drinking and tearing around the streets of the base
later, Andy and I found ourselves on the top of a hill overlooking the
ocean.
Scooter Daredevils - 06DEC88
We decided to see who could race
their scooter the farthest down the hill and onto the beach without falling
over. I decided we should see who could
do it fastest, so we both took off at once.
It was a close race, neck and neck, until we hit the sand. The sand was actually a little firmer than we
thought, and the scooters didn’t just sink right down into it like we had
planned. No, we actually tore across the
beach and headed straight for the water.
Neither of us had planned on having to use our brakes, and I think the
suddenness of the situation hit us both a little hard. Andy and I were both trying to figure out
which brake to use first when we hit the water, in tandem. Scooters at max speed, alcohol, and stupidity
should never mix.
Unfortunately, this was a lesson that we learned a little
late. We hit the water at a good 20 MPH,
and went flying into the surf as our scooters experienced instantaneous
deceleration. Luckily, the water wasn’t
too deep, and there was no coral that close to shore, so Andy and I just waded
our drunk, soaked asses over to our scooters and picked them up out of the
water and wheeled them back across the beach to the street. Neither one would start, and we were sure we
would get fined for destroying them, when the bright idea hit – if we dropped
them off at the rental office now, there wouldn’t be anyone there! And when they came in the next morning and
found the two non-functioning scooters, we could just say that someone stole
them from us and must have left them there!
We were brilliant, and that’s just what we did. We pushed our non-running scooters back to
the rental shop and left them there, propped up and dripping on their front
step. By the time we managed to walk
ourselves back to the house, we were pretty much dry, but very drunk and very
tired. We said goodnight, and I passed
out on their couch – happy to be somewhere more like home than Deck Department
berthing on board the Fresno.
Not feeling ANY pain - 06DEC88
December 7th
The next morning, Laura woke me up and took me back to the
base. I hugged her and thanked her for a
great meal and a place to crash, then headed back towards the ship. I never did hear another word about the
waterlogged scooters, so I imagine that our plan, somehow, actually
worked. Either that, or Andy and Laura just paid for the scooters and never sent me a bill – but I know my sister, and
there definitely would have been a bill!
Since it was a Sunday, and I had liberty weekend again, I just kind of
lazily made my way back to the ship, where I showered and changed clothes, then
set off to discover the base at Pearl Harbor.
USS Arizona Memorial - Pearl Harbor Naval Station, Pearl Harbor, Hawaii 07DEC88
Since it was December 7th, I soon found my way
over to the USS Arizona memorial and museum and spent the majority of the
afternoon touring that. It was one of
the most amazing and awe-inspiring places I have ever been to. I couldn’t get over the number of Japanese visitors
that were there. I think they
outnumbered the Americans easily by a 3 to1 margin. The memorial itself was kind of eerie. Everyone there was absolutely dead quiet – it
was like being in church. You could look
over the side of the memorial and see the ship underneath the water. Small bubbles of oil still came to the surface
from time to time as you tried to imagine what it must have been like there
during the attack.
USS Arizona gun turret base - USS Arizona Memorial, Pearl Harbor (07DEC88)
The island had grown
up so much in the ensuing forty-seven years, that it was really hard to imagine
any sort of attack at all, but the awed reverence of the memorial soon changed
that train of thought. After touring the
memorial and the museum, I felt humbled and indebted to my shipmates who had
given all that fateful Sunday morning in 1941.
Silently, I walked back to the base, and decided to catch the bus into
town to check out downtown Honolulu.
The bus took us from the base to Waikiki Beach, where I got
off. Hawaii was spectacularly beautiful,
and I was enjoying just walking down the beach, looking at the ocean and the
palm trees, when I heard someone calling my name. I looked over and saw a couple of guys from
Deck Department, Steve Haulin and Bob Powell coming towards me. We talked for a little bit, and they told me
that they were heading over to Aloha Stadium in a little bit for a Cheap Trick
concert. That sounded cool, but I
decided to stay in Waikiki and find a little dinner and just relax
instead. We parted ways, and I headed
towards the main drag, where I had seen a Pizza Hut earlier. Since we were in the U.S., I knew that a
Pizza Hut was really a Pizza Hut, and not some cheap dog-meat imitation! I walked in and found a few other Fresno guys
sitting at a table, so I joined them. It
was Phil Darkbull, Kenny Arrington, John Sorby and myself. We ordered a pizza and a couple of pitchers
of beer, not even thinking twice that we were in the US and the drinking age
was 21. The waitress never asked for our
ID’s and brought us our beer and pizza. With the exception of the steak I had
eaten at my sister’s house the night before, that pizza was the most incredible
thing I had eaten in months! There’s
just something to be said for good old American pizza after a few weeks
overseas.
We ate and paid our bill then we walked out onto the street
and tried to decide where to go next. We
found a cabbie who took us to the Honolulu Hard Rock Café – a real,
honest-to-God Hard Rock! It was so cool
– this was back when having a Hard Rock Café T-Shirt was a legitimate status
symbol (or at least it was in Wyoming) and having one from Honolulu made you
immediately eligible to join Laramie’s cultural elite! We hung out at the Hard Rock about long
enough to buy a T-Shirt, then headed back to Waikiki beach, where we found a
strip club. I didn’t feel like going in,
so I bid my traveling partners adieu, and went on my merry way, checking out
the sights of Waikiki Beach at night.
I made my way down the boulevard, and soon found myself in
front of a bar called Moose McGillycuddy’s.
It looked like a happening place, so I walked in, once again oblivious
to the fact that you had to be 21 to get into a bar in the States. Again, no one questioned me, so I strode up
to the bar and ordered up. I struck up a
conversation with a couple of guys from other ships, and we ended up drinking
and talking for hours. Eventually, a
group of other Fresno sailors wandered in, and we wound up together, as we
always did. The booze flowed freely
until last call (yet another reminder that we were FAR from the Philippines),
and we were all drunk enough to think that going home made sense. We flagged down a cab to the base, then
stumbled from the cab stand back to the Fresno.
Since none of us had ever been to the base at Pearl Harbor, it was a
long, unsure trek, but somehow we managed to find our ship. The fact that we found her was due more to
pure, blind luck than actual proficiency, but we weren’t ones to argue
semantics at this point. We navigated
ourselves down to the berthing area, climbed into our racks and were all soon
happily snoring the night away, in anticipation of the sail to Long Beach that
began the next morning.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX: LONG BEACH AND THE END OF WEST PAC ‘88
December 8th - 14th
The nine-day sail from Pearl Harbor to Long Beach went
quickly and without incident. Our
hastily repaired bow doors had been fixed a little more solidly in Pearl
Harbor, and were functioning as intended by the time we made it back to
sea. We had caught up to the rest of our
battle group, and we steamed within sight of five or more other ships at all
times. The excitement on board grew with
every passing day – guys who hadn’t seen their wives and girlfriends in six
months were mere days and hours away from their reunions, and everyone was glad
to be getting back to the States. About
two days out of port, we could finally begin to pick up L.A. radio stations –
this was the first time most of the crew had heard new music and current news
in months. We all gathered around the
few radios on board and listened intently as the signals grew increasingly
stronger.
December 15th
We arrived off the coast of Camp Pendleton, just north of
San Diego, to unload our Marine contingent the day before we were to pull in to
port in Long Beach. This was the first
time I had ever seen how the amphibious tanks came on board or left the
ship. They lowered the big stern gate,
which covered the rear of the ship, into the water and the AAV’s (Amphibious
Assault Vehicles) drove out of the tank deck and into the ocean, where they
turned on their props and headed for the beach.
It was really cool to see it for the first time – an impressive sight to
an easily-impressed kid from Wyoming.
Once the tracks had all been offloaded and all of the Marines were gone,
the ship was once again the sole domain of the sailors. We pulled up anchor and steamed towards Long
Beach, where we circled until morning.
There wasn’t much sleeping going on that night, as all-night card games
and BS sessions were the order of the evening.
They even made pizzas and broke out the ice cream for midrats that night
and opened the mess decks to the entire ship’s crew. It was basically just a big party at sea,
without the booze.
EN3 Benton and an MS in the p-way, having a smoke - 1988
December 16th
The morning of the sixteenth dawned bright and clear, as we
took our place in line to sail triumphantly into the harbor. As we neared the breakwater, I noticed several
of the crew standing by the sides of the ship with their white hats in
hand. When I asked what was going on,
they told me that it was an old Navy tradition – on your last trip through your homeport breakwater on your last Navy voyage, just before you got out of the service,
you were supposed to throw your white hat into the ocean to signify the end of
your Naval career. But, they told me, if
your white hat blew back on board, then you had to re-enlist for another hitch,
because the sea wasn’t done with you yet.
It was then that I noticed that most of the guys had heavy weights tied
inside their hats – rocks, old engine parts, even old boondockers were being
used to ensure that the guys who were making their last voyage WERE making
their last voyage. I watched several
white hats make the plunge into the blue, and not a single one blew back on
board. I swore then and there to find
the biggest, heaviest weight I could for the day that I got to throw my
white hat overboard - because there was
no way I was going to stay in the Navy any longer than I had to, the sea be
damned!!
As we sailed past the port of Los Angeles, I marveled at the
huge cranes that were offloading the big commercial container
ships. I soon learned that this was the
busiest port in the world, and I could see why – it was jam packed with all
kinds of commercial shipping. We sailed
on past that port and on up north for another ten minutes or so, past the Queen Mary and past the domed building that held Howard Hughes' Spruce Goose. Soon, the tugs came alongside and by the
time we got them tied up, we entered the breakwater for Long Beach Naval
Station. The most amazing thing to me as
we sailed towards our pier was sailing past the USS Missouri and the USS New
Jersey. These two battleships were anchored
at the same pier, and we sailed right past them. I had never seen either of them in real life,
but was quite aware of their glorious WWII history. I was absolutely amazed at the size of their
guns, and the fact that they seemed to sit so low in the water, and how
unbelievably wide they were. The Navy
has never built a ship as impressive as those old battleships, and never
will. They were absolutely astounding to
see.
Homecoming - Long Beach Naval Station, Long Beach CA - 16DEC88
The closer we got to our pier, the harder it was to contain
ourselves. The ship’s company was
standing at attention in our dress blues, and we were manning the rails as we
pulled in. The pier was full of Fresno
family members, there to welcome her crew home.
Even though I had only been on board for a month and a half, I found myself
caught up in the emotion of the moment, and I heaved around like never before
when we were mooring up to the pier.
Once we had been tied off, and they had the gangplank dropped, we heard
the Bosun’s Pipe cut through the air from the 1MC. The usual call to
“Secure ship’s work” was followed by
“Secure from West Pac ‘88”, which was immediately followed
by
“Liberty Call!, Liberty Call!”.
An enormous cheer went from the crew, matched by the cheer
from the crowd waiting on the pier. They
opened the gangplank, and the crowd waiting to welcome us home streamed up the
steps and on board the Fresno. Hugs,
kisses and “welcome homes” flowed, and those of us who had just come on board
all felt a little left out of this joyous occasion. We were all just as happy though, because we
were all Stateside once again and would be for a little more than a year.
When the Fresno was secured to the pier, and most of the
guys who were supposed to go on leave had taken off for the airport, I changed
clothes and headed for the phones to call home. When that had been taken care
of, I beat feet over to on-base Burger King I'd spotted for some good old American fast food. That was the best Whopper I ever ate! The entire day was over much too
quickly. It was great to be back in the
States again, and great to hear US radio and watch US television. The excitement to get home had made for a
hectic day, and as I lay in my rack that night, I reflected on the fact that I
really didn’t feel any more at home now than I did my first night on board the
Fresno in Subic Bay. I was still two
thousand miles away from Wyoming, in a place I knew nothing about, with no
family of any kind to go to for help.
The only difference was that the people off the ship spoke English, and
I could get a decent hamburger. It was
kind of depressing, really, but I was glad to be back in the U.S. The next month or so would be one of the big
turning points of my life, as I attempted to go from being a high school kid in
Wyoming to being a US Serviceman in California.
Once we had secured from WestPac '88, the ship’s schedule went into “Stand Down” mode for a month. The entire crew took leave, half at a time
for two weeks each. The entire crew,
except for the guys who had been on board for less than four months like
me. The new guys had to stay on board
for the whole month of stand down and act as the ship’s full-time crew. It wasn’t too bad, as we didn’t really do
anything except for the most basic maintenance functions for a month, and unless
you had duty, you were welcome to leave the ship whenever you wanted to go
explore Long Beach and L.A, and we took full advantage of that!
I’ll chronicle this next section of exploits
in Part Five, Stateside Again - Faded Memories and Booze
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