'Lucky No. 7'

When looking back in time there's a hell of a bunch of special moments that touch a retired sailor's heart. Intimate moments in time long memorized, that characterize who we were and  what we are today. We'll carry these memories until our final siesta in the sky! These were moments that can only be fully appreciated by the men and women who wore that crackerjack uniform and went to sea in large hulking grey ships.
  
I suppose this summer some shipmates from long ago are hosting a get together shindig in Bremerton this July and I was asked if I could give a speech about 'Sea Stories'! This is the kind of thing that causes me to reshuffle  these old images in my mind, unchain those ol' dusty moments and pass them around among my friends and fellow sailors.
  
You see, approval of your shipmates cannot be captured in a single moment but rather a long connection of light hearted laughs, memories, late nights of oil black coffee,  compounded with midwatch monotony, fatigue and boredom sometimes impressive yet other times unspectacular, but never the less  moments of acceptance.
  
On the Rainer we had quite a group of different characters throughout and about the ship!
  
I remember a bunch a good-fer-noth'n sons-a-bitches skylarking, plotting, and lollygagging through anchor windless making non productive bitching a fine art!  Most refer to them as Deck Department or Boatswainmates but we usually referred to them as 'Deck Apes.'  There were only so many inanimate metal objects and other superfluous crap you could chip, needle gun, shine, slap zinc chromate on and paint outside of those places you'd need a midget gynecologist to reach into before these raggety-ass sailors of fortune would find some sort'a mayhem to get involved with! While doing a stent with the ship's Master-At-Arms about 200% of the restrictoids were from 1st or 2nd Division! One particular episode had to do with a fella whipp' n out his cobra commander on another fella's shoulder in berthing... and if he didn't get an ass whoopen for that he sure the hell found himself in front of the Skipper doing Captain's Mast!  These fellas new how to make trouble look good!!
  
Then there was my neck of the woods up in CIC! It's suppose to be the information nerve center of the ship where  we would collect, evaluate, display and disseminate all the task force info and activities... of course ours was more like a walk in closet with a few neon lights! I can honestly say nothing of real importance would ever happen in the wee hours of stand'n watch in CIC!  This place had the architecture of ninety percent of all the funny business and grab-ass that went on underway. Many referred to it as the secret cave.   I'm sure many of you who crossed the path of CIC got a glimpse of the ol' 'DRT snake!!!' Though it could be argued in some cases as the 'DRT worm.' After many weeks of stand'n port and starboard watches you could find yourself claiming  ownership of some kind of stupid shenanigan or cockamamie scheme!
  
Then there were the grease-covered snipes with a bandanna hanging out of their hip pockets. As I recall there was a large collection of paperback novels containing erotic schemes and a variety of interesting anatomically demanding acts few people in the world above the main deck had ever heard of or could have envisioned without having been recently exposed to the literary world of wrench turning, monkey shit pack'n  machinists and A-gangers! I remember an incident where a young female fireman was told to go home and well, she took it quite literally and flew her silly ass all the way back to Alabama... always wondered if she suffered from Asperger Syndrome considering most people wouldn't take that so gaudamn literally! But you could always rely on the snipes for a good ol' BT Punch, bucket of steam or an answer to a request to blow the 'MPA'... never a dull moment down below decks!!!
  
  
Then on the Bridge staring at endless miles of saltwater for 4 hours twice a day, day after day were the good ol' Quartermasters.  These were God's unrecognized gift to harbor pilots.  Anybody remember those gaudamn awful words, "Standby for heavy rolls… Secure all gear adrift." I love the way these sons-a-bitches would lay us in the trough so we could get the full experience of walking on bulkheads and chasing flying objects all over the ship! Anyone who can make a ship the size of Rainier rock-n-roll the way these fellas did had to have a Phd in physics - 'CAUSE OF DEATH - GEAR ADRIFT'!!!  Even more memorable were the ceremonial chaperoned water locker drills of a certain dirt bag who never could seem to take a shower on his own accord! Christ he loved dinosaurs but he didn't have to smell like one too!!! 
  
And we can never forget the 'skivvy wavers' and the signal shack on the 05 level just above the bridge!  Rather it be with the semaphore or the signal lights these fellas were the masters of ship to ship long range sailor to sailor bullshitt'n! . The Skivvy Waver's ploy was to execute some official message then bullshit with the 'crackerjack' on the other ship. While officers were working out their bureaucratic bullshit, the skivvy wavers  would be bitching about what they ate for chow or tell'n dirty jokes in morse code!!! This was a great place to hang out at night watching the horizon with night vision goggles... a real treat for most of us non skivvy wavers!!!
  

Then there was Supply with the unmistakable aroma of three tons of fermenting dirty laundry or the Stew Burners late night with a couple loaves of fresh bread and some Navy peanut butter to compliment 'midrats'!!! On a supply ship like the ol' Lucky #7, Supply had a captive audience of supporting services. Without Supply there would be no ships service, no geedunk, no laundry or dry cleaning facility, no food to feed our faces or no gas station for all the other ships! They kept us all well serviced! Maybe some more than others... considering the rumor of a few lucky shipmate gett'n a little extra pleasure behind closed doors in the Supply Office in the wee hours of the night!!! This can be neither confirmed or denied, but somebody sure had a smile on their face.

Oh and 'What's up Doc'... Every boat had a Doc! Some ships are so small, they don't rate full-blown physicians on par with licensed doctors in civilian life. But we had one!  Our Doc was famous for hand'n out 'Vitamin M' and tak'n your blood pressure and temp rather you needed it or not. "Doc, all I need is a gaudamn Band-Aid to cover up this paper cut!"  Nope, you'd get a dose of 'Vita M', a verbal whiplash for allowing your blood pressure to climb too high as well as a complete course on good nutrition! Now that's one hell of a way to get a Band-Aid!!! Or if you took a visit down to the dentist it always turned into a conversation on how plaque is nothing more than bacteria leaving urine a fecal matter laid away in your mouth!! Hell made me never want to eat again! But at one point both the Med & Dental Docs had cute fannies that kept every male sailor fight'n sexual fantasy overload!!!  
  
And last but not least were those gaudamn Gun Monkeys!!!  Pushing bullets around the deck is a hell of a way to make a living! Sometimes those bullets are as heavy as a gaudamned steamroller!  A lot of cussing and swearing went on during ammo evolutions. 'Dumb bastard' and 'Stupid son-of-a-bitch' were favorites, followed by 'Move your worthless ass', 'How many gaudam times do I have to tell you idiots?', and 'If it was up your butt you'd know where it was...'  Somewhere on deck these gun monkeys would be centering a skid and manipulating chain falls while running fork lifts into bulkheads while crushing fingers and toes! No guadamn wonder we rated a full fledge Doc onboard! All this while the Bridge was trying to find just the right trough to plant us in so we could play a little rock-n-roll while toss'n bombs around on deck! It was later in life when a female Gun Monkey told me how she use to sneak back into the Captain's Gig at night with one of the Deck Apes for fifteen minutes of fun!!! I always wondered why the herculite cover was always loose at night flapping in the wind while I was in the aft CIWS Mount! Now we all know!!!

Yep, if you wore shoulder boards, you missed out! The action all took place in the berthing compartments, passageways and mess decks of the enlisted sailors. While you guys were reading the 'Economist' and 'Wall Street Journal' cheerio'n up in the Wardroom we were all planning mutinies and other diabolical plots of stupid stuff that now consume us in the guise of pure naval history! Officers always felt compelled to begin every discussion with the obvious indignation of our enlisted stupidity!  But it was us crackerjack, white hat wear'n, bluejackets that loaded the bombs, cleared the decks, and monkeyed with all the stuff that could cut a man in half or remove sizable chunks of flesh at the wince of an eye!!

I once heard a Chief say that you can remove all the Officers from the ship and we can still get it underway and into operation. But, remove all the enlisted sailors and that ship will never leave the pier!!!