“Sweepers, Field Day, Clampdown, Happy Hour… WTF”

This one goes out to my ol’ pal ‘Mark Smithee.’ Any of you ol’ Coots out there remember hearing a resemblance of this over the 1MC?

“Sweepers, sweepers, man your brooms, give the ship a clean sweep down fore and aft. Sweep down all lower decks, ladder wells and passageways. Empty all trash clear of the stern. Now Sweepers.”

If it weren’t Sweepers then it was clampdown, field day, zone inspections, and later on in life came this lovely embellishment called the XO’s Happy Hour. Hell, I always thought that had someth’n to do with half price drinks at the local water’n hole. Guess that’s how they suckered us young crackerjacks on the receiving end of all decisions made in regard to boat operations into good moral acceptance. You know the ol’ saying about brow beating,

“The beatings will continue until morale improves!”

Well, I didn't sign on to clean shitters, but little did I know those sons-a-bitches would have me enjoying waxing decks, searching for dust bunnies & ghost turds, chipp’n & sand’n for rust as well as (oh yeah) cleaning the shitters. As a young lad onboard you end up with every mindless job the Navy’s got to offer.

But after being in this Canoe Club for over 22 years I understand why we gotta keep a ship clean. When search’n for them dust bunnies & ghost turds, crap you hadn't seen in months came out of the woodwork, overhead & angle irons…like geedunk wrappers, soda cans, an ol’ cigarette lighter, a good nudey magazine, maybe an ol’ used up prophylactic. Hell, I think we found a brick of dried up ol’ hashish once on the Bagley back in the day. Who the hell knew how long that’d been there?

Field days usually consisted of about an hour’s worth of real work and three or four hours of screw’n around look’n busy with a fox tail in one hand and some GP cleaner in the other. Moving fore and aft during these evolutions required athletic agility of Olympic size proportions! The maze of passageways and ladder wells aboard ship was like a gaudamn jigsaw puzzle to get from port to starboard. Imagine walking into your kitchen but having to walk upstairs, climb over the banister into the living room, through the hallway, out the window of the master bedroom into the backdoor of the house just to get to the damned stove, only to find out some son-of-a-bitch secured it for maintenance purposes. Yep, that’s how using the shitter at 0930 hours in the morning can be onboard ship.

It was especially a treat when the boat was gyrating like a mechanical bull underway. There’s nothing like start’n up a ladder well on an up swing, then the bottom would drop out shoot’n you upward like a cannon ball. Now imagine trying to climb over make-do police tape in every direction with every other gaudamn hatch, scuttle & whizbang secured so’s you’d have to hand over hand across the water main pipe in the overhead like a damn tree monkey to sneak across a freshly swabbed deck…good times!!

I’d been in the Navy for over fifteen years when I was finally introduced to this new PC’ thing called ‘Happy Hour.’ How do ya like them apples!! The Navy takes away our ‘E-Clubs’ in the name of alcohol deglamorization and uses its ol’ school jargon for cleaning stations!!

I remember going into the shitter and found a scribbl’n on the wall that said,

“Yeah for Happy Hour! Screw the mission, clean the position! Break out the swab and shine the XO’s knob!”

Yep, no matter how many times they give it the ol’ greenie wienie wipe down, you could always count on the graffiti in shitter stalls. Some things never change! Go ahead, right down to the third stall shitter in the Second Division Head….it’s there! Go ahead and read it… funny stuff ain’t it? Forty years from now I’ll return to one of them ol’ museum boats and walk right into one of them stalls and find a carving…

"They paint the walls to cover my pen, but the shit-house poet strikes again!"

The last thing we’d be waiting to hear before we could resume our daily bad habits was…………the bos’n whistle over the 1MC, “Secure from Happy Hour!”

Wait, was that a crowd cheering in the background???