“An Unscrupulous Game at Heart”

Sometimes taking care of your shipmates as a Chief is like being a father to an extra group of kids besides your own. Or being a big brother trying to keep them out of trouble so Mom & Dad don’t find out “WTF” they’ve been up too. Other times you feel like a ball coach trying to teach them how to play the game! What ever the case may be, there is always the one or two that really give you a nervous breakdown at times.

I think anyone who’s been in charge of a group of people knows where I’m coming from, but there was a certain set of instances with one particular sailor I had when I was onboard the ol’ MOMSEN! Nate was his name and he really wasn’t too bad for the most part of his stint onboard but most of my guys in the Tomahawk Division had served together before on the USS FOSTER. They had some sort of kinship going that made my job a bit easier to manage. One of my senior guys had already earned me a sit down with the Skipper trying to explain one of my First Class Sailors sticker on his car that used the word F@#K! My ass was in high gear to get the sonuvabitch to scrape that shit off his window.

But it wasn’t that a prick like me couldn’t understand the humor in it all. I’d always heard that being a chief was like being a cannibal; you come back to the fleet wearing khakis to make meals out of your own kind! Some would have you believe they remove all the hell raising from your bones before they make you a Chief! But really it’s just muffled behind a few years and some closed doors. You gotta give the appearance fo being a sonuvabitch! I’ve probably pulled more Silly pranks, been involved in more unscrupulous schemes and diabolical plots and came up with more stupid drunk ideas than the imagination can fathom.

But this particular story involved a real life health condition with a mixture of bullshit in between. You see Nate had an affection where the lining of his heart had hardened restricting the heartbeat which caused him to get light headed to the point he would almost pass out. I think it was called “Constrictive Pericarditis” or something of the sort. Any how, he ended up on limited duty for quite a while because of the ailment. After several visits with a specialist they decided to do open heart surgery on him to completely remove the lining that was causing his predicament. This left little shit on convalescent for two to three weeks away from the ship and would eventually take him off of sea duty for good.

But what happened next left me completely stupified. Nate incorporated every clever, unorthodox, devious, weird, and stupid stunt ever pulled off in this Chief’s history of bullshit stunts! Shortly after going on convalescent leave the little sonuvabitch asked me if there was anyway that he could fly to Seattle from Maine where the ship was at the time to be with his fiancé while he recovered. Considering the fact he just had heart surgery I consorted with our Chief Corpsman onboard only to deliver a resounding NOOOO… to Nate upon his request. The pressure from a high altitude flight could possibly cause complications on his heart after cardio pulmonary surgery and a flight across country was simply out of the question. He even ran a chit up the Chain-of-Command (COC) to see if it would get approved but of course it got denied.

Well, he managed to get hooked up with some church friends that took him in and gave him a place to rest while he was to recuperate from his wounds. After about two weeks the Weapons Officer called me to his state room to let me know the Captain wanted to see Nate and find out how he was doing. So I was to call him into the ship so the Skipper could see him before he went home for the night. I called Nate and to my surprise he explains to me,

“Chief, I’m somewhere in the middle of no where without transportation and I don’t know how to get to the ship or how to explain directions to get someone here. And the family that took me in are on vacation.”

WTF!!! I couldn’t believe what I was hearing and knew something was up. I told him to get a hold of this family and find out from them how to get directions and I would pick him up personally if I had too. I told him he had 30 minutes to call me back. Within 10 minutes one of my first classes gets a hold of me and says,

“Chief we got a problem, Nate just called me on the phone scared to death cause you want him on the ship to talk to the Skipper but he’s in Seattle!”

Again, WTF!!! He’s not supposed to be in Seattle! What kinda shit is he pulling anyway, I told the First Class to tell him he had exactly until noon tomorrow to find a way to get his ass back here or there would be hell to pay! In the meantime I had to come up with some bullshit story to keep WEPS and the Skipper at bay! I don’t remember what I told them but it worked and between the Strike “O” and I we managed to keep this shit under raps until the little sonuvabitch showed up on time the next day.

OOOH, was he in deep shit with me. After his conversation with the Skipper and the translucent air-tight bullshit we passed up the COC it was amazing we never got caught. I tell you this was some Hogan’s Heroes clandestine type engineered bullshit we got away with!! I ended up giving Nate one of the biggest emotionally charged tongue lashings I’ve ever given anyone that ever worked for me!! I made sure he understood what was on the line and how Strike “O” and I stuck our necks out on his behalf. As a way to punish him as if he was one of my own, I took one of his prized possessions in the workcenter from him and told him when I felt he was trustworthy enough he could have it back! Kinda like grounding your kids from their favorite toy! I’m pretty sure that wasn’t legal either, but hey, we could’ve let this guy go to Captain’s Mast and he knew this. But I was the asshole!

Needless to say he left the ship shortly there after. BUMED came back and said after his surgery he couldn’t serve onboard ship for another two years. So he was off to shore duty in Seattle. But we all figured it was probably for the best. He never really was firmly anchored to the ship anyway.