A while ago I posted a snippet called ‘Operation Golden Flow’ about piss tests and exactly just how I’d felt about ‘em… So as recently as a few months ago the ‘Navy Times’ posted an article stating that the good ol’ SECNAV is planning on introducing the breathalyzer to the fine young men and women of the US ‘Canoe Club’… ain’t that a bunch a hooey!!!
It defies the whole point of why young men join the ‘Canoe Club’ in the first place… It’s not just a job… but where’s the sense of adventure?!?
Not too many moons ago we ‘Crackerjacks’ congregated in some of the best gin mills around the world!! They had great names… The Red Onion, El Caminos, Moose McGillicuttys', Tremors, Shenanigans, Jose Murphy’s, Bull and Bear Pub, Sticky Wicket, … and of course I can’t forget to mention Club Metro, San Diego Sports Bar, Cankers and Sores, Trophy Lounge and the infamous ‘Pink Panther’ in Phuket or ‘Caligula’s’ in Pattaya Beach Thailand!! But if you want to go there we could also talk about all the bars on Magsaysay in Olongapo… but I don’t want to write a novel here so we’ll stick to the simple subject… These were anything from dingy hole in the wall joints to pick up stations for the local one night stands… ‘like a sore dick… they just couldn’t be beat!!’
Sometimes it’d be a challenge to find the trashiest & cheapest joint to drink beer and get ‘Flammered’! We’d toss down stuff like ‘Tiger Beer’ that tasted more like Tiger Piss!! Then we’d sit around discussing women’s boob sizes and tell semi-coherent jokes until we laughed so gaudamned hard beer would spew outta’ our noses!!!
There was nothing like a bunch’a bleary eyed sons-a-bitches heading back to the ship ripping three sheets to the wind and pee’n in the street!!!
“I gotta piss so damn bad it feels like I’m gonna give birth to a urine child!”
“I guess your well overdue for a piss call!!”
Then while piss’n away in the alley…
“Hey look… I’m Zorro… oh nevermind… that’s an eight… oops I dribbled down my leg!”
“My liver’s so shot I’m gonna have to go to the hospitipal and get on the liver waiting list!!”
“Haha… when we get home I’m gonna get me a dog and name it liver so I can abuse it!!”
Yes the shit we do and say when we’re soberly challenged!!!
At the ‘Fleet Landing’ a flask of the finest spirits being passed about while telling tall tales of the Suzie Wong Red Light district in wait of the liberty boat coming inbound … That’s what it was all about… ever wonder if one of them dollar bills in your back pocket was stuck in one of them Go-Go girls butt cracks?!? Aaaah… memories so long ago but so vivid like they just happened yesterday!! I can still remember waking up once with my head buried in a trash can… finding sharpy writing pointing toward my ass crack on my lower back…
“For a good time enter here!”
Took a couple of days for that to wear off… and a couple of months to live it down!! But it always made you as anxious as a little kid on Christmas Morning… to get ready for the next Liberty Port!!!
We’d pull into exotic banana booby seaports only seen in ‘National Geographic’ where the only passport to freedom was a pocket full of cash and a Military issued I.D. Card…
“I can't wait to toss down some suds and get wrapped around some big tittied local girl who don’t know any better!”
“Yeah, but if you pick one up around here she could probably suck start a Chevy Truck! Lord knows if you kiss her you might as well be sucking off the whole gaudamned fleet!”
“Hey, sometimes your drunk… with beer goggles on… and that my friend… is not love!!”
Then Chief would step in…
“Boys… try to be weary of the Bearded Clam on the half skivvy... and grab one of them ‘goodyears’ dock leaves on the Quarterdeck… I’m sure he doesn’t wanna be staring down your piss holes on the way out of port!!”
Because back in those days Chief wasn’t afraid to tell you how it was… we took care of our own! Didn’t have to worry about gett’n kicked out for an alcohol related incident less you pissed yourself in the gutter every time we pulled into port!! We could figure out the ones who couldn’t hack it… it wasn’t rocket science!!!
Nowadays they’ve taken away the ability to keep everything within the ‘lifelines’ of the ship… Too gaudamned many ‘Dudley Doorites’ enforcing policy!!!
As a Chief I once had to tell a young’n something of the effect…
And if you tried the next morning to play Limp Dick and Lazy… There was a reason the Chief used to say…
“If you’re gonna hoot with the owls at night… be prepared to soar with the eagles in the morn’n!”
After all… there was noth’n like the Section Leader having you knuckle bust’n bilges and standing ‘Drunk Watches’ at ‘O’ dark thirty the next evening!! It usually took nothing more than a steel toe boondocker in the ass and a promise you’d be stuck mess cranking ‘til hell freezes over if you didn’t get your shit together!!!
I don’t know… for better or for worse it is what it is… but as long as there are American ‘Crackerjacks’ roaming the seven seas… there will always be a market for sexy women and Piss brand beer!!!
Next on the list… the polygraph tests and ‘Spanish Inquisition’ type purification programs… kind’a make us all Leave it to Beaver types…
“Golly gee Wally… I’d never look at nekkit gurlie magazines or drink anything that smells like turpentine!!”
I’ve got visions of Stanley Kubrick’s Clockwork Orange coming on…
Dennis,
ReplyDeleteI remember the good days and wussified days, as I was heading out the door. Specifically I remember a night in Norfolk on the MOMSEN's sail-around, where I got lit up, but made it back to the ship by 6pm WAY MORE THAN the 12 HOURS Required before an AMMO Onload at 9AM, and not only got my a$$ chewed out for it, but probably lost my last chance to make CPO all because the Navy was well on it's way to being wussified.
I remember where ever you went, you can find a California Bar, a Texas Bar, Oklahoma, New York Bar...
ReplyDeleteI was stationed in Keflavik, Iceland as the Supply Department Career Counselor (96-98) and I headed out to celebrate NYE in Reykjavik with the base LN. I got faded pretty fast so I let my friend carry on while I tried sleeping it off in the back of his car. I drove back to the base and got stopped at the front gate by the local Po-Po and after blowing a .08 spent the next few hours at the Keflavik Police Station and then the base police station. Nothing worse than being a First Class and having your LCPO (which was a SKCM) have to pick you up at the SP office at 0400. Now this incident pales in comparison to all the staggered walks back across $hit River from Magsaysay Drive and no doubt if my friend wasn't an LN, my Navy career would have ended before the hangover wore off.
ReplyDeleteVery well written, brings back a bunch of memories from before dewussification took place.
ReplyDeletedriveing from no fuc$ vigin@ to baltimore with about 8+ cases you could trail us by the empitys flying out the van if you got stoped we where told to stop drving and sleep it off. on the rd. would party all weakend drive back to VA sunday night get back monday morning about 0530 just enough time to make it quaters.
ReplyDeletelol by 0530 after a few days like that it's no wonder you misspelled "empties" and "stopped" and "were" and "driving" and "weekend" and "quarters!!" :)) LMAO I love being a smart ass!!!
DeleteThe Good Ole Days of Work Hard and Play Hard have gone away due to political correctness. Buddy system a mandatory thing and not a thing of natural teamship. Returning after a night of debauchery with semi-remembered drunk haze tales that will be remembered forever. A time when hanging out with your chief wasn't looked at as fraternization. In fact afternoons having liquid lunches with your chief where you knew if the duty PO couldn't handle the job and if the chief had to buy a beer, back to work we go after lunch.
ReplyDeleteuh ... wanted to see the pic ... and have option to read comments .. but certainly DID NOT want comments preventing me from viewing pic??? - question might be .. do you view your comments more important than the pic that your comments are blocking?? ... just wondering
ReplyDeleteJohn Metcalf... not sure what you're referring too!! I don't delete anything and I certainly have a few negative comments on here as well as the good!!! I hope you enjoy the stories like wise... I know on mobile phones sometimes the pics don't always show up!
ReplyDeleteFrom one Sailor Dan to another: I like you blog! I was in the navy from 1984 to 2004. Retired SK1. I agree that the Navy is not as fun as it used to be! When I joined in 1984, they just implemented the piss test and in 1985 they made all the sailors cut off their beards! Even though I tried to have as much fun as I could drinking and chasing pussy in the compound in Curacao, visiting the casas in Panama, drinking in New York, Chicago, and Adelitas clubs in TJ, and making dates on shore patrol in Phuket! Now I'm living my dream as a retiree in Cebu City, Philippines!
ReplyDeleteDUDE! You went to Curacao and the Compound? Bet you were on the Caron....if so, do you remember Squicciarini's over the top liberty brief?
DeleteCebu Queen City of the south. That is a beautiful place. Been there many times.
DeleteI remember them puttin' cots on the ASROC deck on the Eddy for those that didn't know the power of Absynthe in Yoko.
ReplyDeleteI was TAD to the civilian world for 28 days of the month between 81 and 84 and was a sandcrab at LBNSY and remember 70 getting popped on a piss test on a ship I was working on.
All I can say is "Thank God I retired in 2000". Fish is no longer king at any CPO initiations (if they still have them).
I'll be retiring in July after 20 years-- and I know all too well what you're talking about! I've seen this "Canoe Club" change so much, that it's more like a "Dingy Daycare". I remember the days when you'd pull in somewhere, like Subic, Phuket, Hong Kong, or Singapore, and wouldn't need a buddy-- all you would get told was to be back by muster on your duty day. Yeah, I got hauled back a few times for having imbibed too much and then "re-painting" the bathroom walls, but not that often.
ReplyDeleteThe problem I see now with it all, is that the Navy treats their people like children, not as adults-- and that's why they keep having to come up with stuff like the "buddy system" (which, as I remember it, worked a lot better when it WASN'T mandatory-- you'd always wind up heading out with someone, and you'd all have a good time, and everyone would make it back), or the new breathalyzer program (although "Big Navy" has said that they're not out to "bust" anyone (they claim it's to help cut down on "mishaps" due to someone at work while still drunk/hungover), I have seen too many cases where people get popped walking across the QD, put on restriction, and sent to rehab-- and they're usually the ones that don't have the problem-- they just went out the night before to celebrate a birthday.
You can forget about the "Tales of the Raging Main". Political Correctness has taken that away. We now have curfews (yeah-- it feels like I went from being an adult to being 15 again... in a bad way) except for homeport. And it always seems that you have to be onboard to make your curfew time WAAAYYYYY to early.
Some things that have gone away or changed:
Chief Petty Officer Initiations-- GONE... NO MORE, as ordered by Congress and "Big Navy" (I know I'm not a CPO, and will never make CPO, but I still believe that the CPO Initiation is/was one of the major parts of making CPO.... just sayin'....)
Crossing the Line-- ALMOST GONE. You wouldn't recognize it now-- no more King Neptune, no more Royal Baby, no more trash chute, no more "calling Flipper". Just get a little wet, and here's your card.
BT/HT/MM/DC PUNCH-- GONE. CONSIDERED "HAZING" AND CLASSIFIED AS "ASSAULT".
SEABAT-- GONE. CONSIDERED "HAZING".
MAIL BOUY-- Not gone, but no one does it anymore.
DRINKIN' THE BOOT-- I don't even know if today's Sailors even know what this is, let alone do it... and even if they did, they'd get busted for alcohol abuse.
Well, I guess all I can say is "Glad I had MY fun, and glad to be leavin' soon!".