Okay, here goes... I feel like a fella who’s soaked in DFM while sparking the flint on one of them there ship store bought Navy Zippos! At the moment when things just start to look pretty dog-gone good, here I go jump’n in the chicken coup ruffl’n feathers & causing a shit storm!! Ladies & Gentlemen, Boys & Girls and Children of All Ages… here’s a simple tale of bullshit laden, contrived gobbledygook stitched together to jumpstart a few smiles!!!
I’d just got done talk’n to an ol’ shipmate the other day who I watched grow up from Seaman to Master Chief over the years and we got to shoot’n the shit about sea stories…
“Alright you big dumb two star… I’m tinkering with a few idears for another glorified Sea Story & I specifically remember you gett’n all bamboozled by a forklift or someth’n or rather in the cargo handling area… you got any details you could spare me?!?”
Now if you knew this fella the way I did you’d realize the quantity of service stripes on his sleeve were inversely proportional to the amount of brain cells left in his nogg’n!! When we served together on the ol’ Rainier, this here fella couldn’t find his ass with two hands and a bloodhound in a locked fan room… how the hell he ever became a Master Chief I’ll never know!!!
But Hey, nobody said you had to have the IQ of Albert Einstein to be a Gunners Mate! As the ol’ saying goes… A Gunners mate ain’t nothing but a Boatswains Mate with a Hunt’n License! At one point that unsalvageable bastard had a foul weather jacket that looked like a grease gun blew up on it and he had the vocabulary to match… Grab ass, nonsense and horseplay was the Pride of such a young Gunners Mate other than shoot’n air bunnies out his ass… or talk’n about bashing the bishop in strange places if you know what I mean!! When it came to being worth a shit… he was about as useful as a screen door on a submarine!!!
Yeah, he was slightly brain damaged by the time he showed up on the front door steps of the PreComm unit N°.7 from the ol’ Great Mistakes Gun School... he’d been slightly abused, was one step above Cromagnum… with a predisposition to become a Chief already having that curl in his index finger from all them too many beer mugs, it made a great fit for a Chief’s coffee mug!!
… As ol’ Master Chief Gurley could tell it best…
“Remind me to tell you about the 2000 pounders I nearly dropped that caused that incident your speaking of!”
… I think ol’ Gurley was try’n to impersonate ‘Don Quixote of La Mancha’ try’n to lance the ship’s gunner to one of them there heavy stanchions at the end of the cargo hold…
“The fork truck is only employed as justification for grown men to run the living hell out of each other... When we make it to the other end of the cargo hold, we score a goal or whatever you wanna call it!! Then Gunner Williamson and the EOD Chief will show up like two Dodge City sheriffs making a two gun draw!! The safety observers will be like refs only call’n penalties if small arms are involved or if a shipmate loses a limb!! Dogg’n Wrenches, Crowbars, DC Axes & other reflash tools pilfered from the DC locker are acceptable substitutes for hockey sticks & football bats!! Onlookers, Lolligaggers, & Skylarkers are allowed to bash each other while dodging fork trucks to keep the causualty figures high and safety numbers low for the next current SITREP… number of maimed… drunks with concussions... ears bitten off.... and folks with broken fingers & toes!! We’ll have to call in the marines to stop this shit… GAME ON!!!”
… he had a whole bunch of years before he had to worry about getting right with his maker and with the way things were going, he just assumed he’d live forever…
“It was a hot day as we were slogging around in obscene heat, wearing flak jackets and basting in our own sweat, heavy web gear, hauling bombs and ammo, water to guard against dehydration, eating stuff you wouldn’t feed your dog... and did I mention it was hotter than a festered titty in a wool bra!?!”
… I could tell this story was going soft brown on us real quick…
“After a long deserved brake of suck’n down the pop and gett’n wrapped around a bunch’a grab ass’n while relaxing for a few on the fantail with some buddies to the tune of a dirty ol’ nekkit girly magazine…”
… Yeah, this was coming from a vertically-fornicated mind…
“I jumped on one of them fork trucks haul’n 2000lb bombs, two per pallet, driving like a Mario Andretti accelerating in circles around the cargo hold on the main deck when the nose of one of them there bombs hit a fork truck guard circling around into the handling area… about that time the banding snapped and one of them bombs went a roll’n off the pallet and down the handling area…”
… And the ‘OOOH SHIT’ factor plays into the equation…
“… The Bos’n and a young deck seaman were in the area and started Yelp’n and Holler’n and Runn’n like hell…”
… Like there was anywhere to run… right?
“The EOD was called up and I got an ass chewing from the BMC(EOD) and Gunner Williamson who wanted to rip my gizzard out through the nose with his bare hands and eventually grounded me to the hold level magazines for the rest of the upload with the ‘Shitty Kitty!”
… And I could only imagine what was going down on the Kitty Hawk as someone yelled ‘FIRE IN THE HOLE’ and the whole gauddamned place probably looked like an ICBM was just launched into orbit!!!
I guess at the time Master Chief Gurley hadn’t read his OP4 & OP5 about the 500 pound bomb drop off a forklift in Port Chicago out of Concord, CA back around 68’! There still pick’n off the pieces of DNA from that poor fella in the local township!!!
Yeah, he was about as slick as snot on a doorknob with too many jokers & not enough aces in that there deck back in his Seaman days! With all the antics & shenanigans that fella pulled… it’s a wonder he wasn’t put on restriction riding handcuffed to the seat half nekkit in a Shore Patrol paddy wagon most of his career!! Hell… Gunner Williamson considered replacing him with a battery operated mechanical monkey!!!
Years later our paths crossed once again as he showed up at my mess as a ‘Chief Select’ with much need and anticipation for training and good mentorship… and a jolly green charge book to go with it! Long forgotten memories began to parade across the reverse side of my eyeballs as I recalled the only clumsy son-of-a-bitch that I knew who could figure a way to trip over a cordless phone!! Whoever would’ve known there’d be a slight chance in hell that the perpetrator of such Barnum & Bailey sized acts of circus clowning would someday be a gauddamned Master Chief!!!
I told him that retirement is grand and how I’m enjoying sitt’n on my ass and turning into a crotchety ol’ coot! I imagine him sitt’n on his front porch in a rickety old wooden rocking chair with ten other long bearded whiskey swill’n hill billies somewhere near a rural Eastern Kentucky distillery drinking the ‘Lighting’ and near 200 proof ‘Shine’ from up there in them hills…
“But I love my job…”
… He says…
“I just hate to work!”
I figure a retired Gunner Williamson will be drop’n off some bomblets on that ol’ front door step so’s he can overthrow the Kremlin… that’s if he doesn’t throw out his back and get a hernia from try’n to pick the bastards up over his shoulder!!!
Keep them coming Dan. You have the gift to tell them just the way I recall the Navy was at times. You could not make that stuff up, but only those who have done the time can believe it actually happened that way!
ReplyDeleteOl' Master Chief Gurley read this and this is what he had to say...
ReplyDeleteo Awesome...should’a told you the one where the Suppo (A full bird) came down to the hold level to see what was taking so long per load...me on a fork truck taking a break in my boxers, helmet and boots (safety first)...unlit cig in my mouth, 28 hours of no sleep and me telling the guy to grab a hammer or get the f$&@ out...gunner Williamson wasn't too happy when he heard about it later...