'Mix'n Work & Play'



Ol’ School Artwork from a few Tin Can Snipes back in the Eighties!!!

'Pick'n On The Boy'



A story I wrote a week or so ago I’d mentioned one of those ‘Pick’n on the Boy’ kinda moments and it reminded me of another jiffy of a flash in this ol’ Crackerjack’s past!! It is a rather sordid tale but I'll speak of it anyway since… well that’s what this site is all about… right?!?   

Being on a bird farm, ‘Chucky V,’ as a young lad in my early days meant dealing with quite an assortment of scallywags and simple minded salts on a routine basis! Well we had this little feller up in CIWS nicknamed ‘Woody’ who wasn’t the brightest bulb in the batch!! He surely wasn’t the wisest in the division and gullible as I’ll get out!! One day after a long stent of chip’n and grind’n we’d been sitt’n in the mount taking a break when ol’ Woody went on one of his spells about the new ‘Love of his Life’ while describing every detail of their intimate lives… her hair, bra size, favorite sexual positions… you know the drill!!!

Well… this went on day after day, over and over for about a week… he was a proud man that Woody was! One of our other cohorts, known as ‘Snowman,’ checks in off leave and we fill him in on all the details that ‘Woody’ had been feed’n us!! Soooo… the next day of work we’re out on the sponson and we got ol’ Woody talking about his girly friend once again!! He states her name and mentions her blonde hair and glasses and ol’ Snowman chimes in…

“Is that Michelle such & such, with blonde hair glasses, she likes to hang out at the El Camino in Bremerton…etc, etc…”

… after all, Woody already divulged this a few days earlier as he replies…

“Well, yeah, how’d you know all that?”

… to which Snowden retorts…

“Hey, you guys remember that blonde gal at the El Camino… the one we took turns on at the ‘Super 8’ after breakfast at Denny’s?!? That’s the girl Woody’s dating!”

… Needless to say ol’ Woody was a bit dismayed by his new revelation as he got more and more pissed off with every guy who chimed in about his girl and how she liked to do it this way and that… the perplexity on his face was priceless!!!

The following day after morning Quarters ol’ Woody was anxious to get us all together as he had something to say! Apparently when he went over to his girl’s house that night he confronted her about the situation…

“She said you all must be thinking of someone else because the group of guys she slept with were off the ‘Nimitz’ and not the ‘Chucky V’!!!”

… We were all pretty gauddamned dumbstruck’n! Woody didn’t seem to care the least bit as long as it wasn’t us… and soon he was engaged and married!! Always wondered what happened with that there match made in hell…LoL!!!

'Vic's Bell'



Another Sea Story from a shipmate during the Cold War era! Anybody remember shining Quarterdeck bright work?!? I remember it well… Anyhow, here’s another cool sea story from Vic Albright...

My first few weeks aboard the ‘Gray Ghost of the South China Coast,’ USS Gridley, I was a 19 year old FTMSN with an attitude and had an LPO, FTM1 Morris, who took it upon himself to straighten it outta me as soon as possible! Being an E-3, on duty days I was tasked with Brightwork Detail!! As soon as I got my Nevr-Dull and rags, my LPO, who was also my Section Leader, grabbed hold of me and brought me up to the foc'sle!!!

There, alongside the ASROC launcher, was a big brass bell… the ‘Ship’s Bell,’ complete with green vertigrae and nasty as hell! I was told by FTM1 that my job was to shine that bell and to keep working on it until it was pertty & shiny!! Of course with my bad attitude, I Gave FTM1 plenty of flak, but he didn't care…

"Albright, you will stay up here and shine that bell until I tell you otherwise!"

That first day, I worked on that stupid bell for hours! When the word was passed over the 1MC to ‘Secure from Brightwork Detail’ FTM1 was right there, telling me to keep going!! I worked on that stupid bell right on up until lunch time, when he finally cut me loose for messcrank’n in the Wardroom!!!

The next duty day, much of the same.... my hands were green from scrubb’n & shining and still no glimmer on that bell! I fell into a rut... knowing enough on my duty days to grab my stuff and head for the bell!!!

After about a month, the bell started to get a bit of luster to it!!!

After maybe six, eight weeks of working on that stupid piece of brass, it actually started looking pretty good...and early on FTM1 had passed the word along that no other duty section was to work on it!!!

After eight or ten weeks, the bell was looking great, and I really had a mirror image going on… and I kind of took pride in it!!!

One morning, I went up to shine ‘my bell’ and somebody else was already there... I confronted him, explaining that it was my job alone to shine that bell, and I started getting flak....

"Every duty day I see you here shining this bell, and now you can go do something else... I want to shine it!"

Little known to me, FTM1 was right there and told the new Boot Camper…

"This is Vic's Bell and it is HIS job to shine it!"

I was taken back a bit, not expecting Morris to have my back so to speak… with my poor attitude and all! The entire time I was an FTMSN my first duty during Brightwork detail was to shine that bell... of course once it was looking good, I could not milk it and had to shine turnbuckles and other stuff!! Eventually I transferred off the Gridley and moved on with my career!!!

When I was an FTM2 I was aboard FOX and Gridley was moored in Long Beach Naval Shipyard! I to the Gridley for a part or something… don’t remember the exact reason!! I asked the POOW for ‘Permission to Come aboard!!’ While waiting on the Quarterdeck for my escort from below deck, I noted the gleaming bell alongside the ASROC launcher and made mention of it to the POOW...

"Oh, That's Vic's Bell."

I had to ask…

"Why do you call it that?"

The response...

"I don't know... that's what we always called it!"

A lesson in pride and humility I suppose!!!

‘DIPPING THE EYE’

Everyone who’s anyone in this ol’ canoe club has been associated in some fashion as a resident line handler! And as a young boot camper on any USS Grey Joy we all get the proverbial ‘pick’n on the boy’ kinda situation!!  Well on any particular day returning to port… ‘Sea & Anchor Detail’ with the tug pull’n alongside…  The Bos’n on the tug tosses down the line to put over the mooring bollard!!!

Now… how many of you ol’ Crackerjacks fell for this one the first time around?!?

While standing there with your thumb up your ass aggressively trying to do the best you can you grabbed the line wondering what to do with it next!!  The Bos’n on the tug yells…

" Dip the eye… Dip the eye!"

… Meanwhile you’re asking yourself…

"What the hell does that mean?" 

The Bos’n yells again even louder…

 "DIP THE FUCKING  EYE!"

Not wanting to look like you didn’t know your head from your ass you figure…

“Oh, he must mean dipping the noose in the water!”

The Bos’n inevitably busts a gut laughing his ass off! Eventually everyone around you is laughing his ass off!! That’s when the Safety Officer or Mooring Petty Officer comes over and kicks you in the ass and calls you ‘Numb Nutz’… ‘Dip Shit’ or one of many other colored assortment of explicatory  and illustrative words!!!

Then he explains to you in a rather derisive tone…

“When you dip the eye, you run the eye of your second line through the eye of the first before putting it over the bollard … you Moron!”

One of those situations that takes months to live down!  Makes you feel dumber than a two story outhouse!!

‘Selling Cameras To Sorry Sailors Off Base’

Image found at DietzDolls.com


According to our Company Commanders and Career Counselors at Great Mistakes, there were folks in the Lakehurst Mall and North Chicago area who would sell any fella in a ‘Crackerjack Uniform’ three quarters of the known world for 'no’ money down and 48,000 monthly payments with balloon interest rates exceeding the national debt!

'An Unusual Case In The Shipyard Machine Shop'



Back in my days on the ‘Chucky V’ there was this here rumor circulat’n the passageways that this matter had happened right there in the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard Shop 31! Don’t know if there’s any truth to the matter but according to ‘Snopes.com’ the incident did happen… just a question of where I suppose, but the time frame fits about right!! Besides, no-shitters are usually a lot of horse shit mixed with a bit of bullshit sprinkled on top… So here goes it!!!

One morning I was called to the emergency room by the head ER nurse. She directed me to a patient who had refused to describe his problem other than to say that he "needed a doctor who took care of men's troubles." The patient, about 40, was pale, febrile, and obviously uncomfortable, and had little to say as he gingerly opened his trousers to expose a bit of angry red and black-and-blue scrotal skin.

After I asked the nurse to leave us, the patient permitted me to remove his trousers, shorts, and two or three yards of foul-smelling stained gauze wrapped about his scrotum, which was swollen to twice the size of a grapefruit and extremely tender. A jagged zig-zag laceration, oozing pus and blood, extended down the left scrotum.

Amid the matted hair, edematous skin, and various exudates, I saw some half-buried dark linear objects and asked the patient what they were. Several days earlier, he replied, he had injured himself in the machine shop where he worked, and had closed the laceration himself with a heavy-duty stapling gun. The dark objects were one-inch staple of the type used in putting up wallboard.

We x-rayed the patient's scrotum to locate the staples; admitted him to the hospital; and gave him tetanus antitoxin, broad-spectrum antibacterial therapy, and hexachlorophene sitz baths prior to surgery the next morning. The procedure consisted of exploration and debridement of the left side of the scrotal pouch. Eight rusty staples were retrieved, and the skin edges were trimmed and freshened. The left testis had been avulsed and was missing. The stump of the spermatic cord was recovered at the inguinal canal, debrided, and the vessels ligated properly, though not much of a hematoma was present. Through-and-through Penrose drains were sutured loosely in site, and the skin was loosely closed.

Convalescence was uneventful, and before his release from the hospital less than a week later, the patient confided the rest of his story to me. An unmarried loner, he usually didn't leave the machine shop of the Naval Shipyard at lunchtime with his co-workers. Finding himself alone, he had begun the regular practice of masturbating by holding his penis against the canvas drive-belt of a large floor-based piece of running machinery. One day, as he approached orgasm, he lost his concentration and leaned too close to the belt. When his scrotum suddenly became caught between the pulley-wheel and the drive-belt, he was thrown into the air and landed a few feet away. Unaware that he had lost his left testis, and perhaps too stunned to feel much pain, he stapled the wound closed and resumed work. I can only assume he abandoned this method of self-gratification.

 

Origins:   The above-cited article about a machine shop worker who sliced his scrotum open while masturbating with a piece of machinery at a Naval Shipyard (causing the loss of a testicle), then simply stapled the sac back together, was popular fodder in text-based Internet discussion groups in the early 1990s. Despite the clinical tone of the article, told from a first-person perspective of the doctor who treated the patient's resulting injuries and infection, many readers found the scenario described too bizarre to be true and suspected it was a hoax crafted by someone working in the medical field.

As a first step towards verifying or debunking this item, we tracked down a copy of the medical journal that had supposedly published the article and ascertained that the article did indeed appear in the July 1991 issue of Medical Aspects of Human Sexuality. Still, some doubters didn't consider that to be sufficient proof that the events described therein had actually occurred — the journal editors might have been fooled by a doctor who sent in a fictitious case report as a prank, they insisted.

So, we tracked down the physician whose name appeared at the head of the article and contacted him to see if he could verify the account and supply any additional information. He replied to us as follows:

Dear Mr. Mikkelson:

I am now retired, but submitted the article; I treated the patient about 20-25 years ago and have had phone calls from all corners of the U.S. ever since. A Xerox is on the billboard in practically every army post, college dorm, men's club, etc. I've had interviews/phone by talk-show hosts, etc… but no Phil Donahue yet!

The man actually came to me three days post-injury when the fever, swelling, and pain of secondary infection frightened him. Though unlikely, tetanus was even a possibility. He was not that impressed with the pain of the moment of injury — it happened so quickly, like losing your fingertip to a band-saw — and was unaware his left testis was probably propelled up into the rafters of the machine shop where he worked.

Every man who questions me imagines the initial pain to have been intense, but should realize that once the testis had been ripped out (gasp!) there was not the continuing discomfort one would experience from a first-class kick in the nuts!

I saw him again five years later in the hospital for a non-urologic problem. Incidentally, the Navy has left Xerox copies in every bar along the Mediterranean from Gibraltar to Tel Aviv — my son's girlfriend saw one in Greece two years ago.

… Now if that ain’t one hell of a no-shitter… I don’t know what is!!!

‘Watch Relief’



Sometimes I get stories from shipmates that are too gauddamned funny to pass up... heres one from an anonymous source I thought I'd share!!!

One night back in the early 90s I was standing watch topside while my ship was in dry dock at San Diego! Our Duty Section was short hands so most of us were standing six hour watches!! I’d been drinking Iced Tea all evening before assuming the Petty Officer of the Watch and after an hour in it started catching up to me!!!

At this point I did everything in my power to get a relief, even asking the Officer Of the Deck if I could use the head since it was after TAPs! He wouldn’t budge. Well, as part of the watch someone was supposed to go down to the dry dock under the ship and make the rounds… considering the Officer Of the Deck was and ass and wouldn’t give me the privilege of doing so, he made said rounds!! It was at this point I couldn’t take it any longer!!!

After he headed down the gangway, I preceded forward far enough away from the Quarterdeck for some privacy yet close enough to catch anyone coming aboard or wanting to leave! I unzipped, pulled out the ol’ snake skin and let out a sigh of relief as I let it out over the side of the ship!! In less than a minute I was done and back to resuming the watch!!!

It wasn’t long before the Officer Of the Deck showed back up from the dry dock basin and headed straight for the area I just came from to relieve myself! He began to survey the area with a curious look on his face!! I asked…

“Whatcha looking for Sir?”

… to which he replied…

“I’m looking for the source of the water that dripped upon me while I was under the ship!”

… At that point I did an about face to keep the smirk from giving me away!! And that my friends is a no shitter!!!

‘Found In The Navy Salvage Engineer’s Handbook (Volume 1) (1992)’

‘Ship’s Salvage is a science of vague assumptions based on debatable figures from inconclusive instruments, performed with equipment of problematical accuracy by persons of doubtful reliability and of questionable mentality…’

'The Nastygansett Nasties'

Another from the Preacher Man!!!

 

You guys got that ARR-52 tweaked and the MAD adjusted? Good... Gather 'round, spark 'em up, and listen good 'cause this ain't no shit...or maybe it is LOL!!!

 

One day at NAS Brunswick (a Friday) there wasn't anything to do! So about 1500 or so the chief cut us loose for the afternoon and a few of us went over to the acey deucey club!! Holy moly, the place was almost deserted!!!

 

We were drinkin' barley pops, eatin' bar snacks and watching some fool movie on the tube when we decided to have a good ol’ fart’n contest! Points for volume… stink… and length!! Finally it came down to me and my best bud Tommy!!!

 

Well now, it was Tommy's turn and after a big long suck of his Nastygansett (that's what we called Narragansett beer), he raised one butt cheek, then said quickly…

 

"Owyn, you win! C'mon in the head and I'll pay you!!"

 

WTF… why not pay me right there? But I followed him in an' he said…

 

"You win 'cause I just shit myself. Here's the keys to my apartment in town. Get over there fast, get me skivvies and dungaree trousers, an' under the sink is a box of plastic bags. Be quick as you can. I'll be in a stall!"

 

So off I went, got the stuff, and got back with everythin' in a paper bag so I wouldn't embarrass the poor feller! Tommy like I say was my best bud in the squadron and I never breathed a word while I was in that outfit… But take it from Preacher now boys, there are better things to bet on!! See now… I told you it was a no shitter and it wasn't, didn't I?!? Now let's get this shop lookin' good before it's knockoff time… okay?!? Okay!!!