"Duty Driver"

 
Anybody remember being selected as the duty driver on your duty days? Without question, it was the best-damned duty you could pull import. Getting “Duty Driver” on your duty day was like a sore dick … you couldn’t beat it!
 
But some days you could be running around town busier than a three peckered dog in a leg humping contest. But hell, I wasn’t complaining. What other watches would you want to stand on your duty day? 
 
That’s why to this day I’ll never figure out why they picked me as a duty driver within my first couple of months onboard the ol’ Baglady as I was asked to ride along with an STG3, I don’t remember his name…
 
"Hey Swing, you’re a non-useful body. Get used to it, you’re just like me. A nonqualified shipmate lower than whale shit and taking up space. That’s why you’re with me! Now come on and get in the van."
 
It took it a few turns to get it started. You ever seen “Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang?”  Yeah, that’s about what it sounded like when it finally turned over, subtle as a sock full of bloody hog kidneys. Our job was to taxi our shipmate to and from pier 3, 32nd Street to Point Loma and the fleet anti-submarine warfare school with the dashboard radio tooling down the way, not to mention all of the pit stops along Harbor Drive. I still remember this little drive-thru joint on Rosecrans where you could pick up a Mondo California Burrito that could fill a whole damned family.
 
There were times we got bored waiting for our shipmates to get out of school so we used one of the gizmos that prints up the colored tape when you turn the dial to pick a letter and pull the trigger, to label just about every nook and cranny in the van! We had the dashboard labeled “foot rest,” the seat pockets were labeled “vomit catchers,” and of course the cup holder as “beer holders.”  In my whole Navy career, I never saw that machine used for official business...
 
Sometimes if the hour was right, we’d drive up to “Dirty Dan’s” Pure Platinum strip club next to the airport and check out the gals who were just coming in for work. Being young and dumb, neither one of us had the nutsack to approach these hot little dames. Hell, I wasn’t even twenty-one yet. I had to get my jollies on the base or take a trolley down to Tijuana to have a good time.
 
The STG3 I was riding with … man was he a madman at the wheel. We would weave in and out of traffic like it wasn’t moving, and these old Government owned Ford Econoline vans had no seatbelts with so much play in the steering wheel, it was a wonder we didn’t get in a wreck.
 
Eventually, I would be sent off on my own accord once I got to know the route back and forth.
 
“Swing, you’d better bring this thing back in one piece, shit only runs one way.”
 
That’s something every young dumb seaman knot head promptly forgot. After a good long run, the section leader would always be at the brow in a cardiac overload wondering what was taking so damned long to get back. 
 
I’ll never figure how or why they gave me the responsibility to haul ass through downtown San Diego with other lives on my hands. I had a driver’s license, with no lick of sense between my ears. Lord knows, when I became a Chief, I wouldn’t put myself in those circumstances … It’s like giving a bucket of 151 Green Primer to a drunk Seaman! Especially when we got the bottom of the barrel when it came to government vehicles.
 
You see, being the low man on the totem pole, our skipper didn’t rate much as a junior commander on the pier. Sometimes you just got what was given to you, and in this case, it was a trusty rust bucket where the interior was just as shitty as the exterior with your standard Am/Fm stock radio push-in buttons and all with plastic seats … absent the seat belts of course. I figured a country that put human beings on the moon could surely develop a duty vehicle that meets the satisfactory standard of picking up children from the school house. I swear we always got the same piece of shit van. The back smelled of piss and vomit with ciggy-butts stashed in every corner and it occurred to me that this lemon was probably used as a paddy wagon at one point or another … but I digress. If you could get passed the aesthetics and the foul odor, it was a pretty awesome duty nonetheless. 
 
A few years had gone by, and I was picked for duty driver onboard the Pre-Comm Rainier AOE Lucky No 7. Stationed out of NASSCO shipyard next to 32nd Street, I was dispatched to drive shipmates back and forth from the shipyard to the Pre-Comm building on dryside, FTC. I just found out I made Second Class, and I was getting a little cocky with myself hot-rodding back and forth.
 
On this particular sunny day, I was picking up my new LPO, FC1 Brian Christiansen, to bring him to the shipyard barge for command check in. Just as we showed our IDs’ and entered the shipyard, we had rounded a corner heading toward the ship’s barge. I must admit, I was going a little fast as the road was narrow with lots of speed bumps and potholes all along the way. Then up pops the devil, as this little golf cart pulled out of nowhere and I swerved to miss him while ramming the side of the van into a lone cemented fence pole. The van’s side door took most of the brunt as sparkling little gems of broken window glass spread all across the asphalt.
 
Just as I stopped, FC1 let out a rebel yell and told me my nickname was gonna be hotrod from now on! Needless to say, he pointed out…
 
"I'm not screwing this goat; I'm just holding the tail."
 
I’d never heard that expression before and had no idea what he was trying to say, but he was right, I left one hell of an impression as I sat there about to pee my pants and I had to clamp down tightly on my sphincter for fear of shitting myself.
 
“This is no gauddamned time to lose control here! Think, man! Think!”

The whole thing seemed fucked six ways from Sunday. But I got back to the barge and told the section leader “my version” of what had happened. Either he was dumber than a box full of nails or just didn’t give a shit. I filled out an accident report and that was the last I ever heard of it, except for FC1 giving me shit a time or two … that’s understandable.
 
Things got pretty good for duty driving over the last few years, as we were allowed to pick up shipmates at the various watering holes around town. It sure beat crowding in a taxi with six strange shipmates trying to get back to the ship from Pacific Beach … that can cost an arm and a leg. Now we had a bumper sticker that proudly said, “Serving your fellow Shipmate.” And being on a deep draft vessel, our skipper commanded the best of vehicles.
 
But no good deed ever goes unpunished. Eventually, the good ol’ Canoe Club came up with the “Alcohol Deglamorization” program and anything that had to do with drinking, or supporting the habit was laid to waste… including picking shipmates up with the duty van from the local watering hole. 
 
We never realized back then what golden memories we were harvesting. The Good Lord has a way of rewarding the plans of dumb sons-of-bitches. I look back now at some of the dumb shit I’d done and still can’t figure out how I’m alive with all me appendages still attached. It’s a damned miracle I tell you! Sometimes I look back and realize I was that kid who would stick his hand into the gator cage and watch the son-of-a-bitch bite it off, then turn around and pet him with the other hand? We were dumb, young, and stood fifty feet tall pissing against the wind … boy what it was like to be young!