"The Mayhem of Scuttlebutt & Beer Barge Brothels"

 

Welcome back again to another installment of DantheNavyman and his Internet Bullshit Show. Now excuse me while I sweep down fore and aft years of cobwebs and mental oxidation as I engineer another distinct journey through my flawed memories of … “This ain’t no Shit.”

Back when this ol’ Canoe Club was about Dungarees, White Hats, Thirteen Button Blues, and Boondockers, we sailor’n types used to bait each other from time to time with fool’s errands, banter, and plenty of scuttlebutt to plow the way. In the world we grew up in, there was a hell of a lot of stuff we had to learn along the way. This was before the internet search engines came about.

Kids today don’t know what it was like before Google, Ask Jeeves, Duck-Duck-Go and all of them other search engines. We got thrown into the rigmarole of banter. There was no polite discourse and gentle conversation. You fucked with the new guy, and he learned how to take it with a smile or bounce off with his tail between his legs.

We had very little in the way of instructional reference. You had to figure it out on your own. The only Google there was back then, was the infinite amount of horse pucky you could throw at the wall to see what would stick. Before Google had arrived, all we had was the local library, the World Book Encyclopedia, and that kid down the road who was clearly full of it. What made it a bit more complicated is that no young man passed his adolescence would ever admit he didn't know a damn thing about anything. 

Where I grew up, the older kids like Terry Baker and Jeff Nichols were the neighborhood authority on damn near everything. Jeff Nichols and all those sons-a-bitches he brought with him dragged your little happy ass to the graveyard across the way from the local elementary school at midnight with an old burlap bag and a stick, only to leave you on your own tapping that stick on some gravestone while they disappeared and left you by your lonesome…

“Here Snipe, Snipe … Here Snipe, Snipe …”

The entire gang had the collective intelligence of a Hostess TWINKIE. You would think we were so stupid back in the day we couldn’t find our asses with both hands!

At seven years old, my step-daddy, Charlie Brown, told me that refried beans were processed baby shit. It took a few years before I realized how full of shit he was that his eyes were as brown as his last name implied.

I’d often say …

“I wonder if they’ll ever come up with a computer or something that will tell us what’s real and what’s not so we didn’t get put in such a predicament.”

But like my Grandpa used to say …

“Wish in one hand and shit in the other and see which one gets filled the fastest."

Then I joined the World’s finest Navy and learned how Sailors get the most recent scuttlebutt among their shipmates. Back in those days we’d sit around the buttkit discussing busts sizes or what if “God dropped acid, would he see people?” or “If you try to fail, but succeeded, did you do either?” Yes, the circular yarn we would spin could be pretty unbelievable, but gullible minds wanted to know. Life without a smarter-than-your-parents search engine was entertaining as hell.

As early as Bootcamp, I remember hearing stories about the Saltpeter they put in your food to pipe down the libido of a bunch of post-adolescent young sailors so they wouldn’t get too horny. There were other stories like not to use shitter #4 in the Galley because the last guy to use it two weeks ago had the crabs. That had to be the cleanest shitter in the head for many years. Then there were others like the story of an island off of Cambodia where they would send you to rot away if you’d caught the dreaded black clap overseas. When I was a Recruiter, the Marines told a prospective recruit that he could become a paramedic when the Marine Corps medics are actually Canoe Club Penis Machinists. I could go on and on, but I digress…

For every Admiral, Captain, Lieutenant, or Chief trying to set the story straight, there are ten times as many Petty Officers and Seamen passing scuttlebutt of the next port-o-call or fool’s errand to keep the monotony from killing everyone off.

Then came the whopper of all whoppers. Just when you thought you’d heard it all, someone said …

“Hold my Beer!”

As most of you know back in the day, Sailors were world renown for our excessive drinking and sexual exploits. We were often guilty of the most ridiculous excess and shameless conduct, and the scuttlebutt was the largest Word-of-Mouth network the military had to offer.

As the story goes, when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, we were looking at the prospect of a major war in the middle-east. The Department of Defense wanted to make a party oasis where our hard-fighting servicemen could catch some well-deserved R&R. Rumor had it they wanted to make it a popular spot where we could get hammered, mingle with a hooker or two, and label it the Sodom and Gomorrah of the New Age. The Navy already had many a barge not bearing fruit while they sat around and rusted away in the local shipyards. So why not make a floating brothel barge and plant it somewhere in the Persian Gulf?

The idea of Sailors, Marines, and Soldiers gathering in large numbers after an unholy deployment period to a waterfront brothel would make for a party of epic proportions. After all, for centuries Sailors wrote shanties about their exploits with hookers and whores. It’s ingrained in our past. Songs such as Barnacle Bill, Black Ball Line, and South Australia come to mind when singing “Now my boys we’re in the docks, the pretty girls come out in flocks.” It sounded believable to a young dumb sailor with sex on the mind 24/7. Boy, that rumor wasn’t even bullshit, it was horseshit! But, we've heard them all a thousand times. Your shipmate heard from another sailor on another ship who swears up and down that when his brother was at the Pentagon he heard it straight from the horse’s mouth.

With ports like Subic Bay, Pattaya Beach Thailand, and Pusan Korea, horny sea going Sailors amidst a bunch of hookers carrying on in a world of commercial romance seemed reasonable. When it came to sex we were like starving anteaters in a termite nest.

Could you imagine back in the day, a US Navy ship pulling up next to a Brothel Barge in the middle of the Gulf? It would turn out to be organizational lunacy, “Esprit de Corps.”

Eventually, the internet took the world by storm and Google made its debut. All the mayhem of a good fool’s errand or silly goose chase disappeared like a fart in a pair of string underwear.

Most of those mythical urban legends had been hauled off to the trash bin like the Easter Bunny, Santa Claus, and the Boogie Man. When Google came about, it was like some kind of evolutionary transitional stage from monkeys to homo-sapiens. I mean, you gotta wonder how we survived without that instantaneous know-it-all computer that puts things back into perspective. Now a kid with an IQ of 150 could benefit himself with the cognitive stratification all made possible by the all-knowing internet.

But the consequence of so much information at our fingertips changed the way we did business. I feel sorry for today’s Canoe Club Cabaret. Now they’re preached to about the use of tobacco and alcohol, to use their free time going to school or the base gym and not to take pleasure in the horizontal mambo with the opposite sex. And if you still have any free time left, organize a bake sale. Without Google, these poor kids couldn’t fry eggs without a mentor or a support group.  

I might sound like a pugnacious old coot who can’t remember a gauddamned thing about the Sailor’s Creed with Honor, Courage, and Commitment, but I can’t help thinking that in today’s Canoe Club some transgender fembot will get her penis in a knot because some sailor called her the wrong pronoun … and your career is destroyed. I say rinse the sand out of your crotch and spare the rest of our Sailors the frustrations of sitt’n through another unpleasant session of a ‘Red light, Green light’ GMT!  Just say one wrong thing and they’ll be on you like buzzards on carrion.

Now if I’m out of line, just say so. It’s okay … I’m an old fart and the days of the drunken sailor with a girl in every port seem like a dream from far, far away. But I swear, it really existed … all of it. So there’s no need to sick rabid dogs on me or set my ass on fire with flamethrowers.

(FiN)