Anybody remember being selected as the duty
driver on your duty days? Without question, it was the best-damned duty you
could pull inport. 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!
