Friday, December 11, 2015

‘Got The Shaft’

The say we’re all stupid, worthless, and dense!
I gotta agree, we ain’t real couth gents!
We’re always flat broke, from the broads and the beer!
But when payday comes around, we’re full of good cheer!

The Spring Bearings hot, they may lock the shaft!
Feed pump crapped out, we’re wrapping up aft!
Seems like disasters come back to back!
Been 36 hours in… I still ain’t seen my rack!

Water went salty, and Evaps on the rag!
Laundry broke down dirty clothes in a bag!
At Quarters a complaint about my hair!
Sure the barbershop’s open, who’s got time to go there!

Eight hours on watch, and eight on turn too!
So us ball bust’n guys have got plenty to do!
With all the breakdowns in old antique gear!
Didn’t we fix that four time last Year?

Liberty went down, but there’s lots left to do!
Like feed water, shore steam, and black oil too!
There’s bilges to clean and just enough time!
We’ll crawl out of there all covered in grime!

The machines have been fixed, the repairs are all made!
So much damned work, so little we’re paid!
While in the Navy, we’re just paid enough!
To cover insurance, allotments, and stuff!

I got a good hunch we ain’t seen the end!
There’s more work and breakdown around the next bend!
The hard luck trophy, it’s easy to see!
Will be given to both --------- M & B!

"Got the Shaft" was written by Roger Niswonger BTFN shortly after his ship went dead in the water when both of the evaporators crapped out in the war zone off Viet Nam!


Picture from ‘Cold Is The Sea Blogspot’… Author Unknown.

Thursday, December 3, 2015

‘ODD STUFF WE REMEMBER’

Here’s one sent by an old Coot from way back in the Fifties off an old FRAM Tin Can, the Dirty Duncan DDR 874…

This is just a funny anecdote to add to your collection of ‘No Shitters!’  In 52’ we were tied up in a nest in Sasebo, Japan loading supplies!! The crew as usual went on the beach and as you know we were not allowed overnighters since Japan was still occupied!!!

The next morning as all four destroyers were to leave port for Korea we were all blown away by a stunt that some crew members had pulled!! We were tied up next to the USS Brinkley Bass, DD 887, as well as the USS Stickell and the Isabel!!!

It appeared as though someone, probably with a snoot full of Nippon beer, got a water taxi to tie up to the stern of the Brinkley Bass! They had with them a can of haze grey and some brushes and proceeded to pain over the letter ‘B’ on both the first and last names of the ship!! Thus when she pulled out to sea she steamed out proudly as the USS Rinkley Ass!!!

The crew of the Bass was blamed for this and received restrictions on their next visit!  I don’t know who did it but I have my suspicions and I don’t think it was any of the Brinkley’s crew!! Lighter moments were not always well thought out as evident in these occurrences!!!


Tuesday, December 1, 2015

'Sailors Got Talent'

It’s amazing what some of us ol’ salts had to do for amusement in the Ol’ Canoe Club! While plowing through the Seven Seas life can get pretty boring at times and every so often you got to do something to relieve the monotony!! Somewhere, somehow, someone down the road decided…

“What the hell!”

and started doing talent shows on the fantail!!!

I’m not talking about your run of the mill garden variety ‘Who’s Got Talent’ like you saw on that ‘Dirty Dancing’ flick with ‘Babys’ sister sing’n the Hula Hana or Spongebob’s Squidward doing his best rendition of Horatio Hornblower! And I’m sure many of you non nautical types imagine squeaky clean Crackerjack qualified liberty hounds doing the Copacabana by Barry Manilo!! NO… it was noth’n of the sort… well, for the most part anyhow!!!

A good ol’ talent show on the fantail could be one helluva premier event during a six month Westpac! There’d be bands playing, Dunk The CMC, Barnacle Bill The Sailor Burlesques, Men doing the Victoria Secret Runway Show, and other skits, spoofs & lampoons of whatever floated your fancy!! It was the one time you could take a shot at anyone and get away with it... No subject or person was off-limits!!!

Some of the talent was pretty good too…

There was some kind of selection process they put you through to see who was flamboyant enough to have talent! Guys lacking flippity flap  razz-a-ma-tazz stage worthy ability, bed wetters,  whiners, and anyone who entertained the slightest desire to be stationed on shore duty need not apply!! The system, Gauddamn it, sorted out the truly gritty & gifted and packed the rest to stand watch elsewhere… unless you had a sense of humor… then you got to partake in the audience!!!

For last place you got garden trowel castration! Second to last you’d be locked up butt nekkit in an enclosed space with every gal on ‘The View’ for a week… or two!!  Never mind… I think I’d rather be castrated or even put through a rectal Cobra insertion exercise before dealing with the Crew on the View!!!

I was wrapping myself around a cup of joe at the CSC console in CIC when the TAO came up, put his hand on my shoulder…

“Chief, you need to lay to the flight deck when you get a chance for relief!”

… Unfortunately the show was over by the time I’d made it topside! But I got a grandstand view on video of the spectacle as a must watch just for me to see!! Apparently the Missile Officer, my Divo, mustered up a skit of me on the Nordic Elliptical doing his best Tony Little rendition on the Gazelle!!!  

“Whew… WoW… YeeHaw… You Can Do It… You Can Do It!”

I had never laughed so gauddamned hard in all my life! He looked like a total buffoon jumping up, down, back & forth like a damned Dallas Cheerleader on Crystal Meth…

“Whew… OOH Yeah… I’m gonna get it… I’m gonna Power Through This… Whew!”

I mean, who writes this shit anyway?!? The dialog… the bantor… I gotta say, those technical skills… they were amazing!! I must be one helluva Acrobatic Exhibitionist to do some of that stuff!!!

One of the greatest gifts of partaking in the ol’ Canoe Club are all those memories and the rogue rapscallions you shared them with! Killing Time underway … we got pretty damned good at it!!!  


Friday, November 13, 2015

'Doing God's Work'

When I was a young Crackerjack on Westpac some of my shipmates would go with the Navy Chaplain into the village to do God’s work! One old coot told me how one day some of our shipmates came back to base in Subic after a few days in a nearby provincial town. The sailors headed straight to the Chaplain and said…

"Hey Chaps, you would have been proud of us, we did a very good and Christian thing!"

“What was that?”

…asked the Chaplain.

"We tore down a damn brothel!"

The Chaplain raised a suspicious eyebrow as he knew these swabbies well and was surprised!

"You did that did you?"

… asked the Chaplain!

"Yes Sir… Nobody should be allowed to charge prices like they did and get away with it!"


Thursday, November 5, 2015

‘Good Gawd I Love This Place’

Now sit right back young tadpoles and Ol’ Salts as I tell a tale of a thousand islands and a thousand dreams! Once a very long, long time ago, in a place very far, far away there was a Utopian Paradise where every yearning a Crackerjack craved could be satisfied to their fullest desires!! This was unlike anywhere in the States where the battle of the suffragettes raged and every butch-dyke feminist with spike hair had a default envy and distain for all tally-whackers and hollered raucously swearing she caught you staring at her tits!!!

Yes, this was the Shangri-La, Nirvana, or Heaven to most! A place of iniquitous Eden!! A place I would recommend to any man deprived of his sexual fantasies!! I’m talking about those unrestrained fantasies, and light hearted perversions if you catch my drift… Yes I’m talking about the Islands of the Philippines!!!  

At Twenty-one, I was quite the specimen of robust sexual prowess! And what better place was there than the PI, a wonderful place of nautical myth and legend to have as your first Overseas Liberty Port!! I’d sat and heeded the tales of yore expressed in such splendor where lonely men refreshed their sacks of scrotal fluid in a land of ecstasy well noted as the Adult Disney World!!!

It was hotter than a whore’s ass on payday when we pulled in passed Grande Island! Liberty went down over the 1MC and all the grown men went nuts!! All of the sudden three hundred or so Crackerjacks were rush’n to the rain locker for that thirty second soap down & rinse, splash’n on the Old Spice, Speedstick and various other sorts of foo-foo juice to mask or hide the smells of thirty days at sea!!!   

Then off over the brow they went… straight across shit river convert’n them dollars to pesos like a paraded sausage fest heading into town! No matter, for every fella there was two or three Honey-Koe!! They all be hornier than a Sea Dog for sure that day!!!

I can still hear the growling of the multicolored Jeepneys whizbang’n by and smell that shitty combo of sewage and diesel! It’s an unforgettable sent, one that brings you straight back to that one single particular place!!!

For me it was time to test my mettle at butterflying my way up and down Magsaysay! Like a true Crackerjack Sailor, all the things worth living for in life were either immoral, illegal, and could probably put you in medical for some time with either an IV or a shot of penicillin!!!

On each side of the road women sat in front of the night clubs… tempting, sexy, and haughtily aware of their attraction to the other sex … us men! They knew what we wanted… that was their business, like a car salesman!! I once heard that Pizza and Sex are a lot alike… When it’s good, it’s really good… But when it’s bad, it’s still pretty good!!!

So I swaggered my way until I found a place with plenty of music and pretty Honey-koe! I sat down and ordered a beer when along came this petite lil’ thing with lips that could suck the color out of a marble!! ‘DSLs’ they were referred too… you shipmates should be fluent in acronyms, after all the gauddamned Navy invented them!!!

She wasn't the most beautiful but she had a charm that could land her a customer on the dark side of the moon with a couple dozen Alien Johns from across the Galaxy stand’n by with a pack of smokes and a jug a mojo to boot! Let’s face it, a true Crackerjack you're not until you’ve been there and done that in the PI!! Her name was ‘Rosa’ which was a rather common name amongst bargirls… seemed every fifth gal had the name ‘Rosa!!’ She was probably in her mid-twenties but she could easily pass for a teenager… and her smile would have lit up any a dark room and that was all that mattered!!!

After a few hours and several San Migoos, we negotiated a bar fine with the Mama-san and headed across the street in one of them rent by the hour motel rooms! You know the ones… Sailors & Street girls must pay for room in advance… or something of the sort!?! Hey, it had mirrored ceilings and a couple of fans with a balcony and a cockroach named ‘Caoili’… gauddamned voyeur she was, watch’n us with her beady little eyes all night long!!!

So there we were in our Eden Pleasure Palace, things progressed at a fun and casual pace! I had a well thought out stash of condoms… flavored, ribbed, French ticklers of various colors all designed for any specific occasion!! Yes, my little Rosa was fun but she wasn’t innocent and she enjoyed the pleasure and excitement even if she’d seen more ceilings than Michelangelo… you know … from being horizontal all the time?!?

I was butt nekkit and sitting up and my little Rosa was butt nekkit and sitt’n on my lap! Her small brown frame was squeezing me so tight around the waist my legs were going numb! Sweat was running down the two of us like a deluge as she was panting like an Olympic runner’s last leg of a 400 meter race! It was a hot rainy night in Subic Bay, and the humidity level was at least 110%!!  It was just past midnight but she wasn’t going to stop now!! She had been riding the rod like a hot piston about to throw it through the engine block … just long enough to know that any time now I’d be a busting a nut!!!

She wasn’t your typical little brown fucking machine (Lbfm), make no bones about it!  And to Crackerjacks like me she was one giant clitoris in heat under the best of circumstances!! The giant speakers were pumping out of the club across the street giving this little ‘Lbfm’ all the rhythm she needed!!!

On that hot humid rainy night in Olongapo every time my little ‘Lbfm’ would drive down on my kielbasa, my knees would bounce up and the tips of my toes would curl in! She thought I was gonna erupt from all that grunting… but that wasn't the reason… at least not the whole reason!! I didn’t want to lose control and blow my stack too soon… so the grunts were a premise for keeping me going… a cadence if you will!!!

She was online and thrusting hard now and if she came down crooked she'd snap my pecker clean off but I'm past caring… Its Karma Sutra time and young Pinays have a way of bending that could cause early arthritis in a Garter Snake! Some salts beat the brow at the crossing… some don't, but they all signed on for the ride!! She couldn't see because her hair was in her face, and I couldn't see because sweat was burning my eyes… but we were doing a hundred miles an hour butt nekkit locked up in some deviant sexual gymnastic hold… you learn a lot about professional wrestling in these circumstances!!!

Something about those Pacific Island Fleshpots… so hot and sweet like warm molasses! The lust you can have for them and the way the play and flirt, they can seduce you in so many ways if not on your guard!! I pondered the ‘what ifs’ and how it might play out with a girl like that!!!

I also knew that play’n around in the nightlife of the Sodomites could hurt you real bad if you fell for it! Our own minds can deceive us in our fight to remain ‘butterfly’ from flower to flower… as some nectar is very sticky and can make you hang out too long!! A crusty ol’ Salt once said…

“A whiskey glass and a woman’s ass are the downfall of many a good Sailor man!”

After all, a hard-on doesn’t count as personal growth, if you know what I mean!!!

Just when you thought you had the system figured out, some lil’ thing comes along and twists & tugs on your heart strings and you realize you’re not immune to their devious little charms! That’s when you got to step back and make a double take… It’s best to stay free and easy and forever horny!!!

“Today I come before Neptune himself to bare my soul, confess the evil I have done and make for a Clean ‘Breast!”

… ‘There are no broken hearts here says I, because ‘Broken hearts are for assholes’… as I quoted the Late Great Frank Zappa!!!

So off I went back across Shit River with my thumb up my ass as I pondered…

“How the hell do I dollarize these pesos before liberty is about to end!”

One thing that always rang true about the Ol’ Canoe Club in the PI… Panties would fall off like a one legged man jumping rope as soon as the fleet came in! Those little ‘Lbfms’ … all of our little ‘Rosas’ … luscious, half-naked, beautiful, young, sexual, and somewhat submissive!! All I can say is I can still taste her Quim…

“Good Gawd I Love This Place!!!”


 


Monday, November 2, 2015

U.S. Navy Directive 16134 [Inappropriate T-Shirts]

The Navy (Marine Corps) never was a collection of sensitive liberals. HUOOA!!!
Subject: U.S. Navy Directive 16134
The following directive was issued by the commanding officer of a naval installation somewhere in the Middle East, and it was obviously directed at the Marines.
To: All Commands
Subject: Inappropriate T-Shirts
Ref: ComMidEastFor Inst 16134//24 K
  1. All commanders promulgate upon receipt.
  2. The following T-shirts are no longer to be worn on or off base by any military or civilian personnel serving in the Middle East:
"Eat Pork Or Die" [both English and Arabic versions]
"Shrine Busters" [Various. Show burning minarets or bomb/artillery shells impacting Islamic shrines. Some with unit logos.]
"Napalm, Sticks Like Crazy" [Both English and Arabic versions]
"Goat - it isn't just for breakfast any more." [Both English and Arabic versions]
"The road to Paradise begins with me." [Mostly Arabic versions but some in English. Some show sniper scope cross-hairs]
"Guns don't kill people. I kill people." [Both Arabic and English versions]
"Pork. The other white meat." [Arabic version]
"Infidel" [English, Arabic and other coalition force languages.]
  1. The above T-shirts are to be removed from Post Exchanges upon receipt of this directive.
  2. The following signs are to be removed upon receipt of this message:
"Islamic Religious Services Will Be Held at the Firing Range At 0800 Daily."
"Do we really need 'smart bombs' to drop on these dumb bastards?"
  1. All commands are instructed to implement sensitivity training upon receipt.