Reminiscing about Navy life

I was born in 1950 and was in the first year that they had the draft lottery. #348. My roommate at the time was #2. Needless to say, living in New England, I put some of my knowledge of back-roads Vermont to good use. Had I been called up, I would have gone into the Navy -- always had an affinity for the ocean and the ships that sail on her, large and small. Denny over at Grouchy Old Cripple was also a squid and writes about just how to recreate some of those tender feelings at home:

For The Squids
Do you ever feel nostalgic for your Navy service? Do you want to recapture those wonderful years? I don't. I started counting down the days from the time I enlisted. I am not a military type. But for those of you who do want to relive those memories, Ron came up with a way to do it.

How to Simulate Being in the Navy
1. Buy a dumpster, paint it gray inside and out, and live in it for six months.

1a. Submarines - Black outside; Pea Green inside

2. Run all the pipes and wires in your house exposed on the walls. Paint them gray.

3. Repaint your entire house every month.

4. Renovate your bathroom. Build a wall across the middle of the bathtub and move the shower head to chest level. When you take showers, make sure you turn off the water while you soap down.

Navy showers. And let's not forget water hours. I remember them well. You could only take showers at designated times.

5. Put lube oil in your humidifier and set it on high.

6. Once a week, blow air up your chimney with a leaf blower and let the wind carry the soot onto your neighbor's house. Ignore his complaints.

Known as blowing the tubes or blowing the stacks. If you were on a ship with diesel engines, like an LST, you did not have this wonderful experience. The snipes (what we called the engineering rates) were notorious for blowing the tubes right after you have swept and swabbed the decks. Assholes.

7. Once a month, take all major appliances apart and reassemble them.

Known as Preventative Maintenance. They had written maintenance measures that you had to follow. You had to sign this off with the PM petty officer. On the Iredell County, I was the PM petty officer for Operations Division. We gundecked a lot of this. I did tear down the power amp of my AN/WRT-2 transmitter and soak the tuning coil in trichloroethane every other month. The radiomen loved the performance of that transmitter. One night, off the coast of Viet Nam, I was able to hit the skips and send traffic to NavCommSta San Francisco. Yeah, I could have sent it to Cam Ranh Bay, the PI, or Guam, but what fun was that. Anyway, Cam Ranh Bay was staffed with assholes. They wouldn't respond to my callups. I would send bells (Teletypes had bells attached to get an operator's attention. I found out later that the operators at the NavCommSta's disconnected them. So what I did was send line feeds. You send enough of them and teletype paper would be all over the deck. Really pissed the operators off. This is what I had to do when sending traffic to Cam Ranh Bay. Of course I wouldn't send my call sign. Then I would wait about five minutes and call them up again. This time they would answer. Assholes.)

8. Raise the thresholds and lower the headers of your front and back doors so that you either trip or bang your head every time you pass through them.

Navigating through compartments was really fun in heavy weather. There were usually bruises on my forehead.

9. Disassemble and inspect your lawnmower every week.

See number 7 above.

10. On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, turn your water heater temperature up to 200 degrees. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, turn the water heater off. On Saturdays and Sundays tell your family they use too much water so no bathing will be allowed.

Another fun thing your shipmates would do to you was wait until you have the water for your shower at just the right temperature. Then they would flush three or for toilets. Your screams could be heard three compartments away. This procedure also worked in barracks. Doesn't shipboard life sound fun so far? But wait. There's more.

Thirty-nine more over at Denny's. I know a lot of squids and this is exactly what it is like and they would not have given it up for the world. Navy life is an on-going game of one-upmanship.