CHAPTER 2
MY CRUISE SHIP TO ’NAM
THE GOOD SHIP LOLLYPOP
I spent four weeks climbing hills and mountains at Camp Pendleton and chasing whores in Tijuana. When it was time to leave, the Marines trucked us and all our duffel bags up to the docks at San Diego, California. There sat our troop transport ship, the William B. Mitchell. It was an old World War II troop transport like you see on the History Channel with soldiers walking up the gangplank loaded with their gear, only this old rust bucket was taking military dependents to Hawaii and Japan, as well as transporting 2,000 Marine grunts to Okinawa. The military dependents took everything they owned—cars, washers and dryers, all their furniture and household effects—so the hold was crammed full.
The Marines were allowed to walk on only one side of the ship and could only use the bow, where the anchor was, and the fantail, where they threw the garbage overboard. All upper decks were for the spouses and rotten brats of the military brass. The Marines entered through a door at water level, then went down to the very bottom of the ship. We slept in bunk beds eight high, climbing up each one to get to the top. I decided it was safer to be up at the ceiling with all the pipes than on the bottom, because if any of my bunkmates threw up, his puke wouldn’t get on me. I felt like an African coming to America in a slave ship. We were packed in the hold, which smelled strongly of diesel fuel, for over 30 days. The only good things down in this black hole of Calcutta were a few cold water fountains. Since we were packed like rats, there was no physical training. There was no room for it, either on deck or down in the hold. We had to climb up four or five flights of steps to get fresh air and see the sun.
Our troop handlers, Marine combat NCOs, often taught with us sitting around them in small school circles. We listened to their stories from Korea, and learned how to kill sloop heads quietly and how to survive. We were all bored shitless and tried to stay topside whenever possible. My buddies and I even snuck up on deck on hot nights and slept in the lifeboats. Navy Shore Patrol MPs guarded every landing and stairwell to the upper deck, where the dependents and officers were. The women and teenybopper military brats annoyed, flirted, walked around the deck with bikinis on, and endlessly teased us by leaning over the guardrail and showing their cleavage.
Some Marines got adult sex books with stories like “I Screwed My Sister’s Best Friend,” and “The School Marm and Me.” We passed these around until everyone read them, all 2,000 bored Marines. Some wrote letters home, some played cards and craps. Most of our time we spent sleeping, sunbathing, waiting to eat, waiting to piss, waiting for a new book to read, and waiting for the ship to get to Hawaii.
The Navy had nine million Mickey Mouse rules and made endless announcements like “Compartment 15 to chow!” Each day, more Marines broke more of the rules and wound up in the brig. The guys in charge looked like pro wrestling morons. They were simple idiots on the boat to hell who would never shoot an enemy or earn a medal. To intimidate the rest of us, they shaved the hair off the Marine and Navy people in the brig and brought them topside in the sun for a daily walk around the anchor chain holders. Each day we hated the Navy more, especially the Shore Patrol muscle-beach idiots who abused innocent Marines for breaking petty bullshit rules like taking an apple topside and throwing the core overboard.
To add insult to misery, the Captain and many other Navy officers had little dogs kenneled in wooden cages in the fantail section of the ship. The Shore Patrol walked the dogs in the Marine sitting area so they could shit and piss in the only place on the ship where we were allowed to go. They walked the dogs several times a day, and they pissed and shit in our area numerous times.
This was the last straw. Why didn’t they walk the dogs in the upper levels where it was party time all day long? One night some grunts had had enough. They opened up the dog cages and threw all the dogs overboard. I love dogs and have had dogs all my life, but these were not Great Danes or German Shepherds. They were small, piss ant, mop-looking, faggot dogs. All the Marines were happy we no longer had to sit in shit and piss.
The Captain of this gray, rusting World War II relic went out of his mind when his rich bitch wife found out her dog was gone. They had the whole Navy looking from one end of the boat to the other. It finally dawned on their pea brains that the dogs had been thrown overboard.
The Captain, in his finest white officer outfit complete with scrambled eggs on his hat, started the Spanish Inquisition. He made endless announcements on the public address system asking for anyone who had knowledge concerning the disappearance of the dogs to come forward. Naturally everyone dummied up and didn’t know a thing about the mysterious disappearances. He interviewed each Marine with his SS Nazi Shore Patrol muscle-beach idiots standing guard over him, to no avail. His old lady, Mrs. Captain Bleigh, came to the top deck and yelled out that she hoped that we all got blown up and killed in ’Nam. Hey, rich bitch from Annapolis, Maryland—how would Your Highness like to sit in shit and piss day in and day out, with only the rain to clean the deck? We were treated worse than Mexican farm workers.
When it was my time to get interviewed, I told the Captain I had been sleeping. It would be against the rules to be up on deck after lights-out. He told me to get out of his sight and send in the next Marine. Until this day, I don’t know who threw the dogs overboard, but God bless him.
After the Spanish Inquisition we all took a vow that when the boat landed and we hit the bars, we would beat the crap out of every sailor from the William B. Mitchell who wore a patch on his white shirt. We even went so far as to rip their patches off. What a hard-earned trophy for a Marine to possess!
HAVOC ON HOTEL STREET
The boat finally landed at Pearl Harbor—a real dump in the 1960s. The Enlisted Club sucked, while the Officers’ Club was like the Radnor Valley Country Club. We all got a 20-minute lecture about whores and VD and were told not to go to Hotel Street because we would get robbed and rolled by hookers. Before we could go on liberty, the Captain told us we needed to load some supplies on board the ship. There were 15 tractor-trailer loads of food to be hand-carried and put in mess refrigerator units below deck. To the Navy’s amazement, 2,000 guys did the job in about 20 minutes. Then we changed into our summer tropical uniforms and off we went to get laid, drunk and beat the crap out of any sailor who wore a William B. Mitchell patch. What a day we had!
There were hundreds of cabs ready to take us to the bars and whorehouses. The local Hawaiians hated us. All they wanted was our hard-earned sitting-in-shit-and-piss money. Hotel Street was filled with bust-out bars like those outside of Camp Lejeune, NC. We all went into a huge place that had six gorgeous go-go girls dancing on the long bar. They were mainland white goddesses imported from southern California. Although in a Hawaiian tourist movie you see beautiful, well-endowed young women putting leis around everyone’s neck, in reality the local women came in one variety—fat and ugly. Why we made this place a state is beyond me.
We drank beer after beer until we got drunk, then my buddy, a huge blond guy named Swede, told me he would claim the blonde-haired go-go girl under Viking law. If anyone objected, let him come forward and fight for her. Battle by combat! It seemed like a good idea. He was from Minnesota and I believed he really thought he was a Viking. More power to him. He was 6-foot-4, about 280 pounds, and all muscle from working on his father’s dairy farm. He was the type of man that picked you off the floor, looked you straight in the face and told you he was going to kill you. He liked to tell people he would rip their heart out of their chest cavity and eat it to make him stronger. I’m glad he was my friend.
Picture 2,000 drunk Marines, six go-go girls, 20 huge bartenders, and about 20 short, fat, overweight bouncers built like pineapples. Put all this together in one huge room looking at Swede up on the stage with the blonde go-go girl over his shoulder, yelling out his Viking claim. All hell broke loose, like a fight in an old western movie. The Marines started beating the shit out of all the sailors in the bar. Marine Fo
rce Recon guys, the baddest of all the bad Marines, made short work out of the bouncers. I grabbed a nearby cash register and threw it against the wall. Out came money and we threw it all up into the air, causing a huge pile-up of bodies. What a great tension reliever. We beat up a couple of sailors and began ripping the patches from their shirts. Then the Shore Patrol arrived with their clubs and prisoner trucks, complete with wire dog cages. The Marines got out of there fast and went to several new bars down the street, causing more trouble, aggravation, confusion, traffic jams, and overall mayhem.
My buddy Swede was still carrying the blonde go-go girl. We had to tell him to get rid of her before the Shore Patrol locked up our asses. He kissed her and wished her well. He put money down her bra and set her down on top of a local bus at a busy intersection on Hotel Street. She then started go-go dancing again on top of the bus. What a traffic stopper that was!
Then the local Hawaii-Five-O cops came, looking like a bunch of fat and out-of-shape pineapples, and started to chase, herd and harass us. We broke into smaller groups and disappeared into the brickwork. By the time we got back to the ship it was 4:00 PM. Everyone was drunk on his ass. All the sailors had ripped shirts, black and blue eyes, and new respect for the Marines they had treated like crap on their rust-bucket ship.
Nearly all 2,000 Marines stood on the front bow of the ship by the anchor and yelled to the last stragglers to get their asses back to the ship for the 4:30 curfew. One Marine did a swan dive off the ship, but instead of jumping on the water side, he unfortunately jumped on the pavement side and got himself killed. What a tragic sight! The Navy came and zipped him up in a black body bag. We had lost a guy already, and we weren’t even in combat yet! We lost another guy when he blew up a condom, and it broke and went down his throat, blocking his windpipe and he suffocated. That sobered up some of us.
The Captain came down to our quarters in the hellhole, drunk on his ass, yelling that we had killed his dog. A huge black Marine knocked his scrambled-egg hat off and told him to get his lily-white Captain’s ass out of our quarters. We all slept very well that night, and were lucky that the Captain didn’t remember the episode later into the cruise. I think he was a Simple Simon who screwed up somewhere in his career and ended up with the lousy job of steering a World War II rust bucket back and forth from San Diego Harbor to Okinawa. He finally realized we were headed for war and didn’t have time for his Mickey Mouse Navy games.
The next leg of the trip, to Yokohama, Japan, was uneventful, except for one incident, when a young 2nd Lieutenant was caught in the stateroom of a 17-year-old teenybopper dependent. He was forced to resign his officer’s commission and spend the rest of the cruise as a civilian. The bruised and black-eyed sailors shut their mouths and left us alone for the rest of the trip. I often wondered what type of idiot would join the Navy, where he was treated like a flunky and had to wear a stupid-looking outfit and a funny hat and paint a rusting gray ship all day. No glory, no medals, and endless chickenshit rules. What a total waste of four years.
THE HE/SHE INCIDENT
When our Good Ship Lollypop got within sight of Yokohama, Japan, we changed into our tropical uniforms, got into the pay line, and received another $150 to waste on booze and whores. We got another ten-minute VD lecture as our rust bucket docked. As we came down the gangplank, we discovered hoards of Japanese cab drivers waiting to drive us to bust-out bars and whorehouses. We had to change our money into yen, which very few of us understood, so we were ill equipped to hit the bars.
The cabbies drove like Daytona 500 racecar drivers and we almost had a million head-on accidents. One joint offered beautiful round-eyed Japanese women who even spoke decent English. They had had eye operations to make their eyes pleasing to Americans, and they all had breast implants, making their breasts feel like hard rocks. We ordered beer and they drank fake champagne, which cost us $5.00 a glass. There were four of us and these four beautiful bitches cleaned us out of about $60.00 each in about thirty minutes. I started figuring out the Nip money and realized we would all be broke in another half hour. Our chances of getting laid at these high prices were zero.
The beer and shots of sake were real, so we got half a good load on. In walked six sailors from the Ship of Sorrow, the William B. Mitchell. We told them to get out of our bar, and started another brawl. Big Swede beat up all six guys himself. He needed the exercise. The Navy Shore Patrol came storming in the front door, whistles blowing. Swede pushed one of the wall partitions that helped hold up the ceiling, and the whole front part of the bar collapsed on the MPs. The bartender came at us with a baseball bat, but Corporal Ruth, who claimed kinship to Babe Ruth, put out his headlight with a drop kick to the groin. We spilt out the back door and up a small alley to another bust-out bar. We looked in the door and saw it was full of too many sailors for the four of us to start messing with, so we wandered the highways and byways until we hit the Crimson Bar & Grill, a joint with no bar girls to steal our hard-earned money with fake champagne.
There were some odd-looking women in this dimly lit rat hole, but the beer was cold and the guy behind the bar was friendly. No women approached us, and Swede was able to get his uniform together and straighten his tie and hat. After an hour of drinking and bullshitting with each other, we saw two Marines from our ship come in and sit at the other end of the bar. Out of the dimly lit shadows came figures of women, but something didn’t quite look right. Then it dawned on me that they were guys dressed up as women. We could have told the two PFCs, but Swede wanted to see if they could figure it out on their own. We really didn’t know them except for seeing them in the chow line on the ship, so we sat and watched the drama unfold. They kissed and hugged the he/shes, and then they all headed upstairs to get laid.
It took these two idiots from Turdsville about five minutes to realize they were with men. After a tremendous amount of yelling and screaming and the crashing of broken furniture, the Marines threw both transvestites out the window. They hit the pavement too hard to move. They were covered in blood, and so was the sidewalk. The two Marines came running down the stairs with blood all over them, and split into the darkened alley.
The bartender called an ambulance and the Navy sent two huge Moran Shore Patrol MPs into the bar to lock us up. We asked them, “Do we look like we have been in a fight? Do we have blood on us?” A Second Lieutenant came in and wanted the guilty Marines’ names. I gave him the names of two famous Marines from World War II, PFC Chester Puller and PFC Ira Hayes. The idiot wrote their names down and left, never realizing they were phony. We did some sightseeing looking for a cheap whorehouse, but couldn’t find one and finally wandered back to The Good Ship Lollypop. This time we actually had money left. We must have fallen into early maturity.
AVIATION GUARANTEED
I signed up for “aviation guaranteed,” so I was not to become a 0311-MOS, also known as a grunt or gravel cruncher. I went to Memphis Naval Air Station 7041 Operational School for six weeks of training, and came out first in my class. Thus I got to pick where I wanted to be stationed. I wanted to go overseas, so I chose the First Marine Brigade, which was located in Hawaii. I was ready to lie in the sun and play with my drum. Not until The Good Ship Lollypop landed in Pearl Harbor was I informed that the First Marine Brigade was in Vietnam, and that I was to travel to Okinawa to meet their rear guard unit.
When our ship of misery got close to Okinawa or “the Rock,” as the Marines called it, we saw a million lights and wondered if there were bars and women and booze. The older NCOs wouldn’t tell us—they wanted us to be surprised. Our ship of fools landed in Naha, Okinawa, where we were loaded into trucks and driven to Camp Hanson, another World War II quonset hut camp off the beaten track in the northern training area of Okinawa.
By this time we were all pretty good friends with the NCO and grunts. They got us fed, watered and moved in. The next day they started handing out M-14 rifles, field marching packs and 782 gear—all the stuff you need to go to war. In one week 2,000 Marines
were to join up fully equipped with the 3rd Marine Division at Da Nang Air Base in Vietnam, and go out and kill zips.
These guys were super serious about all this. I told the Gunny Sergeant, “I hate to rain on your parade, but I signed on the bottom line for aviation guaranteed, not to become a 0311 foot soldier.” He looked at my SRB (Service Record Book) then said in a fatherly tone, “Don’t you trust me? I’ll show you glory and ribbons and medals and more excitement than you dare imagine.” I looked around the room and knew that most of the men would be dead, maimed, or injured in a very short period of time. I figured if I were going to get killed, I’d rather die in the sky. I thought, “Some will be heroes because they are brave, others will only get a wreath on their grave.”
He agreed to drive me to Fatima Air Station, the nearest aviation unit on Okinawa. When he dropped me off, I felt sad after so much time on the boat with him and the men. I truly hated to say goodbye, but I preferred to swing with the wind and die in the sky, than walk on the ground with a rifle and pack in 110 degree heat all day. I made the right decision.
Fatima Air Station was one big picnic. Japanese women waited on us in the mess hall, and the Marines ate off real china plates. No more mess trays with compartments. The base was a brand new, single floor brick barracks and the nicest place I had been stationed so far. We even had two Japanese girls to clean the barracks and wash, starch, and press our uniforms. Since it was so hot, there wasn’t any physical exercise, only training movies on Saturday morning, with porno movies afterward.
LBJ's Hired Gun Page 4
