Cap'n Fatso

by Daniel V Gallery

  CAP'N FATSO

  by Daniel V Gallery

  Rear Admiral, USN. (ret)

  Copyright © 1969 by Daniel V. Gallery

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 73-83751

  Contents

  I Away All Boats

  II Happy Hour

  III Change of Plans

  IV The Gathering Storm

  V High Level Snafu

  VI USS Turtle

  VII Charley Noble

  VIII Storm Gathers Some More

  IX All Hands to Hanging Stations

  X “Repel Boarders!”

  XI Peace Breaks Out

  XII USS Turtle Joins Flying Dutchman

  XIII Computerized Groceries

  XIV On to Israel

  XV Official Visit

  XVI Constitutional Rights

  XVII USS America

  XVIII Rescue

  XIX Lost Sheep Returns

  XX Prodigal Son

  Chapter One

  Away All Boats

  The Sixth Fleet is our country’s instrument of national policy in the Mediterranean. It has ships, planes, and submarines for spreading peace and goodwill on, over, and under the seas. It also has Marines to put ashore wherever needed to help their co-workers in the Peace Corps. In case small countries around the Med take any ill-advised action, these Leathernecks are always ready to land, beat the hell out of the local inhabitants, and restore peace and goodwill.

  This morning in May 1967 the fleet was off the west end of Crete practicing the all-hands drill of landing the Marines.

  Seizing a hostile beachhead is quite a job, involving every arm of the fleet. This shore line was supposed to be heavily defended, so the whole power of the fleet was zeroed in on it.

  An armada of amphibious ships and mine sweeps was hove to a mile off shore. Further out, heavy cruisers steamed back and forth pretending to blast the shore defenses with eight-inch guns. Overhead a stream of snarling jet aircraft from carriers just beyond the horizon “strafed” the shoreline fore and aft and athwartships. Melambo Beach would have been a bad place that morning for natives unfriendly to the Marines.

  Sniffing around the edges of the fleet, and sometimes barging right into the middle of it, were a pair of Russian destroyers. This is SOP in the Med these days. Each task force of the Sixth Fleet has a Russian escort wherever it goes. Some of these muzhiks have fairly good sea manners and keep out of the way. Others behave exactly as you would expect, if you have read any Russian naval history - and can hardly get out of their own way.

  The beach was now cluttered with small landing craft that had put the first assault wave ashore. A dozen sat with their bow ramps down on the dry sand and the waves washing up half way around them. Others had coasted in on big waves and were high and dry. Some had broached and swamped. At one end of the beach, dwarfing all the small craft, an LST, with its bow ramp up on the sand, was disgorging tanks.

  Things were a bit disorganized at the present moment, as they always are right after you land on a hostile shore, even in peacetime. The Beachmaster and his helpers were roaring up and down the strand in jeeps, cursing, swearing, and sweating blood, trying to convert utter chaos into mere confusion.

  A battalion of Marines had already stormed ashore, seized the beach head, and were pursuing the fleeing make-believe enemy inland. In another day or so the situation would be well enough in hand for the Army to come ashore and take over.

  The second assault wave was now nearing the beach. These were larger boats carrying vehicles and the tons of gear that Marines like to take along to set up housekeeping on shores where the natives are hostile. Bowling along in the middle of this wave with a great bone in her teeth was LCU 1124, Boatswains Mate First Class “Fatso” Gioninni commanding.

  Fatso was in his glory this morning. He liked to be where the action is. And there’s action enough for anybody in the second wave of an amphibious landing, even when you’re just pretending. Fatso stood on the bridge squinting into the wind, his feet braced apart, his hat on the back of his head, and a big cigar in his face.

  He had been in real landings at Tarawa, Iwo Jima, and Inchon ... had two Purple Hearts to show for it. This assault against make-believe bullets was kindergarten stuff for him. But it was fine training for the six young students of naval warfare in his crew.

  With one hand on the wheel and the other on the throttles, Fatso handled that two-hundred-ton LCU the way Pablo Casals plays his cello. His popeyed crew studied every move the maestro made. Next time, one of them would have to do it. Whoever got the job would either have to do it almost as well as Fatso did, or else wind up pushing a swab back on the mother ship.

  Fatso cocked an eye over the bow gate and lined up his spot on the beach between two LCM’s. He allowed a little this way for the wind and that way for the tide. If you had asked him, “How much?” he would have answered, “Just enough.”

  Fifty yards offshore he bellowed, “Let go kedge anchor.” A sailor clouted a pelican hook with a maul, and the kedge plopped into the water. Another lad keeping a loose turn on the winch paid out line to it as they plowed inshore.

  Looking back over his shoulder and sizing up the incoming waves, Fatso diddled with his throttles a little bit. He slowed down and let one wave sweep past him. Then he gave her the gun and rode in on the forward slope of the next one. You couldn’t call it surfboarding - not with a two-hundred-ton LCU. But it was the next thing to it.

  At the last second, Fatso whacked off his throttles and yelled, “Heigh-yo Silver. Ride ‘em cowboy!” The LCU slid up on the beach with a crunch. The lad at the winch set taut on the kedge line and took an easy strain. LCU 1124 was beached right smack where she belonged, her bow high and dry and her stern in deep enough water to use her rudder and engines freely.

  General MacArthur himself couldn’t have done it much better.

  “Down ramp. Disembark,” roared Fatso. The big bow gate plopped down on the sand, and a platoon of yelling Marines swarmed ashore followed by four snorting jeeps.

  “Not bad if I do say so myself,” observed Fatso to his admiring crew. “Two feet further up would be better. But this will do.”

  Fatso was nearing the end of a long and distinguished naval career. He was a veteran of thirty years more or less faithful service. It had been very faithful indeed whenever bombs, shells, or torpedoes were bursting around him. But no more faithful than necessary in peacetime. On his dress blues he wore an array of ribbons headed by a Navy Cross with a gold star for a second one in it. You see very few sailors with one Navy Cross. Two was a record.

  He had swum away from two ships that got sunk under him by the Japs. He figured he was now living on borrowed time and intended to live the full life until the loan was called.

  He took a rather hardnose view of the Navy Regulations. He felt that they were absolutely necessary - for those left-handed swab handles who wouldn’t know what to do unless it was all spelled out for them in a book. But regulations had nothing to do with old-timers like him. He was perfectly willing to die for his country in wartime. But he didn’t propose to put up with any horsefeathers for it in peacetime.

  This tolerant attitude toward regulations had sometimes got Fatso involved in legal proceedings instigated by young postwar officers who had never seen a shot fired in anger. But whenever he took his seat in the prisoner’s dock, wearing all those ribbons and those two Navy Crosses, the government always had a hard time getting a fair hearing for its case. Older officers on the court martial were inclined to badger the prosecution’s witnesses.

  Fatso had served in all types of ships from nuclear-powered carriers to mine sweeps. He was one of those all-around seafaring men who are fast disappearing from this modern mechanized Navy. If you needed someon
e to program a computer or to tinker with the insides of a black box, you would get some long-haired youngster to do it. But if you had to lower a whale boat in a rough sea, put a mooring swivel on the great bow anchor chain, or do any other job requiring a seaman’s eye and knowledge of the wind and wave - Fatso was your man.

  This job in which he was winding up his naval career was one of his own choosing. It had always been his ambition to command a ship of his own. This, of course, is impossible for a First Class Petty Officer. But skipper of an LCU is close to it.

  True, an LCU is not a commissioned ship. Its status is that of a ship’s boat belonging to a bigger vessel. But it is the grandaddy of all boats - bigger than most steam yachts. It is a flat-bottomed bargelike craft seventy feet long -with a thirty-foot beam, with blunt bow and stem. It has two diesel engines which can drive it at fifteen knots. It is designed to carry heavy equipment ashore and deliver it right on the beach. The engine rooms and crew’s quarters are aft, extending clear across the craft. Above them are the bridge and charthouse. Everything forward of this is just a big empty compartment with a ramp at the bow which can be lowered when they’re on the beach. All that empty space forward and the deckhouse aft makes it look like a craft that can’t make up its mind whether it is a barge or a houseboat.

  An LCU can just barely fit in the belly of its mother ship - the Landing Ship Dock. The LSD is a strange craft, too. It is a self-propelled, seagoing, floating dry dock of fifteen thousand tons. It can’t beach itself like an LST. But in its big well deck, which is flooded when the stern gates are open, it carries a flotilla of small amphibious craft that do beach themselves. The largest of these is the LCU, and each LSD has one of these.

  The crew of an LCU live on board their craft even when she is in the hold of the mother ship, although they are actually in the crew of the LSD. They eat in the mess of the big ship, go to its movies, and buy stuff in its canteen and geedunk shops. Their pay accounts and records are carried on the mother ship. But they hang out on their own craft, work and sleep there. They have a tight little Navy all their own, and when you’ve got a good skipper, it’s nice work if you can get it.

  Fatso was a good skipper. He ran a taut ship. But there was only one Navy Regulation on board - “Do your job.” There was no more chicken shit than was absolutely necessary. When there was nothing to do, you could do it any way you damn pleased. When there was a job to be done, working hours were from midnight until the job got done.

  The high brass often judge a ship by her outer appearance. So LCU 1124 was always shined up like the inside of a five-inch twin turret. The Admiral could take one squint at her shipshape topside, her gleaming bright work, and her clean, smartly uniformed crew, and feel that here was a craft that was run by the book. Obviously, on inspections, there was no need to waste time snooping around below decks on her.

  This was good, because certain things not visible to the naked eye might have caused unfavorable comment by a narrow-minded inspecting officer. Among them were a well-stocked bar and enough gambling equipment to open a joint in Las Vegas.

  As the last jeep roared down the ramp that morning, Fatso said, “Aw right now. Secure and set the watch. We may sit here two, three days ... With all that cargo ashore, we may be a little loose at high tide. That’s why I said we could of run her up a couple of feet higher.” He then adjourned below to the crew’s lounge to await orders from higher authority.

  The crew’s lounge of an LCU is also the messroom, bunkroom and galley, all rolled into one. There are folding bunks along the bulkheads, a mess table in the center, a small galley range at one end, and radio and TV sets at the other. Outside on the well deck are lockers, the head, and washroom.

  As Fatso entered the lounge he was greeted by Scuttlebutt Grogan, Engine Man First Class, and Chief Engineer of LCU 1124.

  “We gonna set up shop tonight, skipper?” asked Scuttlebutt.

  “Yeah,” said Fatso. “Right after chow. There must be a hundred Marines in the beach party. They sure can’t spend any money ashore here. We might as well give them some action for it.”

  “Okay,” said Scuttlebutt. “I’ll pass the word to them.”

  Scuttlebutt and Fatso were old pals who had gotten in and out of many jams together, both in peace and in war. Although Fatso was in the deck force and Scuttlebutt the black gang, they were both the same mark and mode of sailor man. Their outlook on life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness was the same. They demanded their full allowance of each.

  Fatso regarded Scuttlebutt as a seagoing version of Thomas Edison. He often said Scut must have been born with a monkey wrench in one hand and a pair of pliers in the other. Using nothing but those two tools, a screwdriver, a roll of tape, and some baling wire, he could fix any piece of balky machinery so it would operate as designed.

  Between them, he and Fatso were masters of all the arts needed to run a ship - until ships became floating electronic labs. The six young sailors in their crew were picked to supply the special skills needed to sail the seas in the atomic age. They were specially screened for imagination, coolness in a jam, and the ability to figure odds and to shoot the works when the price was right. They were an improbable crew who might have served with distinction under Captain Kidd.

  The only thing they had in common was a somewhat lukewarm respect for higher authority.

  The reader may already suspect this from what has been said about her skipper and chief engineer.

  The six other lads all hoped that if they avoided the rocks and shoals, they might someday be like these two. But they had a long way to go.

  A certain attitude toward life on this earth and the authorities in charge of it can only be acquired by hearing enough pieces of jagged metal whiz past you at high speed. Fatso and Scuttlebutt had heard plenty. None of the other lads had ever been shot at.

  That didn’t matter too much with Fatso. He knew you can never tell ahead of time how people will act when they hear those kinds of noises. If it disconcerts them too much, you just have to be sorry and get rid of them. If they take it in stride, that’s nothing to really brag about - that’s what U.S. Navy sailors are supposed to do.

  Fatso favored lads who spoke softly but could swing a haymaker in close quarters if the situation called for it. What he looked for in his men was the ability to participate in enterprises not exactly authorized by the regulations and while so engaged to give all outward appearance of being Sea Scouts intent on doing their daily good turn. Enlisted men who possess the strength of character and initiative to do this naturally gravitate to positions of responsibility and trust in a military organization. Although presently in minor jobs on LCU 1124, Fatso’s boys were destined for bigger and better things later on. All regarded Fatso as a modern John Paul Jones.

  “Jughaid” Jordan was a hillbilly from Tennessee. He was a dropout from sixth grade who might have been an Einstein if his education hadn’t been cut short because his pappy needed a helper on his still. Jughaid claimed he had two dead revenuers to his credit - “Made ‘em run so hard trying to catch me they dropped daid.”

  Henry Cabot Worthington was a spoiled brat from a wealthy New England family. He was a sort of a dropout too, but from MIT in his second year of a PG course in atomic physics. He got into a hassle with his old man over a chorus gal they were both chasing and simply walked out and joined the Navy. Naturally, he was known on LCU 1124 as “the Professor.”

  “Judge” Frawley came by his nickname because he had attended Columbia Law School. He was a kickout rather than a dropout. He had been a brilliant student until the faculty as well as the local police began nosing into some of his extra-curricular activities. When this happened, his legal training, incomplete though it was, convinced him he had better leave town. He was the legal authority on board, and although the Supreme Court might have dissented from some of his opinions, Fatso had great respect for them.

  Abe Ginsberg was an ex-newspaper photographer from Brooklyn. He had been drafted just whe
n his fellow newsmen were about to kick him out of their union for violating their professional ethics. They claimed he was giving their trade a bad name by sticking his nose into places where it didn’t belong, riding roughshod over the public’s rights of privacy, and making bums of his colleagues by getting pictures no one else could.

  Webfoot Foley had been a steeple jack and a skydiver before going to sea. He had served three years in the Navy with the UDT boys as one of the bomb disposal men who swim under water to enemy mines and take the fuses out. This is a tough way to make a living, and no one has yet retired from that profession on a pension. Webfoot was one of the best in the business. But he was persuaded to give up that line of work by teammates to whom he owed money.

  Finally, there was Satchmo Armstrong. Satch was one of our Disadvantaged Citizens, although it never occurred to him that he was. He was darker than eight bells on the midwatch of an overcast night. Inside a blacked-out clothes closet, he would loom up as a dark area. He was a jack of all trades, good at everything he put his hand to. He could have been one of the head cooks at the Waldorf but preferred the galley of LCU 1124. He was a good signalman, fine helmsman, blew a hot trumpet, and was an expert at rolling dice. If you had asked him if he could fly, he might well have said, “Ah dunno, Cap’n - I ain’t never tried.”

  Discipline was no problem on LCU 1124. Its crew, when on board the mother ship, were, of course, subject to the same rigors of military law as any other sailors. But aboard LCU 1124, Fatso was the law. If your conduct was such as to incur his wrath, there was only one punishment - a cruel and unusual one. You got kicked off.

  Everyone on board pooled their skills to help the ship fulfill its military mission. It did this so well it had won the coveted gold E for excellence among all amphibious craft three years in a row. Everyone, when he first came aboard, also pooled his money in the ship’s “welfare fund,” thus buying into the bank which ran the bar and casino.