Cap'n Fatso

by Daniel V Gallery

  “Yeah. A couple of times. Once he was head of a General Court that tried me for bustin’ an MP in the nose.”

  “Hah!” said the Judge. “According to law he should of disqualified himself. What did he do?”

  “Well, naturally, he didn’t believe none of the witnesses the government dredged up. I was acquitted.”

  The Judge shook his head sadly over this flagrant breach of legal ethics. “In civil life,” he said, “Only big-shot politicians and other judges can get away with things like that.”

  “And a couple of years ago I served in a big carrier, the Guadalcanal, when he was skipper.”

  “That musta been pretty nice,” said the Professor. “What was your job? Honorary Commodore of the starboard anchor or something?”

  “No. I was Captain of the incinerator.”

  “That’s a hell of a job for a First Class Petty Officer,” declared the Professor. “You musta had some angle.”

  “Hunh! I never work no angles,” said Fatso, piously. “I just do my duty whatever my job is ... But we had a pretty good arrangement on that ship. He let me run the incinerator the way I wanted to, and he took care of all the rest of the ship.”

  “I’ve heard some wild tales about what used to go on down in that incinerator compartment,” observed the Judge.

  “Don’t you believe a damn word of them,” said Fatso. “There were rumors got started around the ship now and then when some of the junior officers misunderstood some of the things that happened down there. But the Cap’n always straightened them out.”

  Chapter Four

  The Gathering Storm

  Next day LCU 1124 tied up at the Naval Station, Valetta, Malta. Had she been a commissioned ship her commanding officer would, of course, have put on his sword and cocked hat and paid the usual courtesy call on the Senior Naval Officer, Malta. On such a call he might have learned about recent events affecting naval strategy in the Med - including the redeployment of the amphibious forces to the Far East.

  But Fatso’s contacts were on a lower level, with Supply Department types. Their interest in global strategy was confined to vouchers, requisitions, invoices, and receipts. They simply produced the stuff that the strategists put in for, and they didn’t give a damn what became of it as long as the paperwork was straight.

  In the fighting forces, a round of ammunition isn’t expended until somebody pulls the trigger on it in the heat of battle, with bombs bursting all around him. But for the supply types, it is expended as soon as they get a proper signature for it.

  When Fatso checked in with the Supply Officer’s chief yeoman, that worthy said, “Yeah. The Sylvania invoiced a lot of stuff to us for the Alamo - and some for the Marines, too. It’s all ready. All you gotta do is sign the papers. There’s about a hundred tons of it. Can you handle that much?”

  “No strain,” said Fatso. “I can take two hundred if I have to. I wanna get loaded and start back this afternoon.”

  “Can do,” said the Chief. “There’s some special stuff for the Commodore, too - an official car, two deep freezes, and a fancy little motorboat.”

  “Okay,” said Fatso. “We’ll take good care of it.”

  “You’d better,” said the Chief. “The Commodore has been bugging us about this stuff for a month.”

  Early that afternoon the loading was finished. The last item to come aboard was a light tank for the Marines, mounting a 90 mm gun. When that was secured, LCU 1124 cast off and headed back for Crete.

  On a small craft like an LCU, there isn’t much to do in your spare time at sea. Standing one watch in six, as they did, it meant that everyone put in a four-hour trick at the wheel each day and had all the rest of the day to live it up.

  A large part of the time was put in caulking off - Navy lingo for boresighting your bunk. The term originates from the fact that in the old days, to caulk a ship’s bottom when she was beached and hove down, you had to lie flat on your back. So now, when you assume the same position for rest and relaxation, you are “caulking off.”

  The rest of the time off watch is put in eating and lounging around the messroom shooting the breeze or playing acey-deuecy.

  Improbable tales are told during these bull sessions and acey-deuccy games. Many of them concerning adventures in previous ports of call are not only improbable, they are damn lies. But with a group like Fatso’s, the fact that some saga of adventure told as a fact hadn’t happened yet didn’t matter too much. All hands knew it could easily happen in the next port.

  After dinner this evening, the Judge was telling a popeyed group about Polly Adler’s famous whorehouse in New York. “I used to know the old gal pretty well when I was in Columbia Law School,” he said.

  “Expensive joint for a college boy, wasn’t it?” asked the Professor.

  “Not for me,” said the Judge proudly. “It was on the house whenever I went there.”

  “Even if that was so, I wouldn’t believe it,” said the Professor. “They tell me you couldn’t get out of that joint for less than a hundred bucks even if all you did was pinch a gal’s (biblical beast of burden).”

  “Maybe she stuck it on my old man’s bill. He was one of her best customers,” said the Judge. “When I went there, there was nothing commercial about it. Everything was on a purely social basis - until I ran into my old man there one day. He started to bawl me out for hanging around whorehouses and Polly got insulted and had us both thrown out. The old man said it was the most humiliating thing ever happened to him - thrown out of Polly Adler’s! It got into Winchell’s column, and he was afraid he might get kicked out of the Harvard Club. But actually, about a dozen members asked him to introduce them to Polly.”

  After the bull session, an acey-deucey game got going. Acey-deucey is the seagoing version of backgammon and has been popular in the Navy since the days of sail. It is about 90% luck and 10% skill. Tradition says that John Paul Jones was the first all-Navy champ at it, and that he claimed he played a scientific game, and his opponents were just shot full of luck. Everyone who has served in the Navy since then has claimed the title, too, and made similar statements about his own and his opponents’ game.

  A kibitzer at the acey-deucey game remarked, “We sure took aboard a lot of stuff today.”

  “That’s what we sure took aboard a lot of,” replied another. “All sorts of radio gear, infra-red snoopers, sideband radars - we got enough to fit out a regular spy ship.”

  “There’s a lot of stuff for the UDT boys, too,” said another. “Scubas, underwater demolition charges, underwater telephones. And a lot of guns and hand grenades for the Marines, too.”

  “Speaking of hand grenades,” said the first, “Have you heard about the new atomic hand grenade they’re working on?”

  “An atomic hand grenade,” said several, incredulously.

  “Yeah. They’ve got it down to about the size of a softball. It blows a hole in the ground about a hunnert yards in diameter. But they’re having a hell of a time testing it because you can only throw it about forty feet ... But speaking of new stuff, what’s all that stack of curved pipes we took aboard? I never seen nothing like that before.”

  “That’s what they call a geodetic frame,” said Scuttlebutt. “When you fit all those pipes together, they make a frame that’s like a slice off the top of a great big ball. There’s sections of tarpoleum that come with it. You fit them over the framework and you get something that looks like an Eskimo’s igloo. It makes a nice roomy HQ for the General, that keeps the wind and rain out. And if you gotta move, you can take it down in ten minutes.”

  While Fatso and the Sixth Fleet were maintaining our control of the seas in the Mediterranean, the government was trying to maintain control of the streets at home. It does this through a system called the Great Society. In this system, most of the citizens who don’t want to work get jobs with the government. Those who won’t work for anybody draw relief checks, conduct riots, and burn down obsolete buildings. The rest of the citizens try to ea
rn enough money to stay out of jail for not paying their taxes. This enables the government to make relief payments, to protect the rioters from the police, and to defend our freedoms from foreign aggressors (and our allies) who would like to do to us what only our own underprivileged citizens are allowed to do.

  To run the domestic affairs of the country, there are ten government departments, the Supreme Court, and the Media. Each department tries to protect the citizens from the other nine. The Supreme Court’s job is to uphold the constitutional rights of the rioters and to liberate any citizens who get in trouble with the cops. Riding herd over all other agencies are the Media - Press, Radio, and TV. They devote most of their efforts to telling the citizens that Freedom of the Press is what enables the sun to rise each morning. Their other duties are to raise hell about everything, keep the citizens stirred up and angry, and to sell advertising.

  The branches of the government that protect us from foreign “adversaries”(and also from friendly foreign allies) are the State and Defense Departments and the Executive Office of the President.

  The Defense Department works the same way as the rest of the government. It consists of the Army, Navy, Air Force, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Whiz Kids, and the Marines. The function of each of these is to protect the country from the other five.

  The Joint Chiefs of Staff are the top military officers in the Defense Department. They are supposed to correct the mistakes of our delegates to the United Nations. When our statesmen and diplomats get us into wars, the JCS’s job is to restore peace and good will in the world with high explosives. In peacetime, they try to educate the Whiz Kids and prevent them from setting their computers in such a way as to put the armed forces out of business. They also try to keep the State Department from butting into private fights all over the world and committing so many of our soldiers to keeping the peace in far-away jungles that we won’t have enough at home to make its citizens conduct their riots in an orderly manner.

  For some months before the Arab-Israeli misunderstanding, life had gone on as usual in the USA.

  The White Sox were in first place (it was only May), the teamsters, steel workers, teachers, and garbage men were out on strike, and J. Edgar Hoover had just issued a report saying rape and murder were skyrocketing faster than wages. There were a few civil-rights rallies here and there where fires and looters got out of hand for a while, until the Army moved in to stop rioting without a license. But in general, things were pretty dull.

  It was at this point in world history that the UN bugged out of the Gaza Strip, and the Arabs and Israelis rushed troops there to preserve order in the empty desert they left behind.

  In Washington, the President was trying to cut down the National Debt. So the lights went out early in the White House that night. But they burned late in the Pentagon, as chicken Colonels and four-stripe Captains prepared briefs for the Joint Chiefs of Staff on the order of battle of the Near East nations. The cold figures on infantry divisions, tanks, artillery, and air wings made it obvious to any expert on military strategy that the Israelis would be overwhelmed in a few days if war broke out.

  A Marine Captain aviator who had just returned from Israel. briefed the briefers on the Israeli air force. He said that if war started, the Israelis would win it in a week, because their flyers were real professionals who would knock every Arab airplane out of the sky.

  This young man got orders to a squadron bound for Vietnam the next morning. Were it not for the fact that he had political influence, the orders would have been to St Elizabeth’s.

  That same morning, the Joint Chiefs met in their inner sanctum on the E ring of the Pentagon. Everyone seated around the broad table had three or four stars on his shoulder and a dozen rows of ribbons on his chest. This is where the fate of nations and the course of history would be decided - if the statesmen paid any attention to the advice of the Joint Chiefs which, of course, they don’t.

  Nearby was the Situation Room, with great vertical display maps of the world dotted with magnetic markers of many colors and shapes, showing the latest order of battle for all possible adversaries and the up-to-the-minute deployment of our own fleets, armies, and air forces. Hot lines and sideband radios enabled the Chiefs to talk via satellite relays to four-star Admirals in their HQ on the other side of the world, or to first Lieutenants in front line fox holes in Vietnam. Even the matchbooks in this area are “top secret - eyes only,” and the runner for the daily Pentagon numbers game has a Q clearance and a background check by the FBI.

  When the briefers finished their presentation to the Chiefs there was a thoughtful silence around the table for a few moments. Then the Chairman said, “This thing is going to blow over after a lot of huffing and puffing. There won’t be any real war. The Israelis aren’t crazy enough to take on forty million Arabs.”

  All heads around the table nodded gravely. “I’m keeping the Sixth Fleet back to this side of Crete,” said the Chief of Naval Operations. “Just in case war does break out. That will keep all our ships five hundred miles away from the scene of action ... and something else you all have an interest in - I’m sending the amphibious forces from the Sixth Fleet out to Vietnam. It is possible Nasser may close the canal, and we are in urgent need of more amphibious forces in the Far East. Suez is the quickest way to get them there.”

  “Now, just a minute,” said the Army Chief of Staff. “Suppose I have to put troops ashore in the Near East. How am I going to it with no amphibious craft?”

  “Don’t worry about that, Joe,” said the Air Force Chief of Staff, smugly. “MATS can airlift a whole division for you overnight.”

  “Hunh,” snorted the Commandant of the Marine Corps. “What good will that do you unless somebody has captured a beachhead for you?”

  “The Marines aren’t the only ones who can capture beachheads,” bristled the Army COS. “We’ve got the Green Berets. You’ve heard of them, I hope.”

  “Hunh!” reiterated the Marine.

  “We’ve got more Marines and amphibious craft ready to sail from Norfolk for the Med right now,” said the CNO. “They’ll be there in another ten days - so you -”

  “Okay, okay,” interrupted the chairman. “Let’s not get into any hassle about that. I think the Med will be safe for ten days, even with no Marines in it. Now ... I think we all agree that an actual war between the Jews and Arabs is very unlikely. If one should break out, I think we also agree that no matter where our sympathy lies, we’ve got to stay out of it. We are over-extended now in the Far East. But remember - the Israelis have powerful friends in this country. If war does start, they may persuade the State Department we’ve got to pull the Israelis’ chestnuts out of the fire for them. So we’ve got to keep our forces alert and ready in case we are ordered to butt in by our own - er - global strategists.”

  “Of course,” said the Air Force COS, “If war should break out, the outcome will depend on who gets control of the air. The Arabs are almost sure to, with all their Russian MIGs and ground-to-air missiles. But the Israelis have got a good little Air Force. If they caught the Arabs on the ground with their first attack, they might have a battling chance - for a while, anyway.”

  “I can’t see any possibility of that happening,” said the Chairman. “With all the ballyhoo and bluster that’s going on now, they will both be on round-the-clock alerts. There’s no chance whatever that a sneak attack would get through. That’s absurd.”

  “I said if they caught the Arabs on the ground,” said the airman.

  The Marine Commandant leaned over and said in an aside to the CNO sitting next to him, “Sure. And if his aunt, had balls, she’d be his uncle.”

  “I didn’t catch that, General,” said the Chairman.

  “The General said,” replied the CNO, “That he considers this possibility to be extremely remote.”

  Later that day, the Security Council met in the Cabinet Room of the White House. By special invitation, Mr Goldberg, U.S. Ambassador to the UN, was present.
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  To open the meeting, the President said to the head of CIA, “All right, George. What top secret stuff have you got for us today that hasn’t been in Drew Pearson’s column yet?”

  For the next ten minutes, the CIA took the assembled VIPs on a trip around the world, peeking in on secret meetings held behind closed doors and drawn blinds; listening to bugged and taped conversations between kings, presidents, sheiks, and commissars; and watching over the shoulders of ambassadors decoding secret ciphers. No one around the table was naive enough to ask questions about how we came by all this red-hot dope. Obviously cloaks and often daggers had been involved in getting it.

  The last item discussed was the Near East Crisis.

  “Gentlemen,” said our Chief Gum Shoe, “the Arabs have finally closed ranks behind Nasser, and the Russians are committed to giving them all-out help. This could be the end of Israel. If we try to help the Israelis, we will be backing a lost cause. We will have nothing to gain, and maybe a lot to lose.”

  “Now just a minute,” said Ambassador Goldberg. “We’re involved whether we like it or not.”

  “Why?” demanded the President.

  “Israel is the homeland of the Jewish people. Their title to it is over two thousand years old, and they’ve had a long struggle winning it back. We must defend justice and freedom. We can’t just stand idly by and see the Jews thrown out of a country that belonged to them originally.”

  “Wa-a-al, now. I dunno that I buy that argument,” said the President. “If Ah did, some goddamned Indian in a crummy blanket might paddle up the Pedernales River some day, knock on mah door and say - mah great-grandfather used to own this place only two hundred years ago. Git out.”

  “Harrumph,” said the Ambassador. “I ...”

  “Let’s not get involved in that kind of argument,” said the Secretary of State. “This isn’t a Sunday School class, where things are run by the Golden Rule. This is high-level international politics, where gentlemen settle their differences on the basis of who’s got the biggest club. But unfortunately, we are committed by solemn treaty obligations to prevent Israel from being overwhelmed. I don’t see how we can get out of it. And the danger is that if either the Arabs or the Jews go off half-cocked, it could get us and Russia into an atomic war.”