"What are you smiling at, Clown?"
"You like me? You think I'm pretty?" "Maybe you want to kiss me ... huh?" Garcia's nose was a scant two inches from my chin as he looked up at me and screamed at the top of his voice. "Well, I don't like you, Clown! I don't like you one bit!" With each punctuation mark, a fine spray of spittle would leave his lips and fall on my face and neck as I stood at attention, staring straight ahead over the top of his head. Moving even closer, he lowered his voice to a fierce whisper and continued, "Don't you ever smile at me again. You hear me, Clown? I'm not your friend. I am not your daddy. I am your Drill Instructor. Got it?" After several seconds of silence I realized that he was waiting for an answer. "Aye aye, Sir." I stuttered, still looking at the opposite wall and trying to keep from visibly shaking. "Aye aye, Sir? Aye aye, Sir?" he repeated, incredulously. "What's the matter with you, Clown? Don't you pay attention in class? Don't you listen?" "Yes, Sir." "Alright then, what are the three responses to a question from an officer?" "Yes, Sir; No, Sir; I don't know, Sir." Garcia turned and repeated it for the rest of the company. "Yes, Sir; No, Sir; I don't know, Sir." Turning back to me he asked, "And when do you answer; Aye aye, Sir?" "When given a direct order," I answered, then quickly added "Sir." "And what does aye aye mean?" he asked me, still facing the rest of Bravo Company. "I understand and I will comply, Sir." His nose zoomed in on me again and he asked through clenched teeth, "Then why did you just say aye aye when I asked you a question?" Panicking, I considered my options, finally deciding on "I don't know, Sir." "You...don't...know. Hmmmmm. There's a lot you don't know, isn't there, Clown?" "Yes, Sir." "Hmmm." he hummed again, losing interest. The drill instructor moved farther down the line of motionless, flagpole straight men and I breathed a silent sigh of relief. * * * * * Technically speaking, a drill instructor is not an officer, he's a petty officer, an enlisted man. But in boot camp all petty officers are addressed as 'Sir'. Real officers are much too important to have anything to do with raw recruits and we need the experience of dealing with officers. Besides, when you're a 'boot', your DI is the next step down from God. Once you get out of boot camp it's a big adjustment learning to refrain from addressing everyone of higher rank, which includes just about anyone in uniform, as 'Sir'. My first day out of boot camp I remember bumping a First Class Petty Officer while in line for the bus to the airport and saying "Excuse me, Sir." The PO looked at me, my skin head haircut and single National Defense ribbon, and said, "Don't call me sir! I'm an enlisted man, I work for a living." "Sorry." I muttered, not knowing what else to say. * * * * * The Navy seems to be very big on semantics. Your 'Piece' is the non-firing firearm that you use for drills. It's your piece that you balance on your shoulder while learning to march in formation. And it's your piece that you fling about trying to make sense of 'Right shoulder arms' or 'Inspection arms'. On the other hand, your 'Rifle' is the fully operational weapon that you use when your whole company is marched to the firing range and you have to try your damnedest to poke tiny holes in a sheet of paper from 20, 50, or 100 yards away. And your 'Gun' is something else entirely. The easiest way to explain the distinction between the two is to recall for you a little poem my DI used to make us recite while standing with our rifle in one hand and the other hand cupped over our crotch: "This is my rifle, and this is my gun." "This is for fighting, and this is for fun." And that garment that you put on, one leg at a time, each morning when you get out of bed; I'll bet you thought those were your pants! Well they're not! Pants are something little girls wear under their dresses. What you put on are called 'trousers'! And a wall is not a wall; it's a 'bulkhead'. The ceiling is really the 'overhead'. And, as everybody knows, you don't walk on the floor; you walk on the 'deck'. When you are making your way upstairs you don't take the stairway; you take the 'ladder'. And it's not upstairs anyway; it's 'topside'. And downstairs is 'below'. The drinking fountain is really the 'scuttlebutt', and mealtime is really 'mess'. And I'll bet you didn't know that nobody in the Navy ever goes to the bathroom! Nope. Not once! Of course, everybody does visit the 'head' a couple of times a day. There is a story, I don't know how true it is, that proposes to explain how the 'head' originally got it's name. It seems that in the old days on the big sailing ships, crewmen were expected to simply use the railing whenever the call of nature made it's presence felt. But many crewmen worked all day far below decks and couldn't be expected to climb all the way topside simply because they had to relieve themselves. Most of this below decks work consisted of manning the large pumps that had to constantly be used to remove water that always found it's way into the ship and sought out the lowest point in the bowels of the ship, the bilges. Bilges were long, trench-like channels that ran next to the bulkheads in the lowest levels of the ship. The unwanted water would trickle down the bulkhead from all of the decks above and, once collected in the bilges, would have to be pumped over the side by two men working the large, teeter totter like handle of the bilge pump. It became common practice for these men, for any men working anywhere below decks, to simply walk over and use an outside wall ... a 'BULKHEAD'! One can imagine these hearty sailors informing their mates, "I have to go use the bulkhead." Well, it's only natural that, in time, 'bulkhead' was shortened to the present day 'HEAD'. * * * * * The two story building that our company occupied was old ... real old. It was made entirely of wood and sat on concrete blocks, several feet above the ground. It was explained to us that all of the buildings in this area of the base were constructed during the Second World War and only intended for temporary use. Well, here it was, 1967, the war had been over since before most of us were born, and the Navy was still using these 'temporary' buildings to house the lowest of her enlistees, the men that didn't dare complain about their environment. Because of the age of the wood and the condition of the temporary electrical wiring, all of these buildings were fire traps, and everybody knew it. There had been several fires over the years and in each case, they had burned to the ground, almost before the fire fighters could get there. In several of these instances men's lives had been lost. Because of this situation, there was someone patrolling the building at night at all times, while the rest of the occupants slept. In addition to our normal duties and instruction, we were periodically expected to stand a four hour fire watch every couple of days. There would be two men on duty at a time, but we weren't allowed to stay together or talk. One man would patrol the upper floor and one the lower, silently walking among the rows of sleeping men and checking the office, rec room, and heads. In addition, we were responsible for seeing to it that any man who had his name down on the wake-up sheet was awakened at the noted time. Guys would have to be woken up in time to stand their own watches, or to go pull early morning spud locker duty at the mess hall, cracking case after case of eggs into large steel pots, or precooking a mountain of bacon. On each floor, there was a single, straight backed chair situated in the hallway (passageway) by the stairway (ladder) next to the drinking fountain (scuttlebutt). This was the only place where a man on watch was permitted to occasionally sit and rest his feet. In order to insure that we stayed awake and alert, and that we remembered the importance of the job we were doing, there was a picture mounted to the wall opposite the chair, directly in your line of sight and impossible to ignore. Every floor of each of these buildings had the same picture mounted in the same spot. It was a black and white photograph showing a set of blackened bed-springs recovered from the ashes of one of the previous fires. In the center of the bed-springs lay a coal black mummy, hardly recognizable as ever once being human, handless arms frozen in the air in front of him as if attempting to ward off the flames that had so quickly engulfed him. * * * * * Because this was the Navy, and because we had all enlisted in the Naval Air Corps, a lot of time in basic training was devoted to sea survival and aircraft ditching procedures. It was demanded of us that, before basic was over, we each pass a series of physical trials involving deep water and survival techniques. "Alright, you clowns! Into the water!" The whole company leaped from the edge, fully clothed, into the deep end of the gigantic indoor pool. Immediately we began removing our boots, before the effort of trying to keep afloat with their weight pulling us down sapped all of our strength. We had to do one hour in the pool, without ever touching the sides or the bottom, seventeen feet below the surface. It was 'anything goes', just so long as we were still alive when the whistle blew at the end of the hour. We could float, swim, tread water, anything at all, alone or in a group. Almost at once, the majority of the swimmers decided to find out if those techniques we had been learning in survival class would really help. I removed my trousers, re-buttoned the fly, and knotted the cuffs together. The next step is to raise them out of the water and try to trap as much air as possible into the waist band by holding it open and flipping it out and down into the water, keeping a firm hold of the waist. Next, I took several deep breaths and submerged below them and exhaled into the opening to complete the inflation. After four or five trips below the surface I had a nice large bubble of air trapped within my makeshift life preserver. All I had to do was insert my head between the legs, knot behind my neck, and clutch the waist band to my stomach with both arms. It worked like a charm! Once in a while I would splash water onto the exposed fabric to keep it from drying and losing some of it's water tight qualities. And every so often I would have to submerge and replenish the air that slowly escaped, but, all in all, it worked perfectly. Of course, it wouldn't be so easy in heavy seas or after a terrifying bailout, but it was a hell of a lot better that trying to keep my head above water by constant kicking or swimming. Out of the entire company, everyone passed that test save one poor, frightened boy from Arizona, Sullivan. Sully couldn't swim a stroke and was scared stiff of the water. After the two DI's threatened to physically throw him into the pool, he finally jumped in and immediately began sputtering and thrashing towards the side of the pool. One of the DI's was keeping him away from the edge with a long pole while they both screamed at him, "Swim, you clown! Don't be such a baby! Come on, you can do it!" The look of terror on Sully's face was pathetic. Smitty and I swam over to him to try to help him, but he would just reach out, crying, and try to crawl up on top of us. Finally, we had to keep out of his grasp or he would have drowned us, too. With all my heart I wanted to scream at the drill instructors to let him out, but I just couldn't do it! I think poor Sully could have gone to the bottom and stayed there and all of us would have been too scared to say anything. Eventually Sully began coughing so bad that the DI with the pole scooped him up with the hook on the end of it and pulled him to the side. As he pulled himself out of the water, sobbing, the DI's were all over him, berating him and calling him a sissy and a baby. "You know you're just gonna have to do it again! You are going into this pool every day until you finally last an hour!" Sully went into that pool several more times during boot, but luckily I didn't have to be there to witness it. The roof over the pool was high, maybe 40 feet high. Another of our little tests involved that roof. There was an opening in the wall about thirty feet up. It could be reached by climbing a ladder from inside the locker room. There was a small platform below the opening and on it stood our DI, Garcia. We would climb that ladder, one man at a time, and when we reached the platform he would greet us by shoving a parachute harness into our hands, "Put that on." Hanging from one of the huge steel girders that supported the roof was a thick rope about fifteen feet long with a quick release snap attached to the end. Running from the release lever to Garcia's hand was a length of nylon cord. As you buckled yourself into the harness, he would pull the end of the rope over and secure both ends of the harness straps into the snap. "Jump!" Off you would fly, swinging from the end of the rope and Garcia would scream a question at you, taken from one of the classroom sessions that week. "What's the U C M J?" If you were lucky enough to answer "The Uniform Code of Military Justice, Sir!", (or the proper answer to whatever question he happened to ask you), he would wait until your feet were pointed towards the pool before yanking the cord in his hands and sending you on a 25 foot drop into the waiting pool. If you were too flustered to give the correct answer, he would pull his cord at the end of one of your swings, with your eyes staring at the ceiling, and you would have to do a mad scramble in midair to try to right yourself before smacking into the water at the end of your fall. * * * * * "Don't eat the mashed potatoes." Smitty whispered in my ear from behind as the line of men slowly made it's way to the serving lines. "Why?" "Cause that's were they put the stuff. The saltpeter." "The what?" "The saltpeter. The stuff that keeps you from getting a hard-on!" When I stopped to think about it, I had to admit that nothing like that had happened to me since coming here. But that wasn't too surprising. This was hardly the place to bring out the romance in any young man. "How do you know?" "I saw the cook measuring something into the mashed potatoes when I had kitchen detail yesterday. When I asked him what it was, he just hid the canister and said, "None of your damn business!" As we shuffled our way to the head of the line I turned this bit of information over in my mind. Smitty was probably right. It made sense. When it was my turn at the head of the line I looked at the guy spooning the big glob of mashed potatoes onto my tray and said, "A double helping, please?" * * * * * The term 'scuttlebutt' has come to mean the same thing as 'gossip'. As you no doubt remember, in the Navy, 'scuttlebutt' means 'drinking fountain'. I imagine that it has something to do with all of the supposed gossiping that goes on while workers hang around the water fountain. None of the DI's while I was in boot camp ever cussed at their recruits. The scuttlebutt (gossip) around camp said that at one time, a very religious governor's son was in boot camp and got cussed out royally. According to rumor, the recruit then wrote a letter to Governor Daddy and the fertilizer hit the Westinghouse. Supposedly, by the time the dust had settled, there were new rules on just what a DI could and could not say to his men. Whether this story is true or not, we never heard any off color language from any drill instructor. Instead, each DI adopted a few phrases and made them his own. All were perfectly innocent words, but were delivered in such a manner that nobody had any doubt just which words they were substituted for. Our drill instructor, Garcia, had managed to turn the word 'clown' into one of the raunchiest non-cuss-words you've ever heard. When Garcia would scream, "Where do you think you're going, Clown?" each recruit unconsciously inserted the foulest name he could think of. To this day, whenever I hear the word 'clown', I have to remind myself that it means some funny looking comedian with a red nose and white face.
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AuthorFlip Rosier
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