Anchors Aweigh, Part 2

I managed to successfully complete bootcamp despite my well-known inability to keep my opinions to myself. I also successfully completed the Navy’s Hospital Corps School. After completion I was what now might be considered partway between an emergency medical technician and a paramedic. After several months of training at the Navy’s Great Lakes Training Center north of Chicago I was on my way to my first duty station. I had spent several months on the banks of Lake Michigan where the temperature sometimes dropped below zero with windchills to 40 below. Now, late in November I was on my way to the tropical paradise of Key West Florida.

After an uneventful flight to Miami, I boarded a DC3 for the flight to Key West. For those of you too young to have ever been on a DC3, it is a venerable old plane developed in the years before World War II. It was well engineered and well-made in the time before planned obsolescence became the law of the land. In fact, over 80 years later some of those airplanes are still flying around the world.

You entered the plane from the rear. It set with its tail down and its nose up. You climbed up at about a 30-degree angle to get to your seat. There were no cocktails, no gourmet meals, and no inflight movies. There was just a nice wide seat, a lot of leg room and a comfortable flight. As we flew over the Florida Keys I remember looking out and wondering if there was any place where there would be enough dry land for an airport.

On the flight I was sitting beside a First Class Signalman, an old Navy salt who had about 15 years of service. We got to talking and I told him this was my first shipboard assignment. He told me about his many adventures in the Mediterranean, in the Caribbean and in the Pacific. I was really fascinated and hoping to see some of those places myself.

We landed in Key West and went to baggage claim and picked up our sea bags. He asked me where I was heading, and I said to the ship. He looked at me in disbelief. He said “It’s only four o’clock in the afternoon. Look at your orders, you don’t have to be on board till midnight. Surely, you’re not going to give them eight hours of your free time?” In fairness, he expressed it more colorfully than I have recorded it here, liberally sprinkled with sixth letter alliterations.

There were a lot of things I didn’t know. One of them was how to go about getting a locker to keep my civilian clothes. Sailors on board Navy ships at that time were not allowed to keep civilian clothes. We could only leave and board the ship in uniform. We couldn’t be on the base in civvies.

He introduced me to locker clubs. This was a place where, for a small monthly fee, you rented a locker to keep your civilian clothes. It was also a place where you could take a shower and buy snacks and drinks. They looked the other way if you were under 21 and wanted a beer.

Following his sage advice, I got a locker, changed into civilian clothes, and stored my uniform and my seabag. And we headed into town. This was my first time “steaming” through local bars with an experienced sailor.

I grew up in a fairly sheltered environment in the conservative state of West Virginia. I had virtually no experience with other cultures, especially with the gay culture. However, a friend of mine and I did spend part of our senior year in high school drinking beer at what was probably the number one gay bar in town. We went there because it was a nice quiet basement bar where, if you were tall and looked like you were 18, which was the drinking age in West Virginia at the time, you could get a beer as long as you didn’t cause trouble. So, for six or seven months we went there usually once a week for beer and had no idea it was a gay bar, which says something, not only about our naivete, but about how conservative and low keyed the culture in West Virginia was at that time.

When I arrived in Key West, I still didn’t know that I had frequented a gay bar. However, I was about to find out that the culture in Key West was a lot different than it was in Charleston, West Virginia. My buddy told me we would be heading to his favorite bar; a place called the Safari Club. We passed by another bar named John Brown’s Body. There were a number of men sitting out front at tables on the sidewalk. As we walked by, I heard a couple of whistles and someone commenting “seafood.” My buddy looked at me and said “Don’t pay them any attention, it’s not worth the trouble. They don’t mean any harm. They’re just trying to get a rise out of you.” I still wasn’t quite sure what was going on and I looked at him with a curious glance. He gave me one of those you’ve got to be kidding looks and said, “Haven’t you ever seen a gay bar before?” Well, I had, I just didn’t know it. I had certainly never seen one like that.

I quickly discovered that Key West was a “live and let live“ place. There was occasional verbal heckling, but it was seldom mean spirited and almost never physical. Sometimes the Navy’s old Key West hands had to provide strong counseling on proper island behavior to new arrivals. Even now, over fifty years later I am amazed at how people from disparate backgrounds and with different lifestyles could coexist if they would just accept that their differences did not make them enemies. As I would discover, the sailors and the gay men engaged in friendly rivalry, and we occasionally challenged one another in beach volleyball and ended with group beer drinking watching the sunset over the Gulf of Mexico. I remain convinced that there are no societal problems that can’t be solved by sincere people on a beach with enough beer, despite their differences.

At 10 minutes until 12 we reported on board the ship. I walked up the gangplank, now back in uniform, and saluted the officer of the deck. I handed him my orders. He looked at them and said, “You’re cutting it pretty close, aren’t you sailor?” Then he looked at my buddy coming up behind me, obviously he knew him, and said, “Well, I see you’re falling into bad company already.”

The USS Bushnell was a submarine tender. A submarine tender is a combination of a supply ship, a repair ship and a floating machine shop. It was known by the Navy designation as AS 15. That stood for Auxiliary Submarine Support 15. Because it seldom went to sea, it was known in Key West as Building 15. Every time it would go out for its semiannual cruise the joke was that the tugs had to come out and pull it off the pile of coffee grounds that had built up underneath it. It had a disconcerting habit of catching on fire. The fires were never serious, but they were frequent enough that the crew referred to it as the Burning Bush.

I arrived in Key West in late November, just in time to have my first Thanksgiving away from home. At the time the temperature in Chicago was about 20 degrees with wind chills down to about 30 below. The first Saturday I was in Key West I decided to go to the beach because the temperature was in the upper 50s and I thought it was a heat wave. I went out to catch the bus to the beach and was surprised to see people walking around town in coats and in some cases even parkas. I guess it’s all about what you’re used to.

I really enjoyed my time in Key West. I took two night classes at Key West Junior College. Drank way too much rum. Bought a motorcycle and toured around the Florida Keys. It was a lot of fun and not much stress. But that was about to change.

I was having a great time until the Navy decided to decommission (retire) the USS Bushnell and all the submarines that were assigned to our squadron. The submarines were all diesel boats; these were World War II veterans and were deemed to be obsolete and no longer needed in the days of the nuclear submarines. Like many things time has passed by, the diesel boats had many die-hard proponents in the Navy, and it was hard for them to let it go. For me, I only went to sea one time in a submarine and that was just on a one-day tour where we went out into the Gulf, dove underwater for about 3 hours and came back. I never really had a true appreciation for diesel boats or the mystique that they held for their crews.

There was one other thing that happened to me while I was in Key West, that completely changed the course of my life, although I didn’t realize it at the time. I was a high performer as an enlisted man. I made Third Class Petty Officer in just barely more than a year and made Second Class Petty Officer with only two years in the Navy. This was an extremely fast advancement that was partially due to the fact that the Navy needed to expand because of the Vietnam War, and I was in the right place at the right time. Because of my rapid advancement, I was invited to apply for a program called the Navy Enlisted Scientific Education Program (NESEP), a program where the Navy took young enlisted men with the potential to become officers and sent them to college for four years. There was an obligation to serve as an officer after college, but if you were getting paid to go to college it couldn’t get much better than that.

I will say, I was sorry to see both the submarines and our tender decommissioned. It meant the end of my time in Key West. All of us were reassigned. I was reassigned to the hospital ship USS Sanctuary then off the coast of Vietnam. I was fortunate because two other corpsmen on our ship were reassigned to serve with the Marines in Vietnam.

I took my seabag to the Greyhound station and put it on a bus to Charleston. I strapped a small overnight bag on the back of my motorcycle and set off on a three-day trip to West Virginia. When I say motorcycle, it wasn’t one of the big highway cruisers so common now. It was a small 350 cc Honda and in the pre-Interstate days that made for a rough trip.

More about the USS Sanctuary in Anchors Aweigh Part 3 and about NESEP in Anchors Aweigh Part 4.