Wednesday, April 7, 2010

growing up--part-10-of-10

.
.
Growing Up
Part-10-of-10
.
Life was Interesting------Another interesting thing that happened involved a queer named Wally Poe. It all started with a miss–sorted letter… One of the PO guy caught the error and tossed the letter to his buddy to put in the right bag… The wind caught it and flipped it to the floor… It busted open and some photographs fell out… They didn’t even pick it up… One look and they immediate yelled for their senior petty officer… One look and he went straight to the Captain… The pictures were of a gay orgy involving many guys off the ship… Besides being stupid enough to send incriminating photos the guy was also stupid enough to tell his boyfriend about an orgy they had planed for Naples…………The part was raid by a squad of Shore Patrol (Military Police) that were all majors or above. They arrested 40 guys… The rank of the guys arrest ranged from non-rated to officers… With in less than 24-hours everyone but Wally was back in the states and dishonorably discharged… They kept Wally on the ship because he was the ringleader and they hopped that he would give up more names… The found a book of names in Wally’s locker, but Wally kept his mouth shit and didn’t give anyone else up… A guy named Campbell’s name was in Wally’s book, but Campbell claimed that he was straight and didn’t know anyone about what was going on………..When I first got aboard ship Wally was my division’s yeoman… I got in his way one morning when he was trying to get into his locker… When I didn’t shut my locker and get out of his way, he got mad and told me that he “ate Texans for breakfast.” … Wally was a big guy so I thought he meant that he kicked Texans ass… I never dreamed that he met it literally………..A few months after they finally sent Wally back to the States, Robert D—d and I found Wally’s sea bag hidden in one of our obscure storage spaces… When we told our first class petty officer about it, he refused to listen and said something to the affect that it would be better for all concerned if Wally’s sea bag were never found… As he walked away he mentioned that sea bags didn’t float… To this day, I wished that we’d have looked in it before we chunked it over the side… No telling whose names or the incriminating evidence that we might have found…………We had a second-class petty officer in our division that was a horse’s ass and like to fuck with a big black guy named ‘Big Lou.’ …The Po was getting off the ship in Rota, Spain to fly back to the States for discharge… The night before he was to depart ship the PO had his sea bag packed and was ready to go… In the sea bag he had a set of expensive wedding rings for his girlfriend, all his cloths, and about a $1000 in money orders…. If $1000 dollars doesn’t sound like too much money, understand that I was only making $89 a month… A $1000 was over a years pay for me… When the PO woke up the next morning his sea bag was gone and all he had left was the uniform he’d kept out to wear in transit… He suspected ‘Big Lou’ but couldn’t prove anything… The Navy gave him a new sea bag an d a couple of changes of uniform to wear in transit but everything else was lost… Although no one was ever able to prove anything, ‘Big Lou’ once mentioned to me that sea bags didn’t float………..I had a buddy that worked in Disbursing (payroll)…this was pre-comp so all work was done by hand…my buddy got mad at an officer whose pay he had to figure…he started over paying him 10%…did this for 2-years…when the guy left the ship for discharge…Instead of sending the guys pay record to the ‘state’ he sent them to Greenland to a buddy that he went to ‘A’ school with…the guy in Greenland sent it to another classmate…they managed to keep his pay record floating around the world for 3 or 4- months…in the meantime Disbursing in the ‘states’ made the guy a temporary pay record so he could keep getting paid…when his pay record filling caught up with the guy and they were processing him out…instead of leaving with the normal big bunch of change (i.e.: travel expenses, etc.) he owed the Navy money…heard that he had to stay in for a couple of more years to pay off the Navy……….Shortly before we went on the second Med. cruise since I’d come aboard ship, a young guy named Eugene joined ‘G’ division… Even though I liked him, Eugene was strange, even by my standards…………Like I said, there was never a dull moment on the ‘Shitty-Shang.’ …………Joining the Navy probably saved my life. When I got my discharge, the day I got back to GP was the day that my senior class got their draft notices. Most that got drafted were sent to Viet Nam and were killed. Had I waited to get drafted I would have been cannon fodder in Viet Nam and killed. ……
.
To be continued…
.
.


.
.
.

No comments:

Post a Comment