"Thorsson was here," a Sea Story

Many moons ago I was a young lieutenant junior grade wrapping up my first sea tour aboard the USS CUSHING (DD-985).  CUSHING was an old Spruance-class destroyer that was over thirty years old and I'd been on board for nearly two years.  It was not a happy time for me.  I'd gotten on the captain's bad side and it seemed like everything I did just dug that hole deeper.  So when I finally got orders transferring me to my next sea tour, things started looking up. 

For my last weeks on board I had fewer and fewer responsibilities and that suited me just fine.  Since I was about to leave, most of my tasking was relegated to weird little short-term projects that I could wrap up before I was due to leave.  So I spent most of my time working alone, toiling away on administrivia and counting down the days until I could put the whole unpleasant thing behind me.

On my last full day I was walking down the passageway when my former leading petty officer, OS2 Roy Frederick stopped me.

"Sir, I just found out you're leaving tomorrow," says he.

"Sure am," says I, "and it's not soon enough."

"Damn, I wish I'd have known," says he, "I could have at least bought you a drink or something."

The officers had had a hail and farewell to mark my departure and welcome the newly reporting division officers, but I realized that I never did get a chance to really thank any of the guys who had been working for me.  In truth, I'd been working without any subordinates for so long I really didn't think anybody would care that their former boss was going to stop haunting the ship.

"I'll tell you what, Fred," I told him, "After work I'll head over to Morrigan's for a while if anybody wants to catch up for a bit.  Hopefully you can stop by.  Pass the word."

The Morrigan's was an Irish Pub situated just across the street from the main gate at Naval Station Yokosuka, Japan.  According to most of the Cushing's crew, it was our official bar.  But then again I suppose most of the ships crews in 7th fleet would say that since it happened to be the closest bar in town.  It closed down about nine years ago, but it used to look like so: 

Inside it was a pretty cramped little space that was staffed entirely by Japanese folks who did a solid job of approximating the look and feel of an Irish pub.  Many's the weekend I found myself there on a Friday night only to find myself passed out in the back of my car on Sunday morning.  That was back in my more serious drinking days.  

But I digress.

Drinking in Japan was expensive.  So before going off base where the liquor was costly, I would usually stop on base for a couple of drinks on the cheap side so I didn't have to break the bank to enjoy some inebriation.  On this occasion I also stopped at the Navy Exchange where I bought this goofy little Polaroid camera that made these tiny little postage stamp-sized photos with an adhesive backing.  Since I'm a sucker for a gimmick, I had to have it.  I also figured at the time that the film cartridges for it would probably be hard to come by, so I stocked up.  I don't know exactly how much film I bought for it, but it was likely enough to snap at least two or three hundred stupid little sticky photos.

So, two drinks into my evening, I stuffed this little camera and a few hundred frames worth of film into my cargo pockets and set out into town to see if anyone showed up at the pub.

I can't say anyone showed up.  Instead, it was more like everyone showed up.  

That's not exactly true, but probably two thirds of the off-duty enlisted guys from the shop popped in to see me off.  Apparently Fred passed the word and it turns out I was going to be missed.  The place was packed.  Within seconds, someone asked me what I was drinking, ordered me a double, and the evening was off to a rollicking good start.

While laughing and joking with one of the guys, I got a funny notion.  I snapped a slightly buzzed selfie with my stupid little Polaroid camera.  On the little tab below the image I wrote "Thorsson was here," and handed it to him.

"Do me a favor," I told him, "after I'm gone, wait a week or two and stick this on the ship somewhere."

"Sure thing, sir," says he.

"Here's the trick," says I, "Don't put it somewhere obvious.  Stick it on top of a light fixture or on the bottom of a desk drawer or something.  Some place where it'll take a while before anybody will ever notice it."

Then I did the same thing with someone else.  Buzzed selfie.  Handed to a shipmate.  Hide this on the ship.

Over the course of the evening I have no idea how much I drank.  I do know that I continued to snap increasingly intoxicated selfies, scrawling "Thorsson was here" across the bottom of them, and handing them off for later attachment to the ship.  To me, this kept getting funnier and funnier.  I imagined a point in the not too distant future where the ship was being cut up for scrap and the shipbreakers would still be finding stupid little drunken photos of me and wonder who was this Thorsson guy.  That dude was everywhere.  The Kilroy of USS CUSHING.

I have no idea how many photos I took, but out of the two or three hundred photos worth of film I bought, I woke up the next morning with exactly none left.  I do remember being drunk enough to vomit in the bushes out in front of the pub not once, but twice.  I also remember being pretty proud of myself each time for managing to take selfies mid-yak.  

Thorsson was here.

The next day was my last day reporting aboard the USS CUSHING.  I shuffled my way up the gangway looking every bit the professional naval officer but absolutely reeking of alcohol.  I'm sure it was still leeching out of every pore, but the only thing I had to do that day was sign my final FITREP,* pick up my official orders, and get gone.  

Several of the enlisted guys stopped me around the ship and told me about various things I'd said or done the night before and I was able to slowly piece together a narrative of what sounds like a pretty benign drunken evening carrying on with a really great group of guys drinking, joking, and commemorating the end of a thoroughly storied couple of years followed by a couple of the guys mostly carrying me back to the lobby of my girlfriend's apartment building.  They said they couldn't be sure I made it up to her apartment, but they watched me stumble into an elevator that at least went upstairs and apparently I made it to work the next day, so everything must have worked out.  

While I was hoping to depart with a minimum of drama or ceremony, they still had the rest of the officers line up on the quarterdeck and see me off.  I was gone before noon and didn't for a moment look back.

Fast forward two years and I was a full lieutenant assigned as an instructor for the Division Officers Course at Surface Warfare Officers School in Newport, Rhode Island. SWOS, as it was known, was a sort of Mecca for Surface Warfare Officers.  It was where you went before your first sea tour and then you'd make pilgrimages back to the school there before becoming a department head, executive officer, commanding officer, and so forth.  So being there as an instructor for a couple of years meant regularly crossing paths with almost every officer you'd ever met in the surface navy.

At some point I was strolling down the hall in between classes and ran into the former Chief Engineer who I'd served with aboard CUSHING.  He was on his way to be the Executive Officer on some newer ship and so he was in Newport for the XO course.  

"Hey sir," I chirped, "how's it going?"

"You!" he exclaimed, which I wasn't quite expecting, "you have no idea how close you came to a court martial."  Which I was definitely not expecting.

"Um, what?" I ask.  I knew the captain on that ship didn't like me.  But there's a big difference between 'we don't get along,' and 'I belong in prison.'

To understand the thing he told me you need to know something about the USS CUSHING.  She was a gas turbine ship.  This means that the main propulsion was provided by four General Electric LM2500 gas turbines.  These were essentially two pairs of big-ass jet engines coupled to two propeller shafts which provided something like 80,000 horsepower.  

The thing about gas turbine engines is that they're made of thousands of tiny, expensive, delicate moving parts that have very tight tolerances and can be readily damaged by introducing any foreign objects into their intakes.  To keep this from happening, each of the four main engines is contained in a sealed gas turbine enclosure.  The air that goes into the enclosure runs through a series of heavy-duty filters before it hits the turbine intakes.

The gas turbine enclosures are kept locked at all times to prevent contamination.  There is only one door into the enclosure and it has a tiny window to allow for visual inspection of the engine.  The only keys are held by the ship's captain and the chief engineer.  Access is tightly controlled and whenever any inspections, maintenance, or repairs are done, the person entering the enclosure has to put on clean coveralls, turn out their pockets, and a every tool, part, or speck of dust going into the enclosure is written on a list before going into the enclosure.  When the job is done, each item that went into the enclosure must be accounted for.  Then the enclosure is locked up again to prevent contamination.  

So it turns out, about six months after I'd left the ship there was some sort of engineering inspection.  I forget the details, but inspectors came aboard and among other things, had to enter each of the four gas turbine enclosures.  Three of them were entered without incident.  But when they opened the fourth one, on the inside of the door, just below the little window, was a sloppy drunk photo of me, grinning the stupidest grin I could muster.

Thorsson was here.

I have no idea who put it there, but apparently the captain went through the roof.  I was calling for my head on a pike and thankfully a few of the other officers were able to talk him down pointing out that I never had access to the enclosure and there had been more than a few inspections since I'd left the ship where there was definitely no photos of me on the inside of the enclosure.  

I realize it's problematic, but I still think it's hilarious.

Not too long after I left in 2001, the USS CUSHING became the last ship of her class still in commission.  She was decommissioned in 2005 and was offered to the Pakistan navy who didn't take her.  Ultimately, she was used for target practice as part of the RIMPAC exercises off of the Hawaiian Islands in 2009.  The ship took quite a beating before sinking to the sea floor, 2,550 feet below.

You can see the SINKEX here: 

Just know that somewhere in the Pacific Ocean, half a mile beneath the waves, there are probably dozens of photos of yours truly.  Drunk as can be and grinning ear to ear.

Thorsson was here.

*FITREP is short for "fitness report" and it's essentially a report card that an officer gets from their commanding officer every six months and at the end of every assignment.  Needless to say, this one wasn't great.

The Porn-O: a Sea Story

Back at the turn of the Millenium when I began my naval career I was assigned to an old Spruance-class destroyer in the 7th Fleet. It was a good, old ship with a strong, tight crew and things mostly went pretty smoothly.  But that was about to change.

I don't want to embarrass anyone in particular, so I'll call him "Captain Deed."

Captain Deed started his tour as our commanding officer as a relatively jovial guy who was clearly very excited about his shiny new assignment and optimistic about making his ship the best ship in the Navy.  He was a welcome relief after the previous skipper who was a whole different story.

Then one day we were copied on a set of personnel orders in our incoming messages.  A new Ensign was coming to us from the US Naval Academy and she would be arriving within about six months.

She.

For most of us this was no big deal.  Women had been in the Navy since long before I was born, serving on ships since before I could read and by 1998, Commander Maureen Farren had already become the first female commanding officer of a combatant vessel (the USS Mount Vernon, an amphibious assault ship).  So we'd have our first female shipmate on board.  Then probably start getting a bunch more of them.  Cool.

Captain Deed was not cool with it.  Apparently he was one of the increasingly rare naval officers who had never in his career served aboard a ship with a woman.  He had specifically aimed for command of an all male ship for fear of having to deal with girl problems.  He was unhappy.

The first thing he did was call the Bureau of Personnel to tell them they'd made a mistake.  "No Captain," says them, "you've made a mistake by calling us about this.  Your ship is being integrated.  There's nothing you can do about it.  It's time for you to catch up with the times."

This was not well received.

Having come up in the time of the Tailhook scandal and all manner of other nightmares, he was convinced that having a woman on his ship was going to end up getting him ensnared in some horrific sexual harassment crisis and end his career and ruin everyone else right along with him.  So he started having us all sit through sensitivity training and sexual harassment prevention training and so forth.

He also started conducting personal inspections of every single space on the ship to ensure we didn't have anything offensive visibly displayed that would trigger his ultimate downfall as soon as some girl saw it.  This sounds reasonable in theory, but it was insanely aggressive in execution.  So a month ago he would've walked by an explicit photo of a nude woman displayed on a bulkhead in one of the engineering workspaces and shrugged, but this week if someone had a copy of the Navy Times sitting on a desk showing a picture of a female sailor in uniform, he'd haul everyone in that crewman's chain of command into the space and yell at them about how this sort of material is unacceptable and we'll all burn for it if we have these sorts of things out where "she" can see them.

It was a little sad, but also really frustrating.

So one Friday evening in the midst of all of this, I met up for drinks at the officer's club with some of the other division officers.  One had brought his wife.  Her name was Sarah.  As would often happen when a bunch of us were decompressing at the end of another unpleasant week, we were talking about work.  This week that meant complaining about the Great Smut Crusade that had the Captain rampaging around the ship and screaming at people in nearly every workstation.

"I hadn't really thought about it," remarked Sarah, "but with 350 guys on the ship, there must be an awful lot of pornography stashed away."

"Sure," says I, "when Navy ships are designed, regulations require naval architects to allow for 1.2 long tons of porn per 100 sailors."

It was a joke, and the discussion got funnier from there.  As we continued to drink and joke about the porn on the ship, the joke took on a life of its own.  If you took the jokes to be true, the single largest space inside the ship is actually the porn library.  Everything is organized by Dewey Decimal System and being an older ship we have a card catalog to keep track of it all, but newer ships maintain a database for ease of browsing.

The comedy continued and one of the ship's junior officers is responsible for maintaining and cataloguing all of it.  The Pornography Officer, or "Porn-O" for short, was responsible for ensuring that items borrowed from the library were returned in a timely manner, properly sanitized, and re-filed for easy access.  Then there was discussion about what percentage of the ship's annual operating budget was allocated to replacing worn items and updating the library.

We had a lot of fun with it. Then went on to enjoy our weekend.

Fast forward to Monday morning.  This was back in my professional drinking days, so I was sitting in the Wardroom having breakfast and feeding a third cup of coffee to my mild hangover when Captain Deed walked in.

Usually we never saw him at breakfast when the ship was in port.  The only time he'd make a morning appearance in the Wardroom was when he wanted to gently announce some kind of policy change to the junior officers.  It was weird to see him and it was never good news.  Still, he made a big show of pouring himself a cup of coffee and casual small talk with those of us that were sitting at the table.

"By the way," says he, to let us know the thing he's here to say is next, "I don't want to know any of the details, but whoever is responsible for the illicit pornography library on board needs to get it off the ship by the close of business today."

All of us who were at the bar on Friday knew exactly what he was talking about.  We also knew there was no such thing.  It was a joke and I'm sure Sarah repeated some of it to one of the other officers' wives because it was hilarious.  Then, over the weekend, it percolated through the other officers wives until it got back to the Captain's wife and lost the funny along the way.  So we knew what he was talking about.  So it was even funnier now.  At least it was to me.

"Captain," says I, "can I call away a 15-man working party to my stateroom this afternoon for porn offload?"

"I DON'T WANT TO KNOW ABOUT IT," he snapped, "JUST GET IT GONE!"

"Aye, sir."

Then he stormed out of the room and when the door closed, we exploded laughing.  That poor guy is so worried about the specter of incoming womanhood that our stupid joke on Friday has snowballed into a major crisis on Monday.

Half an hour later I was working on some admin chores in my stateroom when there was a knock at the door.  I opened it to find the ship's Supply Officer holding a stack of half a dozen VHS tapes.

"These were in my room when I reported aboard," says he, "I heard we were supposed to give them to you."

What. The. Fuck.

"Alright," says I, "I'll take care of these for you."

So I put them in a locker and went back to work.

Five minutes later there was another knock at the door, this time it was one of the enlisted guys from the engine room with a stack of thoroughly dog-eared magazines.

"The Chief said to give these to you, sir."

Shit.

This continued all day.  By the time I was ready to go home, my little X-rated library had grown to several hundred magazines spanning at least three decades of porn history, a few dozen VHS tapes, and a couple of DVDs.  While I had no idea what to do with it, I certainly couldn't risk the possibility of it being found in my possession after this morning's talk.  It had to go.

I went down to the Supply Office and snagged the biggest cardboard box I could carry through the ship's narrow doorways.  Then I went back to my stateroom and filled it.  The pile of porn was so massive that I had to stick magazines in vertically around the edges to make higher walls to keep everything from spilling out.  It was all I could do to lift the thing and carry it by myself, but it was late and there wasn't much help around.

So I dragged the giant box with thirty years of orphaned lewdness down the length of officer's country, past the wardroom, and toward the quarterdeck so I could haul it down the gangway and off the ship.  Once I got to the door, I lifted the whole thing up and carefully started backing through the door.  Just as I stepped onto the quarterdeck, I heard the bells ringing on the 1MC (the ship's loudspeaker system) to announce the Captain was departing.

When I turned around, the man was standing there, looking directly at me.  Me holding a giant box carrying my own weight worth of weapons grade erotica.  For once, I was speechless.

"Is that all of it?" asked the Captain.

"I sure hope so, sir," says I.

"Good."

"Sir," asked me, "I don't suppose there's any way to convince you that I actually didn't know this was all on board before this morning, is there?"

"Just get it gone."

"Yessir."

So I took it all off of the ship right then and there.

Some of it was actually pretty good.