CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Key West, Florida

Pinochle and screened in porches leap into mind when I think of Fleet Sonar School at Key West, Florida. My first experience with double deck Pinochle was in those Key West barracks. At first, being a purist, I resisted, but once I got hooked, I loved to play double deck when I didn’t have to study, and the Pinochle games were made special by the screened porches of those great barracks at Fleet Sonar School. The barracks were two story, white frame, green trimmed, H-shaped buildings almost like the ones at Great Lakes with speckled maroon, linoleum floors and light green bulkheads (as usual subdued shades of anything and everything), but, at Key West, screen porches, crammed with picnic tables, ran around the perimeter of the barracks. Lush grass and foliage everywhere we looked, great spreading oak trees and palms.

In this barracks, I was billeted on the 2nd deck, starboard side. Since it was almost always warm in Key West, we spent a lot of time out on those porches, reading, studying, talking and playing cards. During a week of one of the coldest winter Florida ever experienced, we did suffer 32 degree temperatures, and there was no heat for the barracks. I was pretty cold. Anyhow... we’d throw one of those beautiful, thick, gray military blankets we each owned over the picnic tables and, in the shade of those porches and tall palms and breezed by breezes, play whole weekend afternoons away with the flick and click of cards. Those blankets were wonderful to play cards on. Just the right amount of slide and you could pick up your tricks easily. Plastic decks were big then, and we had more decks of plastic cards than you could shake a stick at, worn nearly spotless with hours, days, months of steady play. Fresh decks came into circulation at payday when someone felt generous.

The pinochle games were intense and sometimes we played for a penny a point, but most of the time, I think we played for fun. We signaled a lot, an even bid for meld and an odd for power. The number of the even bid would clue in your partner as to how much meld you had. Fifty-six meant somewhere near 60 meld, etcetera. The bidding to name trump was very precise. I have no idea how many of hundreds of games of double deck Pinochle I played. We also played Poker, O Hell and Euchre.

Duty was light for students. We had to keep our own barracks swept up, a little bit of cleaning each day to keep things ship shape, a heavier cleaning every Saturday. We were there to study and learn how to drop depth charges accurately on enemy submarines. I think we were scheduled to be in Fleet Sonar School for six months. We attended class 8 hours a day. We walked down the center of a grass lined street to get to and from our classrooms every day.

Nearer our barracks were the chow hall and ship stores and the geedonk with a beer patio outside for drinking after the main building closed. I had an electrifying experience one night out on that patio. A couple of us had been drinking most of the evening, and the geedonk closed. I needed to take a leak and didn’t want to walk all the way back to the barracks to do it so I stumbled into the shadows by a wall that enclosed the patio and peed off the concrete pad into the shrubbery and flowers. Wow! What a shock shot into my penis and through my chest and into my elbows and forehead. I mean, a real jolt. Felt like my heart stopped. I peed right into a live socket where a bulb was supposed to be. I returned to the table to the laughter of my friends and continued drinking.

A lot of the layout of the base is lost in the dreams of time, but baseball diamonds were on it, tennis courts, a swimming pool. I spent a lot of time at the pool ogling and sometimes flirting with wives and daughters. Along the eastern edge of the base lay the shipyard with tall cranes on tracks for provisioning and unloading naval vessels. That’s where the harbor patrol boats lay at anchor, waiting to take us out for our two weeks of hands-on training at sub hunting. A movie theater serviced the base too, where sailors could watch first run movies for free, if they were willing to take their places behind the officers and their wives and ladies who always took the front rows. I was a front row sitter before I entered the Navy so I particularly disliked watching the bastard officers taking my seats in the theater. I was primed to hate authority and to look for reasons to feed my anger.

Sometimes I went into town to see movies I wanted to see. I clearly recall watching an Elvis movie in Key West and hating it for the reason I earlier stated, but I can’t remember one movie I watched at the base theater.

Movies important to me, released in 1955 when I began my six months in Key West, were “Picnic”, “Blackboard Jungle”, “East of Eden”, “Rebel Without a Cause” and “The Rose Tattoo”. I may have watched any one of those but “Picnic” while I was at Fleet Sonar School. I watched “Picnic” and Roz Russell’s disconcerting portrayal of a sexually frustrated, embittered school marm and drifter William Holden’s torn shirt in a theater on Patrick Air Force Base near Cape Canaveral where we killed some time on our way to San Juan, Puerto Rico and eventually to Antigua in the British West Indies. It’s ironic to me that movies about rebellion and working class men and loner drifters should be pouring into the cultural mix at exactly the time I served in the authoritarian, whale belly of military life. Of course, leading up to those movies of drifting and rebellion and lone men against the mob, even while I was still a teen civilian, were “The Fountainhead” (1949), “Cyrano de Bergerac” (1950), “High Noon” (1952), “Shane” (1953), and “The Wild One” and “On the Waterfront” (both 1954), some of which I’ve mentioned before.

“The Rose Tattoo” was particularly interesting to me because Paramount filmed that movie in Key West just the year before I arrived there. I walked the streets one day, thinking I could find where the movie had been shot. I never discovered the exact location, but I strolled curbless, ancient streets between square, one story, frame houses in that city which reminded me of that hot movie, of plump sexpot Anna Magnani and skinny wild Marisa Pavan. Italian! Italian! O stepmom, threaded through my life!

Interesting too, how my intellectual sophistication trailed far behind my experience. “The Rose Tattoo” fascinated me, just like “East of Eden” had, but not until I entered college did I realize who wrote those works. The movies introduced me to Tennessee Williams and to John Steinbeck long before I knew their work had anything to do with the movies I loved. But, I must say I was aware of and did read Melville’s Moby Dick while I was stationed on Nantucket Island off the coast of Massachusetts. Neither did I have an inkling of Hemingway’s history in Key West when I was there. In those day, I was only interested in stars. After Fellini’s “8 1/2”, I got more interested in directors. Now I can balance stars, writers and directors. Still, with Indies, I think the director’s is the key influence to look for.

Married officers and enlisted men also lived on the base. Across the grass playing fields, their homes beckoned among the oaks like dim memories of my childhood neighborhoods. I could feel very lonely and forlorn, standing near the backstop of one of the baseball diamonds and thinking about a more normal life over there. Several times, I strolled the streets where the married men lived, feeling deep loneliness. It was during those times I imagined I wanted to be home, always forgetting how I wanted to get away in the first place. So the eternal wanderer feels.

School was kind of fun. First we built a superheterodyne radio to teach us the basics of electricity. We used ohmmeters. We learned about volts, ohms, watts and the formulas that figure the ebb and flow of currents. All of which I forget these now 40 years later. We learned Morse Code and had to get up to 12 words a minute in order to pass that course. I liked the rhythm of doing good Morse Code. I could imagine just how it might feel to fly through a coded message with the rhythm of the dots and dashes, but I never got that proficient. I passed my test easily however.

We learned how to chart and plot the movement of ships and planes in the command center of a destroyer. It was neat to walk into the red lit, darkened interior of the command center, filled with the glow of green screens and plotting stations. But most importantly, we learned to distinguish up Doppler from down Doppler, to tell whether a sub was approaching or going away from us. My ears used to be so good. I could listen to classical music and chills would course up and down my spine from the harmonies. Now, with tinnitus, its constant ringing in my ears and the loss of higher frequency sound, I am diminished from my youthful prowess as a sonarman.

During an attack run, the sonarman actually directed the ship into the target, probably like a bombardier guides in a bomber during a bomb run. There you would be, watching your screen and listening to the pinging of your sounding devices echoing off the steel hull of your target, and you’d be issuing course corrections, trying to cross the sub’s path so you could depth charge it. In the earliest days of training, the sub signal, artificially recreated on our screens, would make few attempts to escape, moving in a straight-line course. As our training lengthened, the sub would make evasive maneuvers, from gentle curves to hard rudder combined with engine speed changes. I hate to say it, but my memory is that we missed more often than we succeeded.

The hardest stuff was the electronics repair work. We were supposed to learn how to repair our own equipment, and this was electronics repair, a bit harder than the formulas for resistance and current flows. In fact, one of our final tests was to diagnose and repair the trouble with a purposely disabled piece of sonar equipment. We were split into teams of three men to diagnose the problem. Different teams confronted different problems. I feared, as we entered that test, that we’d fail it. Well... we did a lot better than I thought we would. We found our problem pretty fast, and we passed. Later, in actual service, the ETs fixed all the sonar equipment; ET stands for Electronics Technician and not for the Extraterrestrial.

Speaking of extraterrestrials: during the previous couple of years, I’d been reading with great interest in Life about Dr./Colonel Stapp riding the rocket powered sled in the Arizona desert and was entranced by photos of his face distorted by the wind pulling his mouth open. I read about people circling in centrifuges to test the G force effect on the human animal. Wernher Von Braun was shooting rockets into the sky at the Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama from 1950 to 1970. Also, it seems to me that about this time someone rode a balloon to the edges of the atmosphere and bailed out a mile high. Maybe the parachuting was later, but I found that fascinating too.

These adventures caught my attention, and I became convinced that man would fly to the Moon in my lifetime. I was helped in my imaginative leap by the movie, “Destination Moon” which came out in 1950. During a visit to New York City while visiting the Connecticut folks, I got to see the towering five story rocket ship that advertised the movie on Times Square, but I believe I watched the movie at the Dabel Theater in Dayton before our Connecticut trip that year. Can you imagine what a George Bush would have done with the space race if he’d been president rather than the genius Kennedy? Bush would have bombed the Soviet Union rather than trying to beat it in a race to the Moon. Can you imagine him in the Cuban Missile Crisis? Anyhow....

I remember one day telling a couple of my barracks mates what I thought about Moon travel. Two guys from Kentucky laughed me to shame, but I stuck to my guns, and I wonder if they remember me as much as I remember them and their laughter? Many of my mates, born and educated in the American boonies, thought I was an egghead while I was in the service. I was a member of the Science Fiction Book of the Month Club during my stint, and I read most of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation and Empire series among many others. You might say my mind was in the stars while my body struggled on Earth. Strange that I went from being the loner, potential juvenile delinquent in Mr. Wilson’s eyes to being the egghead outsider in the eyes of many of my fellow sailors. Who I really was I didn’t know, and it was driving me crazy. Remember, these were the days leading into the period when everyone with any education at all would be having “identity crises”.

My record collection at the time might also have set me apart from my comrades. On a little portable player I carried around with me from duty station to duty station, I played a lot of big band and jazz sounds: Glen Miller, Harry James, Tommy Dorsey, Don Cherry, Peggy Lee, Benny Goodman and I had also one or two of Jackie Gleason’s soft mood albums. Was it “Music For Lovers”? My music was my parent’s music for the most part, the music of the wartime movies of “Stage Door Canteen”. I never could get enough of Goodman’s “When The Angels Sing” with Krupa’s drum solo. One beautiful sunny Florida morning, I remember putting on Don Cherry and listening to his voice fill the barracks with “When the sun comes up...,” and for a minute I was in heaven.

I also had a record of the bagpipes of the Scottish Highlands Blackwatch Brigade with which I could achieve great mischief. One time on Nantucket, I came back to base in the wee hours, a tiny bit drunk into the smallish quonset hut we Oceonagraphic Researchers (I’ll explain the rating change later) lived in. The crack of dawn, it was, mates, and for some reason I started to giggle at the thought of holding reveille for my barracks mates with the Blackwatch bagpipes. I thought my practical joke was pretty funny, but not too many of my fellow sailors did. Since I was not much into practical jokes, I thought I’d done pretty well by myself with that one. At least, no one threw a shoe at me.

A sailor on the Key West base had a business going that to this day makes my mouth water. His wife made submarine sandwiches, the likes of which I’ve never tasted since, oily sweet, crammed with salami and pastrami and ham and various cheeses and lettuce and, and and... on french bread. We’d call in orders whenever we felt rich. The gob would bring them to our barracks, and we’d eat like kings of Italy. They were so good.

For several weekends, a couple of guys and myself had a pretty good time up in Miami with some girls they’d met on a flight returning from leave. One of the girls had a boat and the other had access to her parent’s car. We’d crash at one of the girl’s home just north of Miami and then boat and go to movies, and drive around the rest of the time. My first sight of the Miami beach front lit at night was from the convertible back seat of one of those girls. My two mates for these adventures were Smitty and Hoff. Hoff was from Iowa, and he lost his virginity on the same night I did a few months later in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Smitty was an easy going guy with a gold tooth in the front of his mouth who was cursed with seasickness.

My dates rotated. The two girls fixed me up with a different woman every time we three gobs took a Greyhound up to Miami. I imagined I was pretty hot stuff, easily the most attractive of the three. My first date was a teen model who left for college the next weekend. Or maybe she just made that excuse so as not to have to go out with me again. Beautiful. Another date was with a dark haired Jewish girl, an intellectual with clearly the most interesting mind I’d run into to that time. Of course I tried to grope all my dates and did get some good kissing in, but I was still a virgin and just didn’t know how to make anything happen sexually. I pretended to be so worldly wise, but I was still a frustrated dork, juvy, intellectual. I think she was an atheist, or I was pretending to be an atheist, so we discussed deep philosophical ideas as most teens do at one time or another. She told me she thought I was pretty cool but she was looking for a Jewish guy. Anyhow....

We three sailors only went up to Miami two or three times and, then, the deal ended. The last time Smitty, Hoff and I went up to Miami, the shit hit the fan and that was the end of it. Jealousy and misunderstanding got in the way and ruined it for all of us, and I almost drowned because of jealousy. Here’s how that came down.

Smitty’s girl, the girl with the boat, was blond, a little heavy and very earthy, and, it was obvious to me that she liked my earthy qualities over Smitty’s. I could see that right off, the first time up to Miami. We made the kind of eye contact that spoke reams, but I wasn’t about to cut in on a buddy so nothing overt happened. One weekend we were speeding the power boat around in a bay or inlet created by a manmade jetty, and Smitty wanted to drive the boat, but his girl would only let me drive the boat. Smitty got the message hard and clear. When we stopped to swim, Smitty angrily dove in and started to swim his frustration out toward a concrete wall several football fields away. I dove in too, and he challenged me to swim with him. Under the circumstances, I had to keep up appearances in front of the girls and swam with him. I had no doubt I could swim that distance and back.

To our left a small bridge arched over the watery entrance to the inlet. The tide was going out. As we neared the wall, we found ourselves in swift water that was carrying us out to sea very quickly. The outgoing tide was so swift I didn’t think we’d be able to break out of it and make the wall. I expressed my fear to Smitty, but he grunted and said, “Keep swimming.” I definitely heard no sympathy in his tone, so I swam like a son of a bitch until my lungs burned and my arms grew tired. We were only a few yards from the open ocean when we reached the wall and found ground we could walk on along that wall. We knew we had to walk back along the wall against the heavy current before we dared try and swim back, and I was afraid I wouldn’t find the strength to get back. Smitty walked ahead of me. He was much stronger than me and his steps were anger driven.

I stepped on something that burned into the heel of my right foot. Now I was in pain and tired too, but I gamely kept up with Smitty. If he didn’t let me rest, I surely thought I wouldn’t have the strength to swim back to the boat, but that’s when Smitty’s girl came to our rescue. She knew the inlet and the currents and observed our rapid sideways motion as we swam toward the wall. I’d been keeping my eyes on Smitty’s muscular back, but when I looked off to my right, there she was, bringing her boat closer so that our swim back to the boat would be short and quick.

We never went back to Miami. Smitty never spoke openly to me about the situation that I can remember, but he silently seethed for a few weeks, and it was his contact that set up the situation in the first place. Since he no longer wanted to go up to Miami, Hoff and I had no strong motivation to continue. It was harmless fun, no sex and no violence, and sober. Teen stuff, on all sides.


J.C. was a wild, motorcycle riding friend all through my time in sonar training and for a year later on Antigua in the British West Indies. From North Dakota, he’d been run out of town by the sheriff. Join the Navy, leave town or go to prison, they told him. He related crazy tales of bar brawls and an Indian girl he made wild on Spanish fly and gotten pregnant. Rape maybe. He loved another Indian girl but his dad, an Indian hater, forbade the marriage. J.C. told about a serious drunken wreck, sending a car through a barbed wire fence and killing a friend who was riding on the hood, told about raging battles with his rancher dad, even fist fights. He was tall and rangy, Irish and western. J.C. taught me to say in a carny’s voice, “Step right up. Step right up, my friend. Do you feel run down after being hit by a freight train? Does everything go black when you turn out the lights? Well, I’ve got just the thing for you, my friend. Step right up and get your I.M. Nobody’s hot beef injection. Good for coughs, colds, dirty holes, fits farts and freckles....”

Four of us, Smitty was one, a mostly sober dude but funny drunk, J.C., Hoff and I decided to rent a motel room one night to drink and play poker. We bought a deck of cards, poker chips and bottles of booze and rented a motel room in Key West. The card game fell behind the drinking. The spots swam around on cards like little water bugs. I was having my first experience with slow gin and liking it. Yep, I drank for the effect, not for the taste. Might as well drink sweet to get drunk rather than to drink bitter was my thinking on the subject. Forget the macho image. Of course, when I was into bar drinking, into macho, for show drinking, boilermakers were my choice. Depth charge whiskey shot glasses into beer mugs. In Key West, where Fleet Sonar School was king, boilermakers were called depth charges. Whoopee!

One minute, J.C. was opposite me at the poker table; the next he wasn’t. I only looked away a moment and J.C. disappeared.

“Where’d’e’go?” I mumbled to Hoff and Smitty.

“Don’know,” my companions replied. We truly didn’t know.

A hand appeared above the far, glimmering table edge. It brandished an empty glass. “Fill’erup!”

Vomiting began soon after laughing. Standing outside the motel room, hands on knees, I paid my slop-shouldered tribute to demon rum.

Slow gin makes a wonderful red stain down the front of the white jumper of a sailor’s outfit. For some reason, I was now staggering through the streets of Key West alone, heading toward the base and talking to myself. Seems I left the party, and I was seriously worried the marine guarding the gate would throw me in the brig for wearing a filthy uniform. I think J.C. may have tried to talk me out of going back looking as I did. He was a cop shy guy.

Here’s another rumor like the one about “GI parties” in boot camp. We innocent Key West students, new to the Navy, believed that marines hated us and loved to get us in the brig where they’d torture us and beat us up and “I don’t know what all” as Andy Griffin used to say when he performed that standup routine about the rube who’d never seen a football game. Rumors like that could keep newbes in line. For our part, we sang, “Horse shit! It makes the grass grow green. Horse shit! It makes a good marine.” We’d call marines “seagoing bellhops” too. All that between services rivalry bullshit. So I was worried as I stumbled back to base, drunk as a skunk and stained from chin to waist with red vomit. I pictured all those wonderful brawls between marines and army and navy rivalries in all those war movies I’d watched, all that! As I approached the gate, lit with floods, I really felt exposed, but the marine waved me on with a chuckle. Tomorrow’s hangover would be terrific. I learned my lesson about drinking that night. I swore off slow gin.

I went home for Christmas that year. I felt, as usual, out of place there now. My feelings of displacement weren’t helped by coming from warm, breezy semitropical weather to snow and icy cold winds. I shivered as Sue and my family approached the gate to meet me, but I imagined I looked spiffy in my peacoat. I think on the drive home, I said something about mustard and referred to it as “baby shit” which is what we called it in the Navy. “Pass the baby shit,” we’d say. I also let that horrible “fuck” word slip into the conversation. My stepmom, of course, had not heard that word pass my lips since I’d told her the “Johnny Fuckerfaster” story in grade school.

“Excuse me,” I gulped hurriedly.

It reminds me of one of those near slips of vulgarity into home life I’d had earlier, in high school. I’d learned another dirty song from somewhere. Maybe I made it up. To this day, I play with song lyrics to change meanings and make funnys. A poet’s curse, even if I am a Nobody. Anyhow....

One day I was singing this dirty song alternative at the top of my lungs while I was getting some clothes out of the closet to put on after school. “My bonny lies over the ocean; my bonny lies over the sea; my father....” That’s when I heard what I was singing and stopped. The house swelled with silence. I could hear my mother leaning into the air toward my room, her ears perked like a dog’s for the remainder of the line. In my head, I finished the song, “...lies over my mother, and that’s how I came to be.” I could also feel my stepmom’s ears perked up in the front seat of the car as we drove home from the airport that winter day on my return from my duty station in Key West. To the day of her death, she believed the Navy changed me for the worse.


The best weeks of training were the two weeks we went out on harbor patrol craft to practice with live submarines. One day we even went down in a sub to experience the other end of the hunt and chase. The sub experience disappointed. When we boarded we were ordered to go to the aft torpedo room where we crowded into bunks to wait until we reached the practice area. In subs as well as in all ships of the line, a sailor is surrounded by pipes and steel bulkheads. Noises echo and clang, pipes burble, joints creak. I had the feel that all around me, steel condensed with moisture and drip, drop, dripped. That doesn’t necessarily happen, but I had that sense of damp and cold, hard things. Fortunately, I’m not claustrophobic.

Submerging created less tummy sensation than lift oft while flying. After we submerged, we were allowed to hang around in the mess area, and we got to go in small groups to the command station, and we took turns looking through the periscope. Then we observed the crew as they went through the exercises of evading the patrol craft above them and as they released the air bubbles so that depth charge runs could be checked for accuracy.

Each time a patrol craft made a depth charge run on the submerged submarine, the sonarman would fire a five count pattern just as if it were a real depth charge run. Only, of course, we didn’t drop depth charges. At the approximate center of what would be the pattern of charges, the sonarman would say “mark center” and a crewman on the fantail would drop a bucket of dye marker over the rail. At the same time, the submarine, listening in, would release a bubble of air. The patrol craft skipper could see by the proximity of the dye marker to the bubble how closely we’d bracketed the submarine with the depth charge patterns. As in computer simulations at school, the sub would commence with simple straight line runs, and, then, increase the violence of his avoidance maneuvers. This game playing was fun and the challenge intrigued me.

During one of our exercises at sea, a sub got to fire a practice torpedo at us. His torpedo, set deep enough to pass beneath our keel, would have hit us almost amidship and would have broken our little patrol craft in half. We could see the torpedo coming, a bubble wake rising up and turning the sea white in it’s wake. It sizzled like a frying tortoise as it passed beneath us. Boom! I was dead.

My favorite part of these practice patrols, out beyond sight of shore, were the long trips back. More than once I went aft to the fantail and climbed up on the railing and leaned back against the jack staff and rolled with the pitch and roll of the patrol boat through the warm Atlantic currents as our craft flew through the gray waters. The sun set before me, the breezes blew my hair, and it was heavenly.

For our pal, Smitty, the sea trips were a hell on water. He suffered with seasickness the whole two weeks. I had a touch of seasickness my first day out, many of us did, but once we got our sea legs, the nausea disappeared. Nausea on a rolling ship is hell piled on hell. For Smitty, seasickness never ended. That first day, since he wasn’t part of my four man team, I didn’t see much of him. But on our return, I went amidships, just below the pilothouse, and found Smitty surrounded by friends, his face burned red and lying on the deck, looking gray under the burn. Next day, he was peeling skin from head, neck and shoulders and still on his back. He was tough and kept coming out, but he never got over the seasickness. It happens to some people. I don’t know what happened to Smitty in the long run. He was assigned a different duty station than J.C., Hoff and me, but I can’t see him being assigned destroyer duty as sick as he was.

On one of our training days at sea, I got into some serious trouble for not heeding signs. We went out on a Coast Guard Cutter that day. We ate well. The Coast Guard bought their stores daily fresh from civilian establishments at the time. It had a civilian connection different from us swabbies. The cutter we were assigned to didn’t have modern sonar gear, like the patrol boats and like the gear we were learning on at school. It only had sounding gear which meant it didn’t have a scope, like radar, on which you could actually follow a sub’s blip across a screen. You had to make all your course corrections just by following the sound of the sub as your pinging struck its hull and returned to your ears. I think it may have been on that Coast Guard cutter we were “torpedoed” by the sub. Anyhow....

During a morning tour around the ship, while the cutter steamed into position for our exercises, some of us trainees were left alone in the sonar room for a few minutes. I stepped up to the battered equipment, joking at its antiquity and, probably, making fun of the poor Coast Guard cousins of the real Navy. A hand printed sign warned us not to touch the gear, but, ever dismissive and adventurous, I touched and moved a dial on one of the panels. Later I was lounging on deck, waiting for the cutter to get into position for our exercises to start, when the intercom summoned Seaman Recruit Nobody to the sonar room where I received a royal ass chewing from the Petty Officer, First Class Sonarman. He was about as furious a man as I ever faced to that time. For a minute I feared court martial or worse for disobeying his written command. Evidently, he’d spent the entire previous day degaussing and tuning his equipment, wanting to do well on our training exercise that day. Later, after we were “torpedoed”, I felt really bad about fucking up that poor Coast Guard sonarman in his quest to be as good as the Navy. I felt sorry for his poor equipment and about the effort he’d put into making his equipment as good as it could be for the exercise. For all my “bad” ways, I could muster empathetic feelings for whoever I deemed to be playing the underdog role in life’s grand pageant. I projected a lot of myself into others in those days.

I graduated Fleet Sonar School with one of the top three grades in our class. Not too bad for a high school student who graduated about two-thirds of the way down in his class. For that reason, just like at boot camp, J.C. and I and another guy were summoned into a conference and offered “secret work” and six more weeks of schooling if we wanted it. I guess I must have liked Key West pretty much because I quickly told them I wanted to stay on for more schooling, but the truth is that I was intrigued by the idea of “secret work”. My movie past entered in again; thoughts of being a spy and doing secret work influenced me, I’m sure. I know that was my chief motivation to go on to more schooling. Secret work! Yessiree, secret agent Nobody, at your service! My new rating was to be Oceanographic Research and Survey Specialist.

I barely recall the classes which made me into an Oceanographic “you know what”. My grades were good, I passed, and I was assigned my first duty station on Antigua in the British West Indies. My rating was in new technology for the time, and that’s why it was secret. In the past 20 years, I’ve come across news about the kind of work I did, but we were told that we could get in trouble if we ever revealed our work even after it became public. So mum’s the word, mate, and let’s shove off for another leave home before I report to my new duty station, carrying my sea bag over my shoulder.