THE NEW GUYS

THE NEW GUYS

One night a bunch of sailors, mostly first and second class Petty Officers came back to the ship after a night of beer drinking in Olongapo which is the town outside the main gate of Naval Station Subic Bay Philippine Islands. San Miguel Beer in an Olongapo bar was one Philippine Peso per bottle. If my memory serves me right, one Yankee Dollar would buy seven pesos.  That’s about fifteen cents a bottle and San Magoo was pretty good beer. We staggered aboard our little tin can, destroyer, and headed down the ladder, steps, to where we bunked.

When we got to the bottom of the ladder, we started to step on and trip over a larger number of drunks sleeping on the deck than normal. SOP, Standing Operating Procedure, was when you stepped on a drunken sailor, a not uncommon occurrence, you kicked, gently of course, the drunken sot to wake him up and tell him to hit his rack, bed. Suddenly all of these sleeping dumb asses jumped to their feet and started saluting us and calling us sir.

Now this wasn’t the usual reaction of a newly kicked drunk let alone a whole gaggle of drunken sailors. One of us turned on the lights in the berthing compartment which did get a typical reaction from a newly awakened sailor. Something like turn the fucking lights of you assholes.  I knew at least this wasn’t a dream.

When quired, who the hell are you ass holes and what the hell are you doing sleeping on the deck, one of the quivering young men, and I do mean young, replied that they woke up in Illinois and graduated from boot camp at Great lakes Naval Training Center, were herded on to a jet airplane and flown half way around the world to the Philippines, herded onto a cattle truck  and  deposited on to this ship in the middle of the night. The whole group was scared shitless because on this very morning, they could only address senior petty officers as sir and had to salute them.

We then allowed the poor clueless bastards to go back to nighty nighty night. We found out the next morning that the Navy, in their infinite wisdom, had decided to step up the crew manning levels of ships operating in the Western Pacific, read Vietnam, but hadn’t bothered to tell said ships in the Western Pacific. Further more, Because of our ignorance  we hadn’t prepared a suitable welcome or installed bunks for them to sleep on.

It took a few days to get things sorted out and we still all felt a little bad for these new boots and cringed a bit on being saluted. A few nights of liberty in Olongapo and the newbies became old salts over night.