AFTER STEERING

 Back in what I call my time in the US Navy the good old days we spent almost two years in the Western Pacific known in the Navy as WestPac. We visited Hong Kong several times as well as Sasebo and Yokosuka Japen but we spent the lion's share in Subic Bay in the Philippines. The town outside of  the main gate at Subic was Olongapo. In Olongapo there was every delight that was available for a few, damned few, Philippine Pesos. The town of Olongapo was like the wild West except instead of horney cowboys who had been on the trail for the last three months it was populated by horney sailors who had been at sea for months and like the cowboys of old, they weren't afraid of getting in trouble or spending the balance of the evening in some warm, dry cozy drunk tank. 

In fact if you had never spent a few nights in some waterfront drunk tank. You were considered to be no better than a lowly Coast guardsman or an Air Force lady having a bad hair day.

We rode out two very large typhoons in WestPac. In case you didn’t know in the Atlantic the big storms are called hurricanes in the Pacific, the big storms go by their Chineese name typhoon.

During one of the typhoons, for some stupid reason I was assigned to break in some E3 in After steering. Stupid because I had never even been in after steering or knew where it was let alone give instruction. After steering on a DDG is about the size of a large phone booth. At one point the E3 let loose and puked into a shitcan and the smell of his puke plus all of the rockin' and rollin' back in the fantale and I joined in the party. An hour later the bridge shifted control to us and I showed him what an old Gunnersmate told me what to do and then I was free to leave. Which I did.