MM2 DROUGHTON, B.L.
USS SAN FRANCISCO (SSN-711)
FPO AP 96678-2391
Dear BRENDAN
Hello, How are you doing? How are you getting along these days? I’m pretty good. But I’m feeling lonely because you are absent from Hawaii.
By the way, I found the new apartment at last! Actually, I was finding a place to live, very hard.
I visited to a Japanese realtor’s office first time. But she presented the rent very very very expensive! (why?!) Don’t joke!
Next time, I found an appropriate one (I looked for a Sunday’s newspaper), called the owner to made an appointment to saw it. But I can’t speak English well. And do people think Japanese has money. I guessed they took mean advantage of me. But then I asked next to them.
「How much is the rent? Are utilities electricity, water included in the rent? Is the apartment furnished? Is there a kitchen?? Does the apartment have an air conditioner, microwave, fridge, telephone??? When can I have the deposit back??? Can I see the room???!!!」
More hard! (In fact I did preparation) Whereupon, they looked for the some apartments, and they were kindness. I saw some apartments later, I decided this apartment after all.
It looks good and I like this a lot. Located along the Ala Wai Boulevard and walking distance to the International Marketplace (pizza!) and three blocks from Waikiki Beach. It has kitchenettes and direct phone service (local calls free) and large lanai.
I think I can look forward to seeing BRENDAN again about 10 days later because I want to ride on your motorbike and eat the pizza and drink beer and take a walk etc. with you.
All my love
MITSUKO
PS Do you understand my letter? I’m sorry I’m many wrong.
__________
I read this standing in berthing before my watch. This was when we pulled in from our ORSE evaluation. I had duty that day. The last thing I expected after returning to Pearl was a mail call that included me.
Me? I actually received a letter?
In fact, I did. That was so sweet of Mitsuko to write to me. Standing there next to my rack, I could barely recall the last time I mailed a letter to anyone. Maybe one four years earlier sent to Linda. She had gone off for her freshman year of college in Boston while I was still a senior in high school desperate for her not to forget about me. She never did remember to write back.
I called Mitsuko once home from duty the following day, after a lengthy nap of course. I tried to thank her for writing to me but had a difficult time communicating with her over the phone. I decided to cut it short. We could talk in person. Just the essentials on the call. There was a small window that we could meet before I had to go back out to sea for the Tactical Readiness Examination. We made simple plans for the weekend. The usual. Pizza, a motorcycle ride, and a few beers. And that would most likely lead to us going back to her place to hook up. It had been a little while.
It seemed to me that you can go two decades without sticking your pee-pee into someone no problem, but once you start doing that regularly, you can’t even go two weeks without the urge to be poking someone regularly again.
Sex! I like it!
I was therefore understandably eager to see Mitsuko and thus had to make preparations to ensure mission success. Anyone familiar with the band ZZ Top knows that “every girl’s crazy about a sharp dressed man.” A lot of people know this. I knew this. Yet even knowing this, I was never once mistaken for being sharply dressed.
Ever get distracted at a restaurant and try to cut your steak with the knife turned backwards? Yeah. I dressed something like that. Black tee shirt with a metal band logo or motorcycle paraphernalia on it, blue jeans, and dark brown leather hiking boots. About the only thing I could cut a steak with were my socks. Even Carlos took notice of my superb brown and beige mottled socks while standing shoeless on his carpet one afternoon.
“Where does a guy like me… get a pair of socks like that?”
Solid socks for sure, but since socks are seldom seen, I relied on this other trick that I had up my sleeve. I had learned something in the military that I thought might possibly also apply to the opposite sex. You see, I had ascertained that your haircut had the ability to override many or even most other aspects of your appearance.
Let me explain. My uniforms were always wrinkled and stained with grease from the engine room. I always rolled up the sleeves against those pesky regulations that I felt were more like suggestions. Plus, I didn’t even bother polishing my shoes even for personal inspections. (I’d just rub the tips of my boondockers against the back of my calves a few times to let the dungarees “polish” them.) Yet I inexplicably had this crazy reputation for outstanding military bearing.
My peers would rather confusingly reference this supposed military bearing of mine frequently. I suspected they were saying this sarcastically, but even Queen La Chiefa was in on this confused consensus. This is what he had written in my evaluation for the review period ending on 15 March 1998:
“Exceptional military bearing – maintains the highest standards of appearance and conduct. Excellent role model for his juniors and peers.”
Granted he did need pretty thick glasses to see, but still, what the actual fuck? It looked like I ironed my uniforms with a rock—a common snipe in the Navy for those who lacked military bearing. So where did this perception of exceptional military bearing originate in my opinion? It had to be the haircut. It had to be. There was no other explanation for this phenomenon. My hair was the only thing I was rather anal about.
I would get my high and tight hairdo refreshed on a weekly basis. In fact, if I didn’t have freshly shaved sidewalls on my noggin, I just wouldn’t go out to try to meet any of the ladies. Not even to see the Déjà Vu bartenders, strippers, and waitresses who I pretty much paid to talk to me.
No fraternization with the strippers until my fade was satisfactory, okay?
Those were the rules. But I no longer needed naked ladies paid by the song or drink to keep me company. I had Mitsuko. Therefore, I most definitely had to look my best for her as I couldn’t simply pay with hourly rates.
So before meeting her for some naughty time, it was first time to visit my favorite barbershop in order to shore up my confidence and appearance. After two weeks of being out to sea, my high and tight had become rather low and loose. I think this little hidden haircutting establishment that I had found a few months earlier was the key to the extra points on my evaluation. Unbeknownst to me, the proprietor had a secret weapon.
Up until I found that particular place, I had done what just about every other sailor would do when in need of a trim. I’d hit up the barbershop on base. They knew the drill and could crank out a military spec haircut in spectacular time. It was just like how the second you put the phone down from ordering Chinese food in New York City, the doorbell rings.
Hmmph. That was fast.
The base barbers were like those Chinese delivery guys. The second you plop down into the chair, the guy yanks your cape off, and you suddenly spring right back up.
Bam! You’re now satisfactory!
One weekend a little ways back with my hair just on the raggedy edge of unsatisfactory, I stopped into the base barbershop for my standard sidewall shaving bam job. Unfortunately, the line was just too long for me despite how quickly they could crank out satisfactory sea-do’s. I wasn’t completely over that edge yet and wasn’t about to wait longer to get a haircut than it took for them to give me that haircut.
I walked out, hopped on my Marauder, and blasted off to the International Market Place for some New York style pizza. I didn’t have any plans, it was too early for Déjà Vu, and so I just wandered around the market and the nearby Waikiki Town Center where my motorcycle was parked.
The Waikiki Town Center was a dying, irregularly-shaped semi-outdoor shopping center next to the International Market Place. Seemed as if some realtors wanted to tear this place down just like they did with my beloved Hideaway bar in favor of a newer development.
Of all the places on Oahu, this outdoor mall was the one of the ones that screamed post-peak tourism the loudest. Other than housing Déjà Vu Showgirls, everything about the Waikiki Town Center seemed a bit depressing. Nearly all the storefronts on the second floor were boarded up to give you an example of the vacant vibes.
There were only two places up there still open as far as I could tell. One was a clothing store called Red Dirt Shirts. They dyed all their apparel with Hawaiian soil, which seemed like some sort of red clay to me. I went inside Red Dirt Shirts to peruse their merchandise, but I didn’t buy anything.
Their reddish-brown shirts definitely looked cool, and they might have even looked good on me if I had a leather necklace with a seashell or shark tooth on it—provided that I was capable of obtaining a suntan. But since I was only capable of sun burning, I figured I’d just stick to my black tee shirts and continued wandering around the upper floor with my blindingly bright white epidermis.
The only other place not boarded up was a barbershop tucked in a corner that had absolutely no traffic or visibility. If you had climbed up the stairs from Kuhio Avenue, you would without a doubt turn right after walking past Déjà Vu into the courtyard area. The barbershop was to the left, however.
You see, a quick scan to the left would look as if all the businesses were boarded up on that side with plywood painted lime green to look a bit less depressing. Look straight, and there was the Red Dirt Shirts, an elevator, and a large banyan tree. Look right, and there was the corridor to the bathroom and the stairs to go down into the courtyard and the International Market Place. There was just no reason to turn to the left and go that way.
So, you’d turn right and have your back to the barbershop before it was even visible. And if you went downstairs and looked up from the courtyard, the barbershop was too deep into the corner and blocked by the big banyan tree.
It was fortuitous for me to even spot it, a benefit of my blindingly bright white epidermis walking without a purpose. Once the barber pole was spotted, I was somewhat reluctant to go inside as I didn’t quite fully need a haircut. Who knows how much a scissor-handed civilian could fuck up a fade? Like what Waikiki wandering tourist ever needed to pass a personal inspection while on vacation buying tee shirts dyed with dirt?
Hold my Mai Tai…
I took a chance anyway since I didn’t have any plans, and my hair could definitely stand a little tightening up. Plus, hair usually grows back no matter how poorly it was last cut. Not surprisingly, the older gentleman with a deep golden tan worthy of wearing a Red Dirt tee shirt underneath his pristine white barber jacket was able to take me right away. I was his only customer.
The barber wasted no time with small talk as he made his preparations. He had quite the heavy accent. Mario was his name, he was from Napoli, and he was the proprietor of the barbershop. That middle part sure piqued my curiosity!
Italy was the first country I had been to outside the United States, and Naples was the second place I had been to in that primo paese. (We pulled into port there twice with Submarine NR-1.) I found Naples to be a large, filthy city where the people tried to rob us and run us over in the streets with their zippy little bubble cars. In other words, I loved it! I absolutely loved the place!
Ah Napoli! You will forever be in my heart!
So what if I was getting my haircut from a civilian sightseer-servicing scissor swirler? I think it’s worth it to support a local business that is handicapped by a dying location. Mario and I certainly had a lot we could chit chat about. Italy was my favorite country in the world way back at the time, still is as of this writing, and cannot foresee this changing anytime in the future.
Mario hadn’t even finished setting me up in the chair, and I had already decided that this was going to be my regular spot to get my haircuts from that point on, even if his cuts were less than satisfactory.
He began swirling his scissors trimming the top. Nothing out of the ordinary. Slower than the base job yet with more style. He was from Italia after all. He switched to an electric buzzer to begin the fade. Again, nothing out of the ordinary, though his buzzer was large and made of metal unlike the little plastic ones on base. Maybe his was from the old world. Or another time period. Prewar?
His cut was slow and steady, and with style so far, but otherwise not all that noteworthy. But then he did something I wasn’t expecting at all. Mario grabbed a handful of hot shaving foam and lathered it onto the sides and back of my head. He wielded a straight razor blade and used it for a close shave all the way up the sides of my head.
This was truly something special. I wasn’t getting a simple assembly-line-like base-barbershop-buzzcut-bam-job. No, an old-world master of his craft was giving me the tightest high and tight I had ever received in my life. Even with all that surface area of my big fat head to shave, he missed not one hair follicle and left not one shaving nick. It was seriously impressive.
It was the most amazing haircut anyone had ever given to me. I got the Ferrari or Lamborghini of high and tights. His haircuts weren’t simply satisfactory; they were outstanding. Out-fucking-standing!
I would return to that dead dying lime green outdoor mall to get a haircut from and chat about the city of the sun with Mario every week when in port for as long as I lived in Hawaii. I truly believe he’s the reason I received such high marks on my last performance evaluation, and he was definitely the first person I’d go see on my way to meet Mitsuko. As usual, I was the only customer and was taken immediately. Mario tuned up my hair, refilled my self-confidence, and I was now ready to rock with my little lady.
I picked her up on the motorbike outside her old place, the place that seemed more like a hotel room than an apartment. She hadn’t yet moved to the new place she mentioned in the letter. We went for a quick eight block or so ride right back to my parking spot in the loading well by the dumpsters across from the pizza place.
It wasn’t until seated with the pile of pizza that I realized we were going to have just as much difficulty communicating in person as we had over the phone. I didn’t remember having so much trouble before the ORSE underway. I struggled to tell her that I would be leaving for the six-month deployment in just a matter of weeks, and that we would likely have at least one port call in Japan called Yokosuka.
“I talked to the guys who have been on a western pacific deployment before, okay? You know, the deployment. We go out to sea for six months, right? Remember that? The deployment?”
“Oh, okay.”
“Yeah, those guys say we will almost certainly pull into a port called… I dunno, they say ‘yuh-KOO-ska’ but the way it’s spelled looks more like ‘YOH-koh-SOO-kah’ to me.”
She looked at me but didn’t respond.
“So, I don’t know. How do you say it? ‘Yuh-KOO-ska?’ ‘YOH-koh-SOO-kah?’ Something else? They say it’s right near Yokohama, so maybe you…”
“Oh, Yokohama. Okay, okay.”
“Well, not there, but the base sorta near it. Do you know it?”
She stared at me without answering me again and looked even more confused.
“Do you know the big naval base near Yokohama? Do you know how to say it?”
“Yokohama?”
“Yeah, the navy base nearby.”
“Okay.”
“No, I mean… What is it called? The big naval base near Yokohama. Because that’s where I think I’m going. Either ‘yuh-KOO-ska’ or ‘YOH-koh-SOO-kah?’ Do you know which way is right?”
Again, she stared at me without responding.
“Do you understand what I’m asking?”
“Oh, oh. I’m sorry. Um. Uh…”
“Nah, it’s okay. It’s okay. I’m just trying to tell you where I’ll be in Japan. I guess close to Yokohama.”
“Okay, Yokohama, okay.”
“Is that near Osaka? How far away is that?”
“Osaka? You go to Osaka?”
“Maybe. Is it near Yokohama? Maybe I can take a train, like a bullet train, like the Shinkansen or something. That’d be really cool to see you if you’re still there whenever we pull in. Are they close by?”
There was a bit of awkward silence with no response. She just didn’t understand what I was asking. Oddly, it seemed as if her English had deteriorated since I last saw her. Maybe I was the only person she spoke English with regularly, so in my absence, she got a bit rusty. I don’t know.
And I still didn’t know how to pronounce Yokosuka, or if Osaka was close enough for me to take a Shinkansen there since she never did answer those questions. It didn’t really matter if she could answer me though. I knew she was returning to Japan soon but doubted she would still be in Osaka by the time we pulled into Yokosuka, whenever that would be. Secret ships make it hard to plan trips.
This trouble in communicating produced a long lull in the conversation once I stopped asking her about Japan. It was tiring, and I was tired. I needed a break. Yet the relief of this silence quickly became awkward. The two of us quietly looking at each other saying nothing despite not having been together in weeks.
I tried to fill the void with small talk that she could understand like “good pizza” and “sunny weather.” That talking for the sake of talking, while not as tiring as trying to get a point across to someone who doesn’t speak your language, still gets old really fast. I soon needed a break from these forced, overly simplistic topics.
I suggested a motorcycle ride along Kalanianaole Highway. Mitsuko eagerly accepted as it was a second part of her four-part plan outlined in her letter. Motorbike, pizza, beer, and a walk. Perhaps in accordance with the plan or perhaps she too was frustrated with our inability to hold meaningful conversations.
We hopped on the Marauder. Initially I had planned to ride around that southeast tip and come back to Waikiki via either the Pali Highway or the Likelike Highway, but then a devious thought popped into my horny little head as we approached the Halona Blowhole.
Heh heh. Blow-hole. I’d like a blowhole blowjob.
I know, it was a juvenile thought, but it was an adventurous thought as well. That place is a total tourist trap, yet perhaps we could find a quiet little spot around there to get it on. There would always be that risk of getting caught which might heighten the senses.
We ditched the Marauder in the pull off parking lot, but instead of gawking at the actual blowhole, we climbed down the rocks leading onto the beach just west of the spout.
I’m not sure if you’d call it a beach so much as a sandy little cove. There’s no actual path from the parking lot, and very few tourists climb down there. That day there were a few scattered ones, so I directed her up the other side of the cove which required a bit of climbing over more jagged, black volcanic rocks.
We made our way out and around a rocky point known as Bamboo Ridge, not because bamboo impossibly grows out of the solid lava rock there, but because it had become a popular spot to fish for ulua reef fish with these long fishing poles made from bamboo. Once the Kalanianaole Highway opened in 1931, fishing for ulua with bamboo poles became a common sight there, which begat the name of the point.
Now, if you’ve never heard of ulua even after visiting Hawaii and feasting on their local cuisine, welcome to the party. I lived there and never once saw it on the menu despite the fish being culturally rather significant. Ulua is the Hawaiian name for the giant trevally and the bluefin trevally, two apex predatory reef fish. The ulua were considered by the ancient Hawaiians as god-like warriors, and the royalty prohibited women from eating them and commoners from fishing them.
That perhaps was a blessing in disguise, and if you are wondering if why such a culturally significant fish is not found on the menus of the tourist trap Hawaiian restaurants you visited, it is because of Gambierdiscus toxicus. That is a poisonous unicell organism found on coral reefs which produce tasteless, odorless Ciguatoxins. Herbivorous reef fish will consume these poisonous organisms and are then eaten by carnivorous reef fish such as the ulua, where the toxins concentrate, ready for you to consume once caught.
These ciguatoxins are not only tasteless and odorless, but also alarmingly, they cannot be killed by cooking. This has led to numerous cases of Ciguatera fish poisoning—or CFP—after consuming ulua. So if you think about it, perhaps the ancient Hawaiians weren’t so much sexist as they were simply trying to protect their wives from getting several weeks’ worth of diarrhea.
Food poisoning was not the only danger posed by those risky reef fish. The main danger was actually rogue waves. This Bamboo Ridge is a rather treacherous location to fish for ulua. Many lives were claimed, including one member of a local fishing club while they were installing signs at the ridge in late 1931 warning of rogue waves.
This fishing club member was then washed out to sea and drown by one of those very rogue waves he was posting warnings about. After this ironic tragedy, a Japanese Fishermen’s Memorial was erected right above the spot to which I had directed Mitsuko.
I should point out that this “memorial” is actually a cultural mistranslation. Westerners, backwards looking as we are, read the inscription describing the tragedy of that fisherman washed away and determined the landmark must be a memorial. This misunderstanding has stuck to this day.
However, its intent was not to remember the fallen fishermen but to protect future fishermen from the same fate. It is a shrine to be visited prior to fishing, where you would leave an offering for protection. The actual name, Umi Mamori Jizo translates to roughly “Guardian of the Sea.”
Silly westerner tourists! The Japanese are forward looking!
Mitsuko and I found a spot below the shrine, selecting one of the numerous cave-like nooks found throughout this volcanic rock, one which was suitably secluded for us to claim for our viewing pleasure. I sat down and leaned against the back of the little rock cave, and she sat on top of my lap facing the same direction to watch the waves come in and crash spectacularly against the jagged coast.
It was a stunningly beautiful location, and thoroughly private. A perfect spot to perform our first outdoor public sex act. While absolutely no one was around, anyone could technically climb up the rugged rocks there just the same as we had. I felt the thought of getting caught could make the sex a bit more exciting. Why not be adventurous?
We’re so young! Live life! Live our life as a collection of unforgettable experiences—even if we couldn’t express them to each another verbally!
That’s what I was thinking, but there was just that little problem of communicating these thoughts to Mitsuko. Despite all of our miscommunications, one thing that seemed to go pretty smoothly between us was when it was time to get down to business. That always seemed to unfold organically. No words needed. I figured it would be like that here as well.
And at first it proceeded as planned. She was very much interested in kissing. The stunning views made for quite the romantic spot after all. As it became more passionate, I began caressing her breasts. She didn’t mind this at all… until I tried moving my hand from on top of her clothes to below them. That was the point she became uncomfortable. It was just like the time when I asked her what her age was. I received the hand wave that could only be interpreted as, “No, no, no”.
I had just found her limit. Kissing passionately and caressing her breasts on top of the clothing was the line. There would be no outdoor public sex adventure that day. Perhaps guardian Jizo was expecting a rogue wave any minute and put a chill in her mood, thus saving our lives.
Or rather, I had really just gotten way ahead of myself. As we were kissing, I was getting as ambitious as wondering what kind of blowhole blowjob I would be getting. Would it last a good while because of the seclusion, or would it be just a few of those little lollipop-style swirly tip-licks she had done in the past because of the risk?
I figured I would take whatever I could get, just so I could say I got a blowjob at the blowhole. I wouldn’t be picky. But that clearly wasn’t what was going on in her mind. She was probably thinking something nice and romantic due to the setting. Perhaps she simply wanted to have a tender moment. What a sweet, sweet girl.
I am a monster.
We didn’t stay in the volcanic nook much longer after I took things too far. However, I didn’t want to leave immediately as to tip her off to the true nature of my monstrous thoughts, and waited what I assumed to be an appropriate amount of time to preclude correlation between actions.
I’m not sure what was a worse way to run out the clock. Cuddling after sex while eying the door wondering how long I had to wait to go home, or sitting on a jagged rock with a boner and a hot chick in my lap wondering how long I had to wait until I could take her home and bang her. Did I mention that I was a monster?
We didn’t go straight back to her place. My hardon subsided while riding the motorcycle, allowing us to stop in at the Really Crap Hole Tiki bar for a couple of beers for part three of her four-part plan outlined in her letter. We skipped part four after the Tiki bar and went up to her apartment for some rigorous, energetic, bottled-up-and-released banging.
She too was quite horny, but only in this privacy of her apartment. Misuko needed some action just the same as me, likely thinking that we would soon be apart for some time once again. Judging by her levels of intensifying squeaking and then silence and discomfort, I am confident she came. At least I certainly did, silently however—as usual for me. To paraphrase the 2005 movie Wedding Crashers, substituting boat for bush:
“Let’s just say when you’re in the boat, a full-blown orgasm is frowned upon.”
Predictably post silent nutting, I once more had to urge to leave immediately. I of course did not act on such urges. I held her for a lengthy obligatory cuddling session while eye-balling the door and the time. How long is appropriate? Once I began yawning a bit, with the yawns each becoming gradually more vocal, I pronounced my need to go home. Seemed like a good excuse to go if you ask me. Gee, I’m beat. It was a relief to run. Until the guilt set in.
My god. What is wrong with me? I really am a monster!
This is what consumed my thoughts during my ride home. I don’t know. Maybe there wasn’t anything wrong with me. Could it just be that I didn’t love her? Was I just using her for sex, but being a little nicer about it than all those jokes I heard about guys giving women cab fare immediately after fucking? Maybe those dudes were just like me and instead of admitting their confusion, they simply acted tough and made cruel jokes about it, perhaps as a defensive mechanism.
I figured all this meant that I wasn’t in love with Mitsuko. But why wasn’t I in love with her? I found her quite attractive. She made me rock hard enough that I swear I could jack up a car with the boner she gave me. I know, I know. There’s more to love than physical attraction. But she was so sweet too! Mitsuko was about as gentle, thoughtful, and perfect as anyone could expect another human to be. Yet I must not have been in love with her to feel the way I felt after making love with her.
It was most likely the language barrier making it just too difficult to really connect in any meaningful way. After so many dates, dinners, activities and going over her apartment over many, many weeks, I really didn’t know a whole lot about her. How can you really love someone you don’t even really know?
I think we were just two lonely people trying to make a connection with someone but almost completely unable to. Our conversations were mostly “oh’s” and “ah’s,” forced laughter, and silence. No silly banter that you’d see in movies and on television between couples in love. That’s what I craved. That fun and silly banter. The only person I done anything remotely close to that with was Anya. And let me tell you something about that sassy, sexy Slav: she was a total ball buster.
Maybe I was in love with Anya. Hard to tell when you are about as far away from someone as you can possibly get without becoming an astronaut. If you’re on the other side of the planet from a potential partner, you tend to dismiss these amorous thoughts as far too impractical. At least that’s how my brain worked. With six billion people on Earth, there just had to be another Anya out there for me but in a more convenient location, so there was no use cultivating any feelings for the original Anya.
But Mitsuko was not a more convenient Anya. She was like the opposite of Anya. So sweet, so gentle, so perfect, but also so submissive. I didn’t want someone so submissive. I wanted an equal. A partner in crime is probably the best, albeit overused, description of what I wanted in a, uh… partner. Anya would definitely be my equal.
As assertive as Anya might appear, it felt I could always disarm her with my sense of humor. Her defense was to put up an impenetrable front, but I’d outflank her with laughter that she didn’t see coming. My humor always grounded her. Each time she lost a battle to contain an unwilling smile, we were equals. Slavic stoicism stripped. I loved doing that to her. I think she secretly liked it too, although there was no way in hell she’d admit that.
I started to think that I maybe I really was in love with Anya because I never could stop thinking about her. Maybe that’s the real reason I didn’t love Mitsuko. At least that’s what I attempted to convince myself upon pulling into the Ala Napunani apartment complex. I went to sleep on my pile-of-laundry bed contemplating this with no resolution.
I woke up with a sore throat in the morning. I knew what that meant. This was going to suck. I only had a few more days in port before the TRE, and now I have a sore throat? It must have been all that ORSE-shit incessant drilling and lack of sleep that wore down my immune system, so now that I was exposed to the harsh winter conditions of Oahu with temperatures as brutally low as 68 degrees Fahrenheit (20 degrees Celsius) at night, I was developing a cold.
I so rarely got sick, but if I woke up with a sore throat, this meant I had indeed caught a cold. There was going to be about two days of this sore throat and then three days with an annoying runny nose, and possibly but not a necessarily, another few days of a cough. Figures I’d catch one while in port. I decided to stay in my room and listen to Slayer instead of venturing out on the motorbike.
My roommate Jeff knocked on my door to say there was some chick on the phone who doesn’t speak English asking for me. Mitsuko had called to see if I wanted to meet up with her, but the painful sore throat blocked any thoughts or feelings of being horny. Besides, it would be pretty rude to pass a cold onto her just to get a piece of action. I told her I wasn’t feeling well yet could maybe meet up for something to eat, but not much else. It didn’t seem that she understood much of what I was saying.
I think I was cranky from my sore throat, so after trying and failing to say I could probably meet in an outside environment, ultimately, I told her that I couldn’t leave my apartment. Despite my frustration trying to make my situation clear to her over the phone, I immediately felt bad after we hung up.
I did try to explain that I was sick, but maybe she didn’t understand. What if she didn’t? That would suck. How confusing for her! I felt really bad about that. I thought of calling her back to make some sort of plan with her, then also worried about passing my cold to her. What to do? I went back to bed on my pile of laundry.
I called Mitsuko a few days later to set up a date before the San Fran left port for the Tactical Readiness Examination. I was still sick but past the sore throat phase and now firmly into the runny nose phase of my cold. But I figured that once I went out to sea, it was likely I would not see her again until after the six-month deployment.
We met up for pizza in the outdoor food court of the International Market Place, but no drinks inside the Crap Hole Tiki Bar or hook ups inside her apartment afterwards. I’m glad she was able to see that I was actually sick. No way to fake a snot nose as far as I know. I didn’t want to make her sad by thinking I was as uninterested in her as I actually was. Language barriers are a bitch.
Before getting over my cold, the San Fran set out to sea. The Tactical Readiness Examination was the coner’s version of ORSE—their annual anal probing. I believe the main thrust of the TRE is to evaluate how well the crew can blow shit up with torpedoes and tomahawks, but it also included scrutiny of their damage control abilities. Lots of fire and flooding drills, it turns out. No steam line ruptures, but they had other drills like “TORPEDO EVASION!” and “JAM DIVE!” according to the highly animated 1MC announcements.
The former is self-explanatory and an excuse to go really fast and deep while changing course. The latter is when the dive planes get stuck in the take-us-below-crush-depth-immediately-please position while at high velocity, which I suppose could happen during a torpedo evasion. Serious stuff.
Down in engine room lower level filling up the illegal trash bags with oil rags and snot rags, I felt relieved us nukes would be able to take it easy. Running those incessant ORSE-shit drills were a miserable experience. Yeah, really miserable. I mean, just picture being on my last underway running all those drills.
Right as you finally make it back into your rack, as if there was some sort of a pressure switch under your mattress, the general alarm or flooding alarm or propulsion plant casualty alarm sounds, a frantic set of announcements are made over the 1MC, lights come on in berthing, you hop out of bed and get dressed as quickly as possible and head back to the engine room to fight the casualty… day after day after day, over and over and over, for twelve hours each day until you’re so tired you even forget exactly what day it is for your countdown.
Is it a thousand forty-three days left of a thousand forty-two days left? No wait, what is today? Uhh… is it thousand forty-four? Fuck.
Fires, flooding, steam line ruptures, and loss of reactor coolant were the main drills we’d run several times a day. But of course, they’d throw in random bonus drills here and there like reactor scrams, hydraulic line ruptures, radioactive contamination, electrical faults, hot bearings, loss of condenser vacuum, high feedwater salinity, and a quarter of an inch of standing water in the bilge. (The last one seemed to be the most dire.) There were others too.
No one individual drill was overwhelming, yet the totality of them wore us down. Fighting the fake fires were the most draining. Sucking rubber through those sweaty emergency air breathing apparatuses, holding your breath to advance through the engine room to the next air manifold just to take a deep breath before unplugging and advancing with your equipment to the next manifold. By this time, the engine room would become a steamy hot sauna as the air conditioning is the first casualty in a drill. I wished those R114 A/C units were considered “vital loads.”
Without the A/C, you just keep advancing with your sweaty head and neck strain from the weight of the mask and its tugging hose. You’re advancing but not exactly sure where you’re supposed to go due to the difficulty hearing the muffled shouting of others through their masks. You know you’re getting close when a red hat drill runner puts a dark, nearly-opaque shower cap over your face piece to simulate thick black smoke. Can’t see, can’t hear, can’t breathe, can’t wait to go back to bed.
But not so fast! Once the bedsheet “fire” is out, all the equipment had to be broken down and stowed, such as all the fire hoses that needed to be disconnected and rolled up in a particular way to ensure they can be quickly unrolled and connected for the next fake (or real) fire.
Can someone get those R114 air conditioners back up for crying out loud!
Even the sweaty EAB’s are a chore to store. They need to be disinfected after each use with alcohol packets, placed in a canvas bag and stowed in a locker with its flash hood. You’re doing this several times a day thanks to the “Vulcan death” watches which ensured maximum time to drill and minimum time to sleep.
I hated the Vulcan death watches. Pretty sure everyone did as I never heard someone say they missed them. Thankfully those were all behind me now that us nukes had completed our ORSE. This underway was entirely for the coners’ TRE, and during their rectal examination, the nukes kept a normal rotation. It was the coners’ turn to experience Vulcan death. I thought that it was surely going to be a nice underway with all the scrutiny finally on the other side of the water-tight hatch of the engine room.
I mean, for torpedo evasion, I just had to kick on a couple extra pumps, raise the speed of a couple of other pumps, and then wing open the valve to the oil coolers. For jam dive, I’d just go back to the giant hydraulic rams to see if anything was amiss and await the coners to wander back aft put them in local control mode. Not much to do in the engine room really. I figured it should be pretty routine and relaxing back aft during the TRE.
But I figured wrong. Of course I figured wrong. I aways figured wrong. In fact, I think in some ways, the TRE was worse than ORSE. Believe it or not, this actually stemmed from putting the coners on Vulcan death watches while keeping us nukes on regular watches that we wanted.
I would find that during one day of the three-day rotation, I’d be awake for… all of it. Yeah, I would be up for about twenty-six hours straight actually, through various combinations of being on watch, eating, running drills, cleaning the engine room, and showering.
Up for twenty-six hours straight every third day!?! How could that be our schedule?
Well, here’s the breakdown of hours for both coners and nukes during TRE over three days for comparison if you started your watch at balls o’clock:
Coners:
Day 1: 18 on & 6 off
Day 2: 18 on & 6 off
Day 3: 12 on & 12 off
This sequence for them was 6 hours on watch, 8 hours of drills, 4 hours on watch, 12 hours off watch, 4 hours on watch, 8 hours of drills, 6 hours on watch, 6 hours off watch, 4 hours of drills, 4 hours on watch, 4 more hours of drills, and finally 6 hours off. Repeat.
Nukes:
Day 1: 24 on & 0 off
Day 2: 12 on & 12 off
Day 3: 12 on & 12 off
The sequence for us was 6 hours on watch, 12 hours of drills, 6 hours back on watch (for 24 hours of being up in a single day), 6 hours off watch, 6 hours of drills, 6 hours on watch, 12 hours off, 6 hours on watch, 6 hours of drills, and finally 6 hours off. Repeat.
After a few days of running twelve hours of drills every day with various combinations of time off or no time off between watches, I managed to get over my cold without venturing into the coughing fit phase. Maybe my immune system was just too tired to fight off the infection, so the cold virus left me in search of a body capable of putting up an actual challenge.
The waning of illness during the rest of our time out did not make this underway any less tiring. I was completely exhausted. The walking dead. Towards the end of the TRE workup while standing Lower Level watch, I also had an unexpected space invader. I was in a deep sleep-deprivation daze on one of the post-drill evening watches walking laps around the lube oil reservoir to stay awake. Then I spotted the Commanding Officer wandering through the engine room all by himself.
The Captain!?! No way!
I had never seen the Captain wander into the engineering spaces by himself before! He always had an entourage. At the very least, a junior officer with a clipboard to write down everything he noted as unsatisfactory.
“Another ‘FTN’ on the number three main condensate pump.”
“FTN, sir?”
“That’s ‘Fuck the Navy’ lieutenant. Mark it down.”
“Aye, sir. FTN, sir.”
I overheard that one day while walking across the catwalk right above the bilge diving Captain. For the record, I was not the one who used a paint marker under the condensate pump to express my feelings. The skipper found all the places that frustrated little seamen defaced his ship and had his entourage make hitlists for us enlisted pukes to correct.
I wondered if offscreen Captain Kirk brought a red shirt into the Jeffries tubes on the Enterprise to mark down all the FSF’s he caught. But I digress. Like on an away team, Captain Howser of the San Francisco always had an entourage. Except this time.
This was true. As bizarre as it seemed, that lone guy without a single scribe beside him a few bays down from me was most certainly the Captain. Officer’s khaki-colored belt, grey hair, and no mustache? There’s no one else with that combination on the boat! That space invader was most certainly the skipper!
This should have been extremely alarming, yet my asshole was far too tired to pucker up for him. I stood there calmly in propulsion lube oil bay leaning against the oil reservoir. I yawned as the Captain approached me from the arrow straight condensate bay catwalk. He stopped to talk to me in front of the giant propulsion lube oil pump motors.
“This TRE business isn’t too bad for you nukes, huh?”
“Sir, by the time this watch is over, I’ll be up for over twenty-four hours straight. I’m very tired.”
He walked off without saying another word. In fact, he never, ever again stopped to say any other words to me while he remained Captain of the USS San Francisco. I guess bitching to the skipper of your ship that you’re a sleepy little sailor isn’t the way to get a promotion or even a ship’s service Christmas card. Yeah, definitely got myself crossed off that list. Unsatisfactory, had there been a clipboard-carrying junior officer by his side.
Concerning rest or lack thereof, I’m not sure what I had been thinking during the start of the TRE or what the Captain was still thinking towards the end of it. Just what exactly was our dumb ass thought process where we both concluded it would be a cake walk for the nukes? Like, does the general alarm go off, we all hear the announcement, but then the nukes simply roll back into bed because the fire is in the torpedo room and not the engine room?
Fuck the coners! They started it; they can finish it. I’m sleeping in for this one.
That’s not how that works! My general quarters station was part of the advanced firefighting team. Anytime the general alarm went off, I had to partially suit up in thick ass fireman suit and wait on the mess deck. If the general alarm went off due to a fire drill, then I had to fully suit up, which included donning a bulky “oxygen breathing apparatus,” or OBA as we called it.
Unlike the emergency air breathing apparatus (EAB), the OBA actually had its own self-contained oxygen source. We didn’t have to plug hoses into tiny little manifolds throughout the ship for air like we had to with the EAB. But right now, you are probably picturing the OBA in your head completely wrong. You see, the OBA was not a big oxygen tank worn as a backpack like a modern SCBA (self-contained breathing apparatus) that real firemen use.
No, the OBA was totally different with its—at the time—fifty-year old technology. It was this very mechanical and crazy looking black and silver “front-pack” that you slipped a green metal clad sodium chlorate oxygen candle canister into the bottom of and then, once your World-War-One-gasmask-looking, double-hosed face piece was properly fitted, you swung the bailing assembly handle up and pulled out the canister’s cotter pin via a lanyard. The black lung-looking air bags along the side of the front-pack contraption fill up, and then your mask will initially fill up with supposedly “harmless” white smoke.
Hmm… the oxygen I usually breathe isn’t smokey. Very suspicious.
So, my ass was up and at ‘em for all the coner drills. And that made sense to me once we started drilling. It was a shock for sure, but at least it made sense. What I couldn’t make sense of was why the torpedomen didn’t have to bring all their shit back to the engine room before the TRE inspectors boarded. Maybe coner inspectors don’t treat the coners like children?
Those fucking ORSE-holes made a mockery of reality. Perhaps the difference in treatment all comes down to the mechanism in which nukes and coners enter the realm of absurdity. Coners underthink their way into it; nukes overthink their way there. (I don’t think normal thinking people were allowed on submarines.) So, through underthinking, the coners were allowed to keep their illegal trash cans, toolboxes, and spare parts in their spaces during cone inspections.
Results? I dunno. I don’t remember how long this work up was, I don’t remember how long the actual examination was, I don’t remember how the TRE was graded, I don’t know what grade we received, and I have no idea what would happen if we failed.
Supposedly when a boat fails an ORSE, they take the “keys to the reactor” away. These keys are actually the keys to padlocks on the nuclear reactor’s control rod drive mechanism breakers. The rods are fail-safe and require electrical power to raise them. You can’t go critical with all the “poles in the holes.”
So maybe if we fail a TRE, they take all our torpedoes and tomahawks away. Or maybe they put The Club on the helm and diving plane controls. I dunno. All I know is that we didn’t fail and they didn’t take our torpedoes away. In fact, soon we would be loading up with a full complement of live torpedoes and tomahawks for our deployment.
When I returned to port from the TRE underway, there was another letter waiting for me. Mitsuko had already left for Osaka. Knowing of her absence was in some ways a relief. I didn’t look forward to sitting across a table from an attractive lady and not be able to communicate with her, thus being relegated to forced conversations and awkward silences until it was time for the reward of her inviting me up to her place, disrobing, and assuming the position.
Yet prior to opening the letter, I also felt a bit of an emptiness knowing she was gone. I couldn’t call her for a ride on the motorbike, for some pizza, for a few beers or for some naughty time. I knew I wasn’t in love with her, but she was clearly more than just a friend. I didn’t exactly know what to feel or what I wanted. Definitely not this empty feeling of no possibilities.
Her envelope was postmarked from Nara, Japan. I would later find out it is a satellite city of Osaka, known for over a thousand wild deer roaming the city streets. I ripped it open and read it by my rack in berthing.
__________
MM2 DROUGHTON, B.L.
USS SAN FRANCISCO (SSN-711)
FPO AP 96678-2391
Dear BRENDAN
Hi. Hello. How are you doing?
I’m fine now. But I’m very hard working every day. Of course my hard work is no mutch for you. I’m sorry the other day. I was shocked when met you. I guess I speak English little progress more than former days. A fatal mistake!
I felt frustrated because I could not make myself understood in English to you. Oh my god… I was very very very very feel frustrated!! But! See what I will do! I speak English well without fail! (really?) Therefore I’ll speak fluently to American – nice guy (?) (Really? Really?) I don’t know wholly…
Anyway, I got many friends in Hawaii. I think that nice persons everybody. (Includ you!) But actually I was in trouble with one guy. He lives same apartment me. (in Hawaii) In addition to same floor. I made a mistake… certainly. He is a nice guy. Nice person and safety. He looks like friendly.
My friend to introduce him to me. But… he was too meddler. (My friend gave to him my phone number. May be she didn’t understand his character yet.) He called me every day. He sometime visited my room still more.
He always asked me 「Are you in trouble anything?」 I answered 「Nothing.」 He said continuously, 「If you are in trouble you call me soon」 (I guess… He is misunderstand himself.)
He thinks to himself, 「Very nice guy. Very kindness guy. And nice person. 」 Ha! I guess so. Because he asked me some other day, 「Do you have a boyfriend?」 (It’s none of yours.) I didn’t answer. Then he said, 「I think that lovers are must be together. 」 (About same mean.) 「Will you have to go back Japan? 」 (That must be expected.)
<she drew a small picture of a hand with a middle finger raised>
By the by, he was New Yorker… Ha!
I guess you leave Hawaii for Asia at present now. Will not stay as long as you like. But… do you remember any Japanese? I write new Japanese. Please keep in mind and use.
How much? Ikura desu ka?
I’d like to go to OO. OOe Ikitai no deu ga.
How can I get there? Soko ewa dou yatte Ikuno desuka?
Have a nice day in Japan! And please take care of yourselves.
ALL MY LOVE.
MITSUKO
__________
I had not yet left Hawaii for Asia as she had written, but I would a few days later. Mitsuko was not to return from Japan until after I myself had left for Japan. I did not know that once the USS San Francisco set sail for our six-month WESTPAC deployment, I would never see her again.