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  Chapter two

  It’s your first float even though you are a third class already, because the advancement exams for bos’un mate are so ridiculously easy that a total rock could pass them and get rank, and you came out of boot camp a seaman anyway because you spent two years in that dumb ass community college before you decided to get your ass out of the shithole town in upstate New York before you died there, so you only had to pass one time and now you are a third class and you don’t go on working parties[21] anymore or hang out in a cage to paint the hull on Christmas Eve in the sleet and the rain in Norfolk[22].

  The first couple of days after you got your Marines in Morehead City[23] and headed out over the cold January ocean, you spent a lot of time up in the signal bridge smoking and drinking coffee with the signalmen and using the big eyes to look out over the cracking waves and watching the other poor bastards on the LSTs[24] and the LPDs[25] looking out their big eyes at you. And the ocean never stopped once and after three days you stopped taking the hike up seven ladders to get to the signal bridge because who wants to look at the fucking ocean anymore?

  But the fourth night out a signalman[26] second you were eating with, Riggens, said it would be clear that night and that you ought to come up before your watch and take a look at the sky and you told him you had better things to do but after the tenth hand of poker on the mess decks and there was nothing good on the SITE-TV[27] and your watch was coming up in 45 minutes anyways, you climbed your way up there to see what he was talking about.

  Riggens was out on the starboard wing of the signal bridge with a cup of coffee when you got up there and he said to look up and you looked up and there in the pitch black sky from one side up across the night there were stars like you never even saw them before, growing up in one bright glowing stream and when you looked up into the mast with the wet signal flags flopping and the boat leaning a little to the left and right it looked like the rigging could sweep them down into the smooth water swishing past the hull.

  When you were a kid, and it was August, your dad would take you out in the back yard to watch the meteor showers and you would lay on your back on the plastic strap lawn chairs in the first frosty August night cold and shiver while you listened to dad tell you about how the Chi-coms would come over the hill and how a mortar fell on his buddy since boot camp and then he was gone all the while you watched the stars fall down around you.

  A third class got out of working parties and got to lead watch teams and got to take charge of sea and anchor details[28] and was done with the shit pretty much since most guys with any brains who started in deck got the hell out as soon as they could, but you stayed in because it was really easy to get rank and anyone with any brains who stayed in deck didn’t do any shit details anyways.

  So you were the Bo ‘sun’s butt-boy, the deck department admin ape, but you still had to stand watches on the bridge and be on sea and anchor and be on the low visibility watch[29], but at general quarters[30] you didn’t have to sweat your ass off in the firefighting suits you were a telephone talker[31] in the number one repair locker[32]. Which was excellent because a lot of the GQs went four-five hours and that’s a long time to hold a hose.

  But you came aboard as a seaman and had to go mess cranking, which was 90 days of working on the mess decks. You got the bug juice locker, which was pretty easy shit as long as you kept the big aluminum cans of bug juice topped up, dumping in the powder and smelling the sweet cherry or grape flavor in your nose and then filling them up with water with the spray nozzle and you kept a dozen or more always ready to hump out on the mess decks and up and over the lip of the bug juice dispenser and pouring the red or purple water down into the transparent tanks on top while the squids waited for you and bitched for their bug juice.

  And keep the juice locker clean, which was a small room about 12 feet square with a big double sink in one corner and stainless steel counters all around and you learned to use a knife to dig the crud out of the cracks so when the chief hit your locker he’d say okay and you could get your ass on liberty. Which was Puerto Rico for your first liberty[33], the blue-green workups where the Marines and their helos and the SEALS and the commodore and staff came on and you all practiced all sorts of assaults and shit off Viegas Island off Puerto Rico.

  And on your first night of liberty, you were on duty which meant you had to stay aboard and make bug juice while the other three sections[34] got to go ashore and get hammered and that night, the Filipino[35] chiefs were fishing off the fantail[36] and they brought a whole shitload of dead fish into your locker and you bet that they had a bottle back there for fishing because they were laughing and shouting in Tagalog[37] and they brought their fish in and cut them up on your stainless steel counters and there was fucking blood everywhere and then they took them into the galley and cooked them with lime and their own juices and then called you out to have some fish with them and it was actually pretty damn good and cool to chow down with them telling stories about fishing in the Philippines and growing up on the beaches and in the sun and so you didn’t mind scrubbing the whole locker again.

  Especially since now you and Chief Esteppa were buds and that the first class down on the reefer decks needed someone to help hump the food up four decks and so Esteppa came in to your locker the next day and said Kieffer how you say your gaddamn name you bastard you want to work on the reefer decks[38] with Leonard? Break outs is a fuck-easy detail for you if you work your goddamn ass off and then you got the whole afternoon to piss off. Except Leonard need to paint the goddamn reefer decks anyways. But it still fuck easy for you? You want to work on the reefer deck, huh, breakouts?[39]

  Hell yea you want to work on the reefer deck it’s a skate detail because your buddy Mike works down there and he told you that all you do is get the order from the chief and break out the food from the reefers and haul it up to the mess decks and then you are on your own and that Leonard is a good guy to work for not like the other first classes busting for chief and busting your ass while they do it.

  So the next morning you are down in the reefer decks with Mike and Leonard and a black seaman named Ames who is really the first black guy you ever worked with upstate New York being a pretty white place anyways.

  Except for boot camp when you were tossed in with 80 other guys half of them from Oklahoma and half of them from Harlem and the all of you sweating while the company commander chewed your ass for not having your butt crack in line with your pants pockets.

  The first morning of boot camp you woke up when the chief whipped a goddamn garbage can 80 feet in the air so it hit the far wall of the compartment and you sat up on your sweaty plastic mattress where you slept in your civvies for about 15 minutes and watched the guy next to you fly through the air on his magic carpet mattress because the chief had yanked the whole goddamn thing off the top rack and on to the floor.

  Your plane landed in Chicago and the intake guy herded all of you sleepy and not knowing where you were down to the sidewalk where you put your feet on black spray painted foot spots and stood there trying be at attention while the businessmen walked by and looked at and then grabbed a cab for the city, and when the bus got to Great Lakes some asshole climbed up the stairs and looked at you all with you hands on your bags and said real quiet that you got 30 seconds to get your asses off this bus and on to the spots on the sidewalk.

  And in the middle of the night you stood there with your bag in your hand and your feet on the foot spots and wondered not for the last time what the hell you were doing there.

  The next four days you only slept standing up in line[40] while they shoveled shit at you and you got about 20 shots in about 20 seconds from the air gun needles that blasted all sorts of weird shit into your arms and ate standing up while some asshole screamed at you to hurry the fuck up and marched in the cold August air of the Great Mistakes[41] Naval Training Center somewhere up near Chicago.

  At the end of the first week you wanted to quit but at the
end of the second week you had the shit down and were marching all over and doing push-ups and sit-ups and making your rack in 30 seconds and at the end of the fourth week you got yourself a skate job in the company commanders’ office filling out reports and shit while the rest of those assholes mashed in the compartment.

  And one afternoon while your pals were mashing, doing sit-ups with their pieces in their arms because some asshole had not made his rack properly and you were in the office keeping your head down and pretending to re-do a report and your company commander had lost his voice and invited the evil bastard from the company next door over to work on them, and he came into the office and saw you there and you shrank down a little and he told you to go out into his company’s compartment, and down to the smoke and coke room and to unplug the coke machine.

  So you jumped like a bunny and did what he told you to and your company was in there doing squat thrusts and you had no desire to join them and you got back into your office and buried your little nose back into a big book of regs and then about 30 minutes later, he came back into the office and told you to go back through his company’s office and back down to the smoke and coke room and to plug the coke machine back in and you did.

  And he went back out into your company’s compartment and told your company to take a break, take a 10-minute smoke and coke and so all those guys all tired and thirsty ran into the smoke and coke room and they all bought themselves warm cokes and slugged them down, and smoked cigarettes and then that evil bastard called them all back into the compartment and had them start doing slow push-ups, up and then down on a ten count.

  And about 30 seconds later the first guy started to puke and then the second guys started to puke, and then the third guys, and this evil bastard was down on his hands and knees and writing in the puke and hollering you are a rock and writing the word rock in the puke or you are a bug and writing the word bug in the puke and you got up and carefully closed the door to the office because you are a sympathy puker and were starting to feel a little sick.[42]