Morning Thoughts: December 14, 2017

The Cooper River was cantankerous at best, treacherous at its most awful: a real bitch if you want to know the truth. She flowed out of South Carolina into Charleston Harbor, past Fort Moultrie, then Fort Sumter, and out to sea, ruining many a career along the way.

Our ship, the venerable USS Hunley, AS31, lay some distance upriver in a complicated “Med-moor,” meaning she was anchored ass-end first to a fixed pier with her bow pointing downstream. Haughty and snug, she let the river do its worst. A fixed pier and flexible gangway provided access.

That river rose and fell with the tide. The flood-tide just oozed in, raising the river sometimes nearly ten feet. The ebb tide ran out like a man caught in the wrong house. Pity the inexperienced sailor navigating amongst the games she played. A drop of ten feet in a few hours could create currents that played hell with trying to land a boat.

They kept a fleet of small craft across the pier from the ship. I coxswained the barge assigned to the commander of a submarine squadron. Carl Ferguson coxswained our captain’s gig. Jimmy Huddleston drove a boat for a commodore who was destined to be an admiral until a nuclear sub ran aground on the “bitch-mother” river. He disappeared next morning, and Huddleston had little to do. All in all, it was pretty soft duty for us all.

We moored to floating docks that rose and fell with the tide. They were connected to the pier by gangways that rose and fell as well. That’s what caused all the fun.

It happened like this. My crew and I were returning from taking my Admiral’s wife and some friends to Fort Sumter and dropping them off at the main base. A steward came along with snacks, wine, and beer. On leaving us, the Admiral’s wife had given me the usual wink and requested that I dispose of the leftovers as usual, “according to approved naval protocol.” We felt pretty shipshape when we turned to our berthing spot. 

It was high tide, so no currents bedeviled us.We moored without incident. I put the crew to work and invited Ferguson and Huddleston over to share in some leftover wine. That’s when it happened. I was pouring some wine into a coffee cup when my “boathook” leaned through the hatch and said, “You better come see this.”

I gave him a physically impossible but time-honored Navy response. He said, “No, you better take a look.”

Cursing in three separate languages, I stepped out onto our dock. In the space between our dock and the next, someone was tying up a thirty-three-footer to the fixed concrete pier. Did I mention that it was high-tide? “Jack me off with a bilge-pump and call me a snipe,” I said to the boathook. Then I hailed the guys mooring the boat.

Two seamen and a pasty-looking ensign in full dress regalia came from the boat’s port side and looked at me. “Yes?” the ensign said. I stared for a second or two until he looked down at the officer’s stripe on his coat and then back at me. I saluted and he saluted back in his best imitation of Bull Halsey. “Yes?” he said again.

“I don’t think I would moor that boat there,” I said.

“Sailor,” he said. “What is this?” He pointed at his hat.

“Your cover,” I said.

“And what does it mean?”

“Means you’re a line-officer, sir,” I said.

He thrust a fist in my direction and pointed at a finger with his other hand. “Know what this is?”

“It’s a ring, Sir.”

“Not just a ring,” he said. “This,” he said, jabbing at the object in question, “this is a United States Naval Academy ring. Do you have one?”

“No sir,” I said, thinking that he probably knew the answer, but then, being a “napolis Man,” maybe he didn’t.

“I see,” he said. “Now what is your rank?” Had he not worn that ring, he probably would have known already. It was sewn right onto my uniform. I was still in dress whites and my rank was prominent, along with my ribbons signifying my recent service in Vietnam. “Bosun's Mate third-class,” I said.

“Now don’t you think maybe I know a little more about mooring small craft than you do?”

Now that was a stupid question. It took me more courage than old John Paul himself needed when he smart-mouthed the captain of the Serapis from the deck of the “Bonny-Dick” to kept from bursting out laughing like I could hear Ferguson and Huddleston doing.

“Of courser sir.” I gave him my best “Barnacle Bill the Sailor” salute. “By your leave,” sir,” I said, and stepped back into the cabin. I hear a distinct “Harrumph,” ere I sat and resumed what I had been doing.

We drank our wine. It took us into a warm fellowship wherein we became trusted shipmates, brothers tried and true. We talked of ports-of-call and “West-Pac Widows,” then moved to great assholes we had known. All were officers save one Chief Bosun’t mate whom we had worked for, before his wife killed him. Most of the great officer-assholes, we agreed, were ‘napolis men.”

We even talked some, maybe ten seconds or so, about what an exciting and marvelous career the United States Navy offered. This time we all burst out laughing.

We were warm, safe, and contented, proud descendants of men who had once faced canon-fire in wooden vessels over a mile-deep sea in service to their country. Outside, the tide began going out and we could hear the steel rings of our dock screeching against the anchor-columns as we sank.

We could also hear the Cooper River—that muddy bitch—snickering.

My home away from home.