Fuel Barges

[This is a monograph that I have painfully reconstructed from the dregs of my wounded mind.  In the final touches of re-write, I inadvertently deleted the entire work.  There was no do-over, there was no retrieval; it just…vanished.

God Damn this PTSD.  I’m so glad that no one but my animals bears witness, as I bumble around here forgetting details, misplacing items, neglecting chores I had started an hour ago or a day ago…or a week.  There are those of you who understand this condition, which I euphemistically refer to as OCD. It is as real as yesterday’s news.  Enough whining and sniveling; here we go--]

It is with no small degree of trepidation that I begin this monograph.  For one last time, I must broach the subject of the fruit flies.  I know, I KNOW what I said.  I’m crazy, not stupid.

But-but-but, pinky promise, this is the final one.  So hear me out:

Yesterday, my sister-in-law (last one standing in the Divorce Wars), delivered a comment in her characteristic clear direct way, ‘No fruit, no fruit flies’

I have only one problem with simple solutions; they never occur to me.  Many of my Fellowship friends out there understand to what I refer when the term OCD is uttered: code for a hopeless state of mind and body.  So, in true OCD mode, I get to blame the PTSD for my oversight.

What I neglected to inform you of, gentle folks, was that there were two dozen homegrown Pears resting on my dining table to ripen.  As I swash buckled around my kitchen, wielding Death Racket in futile pyritic clashes; reinforced resolve by the strategic placement of apple cider vinegar, bolstered by liberal sprayings of watered down Clorox water; the insidious biblical pestilence carried on in the dinette with their incessant breeding.

I rose from my slumber at dawn o’clock and stumbled into the kitchen for a life-restoring first cup of the day to discover the place a seething swarm yet again.  With Abbie’s words taunting me, I angrily tossed aside all pretenses at ecological correctness. After bagging the pears and removing all other fruit from sight, I repaired to my garage, grabbed the Ortho Max Defense and proceeded to inundate the airspace and every flat surface of my home with cold killing efficiency.

Now the little shits are done for.  Piles of them everywhere, malingerers wobbling around in a death wobble.  Bye-bye Drosophila melanogaster—eensy- weensy little bastards!  The bee-zapping boy within me gloats and relishes the instant of total victory over insect.  Good for me!  Bad for you!

As you are all aware by now, this is my typical Mad Hatter Hutzpah to another Viet Nam tale.  Another moment of trepidation: this is one of my most dreadful memories.  Onward, onward.  Looking for light, aren’t we?  The enlightenment bit will have to wait in the wings of stage left.

I’m not through with Camp Tien Sha yet; but I’m going to scroll ahead here to my salad days in Service Craft Division.  As the scene opens, we see our hero holding down two jobs, a hale and mellow fellow amid a troop of like-minded pirates; his zesty joie de vies only periodically dampened by low-life lifers and infrequent incursions of his space by the monastic officers, venturing forth from their air conditioned hole-in-the-wall at the leading edge of the gangway.

Some of these villains I will discuss later in detail.  This story highlights the nastiest of the nasty—our commanding officer.

Lt. Rambo--we’ll call him that to avoid civil litigation--was a Mustanger.  In Navyspeak, this was a creature who wriggled up from the enlisted ranks to become an officer and a gentleman--by an act of the Devil himself, no doubt. Looking to be about 45 years old, he was taller than average, with a fixed sour puss and was probably nearing the end of his nefarious military career at the conclusion of his tour.

Rambo was a back-stabbing manipulative conniver who aggrandized himself in the Command Pecking Order by walking back and forth across the backs of the poor prostrate sailors under his thumb.  Nobody liked him, no one in the entire fricking chain of command liked him; from the nabobs up at air conditioned HQ China Beach down to the lowest rating in the Division.  I was one of those non-billeted wretches near the bottom. Not even the ass-lickers, a constant presence in all military gatherings, liked him. 

I hated his god damn guts.

His radio moniker was Sierra Charlie One.  Most days he sat in the rear of the office in his little cubicle plotting his next move.  If he had dropped dead back there, I am positive his corpse would have remained hidden behind the partition--until it began to smell.  Nobody was dumb enough to deliberately seek out Sierra Charlie One for any reason.  You came when you were called up to the hole-in-the-wall; a session with him always guaranteed to be pure misery—before, during and after.

One bright sunny day, unseasonably cool it was (anything below 90 was unseasonably cool), the nabobs ordered Service Craft to purge two Division fuel barges of their capacity load of 350,000 gallons…each.

Seems that some dickhead had failed to secure the hatches before a monsoon blow, and water had poured in, contaminating the diesel fuel. More on Dickhead later; his soused dereliction of duty nearly got me killed once.

No biggie, chortles our fearless leader over the lima-lima; always happy to accommodate China Beach.  Dropping the call to his masters, SC-1 bellowed out to CPO Rodriguez and ordered the barges lashed to an idle garbage scow. The scow topped up and barges firmly secured, we cast off, headed for the mouth of the harbor about eight nautical miles away (that is, about 9.2 road miles, for you landlubbers).

The YG-56 (Yard Garbage) was old, and slow to boot, her top speed being 8 knots in racing trim. With the barges alongside, the speed dragged down to maybe 3 knots.  She chugged and rolled with her heavy twin burdens for an hour before we came into blue water.

I had no official business being out there, but recall: I was the Skimmer Coxswain to the Chief of Staff and Chief of Staff for Operations, Naval Support Activity, Da Nang, I Corps.  The largest looming motive for Rambo’s intense dislike of me (Oh, did I not mention our feelings for each other were mutually held?) was this vaunted attachment of mine to HQ.  I was a spoiled Prince of Court, beyond his grasp. He hated my god damn guts too.

So, I tagged along.  SC-fucking One was powerless to exclude me.   One of the other pirates held down the radio net in my absence.  I was enjoying the cool passage of air on the water and snapping pictures like some kind of lost tourist. 

SC-1 had assumed control of the wheelhouse. He came along to make sure there were no further SNAFU’s to tarnish his record. I could see him up there at the helm, glaring down at me.  This undeniable fact precluded any notions I might have had about firing up a doogie.   That is all Rambo would need to sink his fangs into my tender flesh; the Golden Boy caught red-handed with a lighted joint in his pretty little white hand.

If I had learned nothing else, six months in-country, it was the noble art of self-preservation.  Lt. Rambo was not the only schemer in the Fleet (See monograph on Hooch, comshawed beer, C-rats, etc.).  So, maintaining a quiet demeanor of stoner celibacy, I leaned against the bow and placidly watched the spectacle of the boatswains’ mates doing the do.

In 1970, everyone smoked and they smoked inside and out wherever they damn well pleased.  The automotive statement of the day was the American muscle car, at the apex of its popularity.  They were 400+ horsepower V-8 behemoths getting 8 miles to the gallon and burning up gas and tires with equal aplomb.

Except for a few brave pioneers, ecology was not in anyone’s vocabulary.  We were a good 25 years distant from ‘political’ and ‘ecological’ correctness.  Green Peace was a slice of Key Lime pie.

Nobody was thinking of the environment or the impact of our casual approach to what we were doing.  When a napalm airstrike was called up, intended to deep fry a platoon of black pajamas, the aftermath was only a matter of body count.  The scorched and ruined earth was not a topic for discussion.  Like the grassfires lit back along Texas roads, if we thought of it at all, we figured the burn would just make the jungle come back greener, after a little while.  Never mind any civilian casualties.  Who the fuck were those civilians anyway, out there in the bush?

That photo of a naked screaming little Vietnamese girl, with napalm burns covering her frail body, as she ran towards the cameraman, with a wall of flame as background; that picture had not yet become an indelible curse of accusation in our minds.  The shame and disgust of it all came far too late for that little girl and her homeland.

We packed our duffle bags, boarded our Freedom Flights, and gave the entire Inferno back on the ground…nary a further thought.

With that same opaqueness of mind that day, the big hoses were snaked into the holds, connected to the pumps, the pumps coaxed to life and the bad old diesel went streaming in glorious spray out in the air and down to the sea.  It reminded me of fireboats in New York harbor celebrating the arrival of the Queen Mary.

We could see the mouth of Da Nang harbor in the distance, but Almighty Rambo in his wheelhouse decided we had burned enough good fuel and ordered the operation under way.  Close enough to the China Sea for our purpose, and removed from the harbor traffic, 700,000 gallons left its berth and stained the water with a rainbow slick for miles behind.

Having re-written this re-write I am readier than you guys to take leave of this page; but I cannot, quite yet: there is one more matter to bare.

As I turned my home toxic with bug killer this morning, I thought back to that outing on the old YG-56.  I thought of my own life forever changed by Agent Orange; my lifespan probably truncated as one outcome of the exposure forty-two years ago.

I recently learned that Da Nang airbase was one of three dumps in-country for Agent Orange.  The airbase adjoins the water on one side.  Considering our cavalier attitude about getting rid of unwanted materiel, I pause and wonder…what if?

I watched a documentary on centers in Viet Nam which care for the victims of Agent Orange.  The victims are third generation from the American War; most of them close in age to the little napalmed girl in her day.  The little kids ran and laughed and played for the camera; but they had cleft palates, deformed limbs and the unmistakable faces of mental retardation.

There are an estimated 350,000 such children today.  After all us old fart Vets getting disability for our many ills die off, will we do anything then with the surplus cash for our legacy of shame?

I pause and wonder…