Leper Colony

I can’t believe how many of you offered Helpful Heloises to rid me of my fruit flies.  I am simultaneously employing all suggestions (OCD front and center!!) except the fly strips.  I got one of those dangling things in my hair once.  Only once.  As practical as they may be, the strips will never get another hanging chance to snag me or mine.

Meanwhile, the Death Racket remains on alert.  Its effectiveness is somewhat diminished by the miniscule tininess of my nemisii; most of them passing through the grid without even making contact on the live wire.  How teensy is that?  By the law of numbers (averages, God’s Will, whatever) perhaps one in a hundred fly into instant oblivion.  Perhaps this might suffice as an alternate to the Law of Diminishing Returns…not enough fodder for the swinging swatter.

(If bad puns turn your stomach, touch your tonsils while leaning over the commode.  This should cleanse your tract sufficiently for you to continue reading)

As to why I would stand in my kitchen swatting at ghosts, it’s not the quarry-- it’s the hunt.  All guys intrinsically know this. A fruitless Snipe Hunt is never a complete waste. Perhaps you girls should ponder that thought when you slow and stumble (figuratively) long enough to let him ‘catch’ you… and disappointment ensues.

The most bizarre hunt in my life happened on a day, like many days, when nothing was going on at the Service Craft Boathouse.  There were three of us to man our corner of a tri-radio net--personnel overkill—a Navy tradition.

The ‘net’ consisted of Tug Control, perched high on a peak that overlooked Deep Water Piers.  There were the tugs themselves and then there was Service Craft.  We dispatched the pusher boats when Tug Control saw a need to assist the tugs in landing a ship.  Tugboats are similar in shape and function; they differ from one another by engine types, size and speed.  Pusher boats were all the same: converted LCM 6’s with a reinforced steel plate welded on the drop ramp and old tires festooning the bow.  Power was supplied by two Jimmy 671’s, the workhorse diesel of the Navy.

That day, the net was quiet.  The lull in harbor traffic was a sporadic phenomenon that rarely lasted for long.  The coxswains, the normative leaders of the three man pusher boat crews, were helping their deck hands with chipping and painting; the never-ending chore of salt water craft.  Some coxswains that is; the older lifers were usually sunbathing, or sleeping in the air conditioned hold, leaving their hapless deckhands sweating away topside.

The snipes were doing their greasy thing down in the engine compartments.  I never looked and I didn’t care.  The Boathouse was not air conditioned (unlike the front office where the officers ‘worked’), but it was a lot cooler than the insides of those steel gray relics from previous wars.

I sat dutifully at my post, playing Hearts with the other inmates; or maybe I was quietly reading in a corner, I don’t remember.  Scott came in and motioned to Griesmeyer and myself.  Outside, he told me to go fire up one of the skimmers; we three were going out in the harbor.

Scott (never heard his first name) and Jerry Griesmeyer were lifers.  I made an exception of not holding these two in contempt as I and all lowly sailors tended to do.  Scott was a Chief Petty Officer; Jerry was an E-5 second class petty officer.  Both were boatswain’s mates.  They were intelligent, soft spoken and most important; they were fair with everyone up and down the chain of command.  I liked them.  I knew they were not my friends per se, but we got along quite amiably.

Besides, they treated me with deference and respect.  Scott was responsible for me being appointed to the lofty position of HQ skimmer coxswain.  On the chessboard of Navy Pecking Order, it was as if I were the rook and I had been castled in a safe corner, unassailable by nasty nom-coms (a few hated my college-bred guts) or Division junior officers who held that disdainful lofty view that all enlisted were scum.

While I untied the line from the stanchion, Scott had already assumed control of the helm.  He was driving, even though it was my fucking boat.  I was not really disgruntled however, since he was the only one who knew where we were going.  And, oh yes, he was the CPO of the Watch.

“Where ARE we going?” I shouted over the roar of the big outboard.  These 16 foot Boston Whalers with center church pew consoles were outfitted with Johnson or Evinrude (remember them?) outboard engines, 75 or 80 horsepower jobs.  That was way too much power for boats this size, but the Navy was into overkill in all aspects of service. Another Navy tradition.

“We’re gonna go take a look at the Leper Colony.”

The what?  This was Asia, not Africa.  What was a Leper Colony doing here?  “Where?” I shouted, nonplussed by this destination.  “Across the harbor, that way” Scott yelled, ignoring my confusion.

He pointed west past Deep Water Piers to the distant side of Da Nang Bay.  That was a distance of over seven miles; the mountain peaks on the far side visible over the shimmering heat waves.  Well, there wasn’t much to say after that.

Jerry and I sat on the bench in front of the console and took in what little cooling comfort was being created by skimming the water at over 40 mph.  We looked up at the cloudless sky and down at the glassy water rushing under the bow.  There were no questions that came to my normally inquisitive mind, no topic of discussion.  What did one say to the prospect of visiting a Leper Colony?

I had no idea how Scott knew where he was.  There were no charts in evidence and GPS was thirty years in the future; but we travelled in a perfectly straight line, bearing down on some point with ponderous exactitude.  We travelled that way for close to an hour. On we pressed, watching the far shore coming closer and closer.

Finally, we approached a long shallow cove, ringed by dazzling white sand.  Up from the beach, a semicircle of small round thatched huts came into view; evenly spaced and perhaps fifty feet back from the water.  Each had a round opening for an entrance.

Nothing-- not a human, not a dog, not a chicken--was visible.  Besides a lack of any movement, it was deathly silent; the only sound the gurgling of our outboard. 

We floated out there, a few yards from the sand.  It was an unspoken given that we were not going to beach the skimmer and trot up to the huts for a cheerful hello, to see what might emerge.  We murmured amongst ourselves, wondering when the village would come to life, a few shy faces suddenly appearing in the openings of the huts.

Also, we were unarmed except for our folding knives.  I was authorized to carry a sidearm as the skimmer coxswain.  I never bothered: just another piece of equipment to clean and guard and fret over.  But here?  One hell of a long way from anywhere, this could easily be Indian Country for all we knew.

Nothing.  Not a flicker.  We trolled back and forth for about twenty minutes.  When it became apparent that there were not going to be any sightings, Scott reversed his course, and we returned to the Boathouse on the other side of the Bay.

I was positive we had been watched the whole time we were there; I had that creepy inexplicable felling one hears about in horror books and movies. In retrospect, I can understand why no one came out to greet us.  Those wretched people, whatever they had suffered and endured, were not the inmates of a zoo.  If they had any dignity left, it was not to be spied upon, gawked at or treated as the inhabitants of some egregious freak show.

Like the whole of Viet Nam, we had no business being there.

Scott never said why we had made that sojourn to a Leper Colony.  He wasn’t much for joyrides, but I found it difficult to see it as some kind of operational trip.  He had that slightly sour disposition of a schoolmaster in charge of unreliable unruly schoolboys.  He spoke little and disclosed nothing.

But he liked me without ever being overt about it.  In the merciful naïveté of youth I never saw anything wrong with either Scott or Jerry, nor did I ever notice any unseemly scrutiny.  I just assumed they were attracted to my Best Boy attitude; my clean military demeanor (five years of high school and college R.O.T.C. taught me well) and my engaging wit.  That was the end of it, as far as I could tell.

Only now, peering back to the past, through the filter of hard learned experience, can I see that their admiration might have been more than an appreciation of the snappy way I wore my uniform.  I was always first pick for off-the-wall jobs; they frequently chatted me up, to the exclusion of all the other young swabs on hand.  Several times they taunted me with the old Boatswains’ Mate’s jeer that ‘when a woman wasn’t around, a blond headed yeoman would do’.  I laughed along with no sense of discomfort of the joke at my expense.

And to this day, I draw no conclusions from any of that. God knows, I maintain my long held belief that another’s gender preference is of no concern to me.  And so it was with these old salts.

Occasionally, when I felt a need to take a break from the never-ending party up at my hooch, I would come across them late in the night, below decks on a vacant pusher boat, sitting across from each other and leaning into the aisle, sipping straight whiskey and conversing in soft, almost subliminal tones, the kind of talk that cannot be casually overheard.

I suspect they are both dead now, having been 20 years my senior in 1970.  What would it matter, anyway?  The boy of that distant past was unharmed, at least by those guys.  Other ‘guys’ back then were another matter; and the stuff of another story.

True to my recollection of that adventurous day, I had really hoped we could have seen a leper.  I’d like to see a leprechaun too; and a Snipe.