The Saga of the YOG-113

LOL. LMAO. WTF.

The ubiquitous proliferation of these acronyms on the social nets and texting has reached the saturation point.  Perhaps Logitech or Microsoft should produce a keyboard with keys inscribed lol, lmao and wtf, accompanied by the equally banal J and : ) and : ( … to save our carpal tunnel pain being exacerbated by the repetition of all those key strokes.

Don’t use them myself, dontchaknow; but like a ripe bunch of bananas, most of humanity has morphed into this droll language rut, all jamming together in the increasingly mad mad world of techno-speak; to the lasting shame of my Mother tongue.

Some of you are well aware of my ponderous overbearing sophomoric use of syntax in daily discourse.  I have tried your patience and pissed some of you off royally by reverting to obscure and sometimes archaic words.  Unable or unwilling to interrupt me in one of my ranting diatribes, you inwardly seethe for lack of a dictionary at hand to figure out what the fuck (WTF!) I’m talking about.  O.K., bozos: go ahead and add HYPOCRISY to my abundantly long list of sins.

But the word you heard may stick somewhere in your synapse, to be furtively researched at a later date; to be smugly kept in the wings for your own ranting and raving.

I fervently hope so.  In this communion of language, you become a gardener such as me in the rose beds of English, a place of recurring delight for those of us inclined to desire thought made beautiful by speech or print.

You would be mistaken if you think that I carry an eidetic Funk and Wagnall’s around in my noggin.  Next to this Word text on my badass 42” monitor is Dictionary. Com, minimized and standing by.  I too humbly bow to my English-speaking betters.  Listen if you will to old videos of William F. Buckley as he twists his opponents around the Tree of Knowledge, his pop eyes rapidly blinking, to score one of his politically conservative missiles.  Or missives, if he speaks in print.

(Paranoically, I fear Bill Gates has begun his counterattack to my assault of his vassal Spell Check.  Thrice have I clicked on ‘ignore once’ for a quite intentional sentence fragment, only to have the fricking green squigglies reappear.  Come on down here, and quit hiding behind your corporate legions of programmers, Billy Boy.  Face me like a man! Chickenshit!)

No matter.  When I finally copy and paste this mess into Zuckerberg’s crib, your corrective measures will not follow me in there.  Suck eggs!  The pair of you tyrants!

My humble regrets, dear reader, that I must drag your blurring vision past this quixotic joust with the evil twin giants of Microsoft and Face Book. 

No, I’m not humble…or regretful, upon reflection.

I just wish I could drag the Apple Troll into this ongoing melee, but I CANNOT, becuzz I can’t AFFORD to buy Apple hardware; and I am unwilling to LEARN yet another mind-dazzling array of alien software. Mebee when I’m rich and famous…yeah; maybe next year in Jerusalem too. More penis envy caused by the klutz-bound ineptiness of my user skills.

Now, after 520+ words devoted to vernacular hijinks, it is time for the glass-encased confessional to be rolled out; to let the truth begin.

The truth is, I am just as guilty as most of you, for getting sucked into the habit of using ‘musty old chestnuts’, to plagiarize a gem from Mark Twain .

There were two phrases that made the rounds of in-country parlance: “Might…(short pause)…but I kinda fuckin’ doubt it!, and, “There it is.”

The first was used to express doubt or incredulity.  The second was the dropped phrase that ended every observation or story told, either by the speaker, or the listener, or both. 

It was a milquetoast stab at philosophical stoicism to bring clarity to our common plight.  “There it is” outlasted the more trendy “Might!...” by several months, as we each privately made our mental hash marks, of time remaining in-country.

The last time I heard the “There it is” catchphrase was from a wizened lifer snipe, who was on hand and actively involved with the saga of the YOG-113.  He punctuated his tale with these worn out words.  I tolerated listening to them for the umphtillyumph time, because the story he told shot right by my limit for comprehension.

The prelude:

Vietnamization went forward with vengeance in the middle of 1970.  Lemmings-over-the-cliff could be an appropriate image for the massive effort engaged in by the military: to transfer responsibility for the War back to the gooks.  As soon as the mission was completed, we could all go back to the world.  That was incentive beaucoup for all hands to feverishly turn to.

All logistical planning for such a massive undertaking was preceded by a pilot program; military planners being the geeks that they are. For the Navy, that program was the YOG-113.

As refresher to you, dear reader, if you have not yet traipsed throughout the foregone monographs, YOG was an acronym for Yard Oil and Gas. A floating stepchild to the Union’s Monitor of Civil War repute; it had a perfectly flat deck that protruded less than six inches from the water’s surface.  It bristled with more hoses, pipes and pump stations than a Shell refinery.

The YOG-5-class self-propelled gasoline barge was a 1,235 ton, 174-foot vessel, with a crew of 23.  This official naval description is germane to the YOG-113.

Three such YOG’s managed to escape to the Philippines in April 1975, when the War went to Hell in an NVA handbasket.  If they bore the fate of the object of this story, it was a goddamn miracle that any of them made it to freedom and safety.

Please forgive yet another disclaimer; I have no idea where some of you are coming in on this, so Mr. OCD would like to say:

-the disparagements, the exposures and the character assassinations are my own, and mine alone. 

-I have embellished these monographs both to entertain and to fill in the blackouts of memory that forty-years have leaked away; however, the basic truths herein and henceforth are not embellishments.  I am not so doddering that I cannot distinguish fantasy from fiction. If you were thinking this stuff is fiction, you can dismiss that thought here and now.

-this may be the first time for some of you to be given a window into the American War.  A lot of it is shocking.  That can’t be avoided.  The Marine Memorial depicting four Marines erecting the flag on Iwo Jima is a lasting icon of the War in the Pacific; but it is hardly the rest of the story.

Will Durant once said that history is what flows down the river—wars, the rise and fall of empires—those small villages on the bank of the river—that is civilization.

In a similar vein, the river of the American War are those images of Hueys descending into a hot LZ, rows of dead soldiers; Charlie and us, the towering fire storms of a napalm air strike; CBS correspondent Dan Rather interviewing Lt. Col Alexander Haig.

What is here by my words is the War, as I saw it, experienced it, within a circle of huts, of the people and scenes of my limited vision: the War of Everyman through time in memoriam.

-For those of you who are my friends, family and acquaintances, you may very well be shocked seeing Corky as few of you have ever seen him before.  As I said at the get-go, these monographs are both a confession and an apology.  To use one more musty chestnut, I am bound to go forward and let the chips fall where they may.

Vamanos a continuar.

A great deal this story is reliant on the old snipe who related it to me.  I can’t vouch for complete accuracy, but it pretty much rang true for me, the Doubting Thomas of his generation.  So, take a pinch of salt and hang in there.

While the crew was subjected to the intense training protocols of the U.S. Navy, it was never known if any of the gooks were sailors or fishermen before their selection for the program.  They might have…but I kinda fuckin’ doubt it.

In parallel to the training, the boat itself was not just re-fitted or overhauled; by the time this craft was declared ready to be transferred to the South Vietnamese Navy, it was nothing short of a brand new boat.

Parts of the hull, both engines, all of the steerage, all of the thousands of fittings were taken out of warehoused crates and installed in the YOG-113.  Absolutely nothing was left to chance.  Painted from bow to stern, inside and out, it sported a gleaming stainless steel galley, the reefers jammed to bursting with enough food to sustain the whole crew for a year with no replenishment necessary.

Well, there was just one little item left off this agenda.  The planning geeks decided that the receiving crew should take the YOG out on its maiden voyage.  The ‘reasoning’ for this decision was apparently to allow the Vietnamese to complement all their classroom/lab work out there on the high seas.  They were now responsible, were they not?  Besides, everyone on both sides was anxious for these sailors to become familiar with their charge, because it was envisioned that these guys would be training more crews, as Navy boats were handed over.

Don’t you just love it when a plan comes together?

Short of a month by three days from the Program’s inception, the great day had arrived.  All hands were ordered turned out in presentable uniforms for the occasion. This is the only part of this story to which I can personally attest. The reborn YOG-113 sat proudly berthed at the dock, shining like a new penny.  I had never seen a boat looking so good, and we were no slouches at maintaining our own craft and equipment.

The commanding officer of NSA arrived fashionably late. The division had been standing out there in the heat for over an hour in our long pants.  None of us were enamored of Rear Admiral Blop-Blop.  One of his first orders upon assuming command of NSA was to prohibit the wearing of shorts or cut-off fatigues. Health and safety, he declared, from his air conditioned office.

 Pompous prick.

He was pompous in speech too, with a rousing forty minute ho-hum on the merits of Vietnamization, the stalwart hands across the deck of both countries turning to on the big job ahead of us (we, not him)…ad nauseum.

At last it began to wind up.  Like adolescents watching the clock for the recess bell, we fidgeted in rank while the colors were lowered, the yellow and red flag hoisted up the mast; and to cheers of bon voyage from the officers and hoots from the ratings, YOG-113 set course for the harbor mouth and steamed from view.

Two weeks later, she was back in dry dock.  According to the gooks, with earnest expressions and fluttering hands, they described a fire in the engine room that they could not put out.  Grade of ‘F’ on damage control.  Having flooded the engine compartment all the way up to the hatch, they had no recourse but to radio NSA and request a tow.

An inspection of YOG-113 revealed that every crewman had brought his family--not limited to his immediate family--and all their livestock on board.  The snipe wasn’t clear on what was meant by livestock, but we agreed that chickens were a must, followed by geese, pigs and goats. 

The engines were junk from submersion in salt water; so they had to be replaced.  Closer scrutiny revealed that every…EVERY…brass fitting on the whole fucking boat was gone.  It was presumed that they were sold or traded to God knows who for all the livestock.  The gleaming galley was a gutted space, along with the reefers and all of the food.

The Navy gently suggested that the presence of whole families and clucks of chickens were entirely inappropriate on a serving ship of the line.  This advice was taken under advisement by the crew and their superiors.  There was nothing the old snipe knew about the disposition of the passengers.  Sent packing home by alternate means was the speculation around the Boathouse.

A scant week later, driven by the geeks’ shrinking timetable, the craft refitted once more in the same condition as before, this same crew waved from the deck to a much smaller gathering of sailors and steamed out of Da Nang, on course for their station further down the coast.

Three days later, HQ received another call for help: this time, the YOG-113 was sunk in shallow waters close to shore.  A salvage operation was mounted, the boat refloated; towed back into drydock and completely refitted for a third time.

A month later, according to the snipe, the YOG-113 was reported sunk…again, this time in water too deep to venture another salvage attempt.

There it is.  The saga of the YOG-113.

Was Vietnamization a success?  Do grapefruits grow in the pumpkin patch?