STG3 Alan A. Lamoureux

They were crusty old guys who had done it all and had been forged into men who had been time tested over more years than a lot of us had time on the planet. The ones I remember wore hydraulic oil stained hats with scratched and dinged-up insignia, faded shirts, some with a Bull Durham tag dangling out of their right-hand pocket or a pipe and tobacco reloads in a worn leather pouch in their hip pockets, and a Zippo that had been everywhere.


Some of them came with tattoos on their forearms that would force them to keep their cuffs buttoned at a Methodist picnic. Most of them were as tough as a boarding house steak. A quality required to survive the life they lived. They were and always will be, a breed apart from all other residents of Mother Earth. They took eighteen year-old idiots and hammered them into sailors. You knew instinctively it had to be hell on earth to have been born a Chief’s kid. God should have given all sons born to Chiefs a return option.


A Chief didn’t have to command respect. He got it because there was nothing else you could give them. They were God’s designated hitters on earth. We had Chiefs with fully loaded Combat Patrol Pins in my day… Hard-core bastards, who found nothing out of place with the use of the word ‘Japs’ to refer to the little sons of Nippon they had littered the floor of the Pacific with, as payback for the December 7th party they gave us in 1941. As late as 1974 you could still hear a Chief Petty Officer screaming at you in bootcamp to listen to him, because if you didn’t, the damn gooks would kill us. They taught me In those days, ‘insensitivity’ was not a word in a sailor’s lexicon. They remembered lost mates and still cursed the cause of their loss… And they were expert at choosing descriptive adjectives and nouns, none of which their mothers would have endorsed.


At the rare times you saw a Chief topside in dress canvas, you saw rows of hard-earned worn and faded ribbons over his pocket. “Hey Chief, what’s that one and that one?” “Oh Hell kid, I think it was the time I fell out of a hookers bed, I can’t remember. There was a war on. They gave them to us to keep track of the campaigns were in. We got our news from AFVN and Stars and Stripes. To be honest, we just took their word for it. Hell son, you couldn’t pronounce most of the names of the villages we went to. They’re all gee-dunk. Listen kid, ribbons don’t make you a Sailor. The Purple one on top? OK, I do remember earning that one. We knew who the heroes were and in the final analysis that’s all that matters.”


Many nights we sat in the after mess deck wrapping ourselves around cups of coffee and listening to their stories. They were lighthearted stories about warm beer shared with their running mates in corrugated metal hooches at rear base landing zones, where the only furniture was a few packing crates and a couple of Coleman lamps. Standing in line at a Philippine cathouse or spending three hours soaking in a tub in Bangkok, smoking cigars and getting loaded. It was our history. And we dreamed of being just like them because they were our heroes. When they accepted you as their shipmate, it was the highest honor you would ever receive in your life. At least it was clearly that for me.


They were not men given to the prerogatives of their position. You would find them with their sleeves rolled up, shoulder-to-shoulder with you in a stores loading party. “Hey Chief, no need for you to be out here tossin’ crates in the rain, we can get all this crap aboard.” “Son, the term ‘All hands’ means ALL hands.” “Yeah Chief, but you’re no damn kid anymore, you old fart.” “Shipmate, when I’m eighty-five, parked in the old Sailors’ home in Gulfport, I’ll still be able to kick your worthless ass from here to fifty feet past the screw guards along with six of your closest friends.” And he probably wasn’t bullshitting. They trained us! Not only us, but hundreds more just like us.