We Were Young... Long Ago

by Bob 'Dex' Armstrong, a "After Battery rat" aboard USS Requin (SS-481)

One of the great things about crew reunions is the opportunity to
rekindle associations with old shipmates and dredge up long forgotten
memories of days when no one worried about the future because
'tomorrow' always took care of itself. It always did, and we all
planned to marry beautiful girls who would never grow old and would
live forever. Boat reunions have a way of torpedoing that horseshit.
The wives have kept their youthful good looks, but your old shipmates
have re-ballasted and look like they missed a few trips to the yard.

So what you end up with are a bunch of old coots who spend a helluva
lot of time tossing down beer and saying stuff like, "Hey, you
remember that kid from New Jersey? Jeezus, can't think of his name...
The little skinny kid... Electrician... The guy who drove that
Mercury with more Bondo patches than original metal... Yeah, that's
the one! The kid who left a present he bought for his mom in some
gin mill in Hamilton and jumped out of the liberty launch to swim
back and get it... Yeah, and he turned up at morning quarters soaking
wet and smiling like he had good sense, holding up a water-soaked box
of stupid earrings..." "That's the idiot... Can't remember his
name... We called him 'Sparky'... Good kid... Always good for
a fiver 'til payday."

That's the only immortality worth a damn... Ol' smokeboat lads
remembering you were a good boat sailor and a fine shipmate. Hell, we
were all idiots... No sonuvabitch who could shuffle a full deck would
intentionally crawl into something equivalent to eighty oil drums
welded end to end just for the privilege of watching mites do
acrobatic tricks in his breakfast cereal. We never gained the level
of sophistication that other folks who had far less international
travel experience, gained.

Take wine, for example. Most of the stuff we got wrapped around had
aluminum screw tops, was less than six months old and tasted like the
byproduct of some industrial chemical process. Nobody ever had a
corkscrew... If the jug had a cork, you drove the sonuvabitch down
with the blunt-ended blade of an electrician's knife and watched it
snorkel around in there 'til you drained the contents.

We never knew there were things running around in the world known as
'communicable diseases'... There were always a couple of duty
containers of distilled spirits being passed around at every fleet
landing in the wee hours. Didn't even matter what boat you were
riding... Only qualifications were Dolphins and a mouth.

"Hey buddy... Have a drink!"

Bleary-eyed bastards heading back to the boats and weird, no-name
booze in flat pints being killed and tossed off the pier.

How many of you reading this inane stuff ever saluted the tender
quarterdeck with a flat pint of distilled spirits tucked in the rear
of his blues, up under his jumper? Come on now, that couldn't be
Requin-specific.

How many guys who had the duty ever shared a cup of coffee topside
with a returning shipmate, that had been doctored up with something
he picked up 'on the beach', that resembled paint remover or bore
solvent? Anyone giving a negative reply will grow a Pinocchio nose.

One benefit the nuke navy has that we never had is the Surgeon
General's Warning... In our day, stuff never came with "This shit
will kill you..." on the label. Life was a crap shoot... The way you
found out stuff would kill you was, you died. The smokeboat lads
drank stuff the government wouldn't let 'em make today.

And another thing... Today, everyone is worried about the effects of
second-hand smoke. Holy mackerel! I've seen times when we were
buttoned up, making turns on the battery and the cigar and cigarette
smoke was so gahdam thick, you could hardly see the needles in the
shallow water gauges. The only times it cleared up was when the air
got so damn dead it wouldn't support combustion and you couldn't
light a match.

The Navy in its infinite wisdom, installed a circulating air system to
make sure the entire crew could share and partake in the joy of
floating atmospheric airborne crap. A cook could bust a blue egg on
the grill and in 30 seconds, every poor bastard in every compartment
got to share the unique olfactory stimulation with the rest of his
shipmates.

There was so much junk floating around in the air inside of an
operating diesel boat, it is a wonder our air compressors didn't spit
out plywood.

At reunions, you recall all that stuff with men you shared it all
with... No one else would believe it and if they did, wouldn't care.
That is why writing this junk has been so much fun.

It is a shame no one with proper skills and the gift for making things
socially acceptable could have recorded our history. It was a special
time, but we went from World War II to the atomic era and nobody took
the time to chronicle the twilight years of the combustion-powered
submersibles. I guess folks could make a point out of the fact we
never did anything spectacular... Never pulled any rabbits out of
magic hats or pulled off the kind of stuff Tom Clancy writes about.

Was riding big ugly stuff, displacing salt water, fouling fishing
nets, wearing out bar stools, scaring hell out of marine life, and
playing ASW target all we were good for?

Well, we were there. Nobody came to get us... No one had to claw-
hammer us out of society and force us to do what we did. We
volunteered and it was rough duty... That's a fact. We made our
equipment serviceable, did our job and were a proud bunch... We
served with men we came to deeply respect.

It would be nice to be able to have a chronicle of those years as a
tribute to the happy-go-lucky days before sedate professionalism
gobbled up the life we lived. Now, the only folks we can share our
times with are old barnacle butts and broken down barmaids... And
guys with computers you never can share a bucket of suds with. Damn
shame.

It was all so long ago. We were young... That was all there was to
it... We were young.

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