NO PIER ONE
Chapter Excerpt from the novel “Not Just A Job”
by Michael Long
Michael Long's Not Just A Job is the story of young Gary Thorpe's time aboard a US Navy ammunition ship in the 1970s. A quartermaster, his job is to steer and navigate the ship, but he learns quickly that being in the US Navy entails much more -- and much less -- than advertised. Authored by a former Navy quartermaster, Not Just A Job is sure to relate to anyone who has ever found himself in a situation less than he imagined.
The December morning sky was filled with black clouds. That would mean rain for sure in most places, but this was northern California. The bus slowed down and stopped next to the sign for Naval Weapons Station Concord. The base looked like a bigger version of the one in Seal Beach. I got off the bus and carried my sea bag toward the main gate. Two marines on guard duty looked at me.
“I’m reporting aboard an ammunition ship,” I said to the sergeant, “USS Okmok, AE-73.”
“Port Chicago Shuttle, over there,” he replied, pointing toward a parked gray jeep.
The guy sitting behind the wheel was a yeoman third-class, according to the crow on his sleeve.
“Heading for the Okmok,” I told him. “AE-73.”
He nodded and aimed his thumb toward the seat beside him. I got in, and we took off.
“THEY KEEP THE AEs AT PORT CHICAGO,” he yelled over the wind.
“HOW COME THEY DESIGNATE AMMO SHIPS AE?” I yelled back. “SHOULDN’T IT BE AS?”
“STANDS FOR ANOTHER EXPLOSION. THE OKMOK HAS GOT TO BE AT PIER TWO, THREE, OR FOUR.”
“WHAT ABOUT PIER ONE?”
“THERE IS NO PIER ONE.”
“WHY NOT?”
“FUCKIN’ AE BLEW UP.” He paused and looked at me. “RELAX, THAT WAS DURING WORLD WAR TWO.”
He was talking about the Port Chicago disaster. It wasn’t an AE that blew up. It was a cargo ship, the SS E.A. Bryan. Our instructor in quartermaster school, a first-class named Kelso, enjoyed telling me all about it when he found out I was assigned here. To make sure Kelso wasn’t laying it on too thick, I looked it up in the base library.
On the night of July 17, 1944, 320 sailors and civilian dockworkers were killed when the Bryan, which they were loading with bombs, exploded. Another cargo ship, the SS Quinault Victory, was moored at the pier alongside the Bryan after having taken on a load of fuel oil from the nearby Shell refinery in Martinez. The chain reaction created a fireball that lit up the night sky and threw white-hot debris some 12,000 feet in the air. Windows shattered on buildings as far as thirty miles away in San Francisco. The detonation registered at a magnitude of three-point-four on the seismograph at the University of California in Berkeley. The force of the blasts lifted the Quinault Victory out of the water. She landed 500 feet away, upside down and facing the opposite direction. The Bryan was vaporized. No identifiable remains of her were found. The Port Chicago disaster was the biggest loss of life on U.S. soil during World War II. Far more sailors died at Pearl Harbor, but Hawaii didn’t become the 50th state until 1959.
That’s why there was no pier one.
We drove past two ammo ships tied up at pier two, the Pyro and the Kilauea. The driver dropped me at pier three, where the Okmok floated at her mooring, her starboard side facing us. She was a haze gray monster almost two football fields long and eighty feet across. The number 73 was painted in white on each side of her bow. Hoses hung from her main deck, dripping rusty water into Suisun Bay. There were four pairs of kingposts on the forward deck and another pair on the after deck, with booms attached for cargo handling. A radio mast stood forward of the stack. Aft of the stack, I could see one of her two twin gun mounts. There was a row of windows at the top of the superstructure where the bridge was located. That’s where I would be working.
I hauled my sea bag up the brow to the quarterdeck. Three guys in dress blue uniforms were on watch. The officer of the deck was a chief radioman with four hash marks on his sleeve, one for every four-year hitch he’d served. He was maybe five-and-a-half feet tall, with malicious eyes and a .45 on his hip. I saluted aft toward the flag. Then, I saluted the chief.
“Request permission to come aboard.”
“Permission granted,” the chief said, returning my salute.
He examined the manila envelope I handed him, with my orders and service record, like he was reading bad news.
“Quartermaster Thorpe, huh?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I’m a chief, lad, Radioman Chief Hackburn. Don’t call me sir.”
“Okay, Chief.”
He took off his hat, ran a hand through his patchy red hair, and put his hat back on.
“Your uniform looks pretty sorry, Thorpe. What the fuck did you do, sleep in it?”
“Sorry, Chief.”
“Don’t be sorry. Just get your shit in one sock. Koslowski!”
“Yeah, Chief?” the junior OOD answered. He was a second-class machinist’s mate. Like the chief, he wore a .45 on his white duty belt.
“Call the bridge and tell Chief Lasko to send someone down here to get his new quartergasket, Thorpe. But first, call the ship’s office and tell them we need a new plan of the day on the quarterdeck. Someone spilled fucking coffee all over this one.”
Koslowski picked up the phone, dialed three digits, then said:
“The OOD wants a POD ASAP.”
“Estorga, get this man checked in,” Chief Hackburn said, handing my envelope to the messenger of the watch, a seaman with a short black beard. Instead of a .45, he carried a billy stick.
Estorga stepped into the quarterdeck shack behind a podium and looked at my orders.
“I need to put your name down in the deck log,” he said. “According to this, you’re a day early. You’re not supposed to be here until tomorrow. The ship’s office won’t file your records until the day of the arrival date on your orders, or after.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” I said.
“Yeah, well, welcome aboard. Don’t worry, man. I work in the ship’s office. I’ll make sure they get your records filed. Hey, it says here you’re from southern Cal.”
“Yeah.”
“Me, too, man, I’m from Whittier. Raul Estorga.”
“Gary Thorpe.”
“If you want to help out with gas money, I can give you a ride home on weekends.”
Koslowski stuck his head into the shack.
“Somebody’s coming to take you up to the bridge,” he told me as a food and coffee truck rolled up on the pier.
“Pass the word, Koslowski,” Chief Hackburn said, “the rolling gedunk is here.”
Koslowski picked up the microphone to the ship’s number one main circuit, 1MC, public address system and made an announcement:
“THE MOBILE CANTEEN IS ON THE PIER. THAT IS, THE MOBILE CANTEEN IS ON THE PIER.”
Chief Hackburn was busy for the next few minutes returning salutes from sailors as they stepped off the quarterdeck and went down the brow to buy snacks. A tall guy in dungarees approached us. He was at least six foot six, with blond hair. The name Stromsvag was stenciled above his shirt pocket.
“Hey, Stretch,” Estorga said. “The roach coach is on the pier. You fly, I’ll buy. Get me a pack of Kools and a Coke and whatever you want, buddy.”
“Gotta get back,” Stromsvag replied. “Southcott’s got a bug up his ass.”
“Sounds like a personal problem,” Estorga said.
Stromsvag looked at me.
“I’m Eric Stromsvag, but everybody calls me Stretch. Come on, let’s get you a rack.”
We walked past a couple of guys painting a kingpost. Stretch stepped through an open oval-shaped doorway into the superstructure. The threshold of the door frame was high, and the header was low. I lifted my feet to get over the bottom, but I forgot to duck and hit my head on the top.
“I had that problem when I first got here,” Stretch said. “Now, I move real slow.”
We climbed up a ladder to the 02 level, walked down a long passageway, and entered a berthing compartment not much bigger than a two-car garage. In the center of the compartment were two tables bolted down to the green tile deck and eight straight-backed chairs below an overhead hatch. A bright red butt-kit overflowing with cigarette butts and ashes sat on one of the tables. Another half dozen butt-kits were attached at various places along the bulkheads. The forward and aft sides of the compartment were lined with four aisles barely two feet wide. Each aisle contained racks stacked three high and six deep on each side.
“Quartermasters bunk over here,” Stretch told me. “This upper rack is empty since Thompson got discharged.”
There was maybe fourteen inches of space between the thin mattress and the fluorescent reading light on the overhead. The racks opened on hinges, like shallow coffins, to serve double duty as lockers. I took a combination lock out of my sea bag, opened the coffin locker, put my sea bag inside the upper rack, and locked it up.
“Who was that chief on the quarterdeck?” I asked.
“Hackburn,” Stretch replied, shaking his head. “He’s haze gray all the way. Don’t worry about him. He’s in our division, so he thinks he’s in charge of us, but we have our own chief. Just be glad you’re not a radioman.”
“Who’s our chief?”
“You’ll see.”
I followed Stretch up the ladders to the 06 level. We went through another low doorway. I ducked this time. We walked past the Combat Information Center (CIC), where two guys sat among radar scopes and transparent plastic status boards. At the end of the passageway, Stretch opened a door, and I followed him through.
The bridge was forty feet across. In the center stood the steering console, which included the ship’s wheel or helm, a gyroscope repeater, and the engine order telegraph also known as the lee helm. A brass binnacle with a magnetic compass inside stood just to the right of the console. In front of that was the row of windows I had seen from the pier. Voice tubes ran up the bulkheads, and exposed wiring ran across the overhead. Two watertight doors led to the port and starboard bridge wings. A door on the after bulkhead had a small brass plaque screwed to it that read: Chart House. Everything was painted the same shade of government green as a post office.
At the chart table to the left of the console stood a potbellied chief quartermaster. He was smoking a cigarette, and his brown eyes needed an alignment job. When he looked at me, I had the feeling he was looking at something behind me at the same time. His short-sleeved khaki uniform revealed faded green tattoos on both his forearms. On his right arm was an anchor with the letters USN across it; on his left, a rose over a curling banner that said Mom.
“Thorpe,” Stretch said. “This is Chief Lasko.”
“Glad to have another non-rate aboard, Thorpe,” the chief said. “Did you save all your notes from quartermaster school?”
“Sure did, Chief.”
“Good. Now, throw ‘em all away. AH HA HA HA HA HA!”
The chart house door opened, and a guy with a first-class crow on his sleeve came out. He had a quartermaster wheel insignia pinned to the front of his ball cap, a narrow black mustache, and a tattoo on his left hand with the word Alfonso.
“Is this our new guy, Stretch?” he asked.
“Yeah, Al,” Stretch replied. “Thorpe, this is Al Mendoza, our leading PO.”
As Mendoza shook my hand, the door we had come through opened again, and an officer stepped in from the passageway. He was under thirty, with reddish hair. He wore government-issue black horn-rimmed glasses and the single silver bar of a lieutenant junior grade on each of his khaki collar wings. He looked like a man with a lot on his mind, and none of it pleasant.
“This is Mr. Southcott,” Stretch said, “our navigator and division officer. Mr. Southcott, this is our new quartermaster, Thorpe.”
“I know who he is, Stromsvag,” Mr. Southcott replied. “I’m the one who ordered him from BUPERS.”
Mr. Southcott pronounced ordered “awdahd” and BUPERS “BUPAHS.” With his red hair and glasses, he reminded me of Woody Allen doing an impression of President Kennedy. That idea must have put a smile on my face.
“Is something funny, Thawpe?” he asked.
“No, sir.”
“What is yaw EAOS?”
It sounded like a pop quiz.
“My End Active Obligated Service, sir.”
Mr. Southcott looked at me in disgust.
“I know what it means, Thawpe. When is it?”
“July of 1977, sir.”
“Well, that’s something, at least. The last man we requested only had six months left on his hitch. Mendoza, let’s get Thawpe up to speed.”
Mendoza put his hand on my shoulder.
“The bridge is a showplace, Thorpe,” he said. “Stretch, let’s break my man Thorpe in right.”
“Let’s go,” Stretch said.
I followed him through the door to the starboard bridge wing outside. A thin black guy with a sparse mustache was scraping gray paint from a bulkhead.
“Thorpe, meet Cooley,” Stretch said. “Truly Cooley. Honest, that’s his real name, but we call him Cool. He’s got three brothers back home in Baton Rouge, Very, Really, and Damn.”
“That ain’ funny, man,” Cool replied. “Got a smoke?”
Stretch took a pack of Marlboros from his shirt pocket and put one in his mouth.
“Got a light?” he asked.
Cool gave Stretch a light with a Zippo lighter, and Stretch gave him a cigarette. Stretch took two wire brushes from a gear locker and handed me one. We all started scraping the bulkhead.
“Slow down, man,” Cool told me. “We jus’ gon’ be scrapin’ it again soon as we paint it.”
“The chief pulled that same dumb joke on me about shitcanning my notes from QM school,” Stretch said. “He says that to everybody.”
“Not me,” Cool said. “I never went to no ‘A’ school.”
“You’re a non-rate?” I asked.
“We’re all non-rates,” Stretch replied. “Anyone below E-4 is a non-rate. Cool here is an unrated non-rate.”
“I’m a striker,” Cool said. “Come up here from deck almos’ a year ago.”
A striker was like an apprentice, a guy who learned his rate by on-the-job training instead of ‘A’ school.
“Once we get underway, you’ll learn a lot from Al,” Stretch said. “Al’s a good guy. He’s pretty easy to work for. The chief can be a goofball, but he’s better than most of the chiefs.”
“He an alcoholic,” Cool added.
“What about Mr. Southcott?” I asked.
“He comes from some snobby family back east,” Stretch replied. “His great-grandfather or somebody was a charter member of the Boston Yacht Club. You don’t want to get on his bad side. He’s got an Adolf Hitler inferiority complex.”
“He a one-way muthafucka,” Cool added.
“Aren’t quartermasters supposed to correct charts and pubs in port?” I asked.
“Aw, naw, man,” Cool replied. “Al do that. We got 350 men aboard this muthafucka. Only take thirty-five or forty to run the ship. Gotta keep them extra hands busy scrapin’, paintin’, an’ scrapin’ again.”
“Al answers to the chief,” Stretch explained. “The chief answers to Mr. Southcott, and we answer to Al. Shit rolls downhill.”
“And we at the bottom of the hill,” Cool added.
“The first rule is: If it moves, salute it, and if it doesn’t move, paint it,” Stretch said. “This paint we’re scraping off, we just put it on last week.”
“Doesn’t make sense,” I said.
“Welcome aboard.”
They never mentioned scraping paint in those Navy recruiting ads.
Mr. Southcott opened the door and leaned outside.
“A little less chattah, and a little maw elbow grease,” he said. “Thawpe, yaw to repawt to the XO, Commandah Crookshank, for an orientation speech. His stateroom is in officers’ country, on the 05 level. Come back as soon as he’s finished with you.”
“Yes, sir.”
I found the door to officers’ country on the 05 level and went in. As I walked down the passageway, a guy in dungarees came toward me from the other direction. He had to be at least my age, but he looked too young to be in the Navy.
“Orientation?” I asked.
He nodded.
“I’m Crimmons.”
“Thorpe.”
“I just reported aboard today.”
“Me, too.”
We stood in front of a door with an engraved brass plaque that read: Lieutenant Commander Cranston Crookshank, Executive Officer. I knocked.
“Come in,” came a voice.
I opened the door. Mr. Crookshank sat behind a small desk. He had iron-gray hair, big ears, bushy eyebrows, and a horse face.
“Welcome aboard, men. Sit down,” he said, looking at some paperwork. “Normally, Captain Grant would be here, but we will be getting a new CO in the next few weeks, and Captain Grant is busy making preparations. Alvin Crimmons?”
“Yes, sir,” Crimmons replied.
“Snipe striker from Idaho Falls.”
“Yes, sir,”
“Never been there. And you must be Quartermaster Thorpe.”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“You look like a troublemaker, Thorpe.”
I felt it best to maintain silence. Mr. Crookshank cleared his throat and rattled off a speech that sounded like he’d said it many times.
“The Okmok is a Kilauea-class ammunition ship. She was named after a volcano in the Aleutian Islands. Her displacement is 10,417 long tons light and 18,088 long tons fully loaded. Her overall length is 564 feet. Beam: eighty-one feet. Draft: twenty-seven feet. Propulsion: three boilers, three steam turbines, and a single shaft. Maximum speed: twenty-three knots. Our complement is twenty-eight officers with air detachment, twenty without; 375 enlisted men with air detachment, 350 without. Our armament is four twin-mounted three-inch fifty guns and twelve fifty caliber machine guns. We can also carry two CH-46 Sea Knight helicopters, also known as whistling shitcans of death.”
Crimmons had his hand up.
“Yes, Crimmons?”
“Sir, what’s a three-inch fifty gun? I didn’t know we made a three-inch gun.”
“The three-inch fifty is not a three-inch gun, Crimmons. It fires a projectile that is three inches in diameter. To get the caliber of a big gun, you divide the barrel length by the bore. A three-inch bore times fifty caliber is a gun 150 inches or twelve and a half feet long. Make sense, Crimmons?”
“Yes, sir.”
Mr. Crookshank continued.
“The mission of the Okmok is to perform UNREPS, or underway replenishments. During RAS detail—that’s replenishment at sea—we steam alongside other line ships, sixty feet apart, and rig up gear to transfer ammunition, supplies, or fuel to the receiving ship. When BUPERS sends us our new CO, we will be going on REFTRA so we can perform SERVOPS during our upcoming WESTPAC deployment in accordance with COMSERVFLEET.”
A lot of military jargon comes from taking the first syllable off two or three words and stringing them together to form a new word, like BUPERS for Bureau of Personnel, REFTRA for refresher training, SERVOPS for service operations, WESTPAC for West Pacific, and COMSERVFLEET for commander of the service fleet.
“Any questions?”
“No, sir,” Crimmons said.
“Thorpe?”
“No, sir.”
“Crimmons, you are assigned to in-port duty section four. Your section leader is Lieutenant Kempton, our first lieutenant and third in command. Thorpe, you are in duty section six. Your section leader is Lieutenant Osterkamp, the gunnery officer. Is that clear?”
“Yes, sir,” Crimmons said.
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“That will be all.”
“Stromsvag,” Mr. Southcott said when I got back to the bridge, “take Thawpe down to the paint lockah and get some red lead primah and haze gray paint. And don’t get lost.”
“Aye aye, sir,” Stretch answered.
We walked down six flights of ladders to the main deck. A dozen deck apes were untangling lines. A second-class boatswain’s mate with a knife and a fid on his belt was supervising them.
“Hey, Smitty, give Evans and Salazar a hand there,” he said. “Hi, Stretch. Who’s the new guy?”
“Thorpe,” Stretch said, “this is Loophole.”
Loophole had the name O’Toole stenciled over his shirt pocket. There was a green tattoo on his right forearm of Popeye over the words Blow Me.
“No, don’t coil it, Smitty. That’s how it gets tangled,” Loophole said. “Fake it down. Don’t you guys know how to fake down lines? Lay it down in long bights. It takes up less space that way, and it runs easier. Gink, you and Thumbs get up here, and let’s show ‘em how. I might not be the smartest boatswain’s mate in the world, but if you guys got questions, and I don’t know the answer, I know where to find out.”
“I got a question,” said a lanky blond guy with his hand up. “Why me?”
“Yeah,” said another guy with the hairiest arms I ever saw. “Why Thumbs? He can’t hardly tie his own shoes.”
“Shut up, Doglike,” Thumbs said.
It wasn’t hard to see why they called him Doglike. Dark hair sprouted up out of his collar, and the hair on his arms was as thick as a dog’s coat.
“He ain’t much with a cutting torch, either,” said a squatty guy with curly hair and dark sunglasses.
Everybody laughed.
“Knock it off, Bootleg,” Loophole said. “Get up here, Thumbs.”
“Let’s go,” Stretch said, and we walked toward the bow.
“What was that guy saying about a cutting torch?” I asked.
“That was Volker,” Stretch replied. “They call him Bootleg. He was talking about last week. A door got jammed below decks. Chief Skinner told Thumbs to get an acetylene torch and cut it open, but the drifty motherfucker went to the wrong door. He tried to cut open the door to the master-at-arms’ office, but, instead, he welded it shut. Needler was stuck in there for hours.”
“Who’s Needler?”
“The master-at-arms.”
When we got to the forecastle, Stretch grabbed a dogging wrench, a piece of pipe used to lever the long-handled fittings or “dogs” that sealed off watertight doors. He gave a few taps to a steel door with the words Paint Locker stenciled on it. The door opened slowly. A droopy face poked out of the darkness.
“Stringbean,” Stretch said, “you’re gonna die in there with all those paint fumes.”
Stringbean looked like he just woke up. He wore a dirty white hat that was too big for him and paint-spattered dungarees. He was as bony as an x-ray.
“What d’ya want?” Stringbean asked. Behind him were shelves filled with paint buckets and square cans of thinner.
“We need some red lead and some haze gray.”
“Got a chit?”
“No, but I’ll go get one if you want. I’m in no big hurry to get started.”
Stringbean smiled, but his eyes stayed gloomy.
“Here ya go,” he said, handing us two buckets of each.
Stretch took two, and I took two, and then we headed back across the main deck to the bridge. “Stringbean’s from somewheres in Nebraska,” Stretch told me. “Needler had guys following him around to find out where he was getting his drugs. It took them two weeks to figure out that Stringbean is just like that all the time.”
This was not what I signed up for. I was beginning to suspect my Navy recruiter had not been completely honest. I liked boats. I could sail before I could drive. I wanted to travel. Those had been my reasons for joining the Navy. They already seemed ridiculous.
I didn’t know it then, but I hadn’t seen anything yet.
Mr. Long is a former Navy quartermaster. He has a BA in English from California State University, Long Beach. Not Just a Job is his first novel.