A sailor sleeping between gigantic puffy bags of clean laundry. (image created by Canva from a prompt by the author)
It was the first time I heard a bosun’s whistle while lying on a rack aboard a U.S. Navy vessel. After we had been called to attention by the sharp sound of the whistle, it was our captain speaking—the commanding officer of the USS Saipan. Much to my surprise, he was talking about me.
He said, “You are seeing all these fresh new faces aboard the Saipan. You are finding them racked with you, and you will see them delegated to your duty stations as part of their education as future U.S. Navy officers. In particular, I wanted to call attention to the fact that one of these midshipmen is my nephew. We all know this first summer cruise for the 4th Class midshipmen is the one chance you enlisted men get to knock a future officer down to size. I want to remind you that these young men are here to learn, not to be tormented or to paint the same bulkhead and then chip off the paint over and over again all summer long. My executive staff and I have alerted everyone in a leadership position throughout the ship that we want these young people treated with respect. Give them meaningful assignments they can learn how to accomplish. Answer their questions. Get them excited about a career of Navy service. If I hear about any abuse of these young people, I will issue discipline accordingly.”
I was not the nephew of the ship’s captain—who never identified himself all that summer—but I was one of those interloping midshipmen the captain was talking about.
In a comic film, an audible groan would ripple throughout the ship, as every enlisted man came to grasp the fact that one of the traditional pleasures of summer—hazing and tormenting future Navy officers—would be absent from this summer cruise. In fact, I heard no response from the men racked near me in medical overflow, the surplus beds of the Navy’s largest oceangoing hospital.
Berthed around me were U.S. Marines detached to the Saipan for mock landing operations scheduled with various European navies in that summer of 1985. The Saipan was cruising in the Mediterranean Sea with ports of call scheduled for Trieste, Venice, Rome, and Benidorm, Spain. These Marines would not have known, the way the enlisted sailors knew, this summer ritual. Only 4th Class midshipmen, college freshmen, were classed as enlisted men on their summer deployments. This was these squids’ opportunity to see the Navy from the point of view of the men they would one-day lead—starting with that next summer’s deployment, when enlisted sailors would be saluting the 3rd Class midshipmen, not torturing them. This was the summer of making future officers burn to a crisp in the hot sun chipping paint off a bulkhead that they had just painted the day before.
The night before I heard that bosun’s whistle, when we boarded the Saipan in Trieste, I started getting to know some of these world-traveled U.S. Marines over poker games at card tables in medical overflow. That morning, none of them seemed to feel they had been denied any opportunity to torment young people who one day would command them.
My after-hours social time aboard the Saipan that summer would be spent with these Marines, who were racked in the extra beds in the hospital alongside most of us midshipmen. I remember those guys for the impromptu exhibitions of their amateur personal pornography portfolios, which many had pasted up in laminated photo albums.
Let me remind you this was the summer of 1985, long before the Internet made amateur pornography a household phrase and even opened up careers for people who shoot their own pornography starring themselves and their ephemeral partners.
Global human diversity was mostly unknown to me until I saw those portfolios handed around, and one had the opportunity to see—it would have been an insult not to look—a treasured portion of a colleague’s anatomy inserted into every kind of woman on the face of the Earth. There was a fascinating dynamic between monotony and diversity. In any portfolio, it was always the same man—or, rather, the same appendage of the same man—doing exactly the same few things with a woman, a naked woman, but always a very different naked woman. The location for the shoot shifted from Spain to Vietnam to the Philippines to Mexico to places I could not have placed on a map. These were U.S. Marines who had sailed on many ships on many tours of duty all over the world, and everywhere they went they found women willing to do these same few things with a strange man for a sailor’s wages.
Their portfolios were photographs, not moving pictures, but worldwide travel exposes sailors and Marines, not only to the sex workers of the world, but also to this wide world’s port bazaars, where a traveler can purchase the freakiest local version of anything, including porn videos.
Duty stations aboard ship tended to have one social space to congregate. Outside of those designated social spaces, the ship was hot as hell and loud as the gigantic constellation of machines it was, so there really was not much to do during your break other than sit in that cool break room with your colleagues. Every break room was dominated by a television set, and an informal rotation was enforced as different sailors got to pick the next videotape to play. Pornography was overwhelmingly the most popular choice.
Long before the Internet alerted a wide audience to the existence of deviant pornography, I was exposed to many images I could not stomach and would like to forget. I remember seeing the worst, which I will not describe, one week when I was billeted in engineering and the spaces outside the break room were unusually hot and noisy. Yet I would wander around the steamed-up dials and try to avoid getting myself mangled so that I could avoid seeing criminal acts displayed as entertainment.
My last detail for that summer was deck, an unskilled division where one did humble things like haul lines and manage garbage and indeed paint bulkheads and chip old paint off them. Each midshipman always had a running mate picked from every duty station, an enlisted man who could be trusted to treat a student with respect and teach him how to do things he would be able to learn in the one week we had for each assignment. My running mate in deck was an Oklahoma boy named Walt Sweet, a sweet name for a kind man who spoke with a soft drawl and told the plain truth when he spoke at all.
I remember one day when I was working a garbage shift with Walt Sweet and we took a break, and he said, “Everybody on this ship has two things in common: we’re all on this ship, and we all wish we was someplace else.”
After that reflective comment, I decided to talk to Walt Sweet about the disgusting scenes I had seen on my previous rotation in the hell of engineering. He listened to me, but did not seem to want to talk about it, which was not unusual.
The summer was winding down as the Saipan steamed toward Benidorm, a kind of Palm Springs of Spain, where Nordic women go to groove with swarthy Spaniards. Everyone aboard the ship knew that they would lose the midshipmen in Benidorm. Everyone knew our tour of duty was coming to an end. Maybe that was why Walt Sweet was unusually lenient if not downright negligent toward me.
The day after we worked that garbage detail, Walt Sweet said, “Come here, and I’ll show you where you can take a break if you don’t wanna be around all the other guys. It’s a place to take a longer break when you think you can get away with it, if your boss isn’t gonna come looking for you, and I ain’t gonna come looking for you.”
Walt walked me around some turns and twists in the ship that he illustrated with things that would serve as sign posts so I could find my way back. Deck also does the laundry, and Walt showed me a kind of way station in the laundry cycle. It was an enormous room, accessed by two opposite sides and filled with large puffy canvas bags of clean but unsorted laundry. Once Walt showed me the door and invited me to go in and get some sleep—something always in short supply aboard a Navy ship—I stepped inside.
Moving through these giant canvas bags of laundry to find a place where I might feel comfortable trying to sleep was the most uncanny physical experience I have ever had. All of my comparisons come from carnivals, like the ride they call the Moonwalk where the floor beneath you billows as you walk, making it impossible to walk in a straight line and frequently impossible to walk at all.
I felt transported and in a kind of dream long before I found a place where I thought I might rest my head long enough to fall asleep, until I was shifted again by what seemed to be the constantly drifting bags of laundry. Sleep would not come right away, a defining experience of life at sea. Added to the queasy motion of the ocean, the heat, and the noise, was a fearsome apparition that Walt had warned me about.
We were not the only people in on this secret, and it was not rare for a sleeping sailor—trying to hide in the soft warmth and the clean smell, trying to escape being conscious in the middle of the ocean—to open his eyes and be confronted by another sleeping sailor, opening his eyes and being confronted by another sleeping sailor opening his eyes. As bags of laundry were thrown in and pulled out and jostled around, it could happen that two secret sleepers would be washed up onto one another and have to offer their apologies as they tried to crawl away from one another across the billowing moon.
To this day, forty years later, I seldom sleep—or, especially, try to sleep when sleep is escaping me—when I do not think about sleeping on that billowing moon, where it was soft and warm and dark and as silent as it ever gets aboard a Navy warship. Nobody will ever find me in here. Nobody is going to come looking for me. I am sleeping on the moon.
