Navy Summary of Mishaps - First Edition

Note: I got this from ME, who is stationed at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, in Dayton, Ohio.

Jackie Gleason used to say that he drank because drinking took warts and moles off other people’s faces. What he failed to mention is the fact that booze, as a universal solvent, immediately liquefies all the cells and synapses in those areas of the brain having to do with judgment, coordination, and common sense; turns them to mush. Afterward, it’s like trying to cogitate with a cranium full of Cream of Wheat. Here are some examples to illustrate my point:

• Not Wanting To Let Go
• Coast Guards and Toughness
• Drunken Hunger and a Mad Dog
• Acrobatic Delusions
• DWA: Driving While Angry

Not Wanting To Let Go

An airman with a BAC (blood alcohol content) of 0.22 decided it would be the coolest thing ever if he jumped onto the back bumper of a departing Honda del Sol to see how long he could hang on to the trunk lid as it sped away. Got to give the kid credit for tenacity. He stayed with it till 50 miles an hour, when his fingernails failed structurally, at which time, parasitic drag dumped him onto the highway.

Coast Guards and Toughness

A pickup truckload of our Coast Guard brethren left a bar and headed down the road with four drunks in the cab and two more drunks passed out in the bed. (Yes, as it turns out, our friends in the funny hats are human, too.)

After they dropped their first shipmate off at home, they regained the interstate and were headed for the second guy’s house at about 55 miles an hour when, like a scene from “Night of the Living Dead,” one of the corpses in the back stood up, wobbled slightly, stepped stiffly over the tailgate and disappeared into the glare of headlights from oncoming traffic.

Suddenly everybody’s sober. They screech to a halt. Doors fly open. Everyone bails out and races back along the interstate in a frantic search for their buddy. But they can’t find him.

Wait! There he is! Face down in the middle of the interstate – backlit by the headlights of a car that has him bore-sighted!

Time compression kicks in as they all wave their arms in slow motion and scream (in an extremely low register), "NOOOOOOO!" Trying, to no avail, to ward off the inevitable. Thump-Thump. And the car sped off into the night – didn’t even slow down.

But you know what? The guy lived! I mean he was messed up big time, but he lived, which means, in the face of this new evidence, that I must retract my previous statement. Them Coasties ain’t human after all.

Drunken Hunger and a Mad Dog

As soon as a drunken Marine ditched his liberty buddies and headed back to the base, he spied a restaurant and thought he’s stop in for a bite to eat. The fact that the restaurant was closed didn’t slow the sergeant down a whit. This Marine wanted chow and no bars, no locked doors, and no alarm systems were going to stand in his way.

Perhaps it was the cold food or maybe it was the slow service, but something must have really irritated this guy because after he’d been in there a while he began to tear the place up.

It wasn’t long before the gendarmes, summoned by burglar alarm, arrived and tried some of their high-powered psychology to coax the Marine outside. But, he (totally impervious to logic) wasn’t having any of that and told the cops to take their best shot.

Well, in this case, the cops’ best shot happened to be a ninety-pound German Shepherd, and they told the hungry Marine that if he didn’t come out, they were sending Bruno in.

"Bring him on!" says the Marine. And so Chief Wiggims let slip the dog of war.

BA DA BING! The dog is on the Marine like white on rice and showing absolutely no respect for the sergeant. Actually, Bruno’s finding the sergeant to be a rather zesty morsel (kinda like a slider at Mid-rats), and the fact that the Marine decided to fight back only served to whet the dog’s already prodigious appetite all the more.

In the end, of course, the score was Drunken-Devil Dog - zero, Regular Dog - five. (Five being the total number of useless fingers dangling at the end of the sergeant’s right arm that – ever since that night – have refused to respond to his commands.)

Acrobatic Delusions

I always get burn severity messed up. Can’t remember if it’s third degree or first degree that leaves you looking like a burger that fell off the grille and lay unnoticed on the coals for a spell.

I will say this, however. I got this second degree burn stuff down pat, especially after I dumped boiling water and equally boiling coffee grounds on my hand one morning recently while trying to brew a cup of java while I was still asleep.

But that was small change compared to what a drunken seaman did not long ago. It seems that six beers and a couple shots of bourbon convinced this guy he was an acrobat. After ditching his buddies at the bar, our here made it back to the pier Ok. But there, the lure of fame and the challenge of the high wire were more than he could resist. So, instead of plodding drunkenly along on something stable and flat link the concrete roadway, this would=be Flying Wallenda jumped up on the CHT piping that ran parallel with the pier and began tippy-toeing along it’s length toward his ship. And he was lookin’ gooooood, beloved. Until, that it, he encountered a knot of pumps and valves that squirts a solution of highly caustic hypochlorite into the raw sewage. There, he stumbled and fell.

But, true to his calling, he wasn’t going down without a fight. He frantically grabbed for a handhold – anything to break his fall, and he snagged one! Unfortunately, what he snagged was one of those high pressure chemical lines which immediately popped out of its fitting and sprayed our hapless hero from head to toe with a caustic bath of searing hypo-chloride.

At the hospital they catalogued his misery as: second degree chemical burns of the groin, the abdomen, left thigh, right ear, left face and left arm. And, for good measure, a third degree burn on his inner right thigh that nearly fried his oysters and will require several skin grafts.

But I did get a chuckle out of the unbridled optimism of this report, which said that, after five days in the hospital and 35 days out of work, “No permanent disability is anticipated." Yeah, right.

I burned my hand two months ago and it’s still as pink as sunrise except when it turns purplish red in the shower and throbs like mad if I get it in warm water. Don’t let anybody fool you; this guy’s going to be in pain for a long, long time.

DWA: Driving While Angry

I read in the paper this week that Daimler-Chrysler has embarked on a program designed to provide job security for the entire traffic safety section of the naval safety center for a good many years to come. With the rollout of their new Dodge, V-10, pick-up truck, we enter a new era of potential disaster. When one considers that sailors in the past have actually managed to break telephone poles in half using just a motorcycle, the possibilities for carnage, mayhem, death and destruction posed by this new, 150-mile-an-hour, 4000 pound, unguided rocket in the hands of your average North American blue jacket are enough to boggle the mind.

Heaven knows they’re doing a more than adequate job with the tools at hand today:

A carload of sailors were on their way to a little weekend liberty, when the kid in the right seat spilled a drink in his lap and then turned and started ragging the driver about his erratic motoring skills. The driver barked back. So, in response, the passenger dumped what was left in his cup on the driver’s leg… you know, just to give him a feel for what it’s like to be facing a night on the town looking like you’ve recently lost control of your bladder.

This brought a heated retort from the driver, who totally failed to see the humor. At which time the passenger doubled up his fist and smashed it into the windshield (“Take that!”), and the driver responded by slamming on the brakes and skidding headfirst into a mini-van in the opposing lane of traffic.

At a party Saturday night I met a woman who teaches anger management to elementary school children. I found that highly amusing until she explained to me there is real value in early training for the still undeveloped infantile mind in the techniques for handling stress and managing anger. Maybe I’ll give her these guys’ address to see if she can hook them up with some kind of correspondence course. It couldn’t hurt.

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