Skippy Eaters |
By Bob 'Dex' Armstrong |
|
Life
in diesel submarines could get very boring if you didn't stir the pot
constantly. To those folks who led normal lives it would be damn near
impossible to explain... But we fabricated major controversies To
compensate submariners for living in steel septic tanks like Aborigines,
the United States Navy decided to feed us like King Henry,
you know, in the movies they show King Henry the
Eighth... Big fat sonuvabitch... Always had this table piled high with
roast beef, haunches of venison... Loaded with everything, flagons of
wine... Big heavy goblets... Everybody digging in, eating with
their hands... Reaching across the table and spearing a leg of duck with
a dirk... Greasy beards... Wine dribbling off their chins. Laughing and hell raising
and tossing the bones over their shoulders to waiting dogs... The good
life. That was the boats, the last freebooting buccaneers. The
Navy fed us. Any bastard who rode smoke boats and doesn't say he
never ate better in his life is either a liar or a way beyond
redemption, unsalvageable whiner... And
we had the best cooks. We never told them that, because ragging
cooks was not only part of the unwritten code, it too, provided
great entertainment. You tell a cook that he was worth a damn and the
next thing you knew his head would get so fat you would have to Crisco
the bastard's ears to poke him down the after battery hatch. We
had the best. Rodney A. 'Rat' Johnson. He could have been the head
chef at The Waldorf Astoria. Loved Rat... We all did... We never
told him, but he knew. Once, saw the man absent mindedly pick up a
radish and a paring knife
and carve it into a perfect miniature rose, toss it to a mess cook and
say, "Beauty is where you find it, kid." All
of my memories of Requin are somehow linked with Rat... He refereed the
crew's zoo like the warden of the rat box, and fed us like kings. One
night we were jack-assign sea stores aboard the boat... Somebody tossed
us a box of powdered eggs off the truck. This booming voice yells,
"Throw that shit back in that truck, I ain't serving no gahdam
powdered eggs to no boat sailors." The
O.D. said ΓΆβ,¬Β¦ "Hold
up there ΓΆβ,¬Β¦ what 'll happen when we run out of eggs?" "You
let me worry about that sir, but I ain't usin' no damn frigging egg
dust, you can bet your ass on that... I wouldn't serve that fake shit to
a cocker spaniel." And
he never did. I yelled, "Give
'em
hell, Rat." And
he winked... "I'll
have chickens livin' in the gahdam ward room before you see egg dust in
my galley." We
ate better than the average blue jacket because the Navy damn near
doubled our per man ration money... And this allowed our cooks to buy
extra stuff at the base commissary. Official
Navy peanut butter came in olive drab green cans. It tasted like stuff
you would find between a hippo's toes... Evil stuff. So
one morning when Mother Rat was heading to the commissary to do her
little 'go to sea' shopping we said, "
Hey Rat get some damn decent peanut butter." "What
do you wayward children consider to be decent peanut butter?" That
is when it started and it was still being fought over when I left
the boat ΓΆβ,¬Β¦ "Peter
Pan!" "Skippy!" There
were two political factions on Requin. The 'Peter Pans' and the
'Skippy-eaters'. I was a Peter Pan. We were the intelligent
culinary knowledgeable connoisseurs of the finer things in life. The
'Skippy-eaters' were worthless idiots who had hemorrhoids for taste
buds. I wouldn't want to interject any personal bias into this raging
controversy or taint this objective history with the slightest hint of
prejudice but, anyone on the 481 who intentionally ate Skippy would
spread kangaroo crap on Ritz cracker. We
Peter Pans kept book on the Skippy eaters so we knew who they were so we
wouldn't run over them on the highway, late on a dark night, when they
were out eating run over dead skunks. To
this day I can't understand why we had Skippy eaters. I have tried to
forgive them but find it impossible. I hope that the nuclear boat force had the good sense to outlaw the degenerate practice of hauling Skippy to sea... This would be a step up in the history of undersea service... A giant leap for mankind. |