Chapter One: Dry Dock

My Dear Foster-Frame

I was Twenty-two and my Navy enlistment would have been coming to an end in seven months. Laid up in a Foster frame with three vertebrae crushed and fused together by the Docs at Tripler Army General Hospital, I was in dry dock. My boat, the Sculpin SS 191, was also in dry dock at Pearl Harbor Shipyards after a Westpac tour but I wouldn’t be going back to her. My luck had run out over a shuffleboard machine at the Sub-Base EM club. I’d just been busted down to Seaman from Torpedoman 3^rd Class and had been celebrating this misadventure with more than a few drinks.

My luck had run out on that shuffleboard machine but not because I didn’t play well. I knew every warp on the board of that damned thing:  I played good alright… too good for the squids off the Coral Sea. They met me on the way back to the barracks and worked me over real well: crushed my cheekbone and a few ribs. I’d flipped over a retaining wall to get away and discovered too late that it was at least twenty feet to the pavement below.  I remember shouting on the way down: “Oh, shit!” and thinking it is over… this is all I have to show for my life. I hadn’t those thoughts while I was getting the crap beat out of me by the Coral Sea skimmers. I was busy fighting for my hide. Had I known it would come to this I might have given them their money back. But I chose to make an unscripted exit: they took off, perhaps believing the fall must have killed me and that I could be more trouble than the few bucks I’d conned them out of was worth.

I lay there in that Foster frame after the Army surgeons knitted my vertebrae together and waited to be carted off for another surgery to patch my crushed cheekbone. One of the candy-stripers came by and gasped in horror: “My God, what happened to you?”

I didn’t really want to talk… I was a mess. The whole left side of my face was a swollen blob of black and blue bruised flesh. I could see through my one blurry eye that she was young, cute and innocent enough, “Oh, I got jumped by some skimmers.” I made part of that up because I barely remembered the fall and, vaguely, a shuffleboard game.

“Oh no, were they black?” She had such deep brown eyes. Her sympathy was enough to stir me through the fog of morphine and pain. I hated to disappoint her… I couldn’t remember what race the skimmers were at that time either. Racial tensions were high. It was 1969 and Black Power was combined with anti-war sentiments that divided race and rank in every branch of the armed services.

“Naw, they were white.” I watched, with my one good eye, her expression sour.

“That is horrid, to think, they were your own kind!” I could have laughed, had I not been so medicated, because she looked Hawaiian with a good amount of Africa in her Wahini blood… like it would have been better had they been black: And horrid? Nobody used words like that except in old movies.

“Naw, I already told you, they were skimmers.” I was getting annoyed now and hoped she would go away without me having to explain that I’d earned my dolphins as diesel-boat submariner and that a skimmer (any surface ship or crewman) was an entirely different species… Hell, we were practically in a completely different Navy than even Nuke Boats.

“By the way, how long does it usually take to recover from something like this?” I was unaware that candy-stripers were just volunteers and not nurses.

“I don’t know… a few weeks or maybe months?” She must have been in the dark about my crushed vertebrae. She just saw my smashed up face.

I added, “Oh, you do know my back is broken.”

“Oh, Jeeze,” her brow furrowed in deep thought; “how bad?”

“Three vertebrae, T-twelve to L-two: Crushed ‘em.” Oh Jeeze? An Andy Hardy movie at that!

“Oh, Jeeze,” she said it again… knitting her brows, “probably six to nine months.”

Whew, I thought; it is February and my enlistment is up in August… good, I won’t have to go back to the boat… hmmm; counting on my fingers, do nine months extend past my separation date?

Just before I was being prepped for surgery on my crushed cheekbone, a brass oak-leaf Major came into my cyclopean view. I saw, on the Major’s other collar, a brass cross. Oh shit, an Army chaplain. The candy-striper was at the door watching. It was mildly embarrassing that she had to be a witness as the chaplain attempted to do his job. He picked up the clipboard from the foot of my frame, looked at my chart for a name, and slipped right into the topic of his visit.

“Hello, Sean… er, Seaman McKee. Would you like me to pray for you?”

“No Padre… no thanks.” I was kinda playing for the candy-striper now but I meant it.

“Are you sure you don’t want to talk or anything?” the Padre was not used to being shunned, “A short prayer helps before surgery.”

“Helps what, Father? I don’t need help.”

“I have seen many healthy young men think the same as you, and sometimes…”

I’d heard this ministerial tone before, “I’ll take my chances.”

“… And sometimes they don’t make it.”

“Well, Padre, I don’t believe in your uniform or your God. Let me go to the grave on that!” On that I saw the girl in the candy-stripes turn away. The Major hesitated a minute, as though he were going to say something, but turned to go pray with someone more receptive to his calling.

I came out of the surgery alive in spite of my curses. It might have been worse. You never know when you go in for surgery… especially in an Army Hospital at a time when battles like Hill 937 were sending planeloads of 187^th Infantry and 101^st Airborne to Ward Ten in far worse straits than I was in. A little meat-grinder in South East Asia called Hamburger Hill was chewing up soldiers, young men like me, in ways that made me feel like my problems were insignificant.