COMSUBBBS
Posts: 3202
Location: Alexandria, Virginia | Subject: Revisiting HOLLAND CLUB subject
Just got off the phone with another old wornout smokeboat rider...an old raggedy ass, former leper colony mayor who presently lives in a hollow tree somewhere in the vicinity of Niantic, Connecticut....We discussed plans for a joint submission of our HOLLAND CLUB adoption papers in two years. We also talked about why being offered the organization's arthritic handshake is so meaningtful and important to us. John. was a far more valuable contributor to the nation's underwater defense than I was....I was more or less similar to a skin erruption on the fanny of the Goddess of the Main Induction. Living in Hogan's Alley in the After Battery of a WWII vintage antique,"Take er down to six-five feet and report your leaks" class Tench boat, cracking the whip on the Topside Gang and flirting with skin cancer in the shears for several years, doesn't get your name on Cold War monuments or dates with debutants. Yessir, we're going in together....like Cisco and Pancho, Red Ryder and Little Beaver, The By-Yourself Ranger and Tonto and like Butch Cassidy and that Sunshine fellow. We are going to eat a steak the size of a tractor tire and toss down a couple of buckets of suds and break the tape that allows you to enter the Hall of the Tribal Elders and park your hippockets in front of the eternal flame of the fire of the Tribal Hogan with the old dinged up, bent out of shape, full of fleas sonuvabitches who rode the submersible iron of yesteryear....We are going to swap lies, laugh and joke, and spend our remaining years of our TAD assignment to this planetary duty-station pissing against the wind with our own kind.....When we get in, there will still be old living boatsailors who remember crawling up on sweat soaked flashpads, virtually percolating with perspiration of a previous occupant who, because of battery water requirements hadn't been next to soap and water for 15 days...Men who whittled the green fur of progressive putrification off baloney, thus surgically removing repulsive appearance from one's mid-rats....Men who wandered around in the fog of air produced by a sanitary inboard vent...Men who laid in a top rack and stored books found on the Catholic League of Decency banned list, above the trans-compartment interior ventillation lines...poked cigarette butts up the hole in the Vent Operating Gear handles and scratched their athletes foot, split toed on bunk chains....Men who stood winter topside watch in pourous plywood shacks where in thirty minutes you could actually feel large chunks of ice forming in your circulatory system....Men who remember heavily tattooed, hairy chested E-8's, wearing CPO hats with verdigris green insignia and covered with hydraulic oil stains...and using the vocabulary of a whorehouse parrot roamed the passageway yelling "Turn To, You worthless, good-fer-nuthin' bastards." Yessir, we'll be rubbing elbows with men who jackassed Mark 14's, and 16's into the tubes like the magnificent giants who whipped Hirohito's fishhead eaters and came home wearing fully loaded Submarine Combat Patrol Pins....We will be hobnobbing with men who, when they saw a platter of fried SPAM knew immediately that the duty cook had screwed up the evening meal....Men who parked their butts on air expulsion freckle-makers and made grocery contributions to fish population of the North Atlantic.....Men who knew the names and bust sizes of 30-40 barmaids and had left beer mug rings on tables in places that would have given their dear mothers heart attacks and their hometown ministers the subject for five or six hundred sermons....Men who have slept in hundreds of Greyhound stations covered with their peacoats and with their heads resting on their AWOL bags....Men, whose only recruitment incentive was the honor of wearing jumpers and bellbottoms that had only known an undefeated Navy....and being given the opportunity to earn Dolphins and eat at the same tables, sleep in the same bunks and go to sea in the same boats, as their heroes. Men whose only knowlwdge and extremely limited understanding of nuclear propulsion came from reading POPULAR MECHANICS while waiting for a 65 cent tender haircut and watching Mister Wizard on television. Men who formed "ship's company" families that would last a lifetime....Men, who when they took their first steps on the road to a seat by the HOLLAND CLUB council fire...were young, full of piss and vinegar, twenty feet tall, bulletproof, would live forever and couldn't see the future beyond next Wednesday....and getting a welcoming handshake and a seat by the fire is what me'n the Cardnal of 40 School Street can't wait to experience. DEX |
Revisiting HOLLAND CLUB subject
