Dixie Cup (Drop of a Hat)
30 June 2021 Wednesday Prose Poem: pretend you’re mad
That’s what we called our covers. Cover is a military term for hats that match our uniforms. Less frequently, we called them white hats. We never, ever called them just “hats”. I don’t know why we never ever did, but I do know that every Chief in the fleet was wired to lose their shit and uncork on us if we ever did, or if we ever let the so-called “barflies” wear them on a lark.
I know that military and nautical terminology were often important, or even critical to mission success — floor is deck, wall is bulkhead, ceiling is overhead, Vietnam was a conflict, not a war — but the whole cover-vs-hat thing always struck me as an odd hill to die on. As if that was the one thing keeping us from abandoning our old lives for a new one. Chiefs are weird.
I mean, whenever we had to purchase new covers from the Naval Exchange — which was often, due to rapid dinginess, or swift disintegration due to overbleaching to stave-off said rapid dinginess — they rang up on the register as “Hat, White”. It was a hat that happened to be white, resembling a dixie cup, right? If I’d stayed a sailor long enough to become a Chief, I imagine I’d be more annoyed by the dixie cup part.
