Veteran Stories: When Salty Language Comes Ashore
In honor of Veterans Day, we’ll be sharing some of our favorite veterans’ stories. StoryWorth is the best way to privately share and record your family’s stories, and we’re offering 6 months free for all veterans, active service members, and their families so these memories can be preserved. This story is shared with permission from Axel Baum, father of our CEO Nick Baum, and Lieutenant in the Navy from 1952 to 1954.
My ship in the Navy, the USS Cambria, was an APA (APA 36) — an amphibious Attack Transport, personnel — which was a fairly big ship on a freighter-like hull, but with a lot of communications equipment and armament. It didn’t go on land itself, but carried a bunch of smaller landing boats, about 24 (I think), both smaller LCVPs (troops and light vehicles) and larger LCMs (tanks and heavier vehicles), which had ramps in front and were built to run up on the beach and spill out their contents. Our ship was also a flag ship, carrying a Commodore, and coordinating a flotilla of other ships.
In the course of an amphibious landing, the boats are lowered offshore, and their crews and the troops clamber down landing nets (an adventure in and of itself in rough seas); the boats then circle around and form up into waves, around ten or twelve boats in a wave, before heading for shore; a couple of miles away, at a given time/signal. The timing is critical; the boats must reach the shore at exactly the right moment when the big ships’ offshore bombardment stops, not too early so as to get into the bombardment, not too late so the defenders can get their heads back up. A matter of seconds.
One of my duties aboard was landing craft control officer, down in the boats, in charge of one or two waves. We were going through landing exercises with other ships off Virginia Beach. The signal came, my two waves peeled off and headed for the beach, with me carefully looking at my watch and getting instructions via radio (headset and mike). Then the wind started to blow, the seas built up and boats began to straggle and separate. We had easy-to-see hand signals, but with boats bouncing around, it was necessary to yell and shout as well, using a megaphone.
Now, sailors in general are not known for polite language, and on shipboard that gets worse. Nouns are frequently — and needlessly — accompanied by colorful (often completely inappropriate) adjectives. Even more so in moments of stress, or difficult conditions. I was no exception, and my shouted instructions were heavily punctuated with (blank) phrases.
Any way, we managed to keep the boats more or less together, hit the beach on time, and completed the landing successfully (I hate to think what it would have been like if real people had been shooting at us, but….).
When I got back to the ship, feeling pleased, the Chief Radio mate met me, and said the Captain wanted to see me right away. Up to the bridge I went. There the Captain and the mate showed me the radio transcripts from the landing — and I suddenly saw all my shouted instructions — nothing blanked here — in black and white. Then they showed me a flow of messages, from taxis, police, and other local radio users, complaining about abusive language on the network. At last I understood: my throat mike (for communication back to the ship) had jammed open, and after that all my shouting , adjectives, adverbs, and all, had flowed out in public. What was worse, apparently our battle frequency was the same as many local commercial or service frequencies. I had been very, very public.
The Captain tried to be severe, started to chew me out, but then couldn’t quite continue without starting to laugh; I was a celebrity on board for days…
