Fire In the Hole
My Darkest Days as a Sailor
My first close encounter with my own mortality occurred when I was 19, on my first ship in the Navy. I was just about two thirds of the way through a six month tour on the USS Stribling, DD-867. The Strib was an old gearing class Destroyer, a vintage WWII leftover. You could tell she had once been a proud ship, but her better days were well behind her by the time I made her acquaintance.
She had just returned from an extended cruise when I boarded her the previous November. I can’t remember if they’d been to the Mediterranean, the Red Sea, or both. I heard a lot of sea stories, that’s for sure. I also kept hearing we were going to be heading back out to sea in a few weeks, but that cruise never happened, during the six months I was aboard. It was very frustrating. The only place we ever sailed was up the St. John River to the Jacksonville shipyard’s dry dock, where they performed some repairs to the hull.
My close encounter happened in early March of 1974. By then, I was just counting the time until I got off that old Tin Can. I hadn’t exactly won many friends, nor influenced my shipmates. It seemed that trouble followed me from the day I boarded the Strib, until the day I just barely made it off her. They were my darkest sailor days, despite being ported in the Sunshine State.
Unbeknownst to me at the time, I was engaged in a battle of my own that I could never win. I had enjoyed my first five months in the Navy, especially the three months since I got out of Boot Camp. I’d spent most of my time at Machinist’s Mate A School in Great Lakes, Illinois, either drunk, high, both, or hungover. I’d still managed to pass the school — it really wasn’t that difficult — then I’d spent my entire three weeks of leave between the end of A School and reporting to my ship, so drunk I had no recall of five days in the middle of it. I literally lost five days in there.
I would later discover, to my horror, that I’d gotten engaged during that “blackout”. What?!?! It was crazy. By the end of that leave, I reported to the Strib right at the start of one of the worst hangovers I’d ever know. It was bad. With it came a terrible depression, which was my state of mind when I arrived on that ship.
Oh, I should also mention, I was just a tad arrogant, and had a way of pissing people off without even trying. Being from Pittsburgh, where I’d spent my first 17 years, then had lived a year in Connecticut before I joined the navy, I had never been south of Virginia Beach before. I’d had no interaction with southern culture in my life. I was about to get a crash course in it.
There weren’t many guys on that ship from north of the Mason-Dixon line when I was on her. Between my drunken arrogance, my “Yankee”-ness, and my being a “Nuke Puke”, I had three strikes against me from the jump. It all went downhill from there.
I got into a fight with the other “nuke puke” in my engine room, a guy much tougher than me who I’d gone through A School with, a nice kid from Georgia named Gary. I’d gotten in his face one too many times, and he just hauled off and sucker-punched me right in the mouth. I remember he was holding me by the neck above a ladder to the lower level of the engine room, demanding an apology for whatever crap I’d been giving him. He’d simply had enough of me. Fortunately, he didn’t drop me. One of the veteran sailors in the engine room intervened and literally talked him down from that ledge.
I eventually fell in with some Jesus freaks on the ship, led by a guy who was a reformed drug addict who’d found Jesus. He tried helping me out. I was just desperate enough for a friend at that point, I went along with the bible studies and the friendly hand he and his bible study group had reached out to me, but I was not really sincere. I eventually even alienated those guys, when I couldn’t take the religious stuff anymore. I was one hot mess.
Louie was a cool cat from the Pittsburgh area, and he eventually became one of my few friends on that ship. He was musically inclined, so we discovered a mutual appreciation for good music. I once sang the Who’s song “Behind Blue Eyes”, a song I could really relate to, while we stood watch in Main Control in the forward engine room.
Louie invited me to a Joe Walsh/Marshall Tucker concert in Jacksonville. I’d been clean and sober for close to a month and was feeling much better, mentally and physically; but when someone offered me a hit of windowpane acid on the way to the show, I took two! I really needed to get high by that point.
Taking the two acid hits was not a good idea. I wound up walking around the outside of the concert venue, certain I was about to melt. A very nice nun was manning a table out there — I have no idea what she was doing out there — and she talked me down from my fear of melting. I went back into the Scope and watched the show, which was fabulous.
It wasn’t long after that concert that my brush with my own mortality happened. I was down in the lowest level of the engine room, where excess water and leaking oil and JP-5 wound up mixing together in the bilges. I was down there dipping the oil out of the bilges, filling up buckets with it, for disposal.
I was still one of the newer guys in the engine room, and we always got assigned such jobs. I also wasn’t much of a machinist mate, despite my E-4 rank, so I couldn’t really be trusted with some of the more complex jobs in that engine room. My lack of attention while I was drunk and high at MM A school was now coming back to bite me.
All of a sudden, I heard a lot of commotion from up above, lots of footsteps on the deck plates, something that I couldn’t make out came over the P.A. system, and alarm bells went off. I dropped my bucket and made my way up the ladder. As I lifted the deck plate at the top of the ladder to the main level, all I could see was black smoke, everywhere. It smelled awful.
I made my way over to the nearest ladder out of the engine room, just feeling my way to it, as I couldn’t see a damn thing in front of me, for all the smoke. I quickly scrambled up the ladder, only to discover the hatch at the top was secured and wouldn’t turn. Damnit!
Back down into the hot cauldron I descended, and began feeling my way over to Main Control and the other ladder out of the engine room. I ran into a couple other sailors on the way, my buddy Louie and a kid named Manny, from Tennessee, I think. “Good, I’m not alone”, I thought to myself.
We got over to the other ladder. Louie led the way up, followed by me in the middle, and Manny below me. At this point, breathing was impossible, as the thick, black, acrid smoke would sear your lungs if you tried, and the whole place was heating up from wherever the fire was coming from.
Our progress out of there was impeded by another locked down hatch! “Oh, man, we are SCREWED!” I thought, only in slightly more colorful language. Louie started banging on the hatch, and I started yelling, “Open up, open up, let us outtahere!”, that black smoke coming in and scorching my lungs each time I opened my mouth. We knew we didn’t have much longer down there before we’d be overcome by that smoke, and most likely the fire that was producing it.
Then I heard one of the welcomest sounds I have ever heard. Someone up above was turning that hatch. We were going to make it out after all! As soon as it opened up, a welcome rush of fresh air hit me in the face, but before I could enjoy it, a “whoosh” sound was followed by a flash, and then we were all engulfed in flames. I don’t know if the force of the combustion that happened when the air met the toxic gases propelled me up through that opened hatch, or if I leaped out of there. All I know was my oil-soaked coveralls were now on fire, I was rolling around the floor of the passageway above, and fellow sailors were beating me with blankets, trying to extinguish the fire that was now me.
My memory of those moments may be a bit distorted, because I relived them for many years in dreams, afterward. It would be much later that I would learn the term “post-traumatic stress” and realize I probably suffered through that for some time after that incident. At the time, I only knew that I was lucky to be alive, and was one grateful sailor for whoever opened that hatch, and for whoever extinguished the fire that was burning on my coveralls.
I was really lucky. I only lost half of my mustache, and most of my hair. The burns weren’t too bad, aside from the hair loss. Manny was not as lucky. He had some serious, third degree burns on his arms and legs. I think Louie got it about the same as me. I would later learn that the fire had begun in the Boiler Room, next door to the Engine Room, and had spread into the Engine Room via the ventilation ducts. They had begun to tow the old Strib out to sea, afraid that the fire would lead to an explosion, since they had just recently re-armed all the guns and rockets on the ship. They didn’t want to cause a chain reaction with all the other ships at the dock.
The rest of my time on that ship was spent desperately hoping that my trouble while onboard — I’d been to two Captain’s Masts and had not been a model sailor, by any stretch — would not prevent me from getting into Nuclear Power School, which was to be my next duty stop. The incident in the Engine Room gave me extra motivation to make it through that intensive training, as I never wanted to go through anything like that again.
When I got to Nuke school, I had the worst score out of a class of 300 on the Physics aptitude test they gave us upon arrival. The captain of the school called me in to let me know I was being let out of the program, and would be returned to my ship. The good news was, I would get the extra two years knocked off of my enlistment, and would only have to serve four years.
But I begged him to give me a chance, I would work my ass off, anything but being returned to that old, falling apart Tin Can. He let me stay until our first real physics exam, after three weeks of classes. If I passed that, I could continue. If not, I was going back.
I was one of only three sailors in the class who aced that exam. I got to stay, and become a nuke puke, for real. It would take a few more years before the bad dreams ceased, but at least I was free from the fear of having to go back to that ship. Thank God!
Epilogue: I did wind up only serving 4 years of my 6 year enlistment, after all. My second ship, a nuclear guided missile cruiser, wound up going dead in the water, in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, when both reactors scrammed within 10 minutes of each other, and it took hours to get them back on line. When we got back from that Med Cruise, I went AWOL for sixty days, with the hopes of getting transferred to another ship, hopefully on the west coast.
Instead, I was offered an honorable discharge, so I took it. Two months later, I took my last drink. On March 17, 1980, I smoked my last joint, and have been clean ever since, coming up on 40 years in recovery.
The bad memories of that fire have faded with time, and I am able to remember some good times on the Stribling, and especially some of the friendships I made during those 6 months. There were actually quite a few upstanding sailors on that proud but falling-apart Tin Can. Today, I am proud to have served on her.
