Kid, Candy Store and a Spiral

Shortly after my 21st birthday, I started my new and official life at the Subic Dispensary on a Monday morning in October 1969. At my first morning muster, which was held in back of the dispensary, I didn’t know anyone. I was the only junior person there who’d served in Vietnam. Everyone else had come from CONUS (continental United States). At one time or another they all asked about the Shithole experience, and I just let them know how lucky they would be to avoid that place and let it go at that.

There were other enlisted men: at least four 3rd class petty officers and several Hospitalmen (HN). I was an E-4, and they were E-3. (E stands for enlisted and the number indicated rank number or pay grade.) There were two HM2’s (E-5). Walt Lavender is the only one E-6 or HM1 that I can remember. He was the X-ray technician who Lt. Crumbly wanted to gain experience as a Leading Petty Officer (LPO). He made an excellent choice as a LPO because he was an uncaring and insensitive asshole. I learned a lot from him: “Here are the rules. Follow them to the letter and everything will be good. Deviate one step and you’ll know how the crew of the Indomitable felt about John Claggart, Billy Budd’s nemesis.”

So, other than working with a class-A asshole, I was excited to be there since they were a mostly friendly lot, professional and fun to be around.

The clinic was a busy one. I forget how many patients a day went through there, but we started at 0800 hours. We had a one hour lunch if the morning patient load was completed, and then were back to it at 1300 (1pm) until securing and setting the watch at 1600 hours (4pm), five days a week. There were three doctors, two of whom worked their asses off. The other one was the Senior Medical Officer. He saw patients when he could or got around to it.

The patient load was filled with fleet sailors who had aches, pains, pilonidal cysts (bad personal hygiene around the bum hole where the poop that gets missed when wiping and not washed off during a shower would form a cyst around the tail bone, or coccyx), hemorrhoids, food borne illness, and just about any ache or pain.

The venereal diseases were so prevalent that there was a special clinic just for those alone. That clinic was full every day. We all had a turn working there, interviewing the sailors, a never-ending task, revealing the stupidity of drunken sailors and Marines. I would love to share some stories, but it’s just not the same as talking to a contrite person whose only concern is to not grab a pipe when they stand in front of a urinal. Then again, there was one sailor who’d had a circumcision due to health reasons (he couldn’t keep it clean due to overuse) but couldn’t wait the ten days for the surgical site to heal before having sex with a street hooker. He wound up tearing the stitches and got clap. He got his money’s worth for sure.

The stories were all fairly similar. The description of the prostitute was almost always the same — petite, black hair (long/short), brown skin and spoke English with an accent. But she looked so nice, she said she loved me, she said I had a great personality or peso-nality.

All E-5 and below were assigned to a duty section, and every six days we stood duty, making ambulance runs on and off base (we had a civilian driver for the off-base runs), treating any urgent medical conditions, and suturing wounds. Whoever walked in the door walked out after having been treated by whoever was sober enough to take care of them. The graveyard shift came on at 2200 hours (10pm) until 0600 in the morning. We did that shift for thirty days. Some wanted it longer in order to avoid supervision and the more strenuous responsibilities and training, but the longest I remember anyone getting it was for sixty days. No one was allowed to hide from good ole Wally Lavender for too long.

The corpsmen from the clinic were also assigned to Grande Island Recreation Center for a week at a time. Grande Island was at the mouth of Subic Bay. The gun emplacements as well as a spiked Naval Gun were still there from prior to WWII, but the Island was transformed into a nice beach resort with cabanas, a club house and, of course, a bar. The Naval Station supplied a Master at Arms, usually a 2nd class petty officer, and the clinic provided an E-4 or below corpsman for a week at a time. God I’m telling you only a fucking idiot could fuck this up. (I didn’t, and no one I knew did.) We could swim all day or laze around in a hammock waiting for someone to come to us for medical treatment. It was mostly treating the feet of those who’d stepped on a pop-top beer tab from an imported American beer. (Some dumbasses didn’t like the local San Miguel.)

I encountered few real emergencies: one guy broke an arm falling out of a coconut tree, while another broke his ankle while jumping from rock to rock along the beach, not to mention the occasional drug overdose. There were also instances where a few of the girls from town who the guys brought out with them would get drunk and the guys didn’t know how or didn’t want to take care of them. I still managed to keep a buzz on for a week, just a buzz mind you. I only pulled this duty for that one week, but it was a memorable one.

Gilligan on his own little island paradise.

I spent most of my time working and learning the X-ray department. Romeo was an excellent tutor, teacher and x-ray technician.[1]He taught me a lot, but I was a bit of a wanderer.

My mind wandered a lot as well, and being a good alcoholic, I was a hard worker who also did good work and overachieved a bit. That way people (except HM1 Lavender) forgave me my minor hiccups like showing up late for work due to my hangovers from hell or leaving work a bit early — those things that alcoholics tend to do.

The X-ray department was a great place for a good alcoholic to hide. I got to spend a lot of time in a dark, air-conditioned room. There were old manual processing tanks that weren’t being used since we had an automatic processor, so I found a mattress that was meant for stretchers and put it on top of the tanks and made myself a bed out of that. When things were slow, I crawled up there and caught up on my sleep for the night to come.

The one thing that no one had problems with at the Naval Station was having a “House mouse.” “House mouse” was the term used for either a civilian guy or gal who was paid to make your bed, clean the floor in your area of the barracks, and wash and iron your uniform and civilian clothes. No kidding. I could have gotten away with having one set of whites and one set of civilian clothes. When I got back to the barrack each morning, the uniform I wore the day before would be hanging on my rack. I’d shower, shave and put my civilian clothes in the laundry bag and by the time I got off work they were hanging on my rack. God what a way to live.

The eighteen months I spent at the clinic were a really good learning experience that served me well throughout my career in the Navy. I think pretty much everyone that was stationed in that clinic during his tour must have gone through a mile of suture line. Sailors and Marines were always finding ways to lacerate themselves. We’d cut out cysts on faces, arms, legs, and backs. We assisted the doctors in various procedures such as colonoscopies (back then a long metal tube was used not the flexible tube with a camera attached), which were very uncomfortable for the patient. We were able to learn a lot from the doctors; basically, we were Nurse Practitioners and Physician Assistants before they existed.

After six to eight months in X-ray, I moved into the Medical Records section where another corpsman (HM2 Basham) and I worked our asses off. There were always people transferring in and out of the clinic. So between managing that and setting up medical appointments at the Clark Air Force Base Hospital, where they had the facilities for advanced clinics and studies, there was little downtime.

While I may have been overachieving at the clinic, my private life was spiraling out of control. My resolution to change myself into a better person lasted as long as my first trip out into the lurid world of Magsaysay Drive.

That’s the name of the street you’d come upon after crossing the bridge over Shit River. If this bridge had a real name, I never knew it. The river was called Shit River because a tremendous amount of sewage was dumped into the river, and it smelled like shit. No one paid too much attention to the smell because the bridge led into a world that had something for everyone.

Sodom and Gomorrah had nothing on this part of Olongapo. Unfortunately, for a lot of Americans this was their view of the Philippines — bars, prostitutes, pickpockets, thieves of all sizes, shapes, genders (a bit of the benders also). If you wish to judge, go ahead.

Honestly, if it weren’t for HM2 Jerry Freeman, my thoughts would not exactly have been as generous either. Not sure why, but for some reason he elected to be my liberty mentor. He’d been in Subic Bay a while as a station sailor but also as a fleet sailor before that, so he knew his way around and understood the culture of Olongapo, which was much different from the rest of the Philippines.

Olongapo existed before the Americans arrived to make a Naval Base. Subic Bay had formerly been the naval port for the Spanish. Built in 1884, it was a mere fifteen years later that the U.S. took control during the Spanish-American War. As the Naval Base grew, the town grew. As with almost every city, there were socio-economic divides. In Olongapo’s case, the place where the bars, prostitutes and thieves existed was right outside the gate for the convenience of the Americans: Navy, Marine, and Merchant Marines.

The town itself and the people were different than any town in existence, with its nice parts hidden away and the rest covered in dust and dirt that came with its own warning label.

And for god’s sake never drink the water or water products such as ice or you’d get hepatitis faster than you know.

Follow a couple of basic rules and you’ll be ok:

Don’t exchange money on the street, it’s illegal and you will get taken and short changed; don’t pick up girls on the street, they are there because they failed their required venereal disease check; and don’t become friendly with the locals you meet on the street, they’re thieves and con-men. Otherwise Olongapo was yours to explore.

When PTSD Meets Addiction

My spiral had to do with my addiction center, the area of the brain that can lead those who don’t have a control mechanism to seek comfort in all that could destroy you. I came from a long line of alcoholics, so perhaps it was a matter of time. Then again, my year in the Shithole and all the nightmares that came after didn’t help matters. I sought comfort in Marlboros, San Miguel and any other addiction you can think of.

“How ya going keep’m on the farm after they’ve seen gay Paree” as the old song from the early 1900’s went. Well let me tell you, Olongapo in the 60’s had more neon signs and bands than just about anywhere else in the world. When you set foot in that town, you had better be ready to party and Rock & Roll. (There was a Christian Service Center on base, and I heard rumors that some people actually went there, but I never checked to verify.)

There were bars for everyone, from quiet piano bars to head banging rock and everything in between. Country and western and rock were the mainstays of Magsaysay Drive. Make a right at the traffic circle onto Rizal and go down another mile, to mile and a half and there was “The Strip,” with more bars with girls, and some who looked amazingly like girls.

Blacks weren’t allowed down Magsaysay. If you came off the bridge and went left, that was known as “The Jungle” where whites weren’t allowed.[2]There was a drug for every taste: beer, hard liquor, marijuana, cocaine, heroin, uppers or downers. You could probably buy a submarine if you had the money. (That was the local joke.)

The first bar on the right just as you came off the bridge was the Mexico Club, which was a small bar with no band, just a jukebox with mellow music. A couple of doors down was the Copacabana Club where you could rock it out, and across the street and up a few doors was the Country Corner, which turned out to be my favorite bar where the band of Little Mike Santos played. He sang Charlie Pride better than Charlie Pride, or Johnny Cash or Merle Haggard. The bands in Olongapo and all over the Philippines were the best cover artists I’d ever heard. They could play Rolling Stones, Johnny Mathis, you name the singer or band.

Next up on the addiction list was female companionship. You could get married to a different girl each night for the right price.

I got to know several girls and started to understand how the sex trade worked in the Philippines. Some, very few I met though, were lured into prostitution. Others found out about the money and came to Olongapo only to become indentured to the bars by taking much needed money given to them by the bar owner and passing it along to their families. Some were even sold to the bar by their families.

When I went out into the countryside with my Filipino friends, the poverty was all around. I traveled around with some of the girls I’d met and visited their barrios, which made for an eye-opening experience. The people treated me like I was MacArthur returning. For me, it was an adventure, taking an open-air bus, with chickens, pigs and other farm-to-table food to a land that in some ways time forgot or just stood still. The restroom was a hole in the ground. Bath time meant squatting next to a spigot outside and using a plastic bucket to dump water over yourself or your newest best buddy doing it for you; and any sleep to be had was on a straw palate. All the while you’re trying to remember your manners and not embarrass your host or your girlfriend. I enjoyed this when I could do it. It just depended on the girl.

Most were very open about how they got into what’s considered a dangerous and derogatory profession, but for many of the girls whom I met and spoke with this was the way out of a very bad situation. Some were looking for husbands, and some found them. Some came looking for a good time, and always had it. Others were not so lucky, succumbing to physical abuse, S&M and/or drugs. More than one sailor or Marine died with a needle stuck in their leg and a girl from the bar dead next to them.

I partied my ass off. Every night I didn’t have duty I was out the gate — Country Corner here I come, followed by the Tijuana Club, Zanzibar, Copacabana, and so many more I can’t remember all of their names. Harbor Lights was another quiet place at the end of the bar scene on Rizal. The system worked pretty much this way: you’d stop by one of the many hotels along the street and pay for a room for the night and the concierge would give you two keys, one for you and one for your wife du jour, then you’d head out to party. The rooms were basic — full size bed, hot and cold shower, mainly cold. Dresser with mirror and nothing else, built for what it was used for, a one-night stand and nothing more.

The weekend days we had off were usually spent at someone’s house if they were paying the rent for a girl. We’d drink San Miguel, go to the beach (there were miles of beach with warm water) and have picnics that consisted mainly of drinking San Miguel. When I got off work I started drinking and didn’t stop until I fell asleep. At 5pm in Olongapo, the lights dimmed all over the town due to the neon lights coming on and all of the bands plugging in. A brown out occurred every night.

I was a freaking zombie, drunk six days a week and partying all night. I kept getting into trouble, mostly for showing up late to work, but Lt. Crumbly kept it in-house as much as he could. The consequence was that I was assigned an EMI, or “extra military instruction”. This meant I had to do yard work on the clinic’s small patch of grass two hours a day for about five days.

I was doing it so often that the gardeners assigned to the clinic complained that I was doing their work or in some cases doubling their work because they’d have to fix whatever I did. So then I was assigned the job of cleaning and polishing brass until the contract cleaners complained. After that, I was made to study for advancement tests or learn some medical procedure.

At some point, I was scheduled to take the Fleet-wide exam for advancement. The day of the exam, as I was in the barracks getting into my uniform (late for work as usual), one of the other guys in the barracks asked me if I was ready for the test. “Test, huh, what test?” I answered. “You know the advancement test, it starts in 10 minutes at the China Seas Club.” Ah fucking great, I wasn’t going to get into trouble for being late, but I had to take the test (given every six months) — hammered. I was still drunk from the night before and flying on about two hours sleep. I hurried over to the club, was ushered to a seat and immediately fell out of it. I stood up, excused myself, went to the bathroom and threw up. When I returned to the table, the proctor asked me if I was ill and whether I would be able to take the test. “Yeah chief,” I replied. “I’m fine. Just a bit nervous.” I passed that fucking test and made second-class on the first round. Maybe some of that studying I had to do for punishment stuck with me.

I wound up getting into a lot of trouble with people, but Lt. Crumbly who was sympathetic about my time in the Shithole, swept most of it under the rug. Eventually, he sent me to one Captain’s Mast where the Commanding Officer of the Base, Captain Anderson, tried to put the fear of god into me. The good Captain gave me 10 hours of EMI and an ass chewing.

“Not getting off to a good start to what has the potential to be a good career. Your Division Officer [Lt. Crumbly] says you have unlimited potential if you get you private life in order. Shame! Shame! Shame! No restriction, no fine, just a bit more EMI.”

A time to look up St. Christopher and say thanks.

Needless to say, it didn’t work. I kept drinking. I was a little too jaded to take his advice to stop. As far as I saw it, the only problem I had with drinking was that work was getting in the way of my being able to drink. I was heading for a crash and ignoring all the signs: depression, false euphoria, poor sleep (if and when I did sleep). I was going through two or three packs of cigarettes a day. All the signs and symptoms of alcoholism were there for anyone to see and intervene, but no one did. I was just one of many drunks, not necessarily in the clinic, but all around the Navy at that time. Looking back on it, I was literally a kid in a candy store and was drinking all the candy I could until I die.[3]

[1] Another Door Opens https://medium.com/@CorpsmanHayes/another-door-opens-8c53cc90cd94

[2] There were racial tensions that were mounting. I was generally too drunk to notice. This was after my time, but a fight that broke out at the Enlisted Club (EM club) led to another fight at the Sampaguita club a couple of nights later, which culminated in the riots on the USS Kitty Hawk in 1972, resulting in over twenty courts-martial. It’s a case that highlighted the institutional racism within the military. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Kitty_Hawk_riot#Sampaguita_Club

[3] A physical death. My soul, if I ever had one, had died in the Shithole. The Night I’d Died https://medium.com/war-cigarettes-and-san-miguel/the-night-id-died-cf32366dac0d