“Fifty feet of three-inch rope should do the trick.”
He looked at me like I was a complete idiot. “Why do you need such thick rope?”
I explained how we would use it in the field, instead of our stiff heavy tow cables.
“You sure that’s what you want?”
“Yes,” I replied, naive enough to think I was dealing with an honest seaman—sort of like assuming I’d found an honest lawyer.
“Where do you want it?” he asked. “Ya know, ya can’t leave it sitting out, or we’ll both get in trouble.” He added that the thickest rope available on ship was only two inches in diameter.
“No problem.” I said. Doubled up, the thinner-diameter rope would still be much easier to use than our heavy cables. “Just make it a hundred feet then. I’ll leave the tank’s hatch unlocked, so you can drop it inside the turret.”
He confirmed my order. “Ya want two-inch rope, right? Ya know, it ain’t gonna fit inside.”
One hundred feet of rope would fit inside a tank’s turret with room to spare. His last statement should have set off a warning bell in my head, but I was too caught up in making the deal.
Before I could say anything, he nodded. “I’ll just put it on the back of the tank and throw your tarp over it.”
“Okay,” I replied. “No problem.”
He smiled. “I’ll arrange for the delivery tonight. But I’ll take the C rats now.” I handed him the case, proud of the good deal I’d just negotiated.
Next morning, we were eating breakfast in the ship’s mess when Embesi walked over to me. “What’s that pile of crap on the back of the tank?” he asked.
Knowing how much he wanted the rope, I told him what a great job I’d done and all the details of the trade.
He just started to laugh. “Go down to the well deck and check out the tank.”
I finished eating and went below, squeezing my way between the rows of tanks until I got to ours. When I climbed up on its back, I was confronted by our tarp hiding a truly voluminous mass. Hell, I could supply all of Bravo Company with all the rope I had here. That Navy guy had really outdone himself!
I pulled back the tarp, and my jaw dropped. Lying there before me—knee-high, nearly four feet in diameter—was a gigantic coil of the thickest, heaviest steel cable I’d ever seen. It weighed at least a thousand pounds!
I stood there, stunned. What the fuck was going on here? I proceeded to scour the ship, looking to track down the dumb squid who didn’t know nylon rope from steel cable. When our eyes finally met, he smiled—as if he’d been expecting me!
“Why the hell’d you leave me all that goddamn cable, instead of the rope I asked for?” I demanded. “I couldn’t even budge that pile of shit!”
“No,” he replied, “I don’t suppose you could. I had to use the ship’s crane to get it up there.”
I was really pissed. “Look, I asked you for one hundred feet of two-inch-diameter rope. What do you call that pile of steel cable on the back of my tank?”
“I call it rope, son,” he said in a condescending tone. “Maybe what you really wanted was line.”
That was my first lesson in seamanship: What we Marines called rope, the Navy called line; and what we called cable, they called rope!
He had kept his end of the bargain and was sticking by it, knowing I didn’t have much choice. “Of course,” he volunteered, “if you want me to replace it with line, it’ll cost ya’ another case of C rats.”
I certainly couldn’t leave a half-ton of cable sitting on the back of my tank, so—shrewdly—I negotiated for him to remove the rope and replace it with the line I wanted.
He just smiled. “Been nice doin’ business with ya, son, but I’ll take the C rats now.”
After being taken like that, I really hated the Navy. My revenge would come later, but right then, I couldn’t imagine how.
AS OUR DAYS AT SEA became longer and longer, the ship seemed to get smaller and smaller. Several of us were so bored we broke into one of the frozen-food lockers. Over the ship’s intercom, our angry captain demanded that the guilty parties come forward. Of course, we didn’t. But at least he got a lesson in the kind of tools that tankers carried with them—a Marine bolt cutter goes through a Navy padlock with no trouble at all.
We ate our fill of ice cream that night. But try as we might, we couldn’t empty three five-gallon containers. After a couple of hours, we had to dispose of the evidence before we had a mess on our hands. At 2 a.m., three faint splashes could barely be heard on the port side of the Thomaston as we shared our leftover dessert with the fish.
Well into our second week, we sighted our first landmass, Guam. I was surprised at the island’s size and its degree of civilization. Except for the tropical palms and the jungle we passed on the way into the harbor, it could easily have passed for a base back in the States, with its streets of houses with cars, telephone poles, and streetlights.
The six-hour layover gave us all a chance to get off the Thomaston. It was easy to spot landlubbers who had just spent twelve days on the high seas. We were the ones experiencing the strange symptoms of what the squids called sea legs, weaving from side to side as if the island itself was rolling—or so it felt.
Refueling went way too fast, and we were ordered back aboard.
We spent our days down in the well deck going over our chariots, cleaning, inspecting, and returning every part that was humanly reachable.
A tank’s most vulnerable component was its very heart: six very large 24-volt batteries, accessible through a hinged door on the turret floor. Only two batteries could be reached at any one time, and you had to rotate the turret to get to the next pair under the floor. Their contacts and connector cables required frequent cleaning, especially in the salty air. For a rookie tanker, the job could be hazardous. By definition, a tank’s 24-volt battery discharged a mere twenty-four volts, but it also delivered the enormous amperage needed to turn over the M48’s twelve-cylinder diesel engine.
And so, when working around these large batteries, great caution was necessary. First you removed your watch and any rings—especially rings!—because any metal tool making contact between a battery post and any part of the turret caused an immediate arc.
If a wrench ever slipped out of someone’s hands, bouncing against a terminal and the turret floor at the same time, the resulting crack! of amperage and shower of sparks could make the calmest man jump. There wasn’t a tanker alive who hadn’t experienced this at least six times in his career.
Sometimes, the wrench didn’t simply bounce away; it actually welded itself to the points of contact. When that happened, you had to act fast and break the contact—with the blow from a hammer or a swift kick from a boot. If you didn’t react quickly enough, the wrench would quickly glow red-hot and make the battery explode. I had never seen this recipe for disaster until one morning, down in the Thomaston’s well deck, when one of us got a shocking initiation to one of the many differences between tanks and amtracs.
Getting at the batteries was always a tight fit, and the rolling of the ship didn’t make the job any easier. Along with many of the other tank crews, I was sitting on top of the turret, cleaning the copper fittings that screwed each leg together to create the long aerials we used. I happened to be looking in the right direction when, suddenly, a blue-white flash, as if someone was using an arc welder, lit up the well deck. It was immediately followed by a loud CRACK! Every veteran tanker recognized the sound.
A banshee-like scream immediately followed. A solitary ring of blue smoke rose from the turret where the arc of light appeared.
None of us moved. We knew what had happened and we just smiled at the tank silently, looking for the rookie who had made the mistake. Five seconds later, up out of the turret came the head of Corporal Washington, an ex-amtracker. Smoke seeped from his hair like steam rising off asphalt after a summer rain. His eyes were as wide as I’d ever seen on a man. Looking around, he realized that twenty pairs of eyes were centered on him. His expression changed to that of a kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar. Smoke was still coming off his head when he uttered what became the immortal words of the cruise: “Them bat-trees is sure much bigger then them amtrac bat-trees!”