A few feet away, the end of a cigarette glowed bright orange in the darkness. At the other end of it was a retired boatswain’s mate, Chris Christenson. One night recently he and I were sitting on the balcony of a beach-front condo, looking out toward the Atlantic. The horizon was a black line in the distance. Down below us we could hear waves splash on the shore. We saw the cascading white foam as each wave hit the sand and quickly dissolved to make way for its descendants. We needed little imagination to be reminded of nights at sea on board ship.
“Mostly you remember the good times,” he said, “and the bad ones kind of fade away.” In the darkness Christenson recalled ship-to-ship transfers in the Med, liberty in the Caribbean, and that special time after evening chow, when he’d go up on deck and walk around as the sun was setting. Coffee cup in hand, he’d stop on the fantail for a smoke and later wander to the forecastle to chat with shipmates. It was a more relaxed pace than in the morning, when he and his seamen were up on deck, clamping down with swabs and hoses as they prepared for another day of ship’s work.
My own introduction to the wonderful world of boatswain’s mates came when I was a 19-year-old seaman apprentice on a reserve cruise in the early 1960s. Back in boot camp the company chief petty officer had told all of us that we were lower than whale manure in the Navy’s pecking order, although I’m sure he didn’t use the word “manure.” A seagoing boatswain’s mate didn’t rate us much higher. For instance, one day after working hours I went to the sail locker of an attack transport. There sat a grizzled old boatswain’s mate third class who, I’d been told, had spent 19 years in the Navy. “Could I have my liberty card, please?” I asked timidly.
“I shitcanned it,” he said matter-of-factly. I’m sure he didn’t view that as profanity, simply as a functional verb that both he and I understood. What I didn’t understand was how he could be so cavalier about my liberty, but he out ranked me, and that was that.
I heard that same term used years later when I was on board the battleship Missouri (BB-63) to do interviews. The ship’s first lieutenant, Lieutenant Wes Carey, was a former boatswain’s mate and a respected leader. He has such an impressive speaking voice that he has frequently been a radio announcer. Later he appeared as naval aide to the Chief of Naval Operations in the movie Under Siege, which was set on board the Missouri. One day I saw him drenched to the skin after he’d been out on deck with his men. He supervised as they griped down topside equipment in the face of a mid-Pacific storm. Another day I was in Carey’s office to interview a boatswain’s mate second who had won a million dollars in the California state lottery but was still on duty because he was so fond of the Navy. While I was waiting for the lucky winner to show up, I struck up a conversation with another sailor, who told me he had become a conscientious objector around the time the country was approaching involvement in Desert Shield and Desert Storm. As Carey explained, “Yeah, weapons [department] shitcanned him, so we found a place for him down here, where he wouldn’t be involved in a direct combat role.”
Boatswain’s mates are essential to the running of the Navy. Both in port and at sea their tasks are myriad: operating and maintaining the anchoring equipment, rigging, mooring lines, small boats, amphibious craft, underway replenishment, cleanliness and preservation, knotting and splicing, running the bridge as boatswain’s mates of the watch, and providing a necessary brand of leadership to the seamen in the deck department of any ship. They also add a great deal to the texture of Navy life as they follow their traditional rituals. The badges of authority are the coffee cup, the silver boatswain’s pipe, and the “wheel book” in the back pocket. So many, many times we’ve heard the sounds of piping and known—without words needing to be spoken—the message being imparted: all hands, turn to, secure, chow time. I couldn’t hope to imitate the long, involved sound of chow call, but I certainly recognize it whenever I hear it.
In many cases boatswain’s mates are characters. There was Jake Willsey, who ran the deck department in an LST and had so many tattoos on his body that his shipmates said it was like reading the comic pages when they saw him in the head. I remember the bulky boatswain’s mate of a destroyer escort. He resembled the character Bluto in “Popeye,” and he liked to talk of his world travels, including such places as the Persian Gulf that we youngsters could only imagine. Charlie Jacobus has a gift for doing fancy-work with pieces of light line. In his former home in New Jersey Charlie built a replica of his shipboard bunk so he could slide into it whenever he wanted to get into a battleship mood. Joe Heeney, ship’s boatswain in the New Jersey in 1969, looked so fierce that I kept my distance, believing he probably ate lieutenants for breakfast. Years later, I ran into him at a decommissioning ceremony and found him to be a warm, friendly man.
Times change for boatswain’s mates, as they do for everyone in the Navy. Due process has replaced the once-un- challenged authority of petty officers. Environmental regulations have circumscribed old ways of doing things. Ships moor to piers, so the Navy operates small boats much less than it used to. Paperwork abounds. Deck equipment becomes more sophisticated. But the men who run the deck forces in the Navy’s ships still answer to a universal nickname: “Boats.”