He Wasn't Lying

Back in 1999, I was on, what would end up being, my last deployment in the Navy. Going to the Persian Gulf and being a general pest to all the folks over there that didn't like us (read, everyone), we boarded ships, prepared to launch missiles and visited various ports that absolutely sucked the life out of you until we finally started heading home.

On our trip back towards civilization, we made a port visit to Suva, Fiji. I had been to Fiji once before for about an 8-hour stop while refueling the ship on a previous deployment, but had been unable to visit any of the local watering holes due to the quick nature of our stop. But in '99, we were going to be there for nearly a week.

A group of us had found a resort that was frequented by many tourists along the beach. It was our daily destination because the beer was plentiful, the weather was perfect and the women were beautiful, so it made for some great eye candy.

The last night visiting the resort, my good friend John (who happened to be my Leading Petty Officer, or LPO, in case you know a damn thing about Navy structure) and I were sharing a few alcoholic beverages and having some laughs. Early on in the evening, we had noticed one of the guys in our division had imbibed a bit too much in the local delicacies and was making a rather large ass of himself in front of two women sitting in a booth and minding their own business. Knowing the potential for this particular sailor to start some sort of international incident, John and I grabbed him by the back of his collar and forced him onto the next shuttle that would take him back to the ship. We were scheduled to leave the following morning at 7, and knew that he'd need every ounce of sleep available to be of use to us when we departed.

Once he was safely in the van and headed back, John and I went back to our seats. Waiting for us was the waiter with a couple ice cold beers. "These are from the two ladies over there," he said, nodding towards the two women we had saved from being harassed by our shipmate. Looking their way with an appreciative nod, they waved us over to sit by them.

Keep in mind that at this point, we had been underway for the past 5 months on a ship with 300 men. Being anywhere near a woman was something we would not pass up. John and I introduced ourselves and the women did the same in return. Lisa was from London and her friend Shannon was from somewhere outside Dublin. We made some stupid joke about them not really liking one another, what with the whole England/Ireland hullabaloo. Beer helps make stupid jokes slightly better.

So we're talking about random crap throughout the night when Shannon asks about life in the U.S. Navy. Our ship was giving tours while we were in port and they had visited earlier in the day. If you tour a naval vessel, you're given a whole bunch of the typical rainbow and unicorn crap you can handle. Sure, you're shown some of the cool stuff, like where the missiles launch from, you see the big ass gun on the bow and you're even given cookies and kool-aid (affectionately referred to as "bug juice" by sailors) while you visit. Shannon then asked if this was how life was really like on the ship.

John and I laughed. Hard.

John explained that so much more goes on when you're underway that there's no possible way the Navy would ever recruit anyone if they told of everything that happened. For example, he said, there are things known as Navy showers.

Every berthing (space where the crew sleeps) has several showers. As a point of reference, the berthing where John and I slept had racks for 100 sailors. And 4 showers. They're cleaned daily and the person that has to clean them is typically some dirtbag that had done something so egregiously bad that he'd been elected to do the most horrible job on the entire ship. Why is it so bad? You go clean a shower that 100 guys use everyday after being underway for months at a time and tell me how pleasant an experience it is.

Look, it's no secret that men are pigs. Our dicks are amazing sources of entertainment for us and, given the opportunity, would be played with or utilized in an entertaining fashion whenever possible. As such, it is a well-known, yet little discussed thing that sailors have a tendency to play with their dicks while in the shower. Hence the birth of the term "shower babies". Again, you don't want to be stuck with the job of cleaning the men's shower on a Navy ship.

John then launched into a 20-minute dissertation of what it was like to be taking a Navy shower. He described the shower as a 3'x3' metal box with a shower curtain, arguably the most vile, disease-ridden piece of vinyl ever invented. Now imagine you're taking a shower in this metal box. And you're underway with slightly heavy seas. Knowing the other pig-like individuals that have been in there before you, and the fact that the dirtbag that cleaned it probably didn't do such a bang-up job, you really don't want to be touching anything except maybe the handles to turn the shower on or off. So you do your best to keep your body contained and close-in to yourself. You get yourself thoroughly soaked and shut the water off. Fresh water is something in short supply on most ships, so you have to conserve it, which means you don't have it running the whole time. Once you're wet and the water's off, you soap yourself up really good. Since the shower's so disgusting, shower shoes are a must. To wash your feet, you have to balance yourself in a 3x3 metal box while the ship bobs and sways with the movement of the ocean. You really don't want to touch anything. Really. So if you lose your balance, you basically have your elbows tucked into your sides while touching the walls of the shower with nothing more than your fingertips. It's typically at this point that someone else will enter the showering area. When this happens, the vacuum created by the air that blows throughout the ship will also create a vacuum seal on the shower curtain, wrapping it around you.

Create this mental image, if you will: You're in the shower. You have one foot up that you've been trying to wash. You're touching the walls with your fingertips for fear of touching some other man's shower babies. There's a moldy, stinky vinyl shower curtain now wrapped around you. The ship's still bobbing and swaying and you're losing your balance. If you set your other foot down on the shower floor, there's really no other choice but to hack it off, lest it infect the rest of your perfectly good limbs. Got the image firmly implanted in your head? Good.

Eventually, you're able to peel the shower curtain away from you, disgusted beyond measure, so you go through the whole process over again. If you're lucky, no one else will enter the shower area creating the vacuum seal, necessitating yet another repeat performance. By the time your shower is all said and done, the only thing left to do is crawl into your rack, curl into the fetal position and cry yourself to sleep.

This, friends and neighbors, is something the Navy recruiter doesn't exactly inform you of when you sign up to be a member of Uncle Sam's Canoe Club.