Larry Bucher
The book is about . . . well, the title and sub-title really say it all. The author served on a battleship, a destroyer escort, and an aircraft carrier, but mostly overseas (Italy, England, Ethiopia, Vietnam) and finished up in Dallas, Texas, and Charleston, South Carolina. While on the ships he experienced various liberty ports in western Europe and the far east, plus Cuba and Brazil.
The book stretches from the days when nearly every literate sailor was reading The Caine Mutiny, through the time when Robert S. McNamara was fervently cursed, to the years of Admiral Elmo Zumwalt’s changes, their subsequent rollback, and the accompanying post-Vietnam “erosion of benefits”.
The author enjoyed himself in a seamanlike manner and uses seamanlike terminology in reporting on same. He describes his near-brushes with the military justice system, which somehow never quite caught up with him. Those who served one or two enlistments during the time period covered should identify with the book. Among “lifers”, some will like it; some will hate it. It should not be read by admirals or chaplains.
Larry Bucher grew up in small-farm-town Illinois and was miseducated at the University of Wisconsin. He spent 23 years hating the navy and 18 more hating the State Department Foreign Service, and is now a comfortably retired hermit in the Black Hills. He was a communicator – one, that is, who worked with transmitters, receivers, and (most of all) with teletypes – a communicator in the original sense, before the job title was pirated by professional bullshitters. He refuses to respond to the term “telecommunicator”.
The exercise completed, we headed for Portsmouth, England. We had already heard that it was “England’s Norfolk”, so our expectations were not high. The description was accurate, still, it was not nearly as bad as America’s Norfolk. On the street with a CR-division group, an Englishman walked rapidly past me and said to himself (but plainly intending to be overheard), “I’m glad I’m a commie.” Girls on the streets were amused but uncooperative when we told them we were looking for Girl Guides (an English organization similar to Girl Scouts). By evening we repaired to a large dance hall and laughed about a prominent sign which hung over the corridor to the rest rooms: Beware of Pickpockets. Ha-ha, look at that sign, never see anything like that in the States! Late in the evening, despairing of making any feminine connections, I was at the bar drinking straight gin. Spider had preceded me at that pursuit and was well ahead of me. When it became time to return to the ship I was still functional, but Spider was a-stagger. We took careful charge of him, took his wallet to avoid loss, and shepherded him back to the liberty boat and to the ship. We presented his ID and liberty cards to the JOOD for him.
Guess who just then found he did not have a wallet, nor ID and liberty cards to present? Funny sign, indeed! . . .
We sailed next to Copenhagen, Denmark. I remember little there. Drinking in a bar with half a dozen other CR-division sailors and a couple of girls, quite attractive. They claimed to be models, asked for and got U.S. dollar bills “for souvenirs”, left promising to return, and didn’t. I sampled Denmark’s over-ballyhooed cherry heering, a syrupy concoction more akin to cough medicine than to a beverage. It may have been here or earlier that I first observed “mandatory quotas”. Well-intentioned local functionaries would devise tours or other entertainments for the visiting crew. Authority knew that most sailors would have other priorities, and imposed quotas on each division in order not to appear ungrateful and disappoint the tour-arrangers with low turnout. You would think that anything mandatory would be levied on the duty section rather than the liberty section. You would be wrong. CR division was only hit for one or two, but the individuals affected were not at all happy about it.
From Copenhagen we went to Lisbon, Portugal. I remember even less of Lisbon; a third-rate brothel with indifferent damsels. I must have wandered the wrong portions of that city; other sailors were more praiseful. After leaving, the rumor circulated:: that “some guy” in (whatever) division was being treated in sick bay for a chancre on his lip.
The equivalent post-Copenhagen rumor had been that another “some guy” had taken a Danish girl to a hotel room, placed his hand between “her” legs, and discovered anatomy that he was not expecting.
