Two years before enlisting in the Navy, I learned to bowl in my hometown’s first all-night bowling lanes. We worked in the restaurants until late and then went and bowled until two or three in the morning.
At my first duty station, I was assigned to the station Bowling Lanes for a short time. There were five of us assigned there, the Chief in charge, a Petty Officer bowling machine mechanic, two other non-rates, and me. The Chief and Petty Officer performed maintenance and oiled the lanes while our duties consisted of cleaning up before opening and issuing score sheets, renting shoes, and collecting for games during the day. There were three of us to accomplish all of this. The business was slow during the day, the lanes were idle, and we spent many hours bowling. It cost me nothing, and I became a damn good bowler with tutelage from the Chief.
Fast forward almost three years, which I spent in the Galley at the station, in an Ammunition Ship during a WestPac cruise, and five months in an advanced school for cooks and bakers. I arrived in Yokohama, Japan, in July 1964 as a twenty-year-old, newly minted Second Class Petty Officer. July 24, 1964, I moved into Bayside Courts and met the pretty girl who would become my wife a little more than a year later.
In those days, Yokohama was akin to Paradise for the underpaid sailor. But, a sailor couldn’t spend all his time in the bars and fleshpots of Chinatown no matter how hard he tried.
There was the bowling alley. I could bowl and drink beer, legally, for not a lot of money. Bowling was a cheap date, and the pretty girl liked it. We became frequent bowlers before and after we married. We eventually ended up on a few teams, bowling in leagues.
Japanese Asahi Taxi company offered to sponsor a team we were forming. This meant they would provide bowling shirts sporting their logo, and the team would incorporate the company name into the team name. The owner of the company became a spectator almost every week.
A televised Kanto area bowling tournament of two-man teams was planned. The owner of Asahi Taxi offered to sponsor another player and me as a team in the tournament. We worked through the preliminary games and made the cut for the televised games.
There were numerous donated prizes for the different accomplishments of the bowlers. We didn’t win the tournament but were in the top five. The prize for the fifth position was a suit for each of us from a tailor shop. I bowled the tournament’s High Game of 262. The prize for the high w game was a one-year’s supply of Kirin Beer! Turned out to be a twelve-bottle case of Kirin delivered to my quarters in Navy housing each Monday morning. The empty bottles from the previous week were required for the full delivery. Those of you who were in Japan in the sixties remember the almost two-liter war clubs of beer.
Almost twenty-four liters of beer each week was a bit much. I recruited help! My shipmates stepped up to ensure that twelve empties would be available each Monday. We worked Tuesday through Saturday. Sunday and Monday was our weekend.
For a year, Saturday or Sunday became “Drink Dave’s Beer Night!”
In the picture, Chief Petty Officer Kenneth Slamon sampled his first installment of a lifetime’s supply of beer, which a brewery President awarded him in 1950.
Chief Slamon was watching a television quiz show on which Chief Slamon was a co-winner of a $6,350 prize.
The Chief said he would spend his share on “an annuity for life — in beer.”
This impressed the beer exec so much that he arranged for Chief Slamon to get free beer for life.
The beer company was the Jacob Ruppert Brewery and was famous not only for its Knickerbocker and Ruppert beer but also for its longtime owner Jacob Ruppert, who owned the New York Yankees.
Fred Linder, president of the Jacob Ruppert Brewery, was watching the program Chief Slamon appeared on and said,…..
“If Chief Slamon wants cold beer so much, then we don’t want his money. He’ll get free beer for the rest of his life.”
The brewery then began sending him a free case of beer every month no matter where he was stationed in the Navy.
Unfortunately for Chief Slamon, the Ruppert Brewery closed its doors in 1965, shortchanging his lifetime supply of free beer.
Chief Slamon was a Pearl Harbor survivor and veteran of World War II, Korea and Vietnam, lived another 32 years without his free beer, and passed away on 4 August 1997.
The year 2022 was an underreported but brutal one for the US Navy. The service is in crisis. Retention issues, an aging fleet, the revelation of several command failures, and a blunt inability to articulate its strategic mission in an increasingly hostile bureaucratic environment bode ill for the navy’s ability to meet American strategic needs.
As the US faces a potential Indo-Pacific war that could spiral into a Eurasian conflagration, revitalizing the navy’s command culture and strategic thought is vital to American interests.
The nation’s founders understood this, and thereby authorized within the constitution the maintenance of a navy without restriction, as opposed to the stringent limitations placed on peacetime ground forces. However, strategic conditions did not bring naval power to the fore until the early 20th century.
The US Navy played a vital role in preserving American access to Eurasian markets, from policing the Barbary Coast to securing Anglo-American trade routes alongside the Royal Navy in the Indo-Pacific. But until 1898, America’s wars were land wars, either of continental expansion or civil pacification.
The Civil War
During the American Civil War, the Federal and Confederate Armies engaged in land battles that resembled European warfare in scale. Nearly 200,000 men fought at Fredericksburg and Gettysburg, making each engagement similar in size to Waterloo or Austerlitz.
But there was no great sea fight, no fleet action akin to Horatio Nelson’s victories at the Nile or Trafalgar. Rather, the naval war was attritional and logistical, with Confederate commerce raiders and blockade runners pressing the Federal Navy’s blockade, while Union ships supported amphibious assaults along the Confederate coastline.
Even the American relationship to significant naval power is unique. The US has maintained a world-class navy since the late 19th century, and since 1945 has maintained the world’s most powerful combat fleet. This navy defeated Spain in a major fleet action, imposed its will on the German U-Boat threat twice, facilitated an amphibious invasion of Europe, and defeated the Imperial Japanese Navy.
Nevertheless, the United States is an industrial-agrarian power, a unique hybrid of continental traditions. The American founders understood the role of maritime power in the national interest largely because they were northeastern Anglophiles, not southern agrarians.
The Cold War
With the death of the Federalist Party and the rise of northern industry, the US discounted the role of naval power beyond immediate wartime needs. Thus the US maintained a large ground army in Europe throughout the Cold War: American strategic thought is comfortable with massed military engagements despite the American political tradition’s skepticism of permanent military deployments abroad.
The United States’ ability to maintain a globally dominant navy from 1945 to 1990 is the remarkable result of committed political leadership by naval officers and their congressional allies.
So it is unsurprising that the 1991 “Peace Dividend” fell hardest upon the navy. This is not simply a case of numerical decline – US Navy and Army personnel numbers fell by roughly similar proportions between 1990 and 2000, but the navy was nearly half of its Cold War size in 2000 as platforms were phased out rapidly.
The fundamental issue, however, was strategic. The US Army and Air Force had a purpose. In 1991 they fought a decisive combined-arms ground war against a predatory Iraq. Then the USAF, alongside army special operations forces (SOF), fought another messy but low-casualty war in the Balkans. After 2001, US SOF and air power dismantled the Taliban. In 2003, another air-ground invasion dismantled the Iraqi military.
Never mind that in each case the navy played a crucial supporting role. The troops needed to man the barricades were the army and marines, alongside precision-strike airmen. The future, insofar as it seemed in the 2000s, was asymmetric, unconventional, and littoral. It was also joint and transformational – the navy would need to leverage new technologies and re-conceptualize its strategic role.
In decline
Hence the first of the navy’s misfortunes, which still bedevil the service today. The F-35 program has finally delivered airframes, and the first Ford-class aircraft carrier has finally reached the fleet, both around a decade later than expected, notwithstanding their cost overruns.
The littoral combat ship debacle is equally embarrassing. The navy designed a small modular warship for various “green water” operations against a poorly defined threat. The resulting ship lacked the defensive capabilities to counter modern anti-ship missiles and the offensive capabilities to pose a threat to targets in the late-2010s.
The same force-development issues persist today. If all goes according to plans, the navy will deliver two Constellation-class frigates a year from 2026. But it took the service well over two years to authorize construction once an initial contract was awarded because the navy, predictably, pushed the Constellation class into the same bureaucratic processes and capability reviews as every other ship.
With the first ship only beginning construction in late 2022, the navy will be fortunate if it receives its 20 new ships by 2040. Meanwhile, the navy receives on average two new Virginia-class submarines a year, while it retires two Los Angeles-class boats. The submarine fleet, then, is static year-on-year, while various maintenance and overhaul delays disrupt deployment schedules even further.
And under the options articulated in its NavPlan – which overlooks how to implement it – the navy will shed large surface combatants, replacing them with still-notional unmanned ships. All this points to a shrinking fleet at least through the early 2030s.
The US Navy is nevertheless asked to do more with less. Operational tempo has increased since the Cold War. At any given time, around 30% of US Navy ships are deployed. Yet the US Navy has far fewer ships, and it will have even fewer in the coming decade.
Sailors are overworked without nearly enough rotation and training time. The results have not been good. Basic seamanship standards slipped throughout the 2010s, leading most notably to the two Indo-Pacific destroyer collisions. Navy ships routinely return to port shedding rust.
These difficulties are translating into wholesale command failures. The USS Bonhomme Richard disaster demonstrates the situation’s severity. The Bonnie Dick, a Wasp-class amphibious assault ship – the backbone of American amphibious capabilities and the most flexible ship in the fleet – burned nearly to the waterline in July 2020. The navy formally accused a single sailor of arson and punished 20 others. Yet when the case went to trial, the accused was acquitted in just two weeks.
The command investigation had found that the Bonnie Dick’s damage-control facilities were non-functional: The ship’s automatic fire responses and firehoses were almost all in disrepair, and the Bonnie Dick’s hatches held open to enable shoddy power lines to snake throughout the ship. The navy sought, and failed, to concentrate its harshest punishment on a single sailor for a colossal command failure.
The Bonnie Dick and the attack submarine USS Miami, its predecessor in a fiery peacetime demise by eight years, were both scrapped. The two ships’ fate is a cautionary tale: The US faces its first naval peer competitor since World War II. The US lacks the secure repair facilities to receive and repair battle-damaged ships. If the navy could not repair Miami and later Bonnie Dick, what will happen if many more ships are damaged at once, or within weeks of each other, in a West Pacific war?
Just as the navy’s training standards fall and its deployment tempo remains the same, it also faces a recruiting dilemma. This is true throughout the military – the navy barely met its 2022 recruiting targets, while the US Army missed its objectives – but the navy has taken several radical steps to remedy its woes.
Most notably, it will increase the number of sailors it recruits from low-aptitude score brackets on the Armed Forces Qualification Test. This, combined with larger bonuses and a modified career progression scheme for senior sailors, may keep force numbers above their targets. But the quality of the individual sailor likely will decline, as will discipline, seamanship, and long-term military capacity.
Most distressing, however, is the navy’s total inability to articulate its strategic mission and ensure congressional support in the face of an unsupportive executive. Exercises at sea, training, logistics and planning all suggest an admiralty that is insufficiently bold in the face of a gathering storm. The pace of shipbuilding and virtually every other category of naval preparedness demonstrate that the most critical service in a West Pacific conflict does not believe that war is possible within the next decade.
Consistent with this, the current administration’s Defense Department actively seeks to ransack the military budget to pay for domestic priorities. The navy is first in the firing line for bureaucratic reasons. The defense secretary and chief of naval operations have been unable to withstand the political/bureaucratic winds.
Congressional intervention saved 12 ships and authorized additional funding for the US Navy and Marine Corps. But this was despite acrimonious exchanges with Congress throughout the year when the navy could not or would not produce a coherent long-term strategic vision.
The issue here is bureaucratic, strategic, and political. As it successfully did in the Cold War, the navy must articulate a strategic vision that it can take to Congress, one that includes a structured fleet plan capable of meeting the country’s defense needs. This, in turn, requires far greater funding, both for ships and personnel to attract and maintain real talent.
The US spends on defense a proportion of GDP similar to that of the late 1990s, a completely unacceptable state of affairs given the accelerating threat from China. A clear strategic vision will allow the navy’s allies in Congress to push back against President Joe Biden’s administration and allocate for it the funding it needs to grow the force.
One of the advantages of aging is developing memories. Like with all, some good and some bad. Fortunately for me all of my naval memories are wonderful because I’ve chosen to forget the bad. This is a choice we all have to make. Although my enlistment was short compared to many of you, my fondness for my only ship is strong.
She was “born” in 1945 and ”passed on” in 73. Not too bad an age for a ship, but not a lady. To us, her crew, she was home. Served her country in Korea and Vietnam and was ”scrapped”. for razor blades, they tell me.
I was never a plank owner or part of a decommissioning crew, and I’m glad about the latter. I guess we all want to be part of the birth of anything. Young, fresh, just starting out, bright and shiny, and ready to go. Decommissioning, no? Call it what it is, a death. The no longer needed phase of existence. I’ve been to too many funerals over the years and think that would be the same.
I don’t know about you, but to me, it’s very emotional. Whatever ship you served on is special in your heart. Some of you guy’s rattled off names and numbers like football signals. From the Bonne Dick to the Big O, the JFK to whatever. They weren’t ships; they were home. They were families of brothers and later sisters traveling the world with you.
Wherever I go near the water, I always catch sight of a vessel and wonder where she’s been or going. Any Navy vessel talks to me. Major harbors stateside home one of the old girls or guys of the sea. Look at any battleship or carrier anywhere, and you swell with pride. It might be a museum or tourist attraction now, but it used to be home to us.
Red lead and Navy gray are two of my favorite colors… Go Navy!
From the time I was three until my father’s premature death when I was twelve, I spent my summers at my grandparent’s farm in Yadkin County. My GrandPap farmed a couple of acres of tobacco, milked a cow and two goats, raised a couple of hogs and of course there were the two mules, not to mention Granny’s formidable herd of free-range chickens. There were a half dozen cats who kept the property free of vermin and when Granny wasn’t looking, baby chicks. GrandPap always had, “the best coon dog in Yadkin County” and a bunch of pups in training.
GrandPap also, as he put it, “squoze” enough corn to fill the three jugs that lasted him through the year. I once asked him to teach me how to make “likker,” but he refused, he said, “You don’t need to know nuthin’ about that stuff boy.”
My other grandfather was more accommodating. I never made moonshine. I have seen it done and know how. Farming tobacco is arduous work. Making moonshine takes a close second, what with slipping around, hiding from the law, and the physical labor of setting up a still. But that is not the story I am here to tell.
The summer I turned twelve, GrandPap drove down to get me the day after school was out. On the way back to Yadkin he told me that there was a fellow sharecropping on the next farm. He had a girl my age and they had a deal for swapping work. In other words, they would help each other with their tobacco. The girl and I were a part of the deal. She would work in GrandPap’s fields, and I would work in her dad’s tobacco. He added, “If it’s all right with you.” As if I had a choice.
They had set their plants earlier and they were getting up to hoeing size. The next day, after breakfast, animals milked and fed, and armed with a hoe I stood looking at the river wishing I were Huckleberry Finn going on an adventure on the Mississippi instead of having to hoe tobacco.
There was a boy coming up the lane, dressed as I was in overalls and a floppy straw cowboy hat with a Hopalong Cassidy deputies star printed on the front of it. He was carrying a hoe. I rightly surmised that this must be the girl from down the road I would be hoeing tobacco with today.
She walked to where I was standing and said, “Hey, I’m Junebug, well my name is June, but everybody calls me Junebug. I guess we are supposed to work together hoeing today. Daddy said we have to do your Pap’s today and our’s tomorrow.”
As much as I hated my nickname, I introduced myself as “Buster.” Up until now I had kept my interaction with girls to a minimum. They were lifeforms that seemed to cry for no reason and would tattle on you for making them do it.
That summer Junebug and I hoed tobacco, topped, and suckered the stuff, wormed it, primed it, cured it, and packed it down after it cured.
After the initial awkwardness with each other, we developed into an efficient team. As we worked, we talked of the things we liked and disliked about school, teachers, books, we had read, songs and singers, and what we saw for our future. She wanted to be a nurse and I, of course, was going to the Navy.
June, somewhere along the way, I stopped calling her Junebug. I also noticed that she now called me Dave or Davy. That’s what the fellow at the store called me. He had misunderstood me when I told I’m my name was Davis. He thought I said, David. In those days, I didn’t much care for Garland either. I guess she sensed that. I don’t believe I ever told her so.
The summer was winding down. Soon I would be going home. Her father had found a job in Virginia working in a shipyard and had made a deal with GrandPap to sell his tobacco. They would be leaving for Portsmouth the same day I went back to Winston-Salem. We spent the little free time we had in those last few days walking along the river together, holding hands and talking, both avoiding the subject of leaving. We said goodbye that last evening as the sunset.
The last morning, I was loading my clothes and stuff into GrandPap’s car when she came hurrying down the lane where I had first seen her. Only this time she was wearing a dress and there was no mistaking her for a boy. She came to me with tears on her face. She placed her hands on either side of my face and kissed me, then turned and ran back toward her home.
My first kiss.
GrandPap saw the kiss. I was sure to be in for some teasing after he told the story. He never told it. All he said was, “Boy, you orta keep up with that girl, she’s a good one.”
Probably should have followed his advice but I was fixated on something just over a Pacific Ocean horizon.
Trivia: When did the nickname “Crackerjack” for a US Navy Uniform originate?
The term “Crackerjack” actually refers to Navy Cracker Jacks or the Enlisted Service Dress Blue uniforms worn by enlisted Sailors E-6 and below.
Though the term “Crackerjack” is also deemed as a term referring to excellence, the association with Sailors began when the Cracker Jack company (candy popcorn) introduced their mascots “Sailor Jack and his dog, Bingo” on their boxes. They were first shown on boxes in 1918.
Sailor Jack is shown, even today, on Cracker Jack boxes wearing the definitive dress blue uniform synonymous with US Sailors. Crackerjacks are the single, most identifiable uniforms to recognize a Sailor.
During the mid-’70s, there was an experiment, and the Navy temporarily removed crackerjacks for a period in favor of a uniform similar to what officers and chiefs wore.
In the end, there was a lot of opposition, and when Ronald Reagan became President, traditional crackerjacks were reinstated. In the late ’70s, they became an optional uniform. The Navy started issuing Crackerjack in boot camp again in 1982.
Do any of you old Asia Sailors Sailors remember that little girl who use to sell the “Monkey Meat” on Magsaysay, not far from the gate…? Guess what…? She’s all growed up now…
Tales of an Asia Sailor 