destroyers, including the Scaffold, was steaming a few hundred miles east of Gibraltar. It was maybe two in the morning, visibility unlimited, stars blooming fat and sultry over a tar-colored Mediterranean. No closing contacts on the radars, everybody on after steering watch asleep, forward lookouts telling themselves sea stories to keep awake. That sort of night. All at once, every teletype machine in the task force started clanging away, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. Five bells, or FLASH, initial contact with enemy forces. It being '55 and more or less peacetime, captains were routed out of bed, general quarters called, dispersal plans executed. Nobody knew what was happening. By the time the teletypes started up again the formation was scattered out over a few hundred square miles of ocean and most radio shacks were crowded to capacity. The machines started to type.
'Message follows.' Teletype operators, com officers, leaned forward tense, thinking of Russian torpedoes, evil and barracudalike.
'Flash.' Yes, yes, they thought: five bells, Flash. Go ahead.
Pause. Finally the keys started clattering again.
'THE GREEN DOOR. One night Dolores, Veronica, Justine, Sharon, Cindy Lou, Geraldine and Irving decided to hold an orgy . . .' Followed, on four and a half feet of teletype paper, the functional implications of their decision, told from Irving's point of view.
For some reason, Pig never got caught. Possibly because half the Scaffold's radio gang, also the communications officer, an Annapolis graduate named Knoop, were in on it and had locked the door to Radio as soon as GQ was called.
It caught on as a sort of fad. The next night, precedence Operational Immediate, came A DOG STORY, involving a St. Bernard named Fido and two WAVES. Pig was on watch when it came over and admitted to his henchman Knoop that it showed a certain flair. It was followed by other high-priority efforts: THE FIRST TIME I GOT LAID, WHY OUR X.O. IS QUEER, LUCKY PIERRE RUNS AMOK. By the time the Scaffold reached Naples, its first port of call, there were an even dozen, all carefully filed away by Pig under F.
But initial sin entails eventual retribution. Later, somewhere between Barcelona and Cannes, evil days fell on Pig. One night, routing the message board, he went to sleep in the doorway of the executive officer's stateroom. The ship chose that moment to roll ten degrees to port. Pig toppled onto the terrified lieutenant commander like a corpse. 'Bodine,' the X.O. shouted, aghast. 'Were you sleeping?' Pig snored away among a litter of special-request chits. He was sent down on mess cooking. The first day he fell asleep in the serving line, rendering inedible a gunboat full of mashed potatoes. So the next meal he was stationed in front of the soup, which was made by Potamos the cook and which nobody ate anyway. Apparently, Pig's knees had developed this odd way of locking, which – if the Scaffold were on an even keel – would enable him to sleep standing up. He was a medical curiosity. When the ship got back to the States he went under observation at Portsmouth Naval Hospital. When he returned to the Scaffold he was put on the deck force of one Pappy Hod, a boatswain's mate. In two days Pappy had driven him, for the first of what were to be many occasions, over the hill.
Now on the radio at the moment was a song about Davy Crockett, which upset Winsome considerably. This was '56, height of the coonskin hat craze. Millions of kids everywhere you looked were running around with these bushy Freudian hermaphrodite symbols on their heads. Nonsensical legends were being propagated about Crockett, all in direct contradiction to what Winsome had heard as a boy, across the mountains from Tennessee. This man, a foul-mouthed louse-ridden boozehound, a corrupt legislator and an indifferent pioneer, was being set up for the nation's youth as a towering and cleanlimbed example of Anglo-Saxon superiority. He had swelled into a hero such as Mafia might have created after waking from a particularly loony and erotic dream. The song invited parody. Winsome had even cast his own autobiography into aaaa rhyme and that simpleminded combination of three - count them - chord changes:
'Born in Durham in '23,
By a pappy who was absentee,
Was took to a lynching at the neighborhood tree,
Whopped him a nigger when he was only three.
[Refrain]: Roony, Roony Winsome, king of the decky-dance.
Pretty soon he started to grow,
Everyone knew he'd be a loving beau,
Cause down by the tracks he would frequently go
To change his luck at a dollar a throw.
Well he hit Winston-Salem with a rebel yell,
Found his self a pretty Southron belle
Was doing fine till her pappy raised hell
When he noticed her belly was beginning to swell.
Luckily the war up and came along,
He joined the army feeling brave and strong,
His patriotism didn't last for long,
They put him in a foxhole where he didn't belong.
He worked him a hustle with his first C.O.,
Got transferred back to a PIO,
Sat out the war in a fancy chateau,
Egging on the troops toward Tokyo.
When the war was over, his fighting done,
