Fork You! Tales from the Submarine Service
Strange happing’s beneath the waves. Enjoy.
‘Guard the forks!’ — the Great Submarine Utensil Heist of 1988
By David Chetlain, The War Horse
Editor’s note: This commentary was first published in The War Horse, an award-winning nonprofit news organization educating the public on military service. Subscribe to their newsletter.
“Hey, Eeyore, we need to do something big,” Jim Gover said, using my nickname since we couldn’t use our real ones in sonar for security reasons.
We were on day infinity of submarine patrol and my partner in mischief, Jim Gover, was about to get me in trouble again.
“We are 400 feet under the water in the middle of the Pacific Ocean with 24 Trident C-4 missiles pointed at the Soviet Union,” I responded. “Isn’t that big enough?”
“No, you idiot. I’m talking about something really important — a big prank.”
“Dude. We’ve been out to sea for seven weeks now. We’ve done all the usual pranks — the ‘mail buoy,’ ‘relative bearing grease,’ ‘water slug serial numbers,’ ‘blow the DCA,’ ‘feed the shaft seals.’ We even stole the executive officers’ stateroom door and replaced it with the door from the officer’s head. It doesn’t get much ballsier than that.”
Jim chuckled. “Yeah, the XO’s door heist was a lot of fun, but I think we can do better. Think big, man. How can we pull something off that would impact everyone on the crew and still be 100% safe? What’s something that touches everyone?”
Bubbleheads is the strangest people.
*grin*
Category: Humor, Navy, The Warrior Mind
Don’t surprise me. I’ve always heard the submariners were all about some spooning. Fork it!…indeed.
Everyone keeps making the old joke that a submarine goes to sea with 150 men and comes back with 75 couples.
I’m here to assure you that is a complete falsehood!
There are always a handful of wallflowers.
😉😎
Thank You, AW1Ed, for sharing the fork story…😆
When I was in, we had Girlie magazines instead of Girls onboard to look at. How about the Sub storing the gold bars from the Phillipine bank during the WW2 evacutation and heading to Australia with the gold and one bar turned out missing so after a number of days, the small ingot turned up in the cooks cookbook which he used it as a bookmark.
Bookmark… wink wink nudge nudge
Mostly nukes. You know what they use for birth control?
Their personalities.
My uncle had a complete set of solid silver utensils that came from the officer’s mess, used for special occasions only.
Stealing is stealing
Tax repossession
Old Navy word is “cumshaw,” a bastardization of the Chinese term for Grateful Thanks.
The largest cumshaw that I know of happened at pier 5 at NOB on a Saturday after dining at the roach coach I noticed a punt tied up to the pier.
First division was busy painting the sides and hanging in a bosun’s chair was slow and precarious. The punt somehow managed to become untied and magically landed alongside our ship.
Monday morning when work resumed the LPO in first division was apprised of the opportunity to knock out painting the sides all the way down to the waterline by using the punt. He was grateful and after we finished he asked me what I wanted and I said a transfer out of first division to ops department and it worked.
The punt was hoisted and stowed away so it would not fall into the hands of someone else even more devious than I was.
So much for the memes around here.
“Bubbleheads is the strangest people.”
Hey! I resemble that remark!
As do I.
I would use the silverware from the wardroom to dine with just to see if the food tasted better. Nope.
Remember, you can take an officer out of the wardroom but you can’t take the wardroom out of the officer.
Some of those XOs can be a might testy:
I hate reading crap on the internet, but that was damned funny.
Forking A!
Dam. How come I never heard this great idea of replacing the XO’s door with the latrine door?
Ti’s shall happens!
Funny stuff; I was a bit of a prankster, sometimes to an extreme but never this much. There was the SF/Ranger PSG I mention quite often who was in the habit of leaving his CAC (ID Card with a chip for computer use) in his office. I guess he had charmed his way into getting a second one, because we were on a closed compound, and he lived on Main Post. One day a staple indentation just happened to appear on the chip, rendering it unusable. He called a friend of his from CID and tried convincing us an investigation was being conducted, then someone asked the IG during an inspection if someone could be charged with damaging government property for destroying the CAC as the PSG threatened. Oddly, the IG said the same thing I was thinking; while it was destruction of property, the argument could be made that whoever did it was simply ensuring the PSG’s information wasn’t stolen.
Other than that, reversing fridge doors, replacing dry erase markers with permanent marker cartridges, allegedly ensuring office door lock keys wouldn’t work, pushing a Team Leader’s Jeep across post (I was Squad Leader and he kept parking in spaces that were for Soldiers that lived in the barracks, so one day I enlisted some help to push it from Building 47 on Fort McNair down near the SMMC’s house and Aid Station), making potato cannon out of picket pounders, and other fun and games kept me from boredom.
As long as you don’t shoot cleaning rods with blanks through the barrel of a M4 you are good. Article 15 would follow. Though we all need an art 15 from time to time. Might as well.
Easiest and fastest way to clean a weapon? Look how much free time to drink beer was suddenly available.
What I found at BNCOC, being somewhat of a gun guy and identifying as a lazy metallugist, is that toilet bowl cleaner cleans the gas piston on machine guns really well. Don’t put it on the blued surfaces, but let’s face it, the M240B and M249 gas pistons are the biggest pain, with scraper tools working alright until the Armorer kicks it back.
My roommate was from 1/75 Ranger and went back to Hunter Army Airfield from Fort Benning every weekend while I enjoyed privacy, so we trier my experiment. Mind you, these were training weapons; I wouldn’t risk it on guns in theater, but it worked and we had a nice factory new looking piston in a few minutes, while we finished the rest of the gun.
I bet that pissed the armorer off.
Ah, fun with blanks. Pouring the gunpowder into anthills, lighting it, and watching the earth move wasn’t enough for one guy in my platoon. He decided he needed a bigger bang, so he poured the gunpowder of several blank rounds (we had M-14s at the time) into one round to see how big a noise he could make. It made a big Ka-Boom. Fortunately, he fired from the hip. Unfortunately he left the blank adapter on. Most of the blank adapter took off for parts unknown, and the firer was dancing around holding his hand and cursing. Seems he used a bit too much powder, and the resulting overpressure had welded(?) the cartridge case in the chamber, blowing off the base of the cartridge and the extractor off the bolt, which was jammed in position just slightly rotated. The connector rod was also missing, and the stock was cracked. It was a total writeoff. Damage to the shooter was limited to a cut on the top of his hand between thumb and forefinger. Somehow the powers-that-be bought the idea that it was a “bad” cartridge that caused all the damage–no statement of charges or disciplinary action.
Meh, it broke the monotony, and I still grin at the memory.
I think I remember who it was, a guy nicknamed “Clarabelle”, after the clown of that name. Just a nice, dumb, gawky, loud, grinnin’, good ol’ country boy. Last time I saw him was at LZ Betty when I first arrived in RVN just after Tet. He had gotten there just before Tet. He had gone from rifleman to helicopter door gunner (which was considered a great job when I was there and had to be earned) and he wasn’t loud, gawky, or grinnin’ anymore. It was a noticeable transformation. We only had a short, mostly one-sided conversation which left me a bit more anxious than I already was about what I had gotten myself into–the word “trepidation” comes to mind.
Had some live round mixed in with blanks at West Point in 2014. I was a lane walker, accompanying one of my Fire Teams on their blank fire iteration. Pop, pop, pop, BOOM! Incidentally right as I had removed my fogged up glasses to see. Sure enough, the Team Leader had put an M855 round through his blank fire adapter right next to me. No one was injured, and we found the BFA the following day about 100 meters away.
I wasn’t there (2 or so years prior to my arrival, seen pictures, heard the tale), believe is was the outgoing Battalion XO of 2-29IN, TRADOC, Fort Benning got every single item in his office wrapped in tin foil, including every individual paper clip in the top drawer.
A bunch of guys came in that weekend over beers, possibly with an assist from Staff Duty, to accomplish the task.
I’m sure the duty log omitted certain details.
Almost as bad as the time I sent a nub from Shaft Alley up forward to get a 10 pound water hammer from the A-gangers just before getting underway. I then called forward and told them to keep it going.
COB saw said hapless nub walking down the pier to one of the shops just before the brow was to go up.
I might have gotten in a little trouble for that one.