What Do You Do On a Naval Cruise?
aka Break Out Your Sea Stories!
I was riffing in the chat tonight about some stuff back from my Navy days. (Yes, Taumpy I was talking about ships again. :p)
While we were talking The Falling Reverend mentioned chemical burns and how much they suck. Which reminded me about the fun and games that could be played with silver nitrate solutions.
In a water based solution silver nitrate is odorless, colorless, and appears to rinse off without any effect. What actually happens is that some of the chemical gets into the skin. When the chemical gets sufficient energy to react with the chloride ions in the skin, it turns dark brown/black. This usually happens after a couple hours of exposure - but if you expose the skin that has been contaminated to sunlight the burn is nearly instant.
Technically it's a chemical burn, but the vast majority of people experience no discomfort from it, and as the dead layers of skin flake away the mark disappears. But until that happens, the mark is indelible.
During the mid-watches people can do a lot of odd stuff to kill the time when they're not working the machinery in the engineering plant. One night there was a bit of an improvised water balloon fight.
The next morning one of the watch standers was coming onto the main deck for the daily muster. And right before the eyes of everyone this rather pale young man turned into a living Al Jolson impersonator.
Shortly after that the Engineer posted orders that water balloon fights were not allowed to use potentially limited availability reagents. :LOL:
I hope other former squids or people who know former or present squids might speak up.
If this thread gets any traction, I'll write, later, about how on one of my ship's last cruises someone tried to take her through the McD's drive thru.
The Story of the Radioactive Poo.
I don't remember exactly which year this was. I think it was '93, but I may be wrong.
Whatever the year, we'd just gotten out of a shipyard availability. Shipyard periods can be really good, or really bad. This one had been pretty bad - Engineering had been on 12 and 12 duty rotations, so we were glad to be getting underway. Which is a pretty unusual situation, except for the occasional lunatic or lifer.
At any rate we got underway, and were heading back to the Caribbean. Everything was going well, when someone found a yellow polyvinyl bag in one of the auxiliary machinery rooms. In the bag were feces: a loaf that someone left as a little present. If it weren't for that yellow bag, we'd have just put it with the other trash and muttered about asshole shipyard workers.
But it was in the yellow bag. In Rickover's Navy that meant that it was radioactive. And had to be treated as such.
Which left us in a bind. As a warship, we weren't supposed to be producing biohazard contaminated rad waste - which was the most expensive category of low-level rad waste to dispose. So, from a shipboard budget perspective, treating that poo as radioactive was a bad thing.
We even could survey it, and prove it wasn't radioactive, and everything would be good. Except to do that, we had to get a detection probe within 1/4 inch of all inaccessible surfaces. Which meant, in effect, to survey the poo, and release it as non-contaminated, someone would have to spread it to a more or less uniform thickness of about 1/8 inch, and then go over every square inch of the resulting pie with the heavy, lead shielded probe. It was a job that was going to prove to be smelly, uncomfortable, and disgusting.
In a classic military maneuver, however, there was an attempt made to let this cup pass us by: It was sent up the chain, in the knowingly forlorn hope that we'd be able to just bag, tag and store it as RAM. Or perhaps do something else with it. So, from the guy who found it, things went to the chem/radcon tech on duty, who told his LPO, who told the division chief, who told our Division Officer, who told the Chem Radcon Assistant Engineer. Who finally made the report to the Chief Engineer.
Now, while I was aboard Virginia our CHENG was a pretty decent sort - but he was from Georgia (I believe) and had certain habits of speech that were ineradicable. Normally this was simply a personality quirk, and didn't affect his work, or relationship with the guys under him. This time it ended up mattering.
The report that the CRA gave to the CHENG was that there had been a yellow poly bag of shit found in one of the Aux rooms. The CHENG considered this report a moment - and told him to have the material spread out and frisked to see if it could be disposed of as regular waste.
The CRA passed this on to the division, and then the process of choosing the *ahem* lucky tech began. I was on watch in #2 Engineroom - so I was never asked. Likewise the guy on watch in #1 plant was never asked to do it. Every other person in the division was asked to do it.
And the all refused.
Along about this time, the CHENG asked for a status report.
When he was told that the division was balking, he blew his stack. He told the CRA that he was to make it a direct order, and that every sailor who refused after that was to be written up. I'm told there was a lot of hemming and hawwing after that. Finally the LCPO for the division realized that none of the techs he had in front of him were willing to do the job. And unwilling to pass on the order, he ended up spreading the poo out, and determining that it was not contaminated. Which was the outcome everyone had expected. It also stank about as badly as everyone had expected, too.
When the CRA went back to the CHENG to give him a status report, the CHENG was pleased that things were finally back on track. The way I heard it, later, he had an afterthought as the CRA was leaving: "By the way, why was there such a hassle about getting this shit spread out and frisked?"
The CRA boggled, and then remembered the speech patterns that can be common in certain areas. "Sir, when I said it was a yellow poly bag of shit, I didn't mean that it was a bag of miscellaneous junk. I meant that it was a bag containing human feces."
:shock:
And so the CHENG finally understood why he nearly had a whole division written up for disobeying a lawful order.
The thing that amused me was that before I'd entered the Navy I'd been at college long enough to flunk out. I'd been on a biology track of study, specifically with various Animal Science courses. I'd done scatological analysis before - where one takes an animal's feces and spreads it out to see what one can determine about the diet and health of the animal. It's not exactly something I find fun, but I'd have frisked the stuff out, no problem.
Not that I took the time to tell anyone in my chain of command about my experience looking through shit. ;)
