The Flag

This is another Navy story and takes place in Orlando, Florida of all places.  Yes, right in the middle of Florida, miles from any ocean is a Navy base.  Actually it was a former Air Force base the Navy purchased to add a third boot camp during the Vietnam era.  I was stationed there in 1969 and 1970, just before Disney announced it was to open up a little theme park there.  These were critical years of protest, peace, love, hippies, the draft, flower power, psychedelic day-glow posters, the Age of Aquarius, Credence Clearwater Revival, Three Dog Night and Blood Sweat and Tears.

I worked in supply and I was housed in a barracks that was nothing more than a long rectangular building.  It had a common hallway and a central bathroom (head) and shower area.   There were maybe ten rooms total situated on either side of the head.  It was of CBS (concrete, block and stucco) construction except someone forgot the stucco.  In its place was paint.  The original color had long since been obscured with dirt and with whatever else that managed to stick to the walls over the years.  Two people were assigned to each room.

There were rumors that these buildings on the far end of the base had been used as a POW camp in World War II.  I doubted these rumors because such conditions would have been in violation of the Geneva Convention.  There was no air conditioning even though the temperatures in central Florida regularly hovered in the mid-nineties.  We did have one luxury which was a large exhaust fan that pulled air in through any open window and up through the ceiling.  For this to work however you had to leave the doors and windows open.  Since it rained every day promptly at 3:18 p.m. you had to leave your windows shut while you were at work.  The attic fan as it was called was about four feet across and had metal shutter louvers that opened when the fan was turned on.  When it was working the fan made it sound like you were sleeping in the middle of the flight deck of an aircraft carrier.  The noise however was better than the heat.

Our other luxury was that this remote area of the base was never visited by anyone of any importance.  I should say almost never, for reasons that will later become apparent. My roommate’s name was Mike.  Mike was of Lebanese heritage from Gulfport, Mississippi.  We were paired up since he was the only other college graduate in the building.  Mike and I regularly made attempts to liven up our dire existence by decorating within our budget.  Our budget was $Zero so everything had to be acquired from nature or comshawed.  This latter word is Navy jargon for “stolen with purpose” or “misappropriated”.  There are other interpretations I’m sure.  The word goes back to the Navy of the 19^th Century and was adapted from the lingo around Chinese ports.

At Christmastime we would chop down a small Australian pine tree and put it in the center of an old wooden cable spool.  We would decorate it with old beer cans or whatever shiny object seemed appropriate.  We found discarded rug remnants for the floor.  On one wall Mike had a poster of his favorite singer, Janis Joplin.  You get the picture.

The object of this story is however a flag.  Not just any old flag but one that reflected the times.  It was a modification of Old Glory where the white stars on a blue background were replaced with a large white peace sign on a blue background.  We used an old Navy flat sheet and two cans of spray paint to create our masterpiece.  Some masking tape and red spray paint for the stripes and a can of blue spray paint for the peace sign.  We hung it proudly on our wall.

Peace Flag

Mike and I left for work one particular day.  Mike says I left the door open.  I say Mike left the door open.  We both agree it would take a child of three with a paper clip about four seconds to open our locked door.  Half of that time would be for the three year old to lift his hand with paper clip up to the knob.  I’m sure the Chief Petty Officer who decided to inspect the barracks that day didn’t care how he opened the door but he was sorry he had.  What he saw almost gave this “lifer” a career-ending stroke.  He was face to face with a genuine sign of anarchy in the form of our peace flag.

When I think back I imagine the chief in his khaki’s opening the door and seeing his beloved flag enjoined with his worst nightmare, peace.  His eyes would bulge.  The veins in his neck would pop.    He would have been apoplectic.  Military men are not about peace.  They are about something else.  Whatever it is it has nothing to do with peace signs or flower power or any of that left wing radical nonsense.   

These were the recruit barracks, not ours

The chief and his first class petty officer stooge who lived in our barracks had a meeting.  They needed justice for this outrage.  It couldn’t be just a simple slap on the wrist either; no it had to be something serious involving time in the brig.  Between them they hatched a plan.  They went to the officer of the day (OD) and filed charges.  Mike and I were pulled from our duty assignments and were charged with desecration of the American flag.  The OD wasn’t sure what to do so he restricted us to base while he researched the matter.

Being restricted to base isn’t as bad as it seems.  We had two lakes with beaches, we had an award winning chow hall, and we had a beach club where we could drink beer.  The worst of it involved having to sleep in our barracks which we would have had to do anyway.

The chief and the first class PO filed lengthy reports supporting one another in their outrage over this desecration of our country’s symbol.  Between the two of them they did have half a brain.  It all evoked lines from the 1967 Arlo Guthrie song and movie, Alice’s Restaurant.  This was our “littering” incident and we had two officer Obie’s bringing charges.  They never got around to the 27 eight by ten color glossy photos with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one.  You could have easily cast the chief and the first class PO on the Group W bench scene from the movie.

Eventually we were both called into the base JAG (Judge Advocate Generals) office where we had to explain our side of the story.  The JAG officer quickly realized we had not desecrated an American flag.  We had destroyed a government sheet.  Mike and I worked in supply so we determined the government’s cost for that sheet was like $0.88.  The charge was then dropped to “destruction of government property, value less than one dollar.”  Being a diplomat the JAG officer let the chief and the PO come up with an appropriate penalty, subject to his approval.

Arial image of the Naval Training Center in Orlando, Florida.  It has been since torn down.  Our barracks were already torn down before this picture was taken.

Our barracks was about where the vacant field is in this later image, 

lower right center

The two of them must have pondered long and hard on this one.  They finally came up with the worst penalty they could think of that didn’t involve trying to keelhaul two sailors in Orlando, Florida.  I’m sure keelhauling came up but without a ship and without an ocean the keelhauling was a non-starter.  It seems that both the chief and the first class petty officer had made three attempts to pass a shore patrol course.  They had failed each time.  We were to be restricted to base until we could pass this course.  They just knew we would be restricted to base for the rest of our deployment.

Mike and I quickly checked out the course materials.  These courses were all self-study and were passed or failed based on an open book test at the end.  There were perhaps twenty chapters to read.  We decided on an all-niter.  After all, we had nowhere else to go.  I read chapters one through ten and Mike took the back half.  The test consisted of 100 questions taken directly from the pages of the book.  I took the test for the first half of the book and Mike did the rest.  We swapped answers.

I asked Mike, “Did you miss even one question?”  Mike said, “Nope, I aced the whole thing”.  I said that I felt the same way.  In order for it to look good I suggested, let’s intentionally miss three questions, but different ones for each of us.  It still gives us more than we need for a passing grade.  We submitted our tests.  They had to be mailed out for scoring so we waited a couple of weeks for the results.

When the results came in Mike and I were summoned to the JAG office.  There, sitting in the office, were the JAG officer, the chief and the PO.  The JAG officer informed us that the test results were in and that we both got identical scores.  The chief and the PO were now accusing us of collusion.  Now, according to them, we were really in trouble.  The JAG officer said it did look suspicious but so as not to jump to any false conclusions he decided to make a phone call.  He contacted the scoring section for the tests and, after a couple of transfers he was talking to someone who could help.

That person informed the JAG officer that while we both had identical scores, we had each missed three different questions.  The shocked look of dejection on their faces was priceless.  They knew we had cheated but couldn’t figure out how anyone could pass this “difficult” open book test on the first try.  Mike and I couldn’t figure out how they had managed to fail the course test three times.   Perhaps they were cheating.

As a postscript to this story the shore patrol course did come in handy later.  While I was in Gitmo I was able to pull shore patrol duty to help out when the fleet came in.  This got me out of regular duty at the warehouse or freezer plant more than just a few times.  Shore patrol at the EM (enlisted man’s) club consisted of finding a safe corner, building a barricade of tables and chairs and waiting for the fights to break out.  I felt safe since I was sober, wore a hard hat and had a Billie club the size of a Louisville Slugger.  You got to watch a bunch of drunken sailors beat up on each other for no apparent reason save for some imaginary wrong that needed to be righted.  If things got really out of hand I would call for help from the regular shore patrol who would come in and break things up.  I was good at this; after all I got a 97 on the shore patrol exam.