The Lucky 13

Me and my friend Davey stood next to our lockers, and it was though the idea hit us simultaneously. He said it first, but I was thinking the same thing. "Let's join the Navy, dude!" And we did.

Davey and I were two opposites of a coin. He was big, a whole lot bigger than me. He was the bad-ass, I was the low key runt. How he got to be a senior was beyond me. He had several sisters and his father was an abusive terror. One night he, me, and the mayor's son ripped off a nice set of chrome wheels right off the auto-shop instructors' car. Well, those two did, actually, I was just along for the ride, as I never had the mind or the guts for crime. I have no idea how me and Davey hooked up to begin with, but as long as I in his shadow, I never had to worry about guys whose key to self-esteem was making life miserable for guys like me. Davey is not the kind of guy I would associate with these days, but back then, fate provided me with many strange associations.

Davey and I had spent the summer previous to our senior year traveling around the state of Alaska with a carnival. I had already turned 18, and didn't ask my "parents" so much as inform them I wanted the experience. Davey was still underage but illogical as it seems, his father gave him the nod. I grew up really fast that summer. But when September came along, and we made the odyssey back to Fairbanks in an old station wagon on it's last legs, I discovered that my Mom and Stepfather had actually been just shacking together the whole time, had never been married, and had decided to separate, thus I really had no home to return to. So here I was, working a late shift dishwashing job, going to school during the day, and living in a run-down apartment with a bunch of other dislocated kids, none of whom were very good at coming up with their share of the rent. Then the real kicker.....my school guidance counselor (talk about an oxymoron) informed me that I wouldn't have enough credits to graduate from high school that year, and would require summer school to get my diploma.
Seems the dozen-odd school systems I had passed through as a welfare kid all had differing crediting systems which left me short in my final year. Which brings me back to the locker with Davey.

I was not clueless to what was going on in the world. Half my life was spent seeing reports coming back from Vietnam, the peace marches, the body bags, the whole mess. At 5 feet three inches and 120 lbs soaking wet, and not one violent bone in my body, I couldn't picture myself with an M16 in my hands wading thru rice patties shooting at anything that didn't look Caucasian. I knew if I was drafted, I was either dead meat or judged a misfit. In 73 the war was not over, and since it was looking dicey just to even get my high school diploma, I knew I wasn't going to have some college to hide in. So when Davey said, "Hey, Dude, let's join the Navy!", for once in his life the guy came up with something that actually made perfect sense.

I had been an avid fan of WWII history, could describe in every detail every sort of warship every nation had ever built, and was a great fan of "Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea". So joining the Navy to see the world, get some sort of job training, and saving my butt all seemed like a great idea. The idea of serving my country had never been a problem for me. Vietnam just wasn't my idea of serving my country.

We both went down to the recruiter, let him give us his spiel, got what "guarantees" we could out of him, and joined up on the delayed entry program. Then he sent us down to take the GED test. Except for math, I pretty much aced the test, but to this day I think they fudged Davie's scores. However, come the day to fly to boot-camp in San Diego, Davey's father refused to sign the papers, as Davey was still 17. I was entering my new life alone. Davey eventually talked his old man into signing, but he was always about four weeks behind me, from boot camp to "A" school, till eventually he managed to finagle some kind of medical discharge. Knowing Davey, I wasn't surprised.

I suppose by now you are asking, "Well, where does the number 13 come into all this?" Well, I joined on December 13th.
I was formed into company 382, which adds up to 13. Somehow, come time to make our company flag, everybody in the company looked over my shoulder as I was sketching out an idea for the flag, Trentcamp's Truckers, the Lucky 13, and all proclaimed I had designed the flag. We lost 13 guys exactly before graduation day. I went on to "A" school, where it was decided I would make a great Personnelman, working in a ship's office managing personnel records. While there, this guy comes into class asking for volunteers for submarine duty. I knew I was never going to make the Navy Seals (which, ironically, would HAVE landed my ass in Nam), but submarine duty to me sounded like the best of the best, and my hand shot up faster than anybody's. I wouldn't learn until much later that they had only just recently included Personnelmen in the billets approved for submarine service because they couldn't get enough volunteers from the Yeoman ranks, which was taken up by mostly women, who weren't allowed to serve on subs. The women also took up most of our shore duty billets, which stuck our male asses out to sea for most of our tours. I made it thru sub school easily enough, and reported to my first command, the USS RAY, a nuclear fast attack submarine based in, where else, Norfolk, Virginia (which we referred to as No-Fuck). The ships number was 653. Yes, that adds up to 14.

Why do I consider 13 my lucky number? Well, I had been on board RAY for three months, had made short runs including the Virgin Islands, and was not far from completing my submarine qualifications, which would have awarded me my "Dolphins", the proud insignia of a sailor qualified in submarines. To be qualified in submarines meant you had to know your boat from sonar dome to screw, knew where every valve to every systems was, where every wire and pipe ran, and how to respond if anything bad happened to any of it, including a hull breach. And as an added bonus, the RAY was scheduled to go into dry dock for an overhaul, which would have meant essentially we'd be on shore duty for most of my remaining tour.
Well, much to my dismay, another boat getting ready to deploy to the Mediterranean for a six month tour was short a Yeoman, and guess who got picked to transfer to fill the billet. You guessed it. At the time, I begged my skipper to get me out of it, I loved my boat, I was almost qualified, and I was feeling so cheated. There was nothing he could do about it. So, I ended up reporting on board the USS LAPON (SSN661), which, you guessed it, adds up to 13. So, apparently, fate made a minor mistake and came back to correct it. Thus, I got to spend six months seeing places I didn't care to see, with the exception of Pompeii, near Naples, Italy, and Lisbon wasn't such a bad shore leave, but most of our time not on patrol was spent tied up to a tender stationed at a tiny island made of rocks and nothing much else.

Before I finally completed my four years of active duty, most of which I can't really talk about, we found out that RAY, due to a really bad navigation error, had run full tilt into an underwater mountain while on patrol. Thankfully, the worst damage she sustained was a stove-in bow, totally destroying the sonar dome, but as far as I know there hadn't been a hull breach.
There were plenty of injuries sustained by the collision, as the inside of a submarine is a nightmare of exposed metal pipes, brackets and hard surfaces, and there had been no warning of the impending impact. A submarine travels pretty damn fast underwater, and it has an impressive mass, and you can just imagine the physics involved. That's why I wasn't on board the RAY that fateful day.............she wasn't my lucky 13.