Navy Epilogue

When I started this series, I discussed my hesitancy to talk about the Navy because it made me nervous. Now you know why. The whole story was just long and boring and drawn out and violated one of the basic tenants of this bloggg. 

I promised early on that my topics would be random and unstuck in time just like Kurt Vonnegut would have wanted it. But I needed to make this segment (sort of) sequential because even I could never have made heads or tails of it otherwise.

So... sorry.

The whole Naval mess ended, not with a bang, but a whimper, as in the poem by T. S. Eliot. The Hand Board declared me useless and bent. The hand wasn't going to return to normal and I was out. They told me to pack up my crap and go home and they would get around to discharging me when they were good and ready. At their convenience. 

So I packed up my crap and on January 19, 1968, I hitchhiked home. 

The last car that picked me up was some kids in a convertible in northern Florida. They took me all the way down to Miami and dropped me near my high school in Norwood, the town next to Carol City. 

From there, I shouldered my seabag and walked the rest of the way home. I just checked, it was 5.2 miles. I didn't care. Of course I had no way of knowing when I would get back to Miami, cell phones didn't exist, I didn't have a house key, and I was tired, so naturally, no one was home. I had to break in but thankfully security systems were unheard of in those days. Locks were only in place to keep your friends out.

I did learn that when you ride 400 miles in the back seat of a convertible, your hair becomes a solid mass of dirty, windswept cactus. It took several days to get it clean. I've had an unnatural fear of convertibles ever since. But I was home.

The law requires me to say that hitchhiking may have still been relatively (relatively!) safe in that millennium, it is definitely not recommended today.

After a brief fling with catatonic stupor, I spent some days at the beach awaiting my final disposition. Days became weeks, weeks became months and eventually, without trumpeting fanfare, my Honorable Discharge arrived in the mail effective May 8, 1968. You will be contacted by the Veterans Administration, goodbye, kiss my foot.

By then, I had already met my future wife and the page had turned.

So how did that hand work out? Well, Doctor Davis, the finger moves. Not very well, I can't make a fist exactly, it's not too flexible, but it's not completely stiff and pokey! The index finger is considerably shorter than it was, about the length of my pinky and the knuckle is misshapen and warped, but that's understandable since a lot of the bone was simply gone.

The scars on my palm and knuckle are impressive and the other fingers are crooked as well from the insult. And on wet or cold days, my hand sings to me, often it plays Mussorgsky's 'Night on Bald Mountain'.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCEDfZgDPS8 

But I still HAVE the finger, it's still there, still attached, still sort of working. I just checked to see if I use it to type and I don't, I've switched most of my keypad/button-pushing duty to my middle finger and it has stepped up nicely.

But I have remaining, nagging questions, some of which are hypothetical. You might recall that I can trace my lifelong computer career to walking down a hallway in the Eastern Airlines personnel department at exactly the correct split-second. I must ask what would have happened if through a split-second delay my hand had not exploded that day?

You've forgotten all about that Naval Academy college career I had tested for, but I haven't. Once I was declared damaged goods, I'm sure that whole application package and the ribbon that tied it up were tossed overboard somewhere. But what if I had been approved and had attended Annapolis? Would I have stayed in the Navy? If I had eventually become a Captain would it be on the Kobayashi Maru?

Or would I have gone on to Fire Control Technician Class A School and gotten involved with computers anyway. Then when I got out, after my full four year enlistment, would I have joined Eastern Airlines after all? Then what? Gone on to Shared Medical Systems?

And while we're at it, what happened to my stuff? Where is my red rubber ball? I should think having my dog tags would be pretty cool. And why did I get rid of my Sterile Distilled Saline medallion? I wore that forever. Shoot, I'd still wear that! 

I recognize now that it was very short-sighted of me to discard practically everything from the Navy, all I kept were my boots, watchcap and Peacoat. Everything else went away, even the seabag with the blood inside. In those days, I had no sense of historical or genealogical value. If I was done with something, out it went.  

But the red rubber ball? Wow! And couldn't I keep one sailor hat? C'mon!

Who took my place as Projectileman on the right side of the forward 5-Inch 38-Caliber gun on the Eugene A. Greene? Were they as good at it as I was? I don't think so!

What happened to Doctor Davis? Did he get to take off other fingers along the way? Was his heart in the right place, or was this all just practice?

And what about Tim? Was he actually the character Orr from 'Catch-22' who gets skilled at crash-landing his plane so he could eventually escape to Sweden? 

Was Tim just orchestrating his discharge? Or was he actually insane? Is he a senator now or perhaps the CEO of a major multi-national corporation? Both are pretty good probabilities.

If I hadn't come home when I did, I wouldn't have met my wife on schedule. Would I have met her anyway? But if there was no marriage, that meant there were no children and no grandchildren. So, yeah, that whole busted hand thing was an unlucky chain of events for me, but if any of my descendants are reading this... 

Boy, are you lucky! Cheers!

                     

Navy Portsmouth Part III

I like to think that the motives driving people are mostly good and positive. But when the doc suggested it may be time for my index finger to go the way of all flesh, I must confess that the thought crossed my mind that perhaps we were being a bit premature. On the other hand, no one wants a stiff, pokey finger.

On the third hand, it was a lot premature.

Hence, it was a bit of a cringe for me when he described a process where he would carve and sculpt my hand in such a way that (quoting here), "people would hardly notice there was a missing finger". Yes, that's right, he told me that no one would notice.

Well, I would notice!

I don't even like cutting my fingernails and for a reason I can't put my 'finger' on, it makes me uncomfortable to have parts of me separated from other parts.

My family has certainly had their struggles with fingers. Dave, my much handsomer brother decided it would be a good idea to catch a softball between his fingers splitting them apart. My father lost the tip of his pinky in some sort of automotive mechanic accident. And my mother! My mother was throwing away an old fire extinguisher and it caught her middle finger in the handle and the finger went with it. Right off! 

They reattached it, but my family didn't have a stable of top surgeons to work through all the issues, so her finger was... in an amazing case of foreshadowing... stiff and pokey! Oh, my, that's just how the doc said my finger would be! 

On a side note, it didn't strike me when I was younger, but now I can see that if my mother shook her fist at someone, she was automatically giving them the finger.

So, I took it upon myself (see earlier reference to self-reliance) to prove Doctor Davis wrong. I made my way to downtown Portsmouth, which as I remember was about two blocks long, and bought a red rubber ball maybe the size of a tennis ball. 

I squeezed that ball to death. I threw it in the air and caught it. I bounced it. I carried it everywhere. But my favorite use was throwing it against a wall, catching it and squeezing it with my busted right hand. 

The bouncing noise drove people crazy and they responded by throwing things at me until I moved to a different location. I finally found the perfect spot: The maternity floor!

The maternity ward was located on one of the top floors of the main building. It was almost completely empty, rarely used and sealed off effectively from the little lobby where the elevators were. I would sit there in that little elevator lobby and throw the ball against the wall and catch it and squeeze it. For hours. For days. Until my hand was numb.

If anyone ever came up the elevators, I could see that they were coming and when the doors opened, it was just a sailor sitting there. Clearly, I was on a mission. A little devious, but a mission.

Then I was fitted with a hellish device intended to cause great pain and suffering. There are no images available of this mechanism because it was probably banned by the United Nations Human Rights Council. It consisted of a strong spring-loaded contraption that fit over my hand and pushed my broken, unyielding finger down. Hard!

Wooo, that puppy hurt! I could take it for a while and off it came! Over time I could stand wearing it longer and longer. I took it as long as I could take it. And I continued using it for a year, even quite a while after I was discharged.

Meanwhile, every time I had a doctor visit with Doctor Davis he would ask, "Well, are you ready for me to take that finger off?" Geez.