Chapter 3: Gitmo three, Scullery Captain

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Gitmo three, Scullery Captain

Scullery Captain

When my grandson asks me why I have to wash the dishes every night, it brought back fond memories from the past.

Guantanamo Bay, US Naval Base 1960-64.

For all of the many things my brothers and I did wrong, we received many a ass whooping, but not always. Mom finally decided the whoopings weren’t doing us any good.

After supper one night and for the next several nights, before supper was over Mom would say, “Mike you get to do the dishes tonight.” It started when I was around nine years old. After a week or so of me doing dishes every night, I copped an attitude. I asked her, “Why do I gotta do the dishes all of the time?”

She asked me if I remembered going down to the docks when the (USNS) Sea Robin came back into port and me buying a box of comic books from the sailors coming down the gangway? I told her yes that I traded a bunch of mangoes and bananas for a box that had about 80 “well read” comic books in it.

Then she asked me how many “Playboys and Penthouses” were in the box? I knew then, “Uh oh” she knows something.

Mom said, “Don’t lie to me, I gave your brother Duane a quarter and he done told me all about it.” That little stinker. Yep, I was busted. Then she added, “Y’all snuck into my bedroom while I was asleep and stole 2 dollars worth of change out of my pocketbook, didn’t you?”

Without totally confessing, I told her that we sold the nudie magazines to the Filipinos who lived in the barracks behind the BOQ across the street. Filipinos weren’t allowed to buy nudie magazines of white woman at the Navy Exchange. We were scared of being caught with them.

She seemed to abide by that, but she got back at me with, “How much did you pay for each comic if there were 80 in a box for $2.00?” Well, I didn’t know that one right off. Mom said, “Until you learn to figure it out, you’re gonna do the dishes every night until you either know the answer or I figure you’ve had enough.” Well, I can tell you now that it was 2.5 cents a book and I washed dishes every night for 80 days.

I would do the dishes and she’d sit at the table, asking me my times tables and my “goes into.” Just for good measure to cross me up, she would ask me what the name of the state capitols were, until I knew them all. I always had trouble with the capitols of Ohio, West Virginia and South Carolina. (Columbus, Charleston and Columbia). Then she started on foreign capitals. “What’s the capital of Iceland?” Every now and then she would ask me questions about the president. Who was the 8th president, who was the last president to fight in the Civil War, what president was elected twice but not consecutively?

This went on for months. “I got to do the dishes,” until I was blue in the face. We didn’t soak pots and pans, oh no, no more than about 5 minutes, then she’d tell me to “get on it” with a scratchy pad until it came clean. Wash the glasses first, then the rest of the dishes and last came the silverware. Mom couldn’t stand a dirty kitchen. Once a week, I boiled all of the silverware on top of the stove. I think that was something she learned from my granny who used to do that to keep her kids from catching sickness from each other.

After I got pretty good at knowing my time’s tables, Mom would shoot me questions at random and I had to be quick with the answers. How much is 9 times 9? How many times will 4 go into 27? How many quarters in a dollar? These were some of the best one on one times with my Mother that I can remember. If I was being punished, she made it seem like fun.

The next time I got into trouble, my Dad threatened me “Mike, you get to do some more dishes tonight.” Mom told him, “Don’t do that, he likes washing dishes, that ain’t punishing him.” Dad thought about it and the next day after school, he took me down to the Galley. The Navy kitchen, was down the street, on the other side of the Navy Exchange, (the same one my brothers and I accidentally burned down). He told the Chief to put me to work in the scullery, the place where the metal trays, silverware and all the dirty utensils got washed.

I started out rinsing the trays off and placing them in racks for the “dishwasher,” then I learned to run the big machine that washed the trays with steam and hot water and to fill the dispenser full of soap. I spent many hours scraping the big pots and pans till they came clean.

Every afternoon for what was supposed to be “a week or so, I “got” to wash dishes for the U.S. Navy. Most of the guys that worked there, were just temporary. Working off “extra duty” assignments instead of going to “Captain’s Mass” for various rule infractions of the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ). After a few weeks, I had worked in the kitchen longer than anyone else. If something broke down or they couldn’t find supplies, they would come to me and asked me what to do about it. Soon I got the honorary promotion to “Scullery Captain.” The Chief gave me an enlisted man’s white hat to wear, with “Captain” stenciled across the brim and a set of dog tags that read, “FRAILEY – SCULLERY CAPTAIN.”

Most clouds have a silver lining. I had access to everything in the kitchen. I could eat anything I wanted, which seemed to lean towards the ice cream. I ate so many cups of vanilla ice cream, that they ran out and I had to start eating chocolate and strawberry. So much better than that mango ice cream we made on our back porch. I hated mangoes. I told my brothers about it. I would let them in the back door to get a few cups of ice cream, whenever the coast was clear.

My youngest brother Duane, even though he was stove up most of the time from leg operations, full-length leg casts and braces, could find his way to the back door when I wasn’t there. He’d tell the guys that Mike said, “to give him some ice cream.”

After my parents found out about our “ice cream scam” they found another way of punishing me. Mom would wash my head in the toilet, if I complained, she’d say, “Shut up or I’ll flush it again.” Dad would make me get out in the hot sun and “cut the grass” with a machete and the back side of a flat blade shovel. He told me that since I like getting in trouble so much, that I’d better get used to “corporal punishment.”

After that, I “got” to be “water boy” with the Sea Bees when they were building pill boxes and bunkers on Hill 300. Hill 300 was the highest point of the base and that’s where the guns and armaments were hidden. There were extensive caves and tunnels dug into Hill 300 to store ammunition for the big guns.

Other times, I “got” to help unload bags of mail. My brothers and I would unload mail from the mail plane to the back of big, gray deuce and a quarter. Dad believed that idle hands were the Devil’s plaything. Back at the P.O. (Post Office), we would help sort mail, looking for fruit cakes and cookies sent to guys that had been transferred or were TAD to another base. We would go through Dad’s desk drawers and swipe confiscated Cuban Cigars, El Presidentes and Monte Cristoes. We would smoke these in our forts, little caves that we had dug into the side of the cliffs behind our house. Sometimes we traded them to our nemeses, the Red Devils, (a rival neighborhood gang, ours was the Blue Angels) for binoculars or aviator sunglasses. It was all government issued stuff via the “USS Comshaw.”

All that seems like a lifetime ago now. When I eat vanilla ice cream, I think about my brothers long gone now. It was suppose to be my job to look out after them. I don’t have much to say about that but I miss them and the many escapades that we shared.

I haven’t read many comic books since, but I do get to use the math skills, pounded in my brain and for that, I thank Mom every day. If I get to do the dishes again tonight, I thank her for that too.

The capitol of Iceland is Reykjavik.

Submitted: August 20, 2020

War and Military life-in-gitmo-pre-missile-crisis