The story below is Chapter 20 of Olongapo, a crime novel I hope to soon publish.
The Compartment Cleaner
By Paul Davis
Back in
1969, I was 16 years old and working full time as a messenger for an office
supply company after dropping out of South Philadelphia High School, or Southern, as we called it.
The job did
not pay well, but I didn’t care as I was just waiting until I turned 17 so I
could then join the Navy. I liked delivering office supplies to the offices in
Center City Philadelphia, the city’s business hub. I handed over the office
supplies to the receptionists and secretaries, who were mostly young pretty
girls. I always stayed there a bit and flirted with the young girls.
For a
girl-crazy young man like me, this was a dream job. The job ended for me when
the owner of the company informed me that the messengers took turns cleaning
the company’s bathroom. I was a proud kid, and as I was dressed in an expensive
Italian knit shirt and dress slacks, I told the owner that I didn’t clean
toilets.
Astonished
that a teenager would talk to him in this manner, the owner said, “I don’t know
what to say, except finish the day…”
“I quit
right now,” I said, and I walked out the door. “I don’t clean fucking toilets.”
Well, I
later turned 17 and joined the Navy. And guess what my first job was in Boot
Camp? Yeah, cleaning toilets.
During my
time in the Navy, I often told other sailors that I joined the Navy because I
liked the idea of clean ships. And then I found out I had to clean them.
That old
joke always got a laugh.
When Lorino
and I first reported aboard the Kitty Hawk in Bremerton, Washington in 1970 we
were lucky to escape pulling a three-month stint as mess cooks, like all the
other seamen new to the carrier. We dodged that drudgery, as the petty officer
in the ship’s personnel office was from Philadelphia. He said he didn’t want to
assign his “homeboys” to the tough and thankless duty of cleaning up the galley
around the clock and being ordered about by the cooks who prepared the crew’s
meals.
Instead, he
assigned us to three months with Special Services, where manpower was required
to install the new shipboard close-circuit TV/Radio cable throughout the length
of the ship. The Kitty Hawk was the first warship to have close-circuit TV and
radio stations. We also performed a variety of other tasks in Special Services.
Having
attended two firefighting schools, I was also assigned to a Damage Control
Team, which was called out to fight fires and other emergencies. A fire aboard
an aircraft carrier could turn into a truly deadly affair, as the warship
carried massive amounts of bombs, missiles and JP5 jet fuel.
After I mentioned
that I was an aspiring writer to the Special Services Officer, LTJG Parker, a
journalism university graduate, he assigned me to write three feature articles
for the ship's newspaper, which were my first published pieces.
At the end of
our three month-detail, I was reassigned to the Communications Radio Division
and Lorino was reassigned to the Deck Department. It had been a good three
months in Special Services for me and having witnessed the tired and miserable
mess cooks swabbing decks, wiping down counters and bulkheads, and scrubbing
pots and pans, I was thankful that I had “skated” on that cleaning assignment.
But imagine my
disappointment when after I reported to the radio division, I was immediately
assigned as the division compartment cleaner. I was informed that I would be
the compartment cleaner for a two-month period. I was unhappy, but there was
nothing I could do.
The job,
however, turned out to be quite easy. Each day I cleaned the head, which had
about a dozen toilets, sinks and shower stalls, and I sweep, swabbed, waxed and
buffed the tiled deck with an electric buffer. While the rest of the sailors in
the division were working long hours in the message processing center during
our sea trials, drills and flight operations off the coast of Southern
California prior to the aircraft carrier heading to Southeast Asia, my job took
only about two hours in the morning. I also had to sweep the compartment’s deck
and empty the ash trays at night after the crew watched the daily movie on our
close-circuit TV. I was largely unsupervised, which suited me.
Despite the
relative ease of the job, I was pleased when a chief assigned me to the message
processing center as we were heading towards Southeast Asia and the Vietnam
War. The chief reassigned a seaman who screwed up in the message center to be
the new compartment cleaner.
My
replacement was Donald Harris, a sailor from Seattle, Washington. A short,
25-year-old with reddish-blonde hair and a full curly beard, Harris was
adamantly opposed to the Vietnam War. Thrown out of college for his antics in a
violent and destructive anti-war protest on campus, he tried to avoid the draft
by stating that he was a conscientious objector. When that didn’t work, he
joined the Navy, thinking that serving on a destroyer or submarine in Europe
was preferable to participating in the Vietnam War.
He was
crushed when he received orders to the USS Kitty Hawk, which he knew would be
operating off the coast of Vietnam. Reporting aboard the aircraft carrier, he
was assigned to the Communications Radio Division. Even before he unpacked his
sea bag, Harris began offering his anti-war opinions to the other sailors in
the division. Due to his overwrought and theatrical delivery, no one paid much
attention to him. Most of the sailors thought he was a kook.
“Opinions
are like assholes,” one old chief told Harris after one of his anti-war rants.
“Everyone has one – and they all stink.”
Harris was
generally tolerated, but he went over the line on one watch when he stood up on
his soapbox – in this case a desk in the message center - and yelled out that
the carrier’s crew and air wing were conducting an illegal and evil war and
killing innocent women and children.
Commander
Olson came out of his small office and ordered one of the chiefs to throw
Harris out of the message center.
Harris was assigned as the compartment cleaner for the rest of his time on the Kitty Hawk.
One night on
Yankee Station in the Tonkin Gulf off the coast of Vietnam in 1971, after one
of my "eight on/eight off" watches, I was lying in my rack after the
late showing of the daily movie on our shipboard TV station. I couldn’t sleep,
so I was reading one of the dozen books I had on the metal shelf in my rack. I
was a huge admirer of Ernest Hemingway’s novels, short stories and nonfiction
books, and I was trying to read the late, great writer’s posthumous novel, Islands in the Stream.
But I had to
put the book down as I could not concentrate on the novel while Harris was
filibustering below. I got out of my rack in a t-shirt and skivvies (shorts),
slipped on my flip-flop shower shoes, and sat in a chair by Trent as Harris was
sweeping up and pontificating about the Vietnam War.
Harris was
on a roll, bending Trent’s ear and the ear of a seaman named Mike Topher. Trent
was a Texan who didn’t say much. He was only sitting out in the berthing
compartment as he was smoking a cigarette. He planned to “hit the rack,” as we
used to say, after his cigarette. Topher, a 26-year-old black sailor from
Detroit, was also a quiet guy who was sitting there in silence drinking a coke
and smoking a cigarette.
When I sat
down, Harris figured he had a live one to debate. Like Harris, I was a
voracious reader of books, magazines, newspapers and message traffic. And like
Harris, I had a keen interest in the war, although we held differing views of
the conflict, much like the people back home.
At sea
aboard the aircraft carrier, we read in the Defense Department’s newspaper, Stars and Stripes and the newspapers we received
from home about how the Vietnam War was continuing to divide a deeply
contentious public back in the states. Anti-war protests and riots were covered
prominently on the newspapers’ front pages. There were also newspaper stories
about counter demonstrations from construction workers and others who supported
the American involvement in the Vietnam War.
Harris
wanted to be back in the USA in the throes of the anti-war protests and not on
a warship actively engaged in the war. Frustrated and angry, he aimed his
speech about an illegal and evil war at me. He also stated that we were
dropping bombs on an innocent and defenseless country.
“Well, you
know the North Vietnamese invaded South Vietnam, not the other way around,” I
said. “And the North is not exactly defenseless. They have one of the largest
armies in the world, trained and supplied by the Soviets and the Communist
Chinese.”
I also noted
that the North Vietnamese surface to air missiles, called SAMs, which were
aimed at our pilots, were state-of-the-art thanks to the Soviets.
“We’re not
just fighting pajama-wearing Viet Cong guerrillas.” I added.
Harris did
not bother to respond to my comments.
“I can’t stand to be complicit in this illegal
war,” Harris said, his voice rising. “Every time a plane launches from the
flight deck, I feel like a baby killer!”
“Shut the fuck up!” yelled someone who was trying
to sleep.
“Swabbing
the deck and picking up soda pop cans and cigarette butts don’t exactly make
you a warrior or a baby killer,” Trent said softly.
“But I’m
here and I’m a part of this massive killing machine.”
Trent and I
looked at each other and shook our heads.
At that
point, seemingly out of nowhere, Topher stood up, grabbed his crotch, and
yelled out, “I gots to stick my dick in something!”
Trent and I
laughed at Topher’s vocal expression of sexual frustration. As young men who
spent months at sea, we all shared that frustration, even if we didn’t blurt it
out like Topher. Harris, who no doubt did not appreciate the change in the
course of the conversation, stormed into the head.
There were
some war hawks in the division and there were some doves as well. Some sailors
had no view of the war, or they chose not to express their view. The doves
believed we should not be involved in the Vietnam conflict, and the hawks
believed that the president and the Pentagon should remove the war-fighting
limitations and restrictive rules of engagement against the enemy and allow the
American military to win the war outright.
I leaned
towards the view that a Kitty Hawk F-4 Phantom jet pilot expressed to me in an
Olongapo restaurant. He said that many of his fellow combat pilots believed we
should use our massive air power to go all out and defeat the North Vietnamese
rather than fight a protracted and limited war to contain the North Vietnamese
Communists.
He said that
American politicians and the general public were fast tiring of a prolonged war
of attrition, featured live and bloody on TV.
“We’re
losing the opinion war,” the pilot told me. “Even though we’ve won every single
battle in Vietnam over company strength.”
Harris, of
course, did not subscribe to this view. He was certainly entitled to his
opinion, and he was certainly not alone in his thinking, but he expressed those
opinions ad nauseum and in an overdramatic fashion. Harris alienated even those
who agreed with his views.
After we
docked at Subic Bay, Harris went alone into Olongapo to, as he put it, “drown
his sorrows.” He began drinking at a bar and was soon joined by a hostess.
Harris bought drinks for the two of them, but he was depressed and found no joy
in the cold beer or the pretty girl next to him.
Harris asked
the girl if she could obtain some “Red Devils” for him, thinking the
barbiturates would dull his internal pain and guilt. He handed the girl some
money and she got up from the table and sought out one of the band members who
took the cash and handed her some pills. She returned to Harris’ table and gave
him five capsules. Harris swallowed all five capsules with gulps of beer.
Quality
control was not a strong point in the producing of Red Devils in Olongapo. The
capsules were unevenly produced. One could take eight capsules and feel little,
or one could take two capsules and die from an overdose.
Harris’ five
Red Devils caused him to collapse as he was trying to leave the bar. He fell on
the floor and foamed at the mouth. A Filipino waiter rushed out onto the street
and flagged down a Navy Shore Patrol jeep.
Harris
regained consciousness in the Subic Bay hospital. After he recovered, he was
put on report for taking drugs and told that if he signed a confession, he
would be given a general discharge. The general discharge stated that he was
unfit for naval service. Harris saw this as a way out of the war. He signed the
confession and was promptly discharged from the U.S. Navy and flown home.
When we left
Subic Bay and headed back to Yankee Station, some other poor slob was assigned
as the compartment cleaner.
© 2025 By Paul Davis
Note: You can read other chapters from Olongapo via the links below:
Paul Davis On Crime: My Crime Fiction: 'Butterfly'
Paul Davis On Crime: My Crime Fiction: 'Salvatore Lorino'
Paul Davis On Crime: My Crime Fiction: The Old Huk
Paul Davis On Crime: My Crime Fiction: Join The Navy And See Olongapo
Paul Davis On Crime: Boots On The Ground
Paul Davis On Crime: My Crime Fiction: 'The 30-Day Detail'
Paul Davis On Crime: My Crime Fiction: 'Cat Street'
Paul Davis On Crime: Chapter 12: On Yankee Station
Paul Davis On Crime: My Crime Fiction: 'The Cherry Boy'
Paul Davis On Crime: My Crime Fiction: 'The Hit'
Paul Davis On Crime: My Crime Fiction: Welcome To Japan, Davis-San
