Paul Davis On Crime: A Look Back At Life Aboard An Aircraft Carrier During The Vietnam War: 'The Compartment Cleaner'

The story below is Chapter 20 of Olongapo, a crime novel I hope to soon publish.

The story originally appeared in American Crime Magazine.

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.

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'