Ammo ships are not like cruise ships. They don’t stop in Miami or Cancún. They head way out into the ocean, beyond the territorial waters, sailing parallel to the coast but far from the busy harbors of cities. You never want to dock a ship full of bombs at a big port because if the ship should blow up at sea, at least the disaster wouldn’t be compounded by casualties on surrounding boats or on shore. We left the States, sailed about twenty-five nautical miles out, and then due south.
The maximum speed of an ammo ship was about seventeen knots, on good seas; we usually cruised at about thirteen knots—on land that’d be about fifteen miles an hour. So, it took us five days to arrive at the port of Colón, Panama, on the Atlantic side of the canal. From there, the Drake Victory took on a canal pilot to sail her the forty-eight miles through the manmade waterway to Balboa, Panama, on the Pacific side. There we filled her with bunker fuel. She was barely “Panamax”—canal-size—and it was amazing to see her needle through locks 110 feet wide. It took more than a day, and the captain let us have shore leave.
Some of us took the parrot-colored Panama Canal Railway train, which runs parallel to the canal across the isthmus toward Balboa. Those hills are where privateer Sir Francis Drake ventured past the Spanish Main to climb a hilltop tree and become the first Englishman to see the Pacific Ocean. I figured the Drake Victory was named for him. He was soon plundering Spanish ships loaded with their own plunder: In-can silver and gold by the ton. Drake was the one who started the legal concept that a captain has absolute power on his ship: after he took a dislike to his co-commander, an aristocrat with strong ties to Queen Elizabeth I of England, he simply accused him of witchcraft and beheaded him. That’s why I don’t like ship captains: absolute power.
Even then, before I had ever worked as a sandhog, I was blown away by what the Panama Canal workers had achieved with nothing but shovels, their bare hands, dynamite, and a few turn-of-the-twentieth-century steam excavators. They had to cut through a spiny mountain in the Continental Divide and build a dam to divert a lake. I read that they excavated twenty-five times what other sandhogs dug out eighty years later for the Chunnel, the thirty-one-mile tunnel connecting England and France beneath the English Channel.
National Maritime Union regulations required that we be paid up to half our salary earned to the point when we went onshore. The US economy was so good then that American dollars went a long way in Panama. We had ourselves a good time in Balboa that night. I partied like it was my last trip, and I kind of felt like it might be. Still, I took comfort in the fact that I wasn’t married then, nor did I have any kids. You’re not as worried about dying when you’re young and unattached.
We got back on board the Drake Victory for the monthlong voyage across the Pacific to Vietnam. We followed the equator most of the way, even though it took longer. With our cargo of ammo, we had to stay out of the shipping lanes. We didn’t see a boat, we didn’t see a plane, we never saw an island.
The ship had been taken out of mothballs and hadn’t carried a crew since World War II. There were actually a few guys on the ship who had served in that war and had been asked to come out of retirement to show the young lads how to run these beauties. Some of them had lost buddies and survived on rafts and lifeboats after German submarines sunk their ships off the coasts of Europe, Asia, and even the States. U-boats had sunk 175 merchant ships sailing from ports in Virginia, Florida, Louisiana, North Carolina, and more on the West Coast. These ships brought essential cargo such as munitions, equipment, and supplies to Europe. In fact, World War II merchant mariners had a higher percentage of casualties—9,521 souls, according to merchant mariner historian Toni Horodysky—than any branch of the military. Yet they didn’t receive any recognition or the benefits of the GI Bill, and they had to sue to receive Veterans Administration benefits more than forty years later, in 1988.
The ship was a 100 percent male world. There was no such thing as “Hey, watch your language.” So, from the first union meeting, guys were marking out their territory. I had gotten myself elected the ship’s union chairman. It was easy: nobody else wanted to fill out the forms. I had learned over the years that captains give union reps a wider berth. They didn’t want grievances filed or anything that would tangle them up in the bureaucracy of hearings. I figured it would help me with time off the ship once we reached Vietnam, so I could do what I had to do.
As ship’s chairman, I announced that the so-called black gang would take care of the engine room and environs, while the stewards would keep clean the officers’ cabins and the rank-and-filers’ fo’c’sles—short for forecastles, the sailors’ sleeping quarters—and the main deck. Some guys had a whole fo’c’sle, with its four bunk beds, to themselves, because during World War II a Victory ship might have had seventy sailors on it, and we were a crew of only twenty-three.
The cook, who was in charge of the stewards, didn’t like that division of labor. He was a big, tough guy, about six foot four, with a chef’s toque perched on his huge Afro. “I’m not gonna let my workers clean up for a bunch of deck apes!” he yelled. We worked that one out, but tension continued between the departments during the sail about who was to chip, who was to paint, who was to do this or that.
Then one morning, we were about a thousand miles from land on a beautiful blue-sky day, so those of us not tending the engines were all out on deck. There wasn’t a plane in the sky or another ship on the horizon. We were in the middle of the Pacific all by ourselves, when suddenly smoke started pouring out of one of the forward hatches. The hatch was a rectangular wooden opening as big as a car, covered with canvas to stop rain and seawater from pouring in below deck, but now it was burning.
“Fire!” somebody hollered. But we didn’t know where it was. It could be the canvas covering the hatch, or it could be down in the hole. And we were standing on the deck of a ship loaded with ten thousand tons of ammunition. If the fire spread to the hold, we’d all be blown to kingdom come. The chef, the engineer, the boatswain, and the deck crew ran like hell toward the fire to put it out together. Nobody asked, “Whose job is this?” It was: “Everybody put it out now!” And we did. For the rest of the voyage, we all helped out one another.
I spent my days tending to the ship’s 8,500-horsepower Lentz steam engine, oiling its huge wheel and all the other moving parts as the ship made its long, slow glide around the belt of the Earth. Time went by with the rhythm of the waves. The guys who join the merchant marines are a tough lot, because it can get lonely out there. Maybe that’s why some of them sign up, like men who used to join the French Foreign Legion to forget someone. But mariners, in general, are men who love the sea. You have to love the sea almost more than you love a “normal” life on land with a family, because you’re often gone for a long, long time.
There was not much to see, save for the rare whale off starboard or a flipper of something off port side. Otherwise, the only thing breaking up the dull buzz of the day would be a shout that signaled the end of a shift: four hours on, eight hours off, four hours on again, day after day for weeks. You always wanted to work overtime shifts if you could, because basic pay was only about $300 a month—about $2,218 before taxes today— and OT could boost it. I worked a lot of double shifts on the voyage, but not primarily for the cash; the seamen I’d traded hours with had agreed to cover for me when I went on my sojourn onshore. There was the occasional game of rummy or blackjack. Sometimes I’d go up on deck and peer at the unadorned horizon, mostly thinking of what lay ahead.
One day I was on deck, and those thoughts turned to Japan, probably because I’d sailed there on the troop ship the USS Hugh Gaffey after joining the marines. The military is like the lottery in determining where you serve, and, of course, your fate is also shaped by whether it’s peacetime or wartime. Some guys spent their entire World War II service in Malibu, California. Others were stationed at a secret US Army Air Forces base in the Galápagos Islands, a beautiful, exotic place where the British naturalist Charles Darwin studied the rare giant sea tortoises and developed his theory of evolution. My brother, Billy, who had joined the marines the year before I did, spent three years in North Carolina. I served five months in the Philippine jungle and on Guantanamo in Cuba, before the Vietnam War.
I also got to serve in Japan. I won that crapshoot. I fell in love with a beautiful girl there named Michiko, which gave me an incentive to learn to speak Japanese and find out about Asian culture. That would come in very handy in Vietnam.
I was daydreaming about Michiko when I suddenly heard someone yell, “Land!” I snapped out of it as every free deckhand on the Drake Victory scrambled up to take a look. There it was: no shapes of palm trees or huts to be seen, but it was land, all right—a dark-green mound way, way out where the sky met the sea.
“It’s probably the Philippines,” somebody said, sounding a little wistful. He must have been right, because a few days later, on January 19, 1968, after eight weeks at sea, we dropped anchor at South Vietnam’s Qui Nhon Harbor, on the South China Sea.
Somewhere out there were the guys from my neighborhood, and it was time for me to find them.