March 5, 1973, Monday

It’s time to go eat lunch. The master chief told us that division is deciding what to do about us flunking. They could do a few different things. They could transfer us tomorrow, three weeks from today or when we finish. They could add that exercise on to the end of the course. They haven’t decided what to do. In the mean time we will carry on with classes. Later.

I’m at lunch. My thigh is sore. I stuck a needle in it. The needle was full of sugar water. Except for the soreness and the small welt, I was assured by Chief Mann it won’t harm me.

Nerve gas kills. From the movies we saw, it’s not very pretty. It looks gruesome. Let’s say one of those times I am decontaminating the ship, I accidentally get exposed to enemy nerve gas. One of my options is injecting myself with an atropine auto injector. It looks like a tin cigar tube. I would remove the yellow safety cap. Holding the tube firmly in my hand I would slam the green end into my thigh muscle. The force would trigger the spring that would inject a needle into my leg, automatically administering a dose of atropine. I didn’t have to inject myself. I tried not to. I was the only one in the class to inject one’s self.

After we were instructed on the how-to’s, why’s, who, and when we would inject atropine, the chiefs brought out a box of tubes, about a hundred of them. In the box were three tubes that were loaded. The other tubes were inert. They wanted us to practice slamming hard in a good muscle. It is important that we get the atropine delivered fast. It’s a matter of live or death. If we are doing it to ourselves or to a ship mate, it had to be administered fast to be effective. We had to get the feel of it now, because our exercises this afternoon may be about nerve gas. We may need to do this for real.

One by one we walked up to the box on the table. Choose any tube in the box. Follow the procedure and hope you don’t get one with a needle. They wanted to show us how hard to slam a muscle. The chiefs had secret markings on the tubes that were loaded.

It was my turn. I reached to the middle of the box. Chief Mann said, “Let’s see.” I showed him my tube. He said you might want to pick again. I handed him that tube, I quickly picked again. This time I went to the bottom of the box. I showed him the tube. The chief smiled. I’ll give you one more try, lad. Once again I handed him the tube. Surely two bad tubes can’t be on the bottom. I went to the bottom again. I showed the chief the tube. That’s your tube no matter what lad. Slam it! I did. Everybody laughed and they are still laughing. The swelling is going down a little bit. Later.

It’s after dinner; earlier today I think we killed every fish in the bay. They put us on this boat. It was a large patrol boat. We took it out to the middle of the bay, we set anchor. They gave us our special protective gear. It was a pair of long sleeve overalls, one baggy rubber suit, a gas mask, two pair of rubber gloves, and rolls and rolls of duct tape.

It was 84 degree outside. I put on a pair of gloves. I put the overalls on over my clothes and duct taped my gloves closed. It was getting hot and it was about to get hotter. I asked for some water. The chief said after the exercise is finished we can drink all we want. It was time to toughen up! This is the navy! He said, if the enemy was attacking would I ask them to wait for you to get a drink. I just shook my head.

I put on the other pair of gloves. I pulled the rubber suit over the overalls and taped up the opening to the gloves and my shoes. We put on our gas masks, and taped each other’s necks air tight. Our bodies were air tight from the outside air. The chiefs told us to wait. They went to the bridge tower to watch us in action.

We waited and waited some more. I was drenched in sweat, so was everybody else. We heard a loud high pitched whistle. “Now hear this. Now hear this.” Then a glass vial falls down from the tower. Crash, it breaks open on the steel deck. Barry and Brice approach it with the testers. The Geiger counter goes off immediately. Ok, we know what we’re fighting.

Half the crew sprays the deck with a foam. The other half scrubs it with strong bristled push brooms. As the first crew scrubs. The second crew readies the pumps to wash the deck with sea water. We scrub in till they are ready with the pump.

Four guys pass out. This is part of the exercise. This would happen in a real attack. We take the sailors that passed out off to the side on stretchers. Contaminates are in the air there is nothing else we can do right now, we moved faster. They’re having trouble starting the pumps. We keep scrubbing. The pumps finally started. I was hoping I would pass out and put myself out of this misery. They sprayed the ship’s deck with water from the bay. We pushed the radioactive foam off of the deck and into the San Francisco Bay. We pumped up good bay water to wash bad radioactive foam back to the bay. It just seemed wrong.

When Barry took his Geiger reading, it was safe. We got the all clear. I ripped off my mask, tape and all. Half of us rushed to the guys that had passed out. Brice and guys like him only wanted to get their own protective gear off. We ripped the suits off of the sailors that had passed out. I was pounding on the bridge door, demanding some water. As they opened the door I saw the steel shiny drinking fountain. The only container I could see was the thermoses of coffee that each of the chiefs had sitting on the table.

I didn’t ask, I barged past them and started to scoop up the thermoses. They might have objected if Barry and a few other sailors had not reached the top of the stairs and were moving towards the drinking fountain. I emptied the coffee from the thermoses. We filled up what we could and rushed down to those that had passed out. They were starting to come around. The water was helping. The good news is we did well on this test. Passing a test made for a fun ride back over the bay to the island. We get to do this two more times. What a day. Later.