We had Dionne

     Jay told us about Joe coming aboard his ship.  That woulda' made my day.  I never did a fancy watch like Jay did; there on the bridge announcing dignitaries.  My watches were down below decks where I watched unionized shipbuilders pretend to weld or I watched groups of yard workers gambling.  Sometimes the bosses gave me an arm band that said SP (Shore Patrol) and a stick.  They expected me to find drunk American marines in a foreign country and keep them under control.  Yes, of course.  As soon as I got out of sight of the Master at Arms, I took that dang arm band off and stuffed it into my pocket.  The stick I just stuck down my pants hoping to get picked up by an interested party girl.

     We did get an interesting visit once though.  Dionne Warwick came abord.  News roared around the ship like a grass fire and there was no way to go topside because every black guy aboard was suddenly trying to force himself up the ladders.  She got a tour of Officer's Quarters and of the hangar deck and they took her out onto the flight deck.  The hangar deck is where they worked on the planes, just below the flight deck.  Those are the more open areas of the ship.  More guys could follow her around in those places and it wasn't so bad when they made a mess of drooling and lusting. 

     Some pilots came out and opened up some fighter jets to show her.  They even let her sit in the cockpit.  Took pictures. 

     Hee, hee, hee.
     Boy did some pilots get into trouble.  You see, fighter jets on a carrier at sea are pretty top secret.  Top secred stuff is supposed to stay just that, top secret.  You don't go taking pictures of it or letting musical musers sit in it, even if they are great and hot.  So heads did roll, as I understand. 

     We had a lot of top secret stuff on the ships.  It's my duty to not divulge a bunch of that crap, but I do.  I figure they didn't tell me the real stuff that they wanted kept secret.  I mean, why would they tell someone like me if it was really secret?

     There is a problem in the military that I'd like to point out to them now, since I'm too old and too long gone to be punished for it.  The problem is, they don't know how to keep secrets.  When we worked in the computer room on board the ship, we did a lot of data entr back then it was called key punching.  We took these sheets of green paper that had certain information on them and we typed that information into a computer.  Then we ran programs against the information and we put output onto tapes and sent that info back to somebody somewhere for perusal.  We had stacks and stacks of these green sheets of paper.  Almost everything we entered into the computers came from these sheets of paper and there were thousands and thousands of them.  Every now and then you'd get a piece of paper that was stamped CONFIDENTIAL, in large letters.  Or sometimes you'd even get one that said SECRET.  Well, what happened when you saw that?  You stopped and looked at it.  Then you passed it on to the next guy who also passed it on to the next guy.  All of us trying to figure out what was so secret about it.  You'd think if they really wanted it kept secret they'd just make it look normal like everything else.

Since I never saw any, maybe that's what they did with the TOP SECRET stuff.