Mess Duty

I too was on mess duty aboard the Saratoga.
As Jay said in a previous post, it was required that almost everyone spend 90 days working in the kitchens at some capacity on board ship.  I got lucky.  I was in the salad bar.  That might be the same place where Jay worked with vegetables.  I worked with only one guy, who was a certified Mess Cook.  Working with him and around other Mess Cook's taught me that being a cook in the military is a crappy job. 

Most mess cooks were from the Philipines.  They would spend 20 years in the U.S. Navy and then return to the Philipines with that pension and be wealthy.  They'd get a compound (a bunch of houses, not just one house) and keep the entire family along with servants.  A delicacy I'll never forget that they all seemed to like a lot was fish heads and rice.  I don't want to remember anymore about that than that.

In the salad bar we made a lot of salad.  Never used warm or hot water to clean up after ourselves.  We didn't have access to hot water, not even to wash our hands.  I didn't eat much salad after working in the cold water salad bar.  We also peeled enough potatoes to feed 5,000 sailors 4 meals a day.  Doesn't that sound terrible?  Well it isn't terrible at all.  You take a 100 pound bag of potatoes and open it up and pour the contents into a large round cylinder.  At the bottom of the cylinder, on the inside, is a curved floor that is made with something like coarse sandpaper.  After you fill up the cylinder with 4 or 5 hundred pounds of potatoes you simply hit the switch.  The thing spins around and around making really crazy loud noises for about two minutes.  Then presto! You have hundreds of pounds of peeled potatoes.

There was a hatch just outside the salad bar much like the hatch that was outside my friend Jay's vegetable room.  Jay had met a Snipe who crawled up out of the lower decks from that hatch.  I didn't ever meet anyone but I did smell a lot.  There was often a sweet smell of hashish that wafted up from the hatch.  Clearly someone used that area to get stoned often.  It usually happened about the same time of day around mid morning.  One day I smelled that familiar smell and knew someone was down below preparing themselves for a non-work-day.  Suddenly a group of guys came from different directions and they were in a hurry.  They were M.A.'s.  (Ship's cops).  They stormed down the hatch and minutes later they came back up with a few stoners in tow.  So it was off to captain's mast and a fine and probably a bust in rank.

I didn't work in the snack bar for very long.  One day a chief came and got me and took me to the Chief's Mess.  I got promoted.  (Not promoted in rank, just in work).
The enlisted men eat in the enlisted mess.  Officers DINE in the officer's mess.  Chiefs eat in their own mess.  There's this separation thing in the navy.  Some people have to feel better than others.

So the Chief's Mess was much better than the enlisted salad bar.  I had good control.  I was the night shift guy.  I came to work in the early evening and it was my job to set up the mess so that the chiefs could have midnight snacks and a movie.  I would go to the movie library on my way to work.  We had great movies because we were on a carrier and the carrier had big wigs on it.  We often had an admiral aboard and always had captains.  Captains in the navy are very high up, not like the army. 

So I would get whatever movie I chose and then go to the mess and get into the huge walkin cooler and see what's there.  I'd make sandwiches with vegetable trays and chips and the like.  I'd also make snacks of cakes or pies  or pudding or whatever I could find.  The chiefs would come in and watch the movies and eat.  Then I'd clean up.  What a gravy job.  Skating is what they called it.  If you skate in the navy you are doing something easy.

I didn't mind most of my mess cook days aboard the Saratoga but I'll never work in a kitchen again.  Oh, uh.  Don't tell Ms Donna I said that.