HOM: AfterBeep

Unless some fresh memories sprout up through the layers of mental fertilizer, I'll move on.

In due course I finished up BEEP school and moved next door to the Electrician's Mate Class A School .

Normal advancement meant spending a certain amount of time as an E3, finishing required correspondence courses, getting a recommendation from your superiors and getting a high grade on a Navy-wide exam. The "A" school condensed the process considerably.

There were a couple of Hispanic kids and a mix of us from all over the U.S. in the class. Most of us were single - I think there was only one married guy in the class.

Some of us were fresh out of BEEP, others were coming in from the fleet. The fleet guys had a certain cachet and were looked up to.

One of them was a hardbitten party guy of German descent nicknamed Wolf, short for Wolfgang. He was a diver and was assigned to the school from a minesweeper. He was big, and tough like all the guys that made it through UDT. He did his best to live up to his nickname.

Wolf missed a few classes - he was in jail in Tijuana for a bit.

He'd been partying down there and decided he wanted a sombrero. Rather than buy one, he grabbed one from a stack in front of a stall and took off running. He made two errors. Every hat in the stack was tied to the one beneath it, and at 6'4" he was NOT bigger or faster than a Mexican cop.

With a fifty foot sting of hats trailing behind him he was easy to spot and easier to catch, and the cops that grabbed him were bigger and much soberer than he was. In a matter of moments he was headed for jail.

Gus, one of the Hispanic kids from class, was with Wolf so the cops hauled him in too. Wolf was pretty calm. Gus, knowing the language, had a better idea of what was going on and was close to hysterical.

They ended up as the only US citizens in a crowded cell. The tension started when they realized one of the guys in the cell was also the guy pictured in a wanted poster in the hall. A "wanted for murder" poster. The guy kept pointing to the poster and preening. He was proud of his achievements.

When they dozed finally dozed off, someone tried to steal Gus' shoes. Wolf clobbered the guy. The future EM3's spent the rest of the night huddled in one corner and the other prisoners huddled in the opposite corner. They had no trouble staying awake.

Luckily, some of the other guys in the class were also in TJ. When they missed them, knowing Wolf's temperment they checked the jail, found what happened, and raised the "mordita" to get them out early the next morning. I don't think either of them went south of the border again.

Wolf's only comment to me was that he "Didn't realize Mexican cops grew that big."

Marriage and Navy didn't mix too well. Absentee husbands created a class of ladies called "WestPac Widows". With husbands overseas in the Western Pacific, these women hung out in the bars looking for fun & games. They could act like widows as long as they could find a babysitter & their hubbies were on the other side of the ocean.

After watching the way a lot of married sailors acted overseas, I didn't blame the wives too much...

Which reminds me of the selling point the Navy used for Nuclear Submarine duty. Nuke subs spent six months at sea, six months at home. The brass touted the idea that whether you had a good or bad marriage, you always had six good months a year. Military logic.

TBC

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