“Not bad,” The Captain commented as he returned to the bridge. The ship had just completed a General Quarters drill, and the Captain had been in the Combat Information Center while the Executive Office manned the bridge. “But we had an unsecured watertight door.”

“I heard it too,” the XO said. He was second in command, much like a high school Dean, and he usually took care of crew discipline. When the ship was at General Quarters, combat ready, all watertight doors and portholes were supposed to already be secured and the crew at battle stations, pants tucked into their socks and shirts and jackets tightly buttoned. The ship had been at GQ for over a half hour when the slamming of a heavy watertight door telegraphed through the steel hull. These doors were normally secured in an open position, but when the General Quarters alarm sounded they were closed and dogged down tight. This was just a training exercise, one of many that would be run while on the way to the Viet Nam coastline, but had it actually been a combat situation the lapse could have cost lives or even the ship itself. “I’ll look into it, Sir,” he said, but they both knew the outcome. There were so many of these heavy doors that segregated the ship into watertight compartments to isolate fire or flooding that no one would know which one had been left unsecured. Those forward would say the noise had come from aft. Those aft would swear that it hadn’t been in their section and that it sounded to them like it was somewhere below. Looking for a culprit would be futile but he still had to follow through and at least put a little heat on the ship to try and prevent it from happening again.

“We had a watertight door left unsecured on the last exercise,” The XO told the Chief Boatswains Mate as soon as the ship was secured from General Quarters. The Chief nodded. He’d heard it too and had already started looking for the person who’d been responsible for securing it and at the same time had been busy covering his own ass, lest it reflect on his next promotion.

“Aye aye sir, I’ll shake the bushes,” the Chief said. He’d go down below and chew some ass but he knew that nothing would become of it. Sometimes shit like that just happened.

“Uh, Chief,” a young seam interrupted, then stammered “uh, sorry sir,” and saluted as he saw the officer. “We had a, uh, casualty on the General Quarters drill. He’s in the sick bay.” He had just finished delivering this news when the ship’s loudspeaker system broke in requesting that the Pharmacist’s Mate and the XO report to the sick bay. Any injury at sea was potentially serious, but the Exec was smugly satisfied as he made his way to the sick bay. Nothing like a young Seaman or Seaman apprentice walking around with his hand bandaged up like a catcher’s mitt to drive to home the point: All water tight doors must be properly secured. Destroyers didn’t rate having real doctors aboard; just a sort of EMT trained Pharmacist’s Mates who could administer first aid and treat minor ailments. Any sailor with broken bones, such as fingers caught in an unsecured watertight door, would just have to tough it out until they joined the carrier group or got to a shore station with a real hospital.

Dad and I had both joined the navy under duress. He was a dirt-poor depression era orphan looking for a roof over his head and three meals a day. He joined up in ’38 and mustered out in ’48, got married and spawned me, then was called back for two years during Korea. We weren’t a hard-core seafaring family but I still grew up learning to do things the Navy Way, which was the only real structure Dad ever knew. I graduated from high school right in the middle of the Viet Nam shitstorm. I was draft bait and there wasn’t any money for college, so I figured that four years of Navy was better than two years of living in the mud and getting shot at. Plus an accident at the sawmill where I had been working made getting out of town seem attractive.

“Don’t let the bastards get to you, Son,” Dad warned me as I left for boot camp. In his day boot camp was hell and the Chiefs were brutal. I was a skinny kid back then and took a lot of shit about looking young for my age and not yet needing to shave, but other than that I didn’t have any problems during my basic training and advanced schooling, in fact, it was the first time I’d ever actually been treated like an adult. I came home for a week before joining the ship and heading overseas. “Don’t let those old chiefs get your pants down, Son,” Dad cautioned as I left. I told him to not worry, that things were different now than when he was in, and that sodomy was no longer accepted, and that we’d learned about such things and the penalties involved during the first week, and that I wasn’t wired that way anyhow. I remember his words so well because a week hadn’t passed before an old Chief groped my ass.

All junior seamen spend the first part of their shipboard tours as mess cranks, or kitchen helpers. It wasn’t too bad for me because our ship had a lot of newbies and the work was shared. Some guys had to spend four months working twelve hours a day washing dishes. That really sucked because the way to advancement is to get competent at your job and you can’t do that while stuck in the galley. I only had to work half a day, so at least I could learn my regular Sonar job the rest of the time. I wasn’t planning on being a lifer and making a career out of the navy, but I did want to get as far up the promotion ladder as I could. The higher your rate the better the pay and living conditions, and every serviceman knows that shit runs downhill and the guys on the bottom catch all of it.

The worst job in the galley is scrubbing pots, so that was the first job they gave me. It was hard, messy work and it took forever to get all the baked on crap scrubbed off of the big aluminum pans. I was bent over the sink when I felt a hand gently squeeze my left ass cheek. “Why don’t you come down and see me sometime?” I shied away from the touch and looked up to see a Chief Petty Officer wearing the crossed axes of Damage Control. He was old, like thirty-five or forty, and I was scared shitless.

The chiefs run the navy. The officers are administrators and give the orders, and the junior sailors do the actual work, but the chiefs are the only guys that actually know how everything works. The officers know the theory and the junior Seamen have been to school to learn their jobs but have no experience. The chiefs are the only guys who actually know how to light off the boilers, make steam, and convert it to power, as well as keep all of the other systems up and running. They are invaluable and they know it, and their continued reenlistment is what keeps the navy functional. Transgressions that would terminate a young officer’s career or cause a junior seaman to be discharged or disciplined are overlooked if the perpetrator happens to be a senior chief, and many Ensigns and Lieutenant Junior Grades have learned the hard way not to mess with them lest they discover that their staterooms suddenly have no air conditioning or that their toilets have become hopelessly plugged. Junior Seamen like myself also had to watch out. Your own chief took care of you, but if you crossed one of the others you might find yourself holding the shitty end of the stick. In my dad’s day the horny old fuckers could get away with sodomizing the young recruits, but that kind of stuff isn’t supposed to be part of the modern Navy.

I pretended to not hear his come-on, and before he could repeat it another sailor entered the galley where I was working, and the chief left. Any homosexual activity could result in a court marshal back then, and I probably should have approached my own chief with a complaint. The problem was that the chiefs all stick up for each other and it would be my word against a superior’s.

We were in the middle of a General Quarters drill the next time it happened. My GQ station was in the Sonar room, but the Navy likes to eat and since this particular drill wasn’t focused on my section I was instructed to keep working. The hand on the ass again, this time followed by an order instead of a suggestion. “Follow me, Boy.” I hesitated. I had a pretty good idea what he wanted, and I had no intention of going that route. “That’s an order, Sailor,” he said.

The chain of command is clear: All legal orders by a superior officer or rating must be obeyed, and a lowly seaman has no business questioning the legality of an order or requesting an explanation. Still, I had to try. “My chief instructed me to stay here,” I told the guy.

“I need you in the Damage Control locker,” the old chief said, “and I outrank your chief.” When I hesitated he pushed me towards the door, and I couldn’t help but feel his erection brush up against the small of my back. He directed me down two decks and through several watertight doors to one of the damage control lockers where the equipment is stored to plug leaks, fight fires, and do emergency repairs. He unlocked the door and pushed me into the small compartment, then closed the door behind us. “I need you to do something for me,” he said, unfastening his belt and dropping his trousers. “Get down on your knees.” He thumbed his skivvies down to free his erection, the put his hands on my shoulders. “We can do this nice and easy or nice and rough. Either way if fine with me.”

“I was paralyzed and unable to move a muscle, and he repeated the order. I made a break for the door. But before I could even touch the knob it turned and opened of its own accord and four men forced their way into the compartment. All were chiefs of some rate or another and all wore woolen watch caps pulled low over their foreheads and had towels wrapped around their faces.

I fled down the companionway as they dragged the old chief out his fuck-den and up to a nearby watertight door. I watched as they tied a gag around his mouth and fastened his belt around his waist and over his now soft cock. They then tied a short piece of cord around his ball sack, and three men held him firmly on one side of the doorway while another stretched his captive balls against the gasket surface of the door. “Slam the door, Son,” one of the captors told me, “as hard as you can.”

The gag in his mouth muffled his screams, but I could still hear his frantic clawing and pounding as the three hundred pound door was dogged down tight, him on one side, a small hairy fold of his ball sack on the other, and his nuts in the middle. “Go back to your duty station, Son,” the man said, his voice muffled by the towel covering his mouth.

“My old man used to talk about what happened to guys they caught stealing,” Jones, one of the other mess cranks, said a week later. News of the mishap had spread like wildfire through the ship. “Some guys would get together and slam the thief’s fingers in a watertight door.”

“Well then, the old fucker must have been a Rump-Ranger,” Wallis ventured. “Either that, or it was a property dispute. You know, like maybe the old fucker was milking through the fence, so as to speak.” That got a laugh from just about everyone, but I had to force myself to laugh along with them. The brass questioned just about everyone on the ship but no one seemed to have a clue about who might have been to blame.

The ship went to flank speed, which was as fast as could be maintained, and the next day a helicopter showed up and hauled the guy to a hospital or bigger ship somewhere. I was pretty nervous for a long time, but was never again hit on, and the sailors that corrected their shipmate’s behavior were never caught.