Messdeck Duty

Once a sailor begins his career in the Navy, you are thrust into the rigors of military life, part of which is indoctrination into military domestic service. The demand for cleanliness and neatness is constantly stressed. From the time you step on the base of a Naval Training Center (boot camp) cleanliness and neatness effect each of your chances of success in each and everything you do. Cleanliness will be a burden to bare throughout your service in the U.S. Navy. Your physical appearance, place you work and your ship or station are constantly scrutinized by the higher ups. They’ve devised inspections for every facet concerning naval life and there is no escaping attention this particular obstacle. After all, our summer dress uniform is dress whites.

In boot camp you learned about clean haircuts(short or long,) clean shaves(whether you have whiskers or not,) clean uniforms, clean shiny shoes, clean living quarters, clean finger/toenails(with absence of toe jam,) and even maintaining a clean record. Hopefully you make it out of boot camp unscathed (many don’t make it and are weeded out) and you look forward to your first duty assignment. Trouble is, unless you’re an admiral or maybe a captain, unless you’re really special or have some rare talent, you’ll arrive at you new duty station/ship, check-in onboard and go directly to the mess decks for 90 days of messman duties(I think the Army calls it K.P. and they’ll usually use it as a form of punishment in that branch of service.) Then after that’s over and done with, you go back to your original division and they slave you out to be a compartment cleaner for another 90 days cleaning berthing spaces and cleaning up after a bunch of knot-head sailors.

When I first came aboard the U.S.S. Dixon, I felt as though I was betrayed. I trained to be a Hull Maintenance Technician, not a subservient dishwashing, deck swabbing squid. Well surprise, surprise. Everyone I met hated working the mess decks, but if you’re smart, you get over it and get to work. Time flies when you’re having fun, then you move on to better things. Just do as L.P.O. asks and get it done fast as you can. Then you can kick back and take a smoke break, daydream or whatever ‘till the next evolution your services are needed.

Any way you look at it, the work wasn’t really hard on the mess decks unless you got stuck on a working party loading provisions and stores. That never happened to me ’cuz I did my job assignment as best I could, never got into trouble(or got caught) and I always showed up for morning muster clean shaven, in a clean uniform and in shiny shoes. The cleanliness next to Godliness thing, always helped me survive in the Navy.

The Dixon had two dishwashing compartments called sculleries. One was on the port side of the mess decks, the other was to the port. Commissaryman 1st Class Hippolito assigned me as the “Starboard Scullery Captain,” in charge of three fellow dish washers. The reason why Hip made me the lead guy was anybody’s guess, but I suppose it had to do with my being 6’4” and big enough to keep the others in line to get the job done.

Hip was an alright dude. We got along real well. He told me what to do and I did it. At first he’d bird dog me to make sure I did as I was told, but when I figured it was a weak communication problem(Hip was a Philipino and his brand of English was a little hard for me to understand.) So I learned to repeat back his orders to me until he shook his head up and down, smiled at me, then left. As long as I did this, he’d leave me alone unless he had something else he wanted to add.

Working in the scullery was a drag at first. No one on the mess decks would switch jobs with us. It was fast paced, hot, cramped, wet and noisy in that scullery compartment. At the end of a meal we were usually drenched in dishwater and sweat from our toil. Yet on the plus side, we were always the last messmen to start work and the first to complete our assigned tasks and kick back until the next meal was served. The faster we worked, the more time we had to kill. Once I convinced the others in my charge of this fact, we worked as a team and were in constant competition with the port scullery. There was no finer crew to be had for the scouring of Navy issue dishes and cookware.

When a crew of 1,500 sailors set down for a meal, lots of clean dinnerware is needed and with only one hour to serve and eat, dishes might come through the scullery for washing several times before the meal was finished. You never want to run out of clean dishes or there’d be hell to pay from the Messdeck Master-At-Arms. At sea we ate off of stainless plates that resembled over sized T.V. dinner trays, since they were unbreakable if they were tossed to the deck in rough seas. In port we ate off of homestyle Pyrex platters, dishes and bowls which had a tendency to shatter into a million glass slivers if they accidentally were dropped on the green tile covered steel decks of the Dixon. Breaking dishes was greatly frowned upon by CM1 Hippolito.

One fine summer day, we were in the midst of a typical afternoon meal. We were all grommets and elbows at our given tasks. One squid would bring in the dirty dishes and serving trays from the mess deck, scrape them clean and stack them near me while I would pre-wash them in a large sink and stack them. Then the squid next to me would place them in wash racks and feed them into the belt fed scullery machine that steamed them clean and blew them dry. The last squid would finish the process by emptying the scullery racks and place the hot Pyrex in stacks upon shelves along the bulkhead next to him. Let me tell you those dishes were hot! And since they were so hot he’d stack them on the vibrating scullery counter to let them cool a little before stacking them on the shelves.

Well, I forgot to mention that we were all high as kites that day(more often than not.) One of the guys brought in some killer Redbud that morning and we took turns blowing the smoke up and out of the scullery exhaust vent. Yesiree, we were one happy crew that day! Trouble was that the guy unloading the machine was paying more attention to not burning his fingers on the roach he was bogarting, than the three stacks of vibrating platters he had yet to put away.

One by one each of the stacks of explosive Pyrex walked off of the counter. Crash! Crash!! CRASH!!! To the deck below they went. Everyone in the galley and mess deck heard the calamity. We could hear sailors hooping and a hollering at us over the din of the scullery. We laughed so hard and long that we had hardly noticed CM1 Hippolito standing in the scullery with us, seething with displeasure. Hip was jumping up and down screaming his foreign dialect. Then drug me out into the passageway where I had to lie our way out of a Captain’s Mast. I told him that one of the guys must’ve stepped out to use the head and that the rest of us were too busy at our tasks to notice the sliding stacks of dishes. Hip did admonish us and he pointed out the cost of those platters, but all was back to normal before the next meal.

That Redbud was good though.