The
captain called me on this one.
He
says, “Hey, Ron, Captain Dwyer. You wanna go bomb Iraq?”
I
says, “Sounds cool to me, Dave.”
He
says, “I need you on here. I’m captain on the Cape John.”
This
was an older freighter from the ‘60s, ‘70s, one of those self-unloaders with
booms, and it’s in Orange, Texas. It’s being put into commission—you
know—even though it’s been laid up and it’s been maintained, now you have to do
the little things to it to get it together. We go up to New
Jersey to load November 30, 2002, and we’re getting ready to
go across to the Middle East.
I
get internal blockage from an old wound, scar tissue had built up, from when I
had my appendix removed. They take me off the ship, and I go to the hospital in
Red Bank, New Jersey.
They perform surgery on me. I’m off thirty days. I get back on the Cape John. ‘Fit
for duty’ again.
We’re
on our way with a load of bombs. Going across, the crew isn’t that bad:
personalities, conflicts, the usual thing you find if you ever make a trip to
sea with people. I mean, literally, we’re all in the same boat, and the
personalities start coming out, you know, “I’m doing more than that one,” or
“This one’s not doing enough,” and “This one’s getting paid more.”
During
the Vietnam War, McNamara was Secretary of Defense, and there was so much
trouble on these merchant ships, taking ammunition over to the war, that he
said—they give all servicemen mental tests—they’re gonna give all merchant seaman mental tests. The
presidents of the unions got together and said, “If you give these guys mental
tests, you won’t have anybody to sail
your ships.”
Like
I say, even among the officers you don’t have rocket scientists going out. You
don’t have NASA engineers. You have people that want to do this for a living,
and then they’re stuck, or they think it’s an adventure, and then they quit
doing it. Everybody’s got their own little agenda.
We
go to Sicily,
take on some fuel and some deck cargo that they want us to have. I should
mention, the last thing we put on board in New Jersey was a load of lumber—two by fours
and planks and stuff—on the deck.
Everywhere
we stop they want this lumber. “Can we have that lumber?”
“No,
you can’t have it because it’s for some general in Kuwait
or Iraq
that wants this to build his house.”
In Sicily they’re asking,
“Can we have that lumber?” The Navy, everybody, “Can we have that lumber?”
I
says, “If it was up to me, I’d give it to you, but it belongs to some general
in Kuwait or Iraq.”
You don’t just give away a general’s lumber.
Now,
part of the crew decides to go home. It’s not their war, and I don’t blame them. So it’s back and forth to the
doctors. Everybody’s trying to talk the doctor into letting them off, except
me. I get some kind of an infection, but I just want some medication, cuz I’m
gonna do this. You know, here’s
another adventure to get into, some kind of trouble.
We
get orders to go up to some port in Norway—something like Goodensnot, or
Jackuoff, or something like that, Norway. This is near the Arctic
Circle. Back in the 60s and 70s we’re storing ammunition in caves
up there in case of a war with the Soviet Union.
We
come back out of the Med, stop in Rota for
more food and fuel. Everybody’s kind of relieved that we’re not going into the
war zone just yet. We’re going to a sideshow to what’s gonna happen later.
In
Rota we pick up some Navy guys that’re gonna do the shoring of the ammunition
when we get up to Norway.
So now it’s up through the English Channel, up to Norway. You talk about lousy
weather. We’re getting beat to death. It’s very close to the Arctic
Circle. We go into the fjord, a secure area, and it was six or
eight hours to get where we’re going. A Norwegian tug is breaking the ice up
ahead of us.
Now
we anchor out, and we take eight hundred feet of anchor chain. Eight shots. One
shot is about a hundred feet. We have eight shots out to hold us. You know how
deep those fjords are? I mean, Russian submarines used to hide in there. That’s
how deep they are. They got a barge, and the tug takes the barge to the shore
and gets the ammunition, trucks it in. They’re bringing it to the ship. As they
push the barge alongside, only one barge at a time, the tug has to go around us
breaking up the ice cuz we’d freeze in there.
We’re
there two or three days with this operation, getting all these bombs on board.
We let the Navy guys off before going through the channel. And now we hit another storm. Now the ammo’s shifted.
These big five hundred-pound bombs that they shored up with lumber are
shifting. So now we’ve got to go down there and shore it up again. Everybody’s
pissing bricks, you know, “Goddamn this,” and “This is bullshit,” and “Gotta do
all this fucking work.”
But
we get it done, and shoot through again. Now we stop in Crete.
We pick up Marine guards, security, they’re gonna stay with us in case we’re
attacked. Through the Suez Canal, all the way
around, they stay with us. Good bunch of guys, they believed in what they were
doing, which was more than I could say for myself and half the crew on that
ship already.
We
go around, into the Gulf of Aden, then the Gulf
of Oman and then into the Persian Gulf. We stop in Kuwait. There’s three bases there,
port facilities. That’s where we’re gonna discharge the ammunition.
I
get a toothache. It’s killing me.
So
the Navy doctor comes to the ship and says, “Yeah, you need dental, but we
don’t have a dentist here. The only dentist we’ve got is up about a hundred
miles from the Iraqi border, waiting to go in with the Marines. Do you want to
go?”
I’m
thinking about it now. How bad does this hurt? I says, “You know, I’d rather
take my chances than have this toothache.”
President
Bush is still screaming about the line in the sand, and we got a week or
something before the war starts.
A
Marine sergeant and a corporal come and get me in the lieutenant’s Wagoneer.
Sergeant says, “Now we gotta get these other Marines. Cuz everybody needs
dental work. We’re taking you all up.”
Now
this was interesting. We had to go through Kuwait City.
I mean, he’s driving sixty, eighty miles an hour. I can still see some damage
in Kuwait City from Gulf War One. This is Gulf War
Two coming up.
Then
they says, “Alright, now we’re gonna go the tourist route. We’re gonna go on Dead Sheep Highway.”
I
says, “OK.”
They
says, “By the way, have you had your anthrax shot?”
I
didn’t have the shots yet. They were getting ready to give ‘em to us on the
ship. I says, “No, I haven’t.”
Then
I’m seeing these water wells that are dry now, and there’s big signs by them,
“Don’t drink.” I see all these dead sheep: Dead Sheep Highway.
I
says, “Excuse me. These sheep: are these road kills?”
They
says, “No, this is from the last war.” Poisoned wells, and the water gone into
the ground, and now the anthrax is coming back up and the sheep eating the
grass.
I
says, “Oh, that’s nice.”
We
get up to the base, and I get to the dentist. I mean, I’m talking they got generators for electricity.
I
get a young Navy dentist, Oriental-American, and he says, “We have to pull
that.”
I
says, “I hope so, after I’ve gone through all this. Don’t try to drill this
thing.” I says, “One thing, if you would, please, I’d like to have the tooth
after you pull it.”
He
says, “Oh, I can’t, because after I take it out of your mouth, it’s
contaminated.”
The
only thing I could think of was, “It was contaminated when it was in there. If you’d seen some of my
girlfriends.” Now that it’s out, it’s
contaminated? I want to save the tooth because I bury them. All the teeth I’ve
had pulled, I bury all over the world, or throw in the ocean, different spots,
everywhere.
It’s
a sentimental thing. Once I threw a tooth into the ocean halfway between New Zealand and Panama. I just threw it in the
ocean. I left blood and sperm all over the world. Why not my teeth, too?
I
explain this to the Navy dentist.
He
looks at me a little strange. He’s young, doesn’t understand the ways of the
world yet. But now I get in an argument with him.
I
says, “I gotta have it.”
“No,
you can’t have it, it’s contaminated.”
“Look,
friend . . . .”
He
says, “I’ll tell you what. I’ll pull it and save it, and then we’ll ask the
captain if you can have the tooth.”
I
says, “Yeah, go ahead and do it.”
He
pulls it, then I’m waiting, cuz the other Marines need dental work. Then here
comes the captain.
The
Navy dentist says, “Captain, we have a problem here. This gentleman’s a
merchant seaman, and he’s up from a ship in Kuwait. He needed a tooth pulled. I
pulled it, but he has some religious thing about burying his own teeth. He
wants to take it with him, but it’s contaminated.”
The
captain’s looking at him like, “You know, we’re less than a hundred miles from
the Iraqi border, there’s gonna be a war
here, we’re all going up to the front lines in less than a week! Give this guy
his tooth!”
So
the dentist, he puts it in alcohol in a little plastic container and gives it
to me. I thank him. I wanted to thank the captain for siding with me on that.
Now
I have to wander around the base with the Marines, cuz we can’t find the
sergeant or the corporal. So they drop me off at the company headquarters, this
tent. It has a wooden deck, not sand. So I’m sitting there, and guys are in
there on the internet complaining to their wives and girlfriends. There’s
homing pigeons in there, too, and I’m looking at these.
One
of the Marines comes by. “It’s my job to take care of these things,” he says.
I
says, “That's nice.” You know, we're talking World War I here.
Finally,
somebody with authority comes in, this warrant officer. He's got his hands in
his pockets, and they're all coming up to him with their problems.
One
of the Marines says, “Somebody said this was stolen.”
This
officer looks at him and says, “There's nothing stolen in the Marine Corps.” He
says, “It was appropriated.”
He
gave me the impression like, "Do I really need any of this?" My kind
of guy.
We're
kind of drawn to each other because I have coffee.
He
walks right over to me and says, “You being helped? Is there something we can
get you?”
I
explain to him why I'm there. It's like he finally found somebody he could
communicate with.
He
says, “I got two more years, and I'll be getting out.”
I
says, “Where you gonna retire? I’m planning on retiring, too.”
He
says, “Well, I’m dual citizenship, Brazil
and America.
One of the officers I’ve been with actually retired to the Canary
Islands, and he’d like me to come over there. You know, we keep in
touch, he’s retired over there, and I’m really thinking about it.” He mentions
a golf course.
I
says, “The golf course that you fly over when you land there?”
“You’ve
been there?”
I
says, “Yeah!”
He
says, “Man, come sit down here a minute. You know, we could—”
Now
he’s got somebody he can bond with here. We’re talking about the Canary Islands
and Spain
and this and that. And about that time, the pigeons start acting up.
“Look,”
he says, “I’m requesting everything I can, and what do they send me? Pigeons! Carrier pigeons. In case we lose communication, we can use these
pigeons.”
I
says, “You better be careful. The Iraqis will eat them if they get a chance.”
I’m
there two or three hours talking.
He
says, “Well, it’s getting late. You wanna stay here?”
“Stay
here?”
He
says, “Yeah. We’ll get you something to eat. We’ll get you a bunk. You can stay
here. Just stay here with us. We might pull out tomorrow or the next day. But
you can go with us.”
“Go
with you?” I says, “Look,” I says,
“no offense, me and you are OK, but I’m going back to that ship one way or
another, even if I gotta thumb my way back. I seen sand.”
By
then the sergeant and corporal are back. It’s dark already.
He
says, “You come on back anytime, we’ll be more than happy to take care of you,
help you out, just come up.”
To
this day I don’t know the guy’s name, and he don’t know mine.
I
get back to the ship and give Dave the paperwork.
Dave
says, “What the hell took you so long?”
I
says, “They wanted me to stay there. They wanted to give me a bunk, and I could
sleep there for the night.”
He
says, “I don’t believe it.”
“Neither
do I.”
OK,
now the war’s supposed to start, the line in the sand thing, George Bush gives
them two more days. We know the war’s gonna start because they send us away.
They says, “This is it. Stop discharging ammo. Secure your ship and go out to
sea.” They don’t want us alongside the dock for the war.
And
everybody’s really confident. Guys are having their picture taken on the bombs,
on the dock. The Navy’s doing the discharging.
They
says, “Come on, Ron, we’ll go down on the dock and have our picture taken on
the bombs.”
I says,
“No. I don’t think so.”
“You
don’t think Saddam Hussein’s gonna win, do you?”
I
says, “I don’t want my picture taken. It’s OK. I rarely have my picture taken.
It’s a personal thing.”
“Well,
you don’t think Saddam Hussein’s gonna win this, do you?”
I says,
“We’re gonna win the war, and we’re gonna lose the peace.” I says, “America’s
never gonna get outta here.”
They
look at me like, “How can you even talk like that?”
I
says, “Trust me. Trust me on this.”
Just
before we leave we get Navy reservists who are gonna do unloading at sea. The Cape John has that capability, to
get bombs moved from ship to ship. So now they’re gonna use us as a floating
warehouse.
We
basically do grids in the Persian Gulf. We
have a certain area we stay in for the entire war—OK, for the entire twenty-three days. We got Marine security, we got
Navy reserves who are gonna do this replenishment at sea with other ships. And
I’m thinking, “Oh, God, all these bodies on a ship. There’s too many people on
here now!” These Navy reservists, they had firemen and policemen and some guys
that were run-of-the-mill people that just had jobs and stayed in the Navy
reserve, you know?
Give
me a break. They got no finesse. They’re wandering around the ship all hours of
the day and night, coming up to the bridge. One of them wants to have a photo
op, so he tries to get one of the Marine’s M-16s and have the other Navy guy
take pictures of him like he was actually standing guard on the wing of the
bridge. The Marine wouldn’t give it to him.
So
he goes and gets the Marine captain, and the Marine captain comes up there and
says, “Humor these assholes. Give him your rifle. Take the clip out, but give
him a rifle.”
This
guy puts on the flak jacket and the helmet. The other Navy reserve takes
pictures of him, like he’s actually doing this.
One
of the Marines walks by me and says, “What do you think?”
I
says, “Hey, you know, more heroes. Everybody’s a hero.”
It’s
all bullshit. I got along better with the Marines. The Navy tolerated me, and I
tolerated the Navy.
We
do these replenishments until the end of the war. Then they send us back into
the dock.
We
have two sandstorms. First time I’ve been in a real good sandstorm, other than
like in Egypt.
But this is a good one, I mean, blinding.
One, we’re alongside the dock, and one out in the Persian
Gulf where the sand is actually coming out. It’s just like you see
in the movies. Your eyes burn, your throat chokes.
They
had the PX in Kuwait,
but you couldn’t even get rubbing alcohol. There’s all the Cuban cigars you want,
though.
There’s
women in the Navy, these replenishment crews that come on. I assume I could
have talked one or two of them into something. But you get to the point where
you just don’t need it anymore, you know? You just don’t need the bullshit
anymore. It all ends up being the same thing. I don’t bother them, and they
don’t bother me. Well, one of them gives me a piece of candy.
We’re
at dock, and I’m out there on gangway. One of the Navy girls comes out, gives
me a piece of candy. Just walks by and says, “Oh, here.”
I
says, “Thank you.”
I
should have asked her name or said, “Hey, I’m Ron.” But the only thing I’m
thinking about is getting this fucking over with and getting back to Ibiza.
I
mean, really. I’m very plain about that. I’m getting off of there. I don’t want
to stay, although the money’s good, plus we get the war bonus, and hazardous
duty pay from the time we hit Crete. And I’m
making extra overtime because of the crew reduction. So it’s actually pretty
profitable.
So
Dave gets me one day and says, “Hey, we’re leaving sometime the first week in
May. Alright with you?”
I
says, “Yeah. You go, I go.”
He
says, “Would you like to stay?”
I
says, “No. You go, I go.”
We
get off in Jebel Ali, United Arab Emirates. UAE. It’s a
small country. You’ve heard of the Dubai Open, Tiger Woods. They use all their
oil money to build things up. They’re gonna have the largest air-conditioned
mall in the world. There are signs there that say “Fastest growing city in the
world.” I mean, girls from all over the world are coming there. Women and booze
are wide open. No restrictions on that. I end up with a Russian girl for two
days, I don’t remember her name. She probably don’t remember mine.
And
the UAE is all very progressive, very open-minded. It’s nice, if you can stand
the heat. We’re stuck there for three more days. We do a desert tour. We sign
up for it at the hotel when we find out it was gonna be at least three more
days before they can get a flight out for us, because they took us from Jebel
Ali, on the coast, into Dubai.
So
an agent explains we’re flying from UAE to London.
I
says, “Here we go again.” So I ask the agent, “What happens if I get off in London?”
He
says, “Just explain to them that you want to get off in London. Don’t put your luggage on there, and
then when you get off in London,
tell them you’d like to have the ticket changed again.”
So
from the hotel I call Ken Bottoms. He answers the phone.
I
says, “I’m on my way.”
He
says, “I’m here. You know where the key is, in case I’m not.”
So
I knew I had a safe house in London.
I
get off there, turn around, and he’s getting ready to go back to work on the
dredge. So we get together and do a little wandering around. We do the tours,
Jack the Ripper walk, the London Eye, that big Ferris wheel. We do it all. The
Ten Bells where Jack the Ripper’s victims used to drink, before he cannibalized
them or whatever he did to them.
Then
I decide to fly down to Ibiza.
Yeah.
So
I fly down there for a week. Then back up to England. Then back to the States.
Oh.
And the tooth. I buried that in the Persian Gulf.
Flipped it overboard. I just wanted—you know—blood, sperm, and teeth all over
the world.
--end--