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Santiago’s Leg

Mike Brennan

    Sailors are known for being notoriously superstitious. We try to avoid bad luck with all sorts of rituals and with all our might. Bad luck can mean life or death out in the middle of the open ocean. While dolphins surrounded our ship when we left the pier, a myriad of bad luck all seemed to conjure around Airman Santiago’s leg. He was much loved by our division, and his leg seemed to spark a series of events that would alter and haunt all of our lives forever. There was always talk that our ship, the USS Richard M Nixon, was supposedly haunted and cursed, as it had been commissioned before the Vietnam War and had seen it’s fair share of death and disasters, especially during that particular conflict. After my first tour onboard I would have to agree.
    V1 Division was conducting flight operation, probably somewhere near Korea but no one of my lowly rank could really be too sure. It was a dark but starry night, the kind you can only experience and contemplate out in the middle of the ocean as we drifted around three o’clock in the morning, and we were winding down the hyperactive flight deck until 0800, when we would repeat the whole jig all over again.
    We had been launching and recovering planes with little or no breaks since 0800 the day before. For almost three months straight we only had a few days off deck, which was usually around one Sunday a month, which was enough time for the crew too receive their many different religious rites and in my case a brunch of bacon and eggs. We were promised a port visit to Hong Kong in about a week so despite our dragging spirits there was still some glimmer of hope. We all needed a little R&R, which usually meant stiff drinks and bar broads, yet we still did not have a set date for our much needed debauchery.
    The flight deck was a football field sized airport with hundreds of different players dancing an esoteric ballet masked by their goggles and helmets, identifiable only by their different colored jerseys. Purple shirts pulled fuel hoses from the catwalks and fueled the jets already parked on the flight line and along the deck edges, as yellow shirts directed the aircrafts still in motion towards their final parking spots by waving amber wands at the pilots, and green shirts performed maintenance on the catapults and arresting gear every time another plane hit the deck and caught the wires with a roar that made me feel like I had stepped right into the middle of a battlefield. The only way to really describe the sensation of being up and out there, is like you are suddenly caught in the middle of a war-zone. The mission was always methodical but madness always had the potential to rear its ugly head.
    I was designated a blue shirt at the time, as was Santiago, which meant that we were glorified tire-chasers, following planes all around the football-field sized Flight Deck, pulling or throwing chalks and removing or tightening tie-down chains that held the war planes secured to the ship. It was dangerous work but ultimately a monkey’s. It was the kind of job you just have to suck up and deal with when you have been in the Navy less than a year. Santiago had been onboard a few months longer than I had, which meant he was trusted to be alone on the flight deck and train others, while I was still in the process of being trained. Santiago was given the task to train or “shadow” me.
    “I’m exhausted, man,” I yelled into his helmet covered ear two seconds before another plane landed about ten feet away from where we stood.
    “Just hang in there. We are almost at final recovery.”
    “This just seems to never end.”
    “We’re almost there. We just got about an hour more.”
    Another F18 Hornet landed, caught the landing wire, and headed towards the center of the flight deck, where Santiago and I were hooking up another Hornet to a tractor to park it on an elevator back aft. I untied the chains, threw them on the tractor, and pulled the chalk from the port side of the plane while Santiago watched over me, and another crew did the same on the starboard side. The yellow shirt plane director gave the directions to the tractor driver to start driving, and I followed the plane along with a whistle in my mouth and the ten pound tire chalk in my hands, while Santiago observed me from under the wing and made sure I did everything correctly.
    I constantly wonder how I wound up here. I figure I was in uniform because the economy sucked, I was sick and tired of undergraduate philosophies, dead-end jobs, my parents, my generation, phony intellectualism, my own lofty ideals constantly marred by apathy and poverty, and the day to day struggle that came with couch surfing through the meaningless void of my existence. Bush was re-elected, the war on terror(whatever a war on an emotion meant) was still raging. Television, music, movies, and modern culture was all so much trash and garbage. Everything great had already been said, done, written, produced or recorded. Old rich white morons controlled everything. All my heroes were ghosts. I had been through one too many bitter love affairs. And who would have thought that drugs really were as bad for you as people always said they were?
    I was twenty-one and felt tired enough to die, but instead of a literal death, I decided why not just sign everything away for four years after all, “this was not just a job- it was an adventure,” and if I got anything out of it, that would at least be one plus above all the negatives I had accumulated from this life. Maybe I was just bored but not bored enough to learn to value my lethargy after what was to become.
    We had probably taken the plane about twenty feet when another that had just landed turned and burned Santiago and me with the searing heat of its exhaust. I turned my head away just in time to see Santiago duck further under the wing. He screamed. His left leg was wedged underneath the plane’s tire. I dropped my chalk and began blowing my whistle. It was a knee jerk reaction and something that I had only learned how to do a few days prior when things went drastically wrong. Within seconds a small crowd began forming around us, as the ship’s intercom blared the horrifying, “Medical emergency! Medical emergency! Medical emergency on the flight deck!”
    Santiago had passed out cold with the plane still on top of him. His leg had been flattened to the width of a piece of notebook paper just above the knee.
    A crew of corpsman quickly arrived with a stretcher in tow. They gave the direction to move the plane forward and off of Santiago. His leg expanded like a camouflage colored balloon. They pulled him onto the stretcher, tied him down, and then took him down the ship’s escalator below to medical.
    Within a few minutes, the last two planes landed, and the order was given for the division to muster in the blue hole, which was our break room. I crawled through the tiny hatch from off the flight deck, and saw that our division’s Leading Petty Officer, ABH1 Thomas, a gigantic and imposing ex-football player from Detroit, had everyone at attention even as they were sitting down on the four benches that cornered the cramped over-occupied shelter.
    “As some of you know, Airman Santiago just lost his leg tonight. You’ve all heard a million times how the Flight Deck is dangerous and here you go, one of your brothers is crippled for life. Now I know you all are some bad-asses, so I am going to ask you now at the request of the higher ups. Who here does not want to work on the flight deck anymore?”
    Everyone, including me, raised their hands.
    “Flight Ops is suspended for twenty-four hours so think about what the fuck just happened up there and know that it is your responsibility that this shit don’t happen no more.”
    He headed back up top-side, and we all sat around and stared at each other in silence.
    “Santiago was just telling me about a new pair of Nikes he was gonna buy in Hong Kong,” a Third Class Petty Officer from Chicago mentioned into the bitter silence. “He’s definitely not gonna be needing ‘em now.”
    Over the next week, Flight Ops continued on schedule, Santiago was lifted off the ship to a hospital on shore, and I was interviewed and forced to write statements for at least five different officers. I had constant nightmares, and it didn’t help that I always had to talk about and reflect upon the incident. I was also extremely nervous every time I had to go up and work on deck, especially at night. I did receive a new trainer, Airmen Shelley, who continued to teach me the ropes. Through it all I talked to Shelley, who told me stories about his Ex-Special Forces Vietnam Vet father who hallucinated violently and had nightmares all the time. How his mentally retarded brother that was a probable victim of his father’s exposure to Agent Orange died while Shelley was out at sea and he still wasn’t granted leave to go to the funeral because he was in the Gulf. How Shelley himself swore he saw such things as the ghosts of everyone that had died onboard the ship and felt the rumination reflected within the keel of the boat that dramatized it’s four decades worth of thousands of sailor’s constant depressions, sudden untimely deaths, and despair.
    He also professed to practice palmistry. He read my palm and claimed I was ideally suited for the naval profession and would have three children and live to be around eighty-three years old. I was amazed I managed to live as long I had and definitely didn’t feel suited for this kind of work. The only news that held my psyche together was the word was that we were pulling into Hong Kong.
    Island fragments appeared asides the ship’s mammoth wake as it became evident we were now approaching Queen Victoria’s Harbor, which emptied sullenly through a salted cloudy haze into the very lips of Hong Kong. It was 0759, and the ships whistle announced thirty second later, “Cleaning stations, Cleaning stations, the smoking lamp is out throughout the ship. Set sea and anchor detail. Set special navigation detail. The smoking lamp is out throughout the ship. Cleaning stations.” This was the signal for an hour of mindless labor which was the custom every single morning besides Sundays at 0800.
    Two hours later I was onboard a three-deck powerboat called a liberty boat run by a Chinese charter company, chain-smoking cigarettes and watching the huge city of Hong Kong dance with life and light as we made our approach to a pier that conveniently enough for both nations served liquor and any vice a man could desire.
    As soon as we hit the dock it was like the invasion of Normandy. Sailors who hadn’t seen themselves in civilian clothing for around four months were dancing onto dry land with the prospects of all the booze and broads waiting for the taking of all the pay-checks a man couldn’t spend out at sea. Cash to be spent in a cloud of liberty and liquor, which was all mapped out across this exotic city half of us have never been too and another half of us would never set foot upon again.
    Needless to say, Shelley and I indulged to our heart’s content and beyond the pale, and the three days we were there passed by in a drunken blur that made the time seem to fly by like mere seconds. Before we knew it, our liberty had expired.
    It was at our morning divisional muster the day we were leaving, standing at firm attention, that we heard the news. It made my hangover a hell of a lot worse. V1’s Chief, Divisional Officer, and Leading Petty Officer all came out from the divisional office while we all stood at attention in ranks on the Flight Deck. It was the DIVO, Lt Troy, a bespectacled twenty-something obviously straight out of college, who broke the news.
    “V1, at ease, last night they found the body of Airman Scott in an alley in Wan Chai. His throat was slit and his wallet was missing. As far as we know it was a robbery gone wrong, but his liberty buddy, Airman Garcia, is also missing. Does anyone have any information?”
    We all looked at each other and no one said anything. Scott was a popular member of the division, who had been onboard for about two years and was pretty much friendly with everyone, including me. I couldn’t imagine him being murdered and dumped in a filthy alley in a foreign country. Scott was just a nice average farm kid from Iowa. The fact that Garcia was missing and the ship was pulling away from the port was also frightening. We never would find out what happened to Garcia, although we all were aware that Scott’s body was being kept in the freezer down in the mess decks until he could be shipped home to his parents.
    Two days later we lost another man, and this time I actually had to view the body. We were all just waking up at 0600, when I head a yell for help from the cubicle behind mine. I headed over and saw the body lying in his bunk, totally lifeless and blue. I recognized him as Jones. We weren’t that tight, as he always had a reputation as a troublemaker and slacker, but it was all so disturbing to watch Shelley check his pulse and solemnly shake his head. Thomas immediately came over and ordered me to call medical. Seconds later, the announcement came over the intercom. “Medical emergency! Medical emergency! Medical emergency in 0-3-151, V1 Berthing!” Within five minutes a crew of corpsman arrived, while we all stood around the body, most of us still in our underwear. As they loaded Jones onto a stretcher, one of the corpsman found a cellophane bag that appeared to have contained a white powder, so it was no surprise when we found out a few days later that the cause of death was an overdose of pure china white heroin. He was celebrating his twenty-first birthday with a bag of smack, alone, in his bunk. He was now in the mess deck freezer keeping Scott company, and tried not to think about it whenever down there to eat whatever shit on a shingle they served that said “not fit for feeding inmates” stamped on the carton’s side. It is a fact that death row inmates get fed better food than the U.S military. Yet we die for their freedom to kill.
    A few days later, at three in the morning, when we were to be awakened at five, and on deck by six, I was blacked out in a quasi dream-less sleep after enduring a hundred and fifty consecutive launches and landings.
    So as a matter of course the whistle blew in some much needed chaos.
    “Man overboard, Man overboard Starboard side, All hands muster with their divisions, Man overboard, Man overboard!”
    Every curse word invented was invoked in less than a minute. We threw on our boots and enough clothes on to be deemed decent and sleepwalked up to the flight deck.
    The division’s roll was called off a list kept in Flight Deck Control and we wait for a final word. The Captain finally came on the 1MC about thirty minutes later.
    “It was reported that there was a green survival light glowing in the water. It appears that someone threw a glow stick overboard. An investigation will be conducted and perpetrators will be punished. Secured from man over board.”
    “Shit, I was hoping some motherfucka was dead or something,” a random face to the left of me stated.
    “Yeah dawg, if I got to get up at this hour someone betta be drownin or something. It’s all Night Check bro, those fools get to sleep all day and they still got to mess with us cuz we gots to be up at 6. I’m still hurtin from Hong Kong and I need my motherfuckin’ sleep!” A former high-school basketball champ from LA exclaimed.
    We filed back through the passageways like sheep surrendering to the slaughter, hit our racks, and waited for the much anticipated five a.m. wake-up call.
    I couldn’t sleep so I ate breakfast when the mess decks opened at four and chain-smoked and drank pitch black Folger’s coffee until I had to go up to the flight deck a few minutes before six.
    About a week later there was another casualty, although this time it was not a member of our division. Flight Ops was in full gear and I was concentrating on my mundane yet necessary task of following airplanes and chalking and tying them down. I had just tied down a helicopter when the intercom blared, “Man overboard, man overboard, starboard side.” The air surrounding the ship was so foggy I could barely see the sea, and I searched around me for some tidbit of conversation to inform me what the hell was going on.
    Sure enough, I heard ABH1 Thomas, wearing his yellow V1 LPO jersey telling our divisional officer, “This squadron guy, I think from 172, the Prowler squadron, just took the CO2 bottle out of his float coat, threw it to his First Class, saluted him, and with all his chains still wrapped around his arms, jumped off the rail back aft. You can still see his foot-prints on the railing.”
    I spaced out for a few seconds, but then Shelley said, “This is either the best or worst possible day to go over-board depending how much you really want to drown and never be found again.” He gestured at the fog-engulfed sea with his left hand. I just wanted a cigarette break. Helicopters whirled around for a day and a half but they never found his body.
    About a day later, I almost lost my life. We were caught in the catcher’s mitt of a particularly dramatic typhoon. Our massive ship rocked and rolled like it was in the hands of a child playing in a bathtub. All the smoking areas were closed since it was quite easy for us to be sucked out to sea, but after two days of chewing tobacco and massive amounts of coffee, I had to do something. One of my Leading Petty Officers, a mild-natured forty-something black North Carolinian named Holt, was as much an avid smoker as I was, and asked me to come along with him. We crouched in the cat-walk right near the bow of the ship and lit up, disregarding the water splashing all around us. We rocked back and forth with the ship, while I quickly and greedily sucked down a Camel and him a Newport. It takes the average smoker about six minutes to finish a cigarette, but we got our nicotine fix in probably less then one. It was illegal and clandestine, so we quickly discarded our butts over the side into the angry water and made our way back inside through a tiny hatch. About five minutes later, the ship hit a wave that could have only came out of a move, such as the Perfect Storm or The Poseidon Adventure.
    He looked at me as said, “Damn, God was looking out for us.”
    In disbelief and as a true atheist, I just responded, “No man, we were just lucky.”
    I thought that enough was enough, and bad luck was bad luck, but everything climaxed three days before we were to pull into our home port of Yokosuka, Japan. We were all exhausted and ready to head back to our adopted home after six grueling months at sea. It was around 2230, and I was parking a plane up at the bow of the ship when I heard a metallic shriek accompany the landing of an F18, immediately followed by an enormous splash. I tied down the bird and ran to the middle of the deck to see what the commotion was about. One of the landing wires had snapped and the jet had crashed into the water. What was far worse was the sight of about six bodies all scattered around the deck, at least three of whom where motionless. One corpse lay with his head about five feet away from where he fell. It took me a few horrid moments before I recognized from the Fly 2 blue shirt jersey and its distinct dimensions that it was Shelley.
    The familiar medical emergency and man overboard announcements sounded, and a helicopter was launched to recover the pilots who had successfully ditched their bird in the drink. Crews of corpsman collected limbs and placed bodies on stretchers. It was a nightmare that I just couldn’t awake from. The non-skid surface of the deck was covered in large blotches of blood. I would later have to scrub it up. I watched one corpsman pick up Shelley’s head and remove his helmet, while another placed his body on a stretcher, before I vomited over the side of Aircraft Elevator 2.
    This was my first full cruise at sea and a totally horrendous introduction to the hellish reality of war, although there was no visible enemy to fight aside from foul fate and bad luck. I later had four more cruises and only one where nobody died.
    It seemed as if we were all cursed from the very second we hit the open sea, and any form of morale seemed to completely separate from our very souls- just like Shelley’s head and Santiago’s leg, or maybe just yours- which I might just be pulling right now.

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