Something Below Decks

[MUSIC] Naval history is filled with stories from sailors, dock workers, museum caretakers, and civilians, claiming they encountered something they couldn't explain aboard Navy vessels. Footsteps in empty compartments, voices carrying through dark passageways, figures wandering the decks long after everyone aboard should have been asleep, or long after they should have been dead. Maybe it's because ships exist in such unforgiving places, storms, isolation, war. Thousands of men trapped together out on open water for weeks or months at a time. And when enough fear, death, and suffering pile up in one place, maybe some part of it stays behind. From sailors, civilians, and caretakers, these are the true stories of strange encounters aboard American naval vessels. [MUSIC] I'm Luke Lamana, and this is War Time Stories. [MUSIC] >> Not sure if I ever did see a ghost on any of the ships I was on, but then again, all of the vitamin D to pry of sailors already looked so pale and gone. So maybe I still didn't notice. Probably some of the most ridiculous stories from my time on ship came from simple things like sorting our trash. Because of the way it's processed, you have to separate things into three categories. And that was really when I found out why Marines are called crannators. Apparently putting big, obvious signs that say metal, plastic, biodegradable isn't enough. Either they just didn't care or they didn't read them. Then after watching a young Marine toss his Pringles can into the biodegradable bag, I had to quite literally teach him that it was made of all three of those items. The plastic lid, the cardboard tube, and the metal base. And it's like a light went on after I explained. And I was like, oh, we're supposed to separate them. Then again, I am a simple guy. I've got my own moments where I get very confused. And one of those things is cryptocurrency. After nine years in the military, I got out and suddenly everybody's talking about Bitcoin like it's the most basic thing in the world. Wallets, codes, blockchaining. Fortunately, I found something that simplifies it. If you've been curious about Bitcoin but haven't made the jump yet, cash app makes it easy. You can set up automatic purchases with zero fees or by larger amounts also with zero fees. If you start small or go bigger, it's designed to be simple either way. For a limited time, new customers can get $10, add it to their balance. Just use code Bitcoin 10 when you sign up and don't forget this part. Send at least $5 to a friend in the first two weeks. Terms apply. Cash app is a financial services platform, not a bank. Banking services provided by cash apps, bank partners, Bitcoin services provided by block ink brand. For additional information, see the Bitcoin Disclosures at cash.app/legal/podcast. [MUSIC] It's easiest, man. My bad, my bad, I'm sorry. How the hell are you going at such a hurry? You okay? Yeah, yeah, I'm good. Bullshit, you look like you just saw a ghost. What? Oh, no, no, I just got to turn around for a second. You got lost? Seriously? I was just down in the hangar bag. The hangar bag? It's started after the hoist. An ancient shop? Yeah. So? What? I didn't see anything. I never said that she did. But you wouldn't be the first. What do you mean? You didn't hear about what happened back there? No. First tour guy came aboard not long after we got to Sassivo. They found him down there a few months back. Found him? He had it been a few days. Oh. Yeah, right outside the ancient repair shop. Shit. You're going to be okay? Yeah, yeah, no, no, I'm good. I'm good. Sorry. Yeah. I'll see you later. This first story hits very close to home for me. It was sent to me a long time ago by an American sailor. I didn't get a chance to ask about using his name, so we'll have to call him Robert. That may or may not be his real name. Robert is a Navy veteran who served for many years across a number of vessels. But one that's always stood out to him was the USS Bonham Rechard, the good man Richard, the Bonnie Dick, a wasp class amphibious assault ship first commissioned in 1998. I myself was deployed aboard this ship three times during my overseas tours with a 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit. Why did it have mechanical problems after 15 years when I was on it? Nothing like the engines dying in the middle of the night and you wake up drenched in sweat because the air conditioning stopped working. It had a real streak of bad luck. Just recently the ship caught fire and quite literally burned down in the San Diego harbor where it had been docked, for extensive repairs, which would never happen and the ship was then decommissioned and scrapped. During its 20 years of active operations, while a small handful of Marines and at least one sailor assigned to the vessel have died in various accidents, there was a gunny who lost his foot when I was on board, he was in the well deck and one of the boarding ramps got lifted up in the rough water and came down on his foot. But there's otherwise no record of any lives being lost on board as a result of combat. But according to Robert, a little no tragedy cast a dark shadow over the ship that stayed with it, right up until the ship was destroyed. He writes, "There is an unofficial rule of thumb in navy. Every ship has at least one thief, one sexual predator, and one murderer. I think one ghost should be added to that list." In late 2016 I was stationed on the USS Bonhamerschart, LHD6 out of Sassebo, Japan. This wasn't my first ship, nor was it my first time in Japan. I'd been in the navy for seven years by that time. By that point in my career, I'd already seen some pretty insane things, dumbass Marines nearly setting the birthing on fire. I've caught some whales mating on sonar, I've been met my father's uncle for the first time on an aircraft carrier. But nothing so strange is what I witnessed aboard that ship, the Bonhamerschart. One of my guys, I'll call him Tats, told me a story about a first-tour sailor that arrived at the BHR a few weeks after the ship arrived in Japan. The BHR isn't a small ship, its complement is about 1500 sailors, and it takes on an additional 1000 Marines with all their equipment for exercises, so it's easy to miss a few faces. But everyone knew this kid. He was young, nervous, and didn't quite understand what he'd signed up for, probably like how a lot of us were when we first joined up. But military life isn't for everyone, and this kid had a really hard time adjusting to it. On arriving, he was hit hard with qualification requirements, deployment schedules, medical readiness, and all the administrative BS that everyone loves. The sailor was told he'd be stationed in San Diego near his home of record, but instead he was forward deployed with real adversaries, preparing for real fights. As he was telling this story, my buddy Tats looked out of one of the portholes down at the concrete dock below, and said to me, "I saw him walking up the pier one morning, he was going so slow, you know, nowhere in a hurry." A couple of weeks later, he hung himself, outside the engine repair shop. I looked over his shoulder out of the same window, a few shipmates walked past a forklift working party, but I just imagined the stick of a kid shuffling up the quarter mile of the pier. I'd been battling depression for years at this point, so I could imagine how he felt. How many times did he hope to ship would leave port without him? Would he get a dishonorable discharge if he just laid down on the pavement, or refused to move? And then he probably dealt with an overwhelming guilt for having those kinds of thoughts in the first place. Like I said, this was just a story to me I'd never met this kid, and I know it's easy to label him as a coward or whatever, but with everything I'd been through, my own battles, I just really felt for him. Anyway, so Tats tells me this sad story, and then over the next few weeks, I grew accustomed to my new watch rotation, daily duties, and got myself lost in the ship on more than one occasion. One day that I wasn't on duty, I stayed after normal working hours to locate my damaged control locker and find a path to the hangar bay from there. I opened a huge watertight door to the starboard aft part of the hangar bay, a jet engine was sitting on stilts half open and ready for the morning crew to start tinkering. If you've served aboard a ship, you'll know there are parts of the ship that are overpressured, going through hatches from under to overpressured parts of the ship can cause these. gusts of wind that sometimes make hatches difficult to close. This door had no such problem. I shut the hatch behind me, threw down the loose handle, and headed towards the forward ramp to the quarter deck. And that was when I heard this gentle, clanking sound. I turned around and saw length of chains hanging over the center of the plane's engine. They were swinging back and forth quickly in a short round arc, almost angrily, I thought. There were other chains in the area, hanging from the overhead or hung on the walls. None of them were moving. I didn't have any sense of dread or a feeling that someone unseen was watching me, but at that moment I remembered Tath's story about the guy who had hung himself and I just ran to the quarter deck as fast as I could. I happened across a fellow first class on the command duty officer's CDO watch. He looked me up and down and said, "What, you can't be that fed up with this ship already?" I described to him what I saw. He looked at me and said, "Oh yeah, that kid hung himself there a few months back, didn't he hear about that?" The spot was full of crates, so nobody found him until after turnover. The bottomer shard experienced a catastrophic fire for five days in July 2020 and was decommissioned on April 14, 2021. I really don't know what happened that night in the hangar bay, but if it was that young sailor, I just hope he finds peace after the ship is scrapped. This next story was posted online by an American sailor under the handle, a political politician. In it, he tells us about the time he and his buddies saw something strange while working below decks on the night shift. He writes, "I am a firm believer that most US Navy vessels are haunted for a plethora of reasons. I've heard countless sailors share their own personal experiences aboard different ships, so I figured it was about time I shared mine." For my own privacy as well as that of my buddies, I won't be sharing the name of the ship. I experienced this on. Same goes for my rate, name, rank, etc. Anyway, I've been in the Navy for a little over a decade. With the majority of that career spent on the night shift. One night, myself and four other sailors were working in the wee hours of the morning. Our shift was between 1900 and '07, 7pm to 7am. We worked down on the seventh deck in an engineering space directly next to the ship's pump room. So at some point in the night, one of us was called up to tend to some business on the main deck. Can't really recall what the reason was, but I watched my buddy as he climbed his way out of the engineering space via the ladder well, which was the only way in or out of this area. Only about three to five minutes after he left, it started getting weird. So we're sitting there, working away, staring at monitors when all of a sudden the hatch to the pump room adjoining the space we were in burst open. Like it didn't swing open like someone just casually entered the room. This sounded like someone who was a royally pissed, kicked open the hatch with an insane amount of force. We kind of just look at each other remembering that the hatching question had been securely dug down. That bar was jammed shut. It was then that our attention was drawn to the ballistic glass windows, the port holes, that allowed us to peer into the pump room. The lights were dim, but someone was definitely moving around in there. At first we thought it had to be our buddy who went topside, but it was just something off about the way this guy moved past windows. You know how when you walk, you swing your arms and kind of do that slight bobbing up and down with each step, there was none of that. It was almost like he was floating. Couldn't see his feet, but I always say it looked like as if he was riding a skateboard or something, just gliding right past. He didn't look at us, he just carried on out of sight before disappearing. Sketched out, we all went to investigate, only to find an empty pump room. While sketched out soon turned into freaked out, and we hauled ass back to our little enclosed area. Just to make sure we weren't going crazy, we phoned the office and asked if our buddy was still doing his thing on the main deck. He was still up there. Nobody should have been in that pump room. A few days later, we had this bright idea to shut the lights off in the pump room and take a few flash pictures to see if anything strange turned up, I guess. The majority were lame and vacant, until we got to the back corner of the room. My buddy brought his phone up and snapped a pick. Staring at us from the top of a toolbox was a face. Unfortunately, it wasn't my phone that took the picture and I'm sorry to say I have no idea where it ended up, but just thinking about it was enough to freak me out. It had this smokey, wispy look to it and it was clearly staring back at us. There are dozens of other stories aboard this ship. Guys have been shoved, seen sailors and outdated uniforms walking the p-ways. I've even heard what sounded like someone walking up directly behind me, only to turn around and find nobody there. So yeah, ships are most definitely haunted. This next story was sent to me by an American sailor named Matt, who served aboard an aircraft carrier with a history as decorated as it is bloody. By his telling of the story what appears to be the USS John F. Kennedy, CV67, also called Big John. Like so many of these stories, Matt's story finds us deep below decks on the night shift. He writes, "All right, I've got to go story for you. Way back when I was assigned to a Vietnam era aircraft carrier, working in the main engineering space. The ship had seen its fair share of action over the years, fatalities, fires, and in the 1970s a catastrophic collision with the guided missile cruiser USS Belknap that left both ships burning and took the lives of several sailors. We were a few days away from a major deployment to the Middle East, so major preparations were well underway. The memory serves me correctly. I think we were sent to light fires, sometime the following morning. The engineering space we found ourselves in had a reputation for being haunted. I'd heard a lot of the stories from the old timers, but didn't really think much of them. Just outlandish pranks meant to scare the new guys, you know? That night I was part of a two-man watch, one BT and one MM, boiler technician and machinist's mate. Both of us were seasoned veterans with many deployments under our belts. We were comfortable in our jobs and knew the sounds of our workspace like the back of our hand. Anyone set foot in the area, we'd hear them log before we saw them. Part of our job was to challenge anyone who came down there after hours. Didn't happen often as most knew it was a restricted area. But occasionally a yard bird or civilian contractor might come down unannounced for an urgent repair or to fly in some special part, even at night. So anyway, right around midnight was when we heard it. The unmistakable sounds of someone walking around the engineering space. When we weren't making our rounds, the two of us stood in the EOS and closed operating space to monitor the boards and phones. When I heard the sounds, I looked up at my watch partner, which is called Frank. Frank had heard the steps too. His eyes starting up from the operating manual he was reading to the open watertight door that led into the engineering space. From where we were sitting, we couldn't see anyone. So I got up, locked between the two boilers, glanced up the starboard and poured ladderways, nothing. I shrugged and went back to the EOS and right as I sat down, I heard it again, footsteps on the hard metal deck. This time we both did a full search of the entire main space. Lower level, upper level, four strap, lower room, all the way up to the main deck and back down, both sides, port, and starboard. We even checked the escape hatches. Nothing. And yet, these noises wouldn't stop. If there's one thing to know about Frank, it's that he's a big dude. Like, I wasn't small, but this guy was an absolute beast, and I could tell he was getting pissed. The sounds had been going on for a while, and I was so convinced that there was someone down there with us there had to be. As I was searching the upper level, I just heard Frank down below shout, "I don't care if this is a security level check. If I find you hiding down here, I'm going to kick your ass." I honestly thought it was pretty funny. Eventually, we went back to the EOS and just stayed there. But the sounds never stopped. I stood at the door just looking out, chain-smoking, through calm my nerves. I asked Frank if we should call in a security alert. "Him being my senior," he said. Hell no, what are we going to tell them? They'll think we're nuts. It was probably right, but we were both pretty shook by that point. For some odd reason, the sounds came to a total stop around 4 AM. And by 6 or 7, our relief showed up. As you can imagine, we hauled ass out of there as fast as we could. This next story was sent to me by one of your fellow listeners, a civilian who wishes to be referred to simply as Mr. W. A few years ago, Mr. W was invited by a Navy friend of his to check out the aircraft carrier that he was going to be stationed on. But while exploring the decks and seemingly never-ending corridors, something happened that he still can't explain. He writes, "This story dates back to about 2018. I'm not a military man, or have I ever served in the military, but one of our best friends was a Navy corpsman. At the time, he was assigned to a U.S. aircraft carrier that I've long forgotten the name of. He'd only been to the Navy for a few years at that point, and he invited us to where the ship was stationed in Norfolk, Virginia to give us the grand tour of the ship that he'd be living on for the next six months. We were all pretty hyped. He invited me, my girlfriend, my other buddy who I'll call Dave and Dave's girlfriend. He showed us around the loading dock where we entered the mess room, his bunk bed, and one of the mechanical rooms where the ship uses cables to catch planes, at least that's what he told us. And of course, the carrier platform. Honestly, now that I'm riding this all out, I'm not entirely sure if my Navy buddy had the authority to do all this. I don't know anything about military regulations, but they never questioned us, so I guess it was cool, although they did screen us for weapons and other stuff. Anyway, if I were called correctly after walking around the carrier platform, we headed back to our friend's bunk bed. Dave and I asked him if it was okay for us to explore a little and look around. He responded, "Sure, just let me know where you're going." So Dave and I decided to go down to level to check things out. We climbed down a ladder, and as soon as our feet touched the floor, we turned and saw someone approaching us. He was about 20 or so feet away and looked like a sailor. But his uniform was notably different than the dark Navy one our friend was wearing. This guy was wearing a light blue, long sleeve button up shirt tucked into a pair of jeans. I mean, for all I know, this could have been a totally normal sailor get up, like I said, I'm a civilian. I know next to nothing about this stuff, but something about this guy just was off somehow. The sailor said, "What are y'all doing down here?" And as he got closer, I could see that his face had this kind of very odd pale complexion about it. And naturally, Dave and I think we're in deep shit. I told the sailor that, "We're here with our Navy buddy who said it was okay for us to explore this area. Hearing that, he just kind of looked at us before saying, "Okay, just be careful." And from there, he continued on his way down the hall before hooking a right out of sight. After dodging that bullet, Dave and I carried on with our little self-guided tour wandering down the hall in the same direction as the sailor. And that's where it got strange. When we got to the end of the corridor and looked right where the sailor had turned, there was nothing there, there's no hall, there's no side passage, just a solid wall, and some mechanical stuff. Dave and I were just both dumbfounded, like, where the hell did that dude just go? We didn't have to say anything to know, it was time to get the hell out of there. And the sudden chill we felt prompted us to speedwalk back to where we came from. When we climbed back up the ladder, we found two Navy personnel who seemed pretty surprised to see us and they were like, "What the hell are you doing down there?" And we said that our friend told us it was all right to explore the lower deck, trying to get in trouble. This made them only more confused. Who told you that? They said, "Nobody should be down there right now." And at that moment, we just apologized and headed back to our friend's bunk. Of course, we told our Navy friend about the incident, but he just shrugged it off and said, "We were becing him." And hindsight, I wonder if maybe he refused to believe our story because if he was going to be stuck on that thing for six months, a story about a ghost living aboard the ship he was stationed on was probably the last thing he wanted to hear. This final story is a little bit different. It's not set on an aircraft carrier, destroyer, cruiser, or any kind of modern warship. The focus of this account centers around the U.S. Navy's oldest vessel, one that's still on active duty even after over 200 years of dedicated service, the USS Constitution. Unable history buffs, it really doesn't get much better than the Constitution. I know Jake, our writer, will disagree and say that the HMS victory is where it's at, but I've got to stick with old iron sights on this one. First launched in 1797, the vessel is still operated by 75 active duty officers and sailors. Their primary job, being to preserve history and educate the public on the Navy's role, in both war and peace. Not to mention the undeniably cool perk of getting to take the ship out for the occasional sail around Boston Harbor. But as I was reading about the vessel, I came across this post, made to an online message board that just grabbed my interest. It was written by a user under the handle "Viking" 1990, who says, quote, "My buddy said he could see shadows in the captain's cabin of the Constitution when he was on gate guard. Also said he heard rolling cannonballs, despite it being a century since the last cannonball was on board. His buddy fell asleep on watch and was supposedly woken up by a little boy in colonial clothing. Following this shorter comment, another user, a sailor who once served aboard the Constitution, pulled up with his own paranormal experiences aboard America's oldest warship. I was ship's company. Old iron size was probably my coolest duty station. I still remember the intro speech I'd give when it was my turn to lead the tour groups. Ladies and gentlemen, contrary to what you might have been led to believe, this is not a museum. It's not a display and it isn't a replica. This is a 225-year-old frigate with over 30 victories. This vessel has been present for the fall of empires and was floating since the infancy of our nation. On behalf of all crew members past and present, I ask only that you show her the respect she deserves. That last statement was true in more ways than one. Because if you did your job and respected the ship, you had no problems. But if you didn't, weird stuff would start to happen. The ship was mored up very, very tight to the pier. It only moved five or six times a year and it's a major operation every time. And Boston Harbor is not that rough that far in. All that to say, there's no rocking or pitching on the boat when she's mored. And yet despite this, the door to the ward room would slam all the time, like at least once a week. The ward room was a pretty tiny area and I never spent any more time that I had to on the birth deck if I could avoid it. I always knocked before entering the ward room. I wouldn't wait for a response, but I figured that by knocking and at least acknowledging that I wasn't supposed to be in there, the old crew would give me the benefit of the doubt. At night, when I stood OOD officer on deck, I was basically the watchstander responsible for the ship during that shift. And on the constitution, even though she's tied up in Boston Harbor, you still treat it like it's a real Navy vessel. So we had what's called sounding and security, that's a roving watch. Their job was to move through the ship, check the spaces, make sure nothing was leaking, nothing was unsecured, nothing on fire, and generally make sure the 200 year old wooden warship wasn't doing anything she wasn't supposed to be doing. Once they finished their round, they would report back to the OOD and let us know that the round was complete. And there were plenty of nights where the SNS would come, hang out for a minute, especially if it was cold, rainy or snowing. But if they got too comfortable, if they sat around too long or let too much time pass between their rounds, that's when you'd start to see shadows moving around in the CEO's cabin. Almost like somebody was walking around in there, checking on the ship themselves. And I always took that as the old crew's way of saying, "Get back to work." We occasionally let the boy scouts sleep overnight on the ship, and this one time, I found one of these kids, with a thumbtack engraving his name on an overhead beam. I lost my mind, I read him the riot act, and his scout leader immediately came over and asked what was going on. I essentially said, "Hey, your boy here thought he wanted to leave an impression on a two-central [BLANK_AUDIO] warship. He's not sleeping here tonight. Well, the scout leader said that he wasn't going to leave. He apologized for him doing that, but they weren't going to leave the ship tonight as it was late, and they had traveled two hours to get there. I said fine, but he stays in the maintenance area afs. That way, if he messes with anything, it's nothing we can't replace. I swear, this kid woke up every hour sobbing, saying that somebody kept breathing on him and whispering to him. I can tell you that there is never a draft on that boat, no matter how hard we may have tried to induce one. Personally, I like to think it was the old crew, making sure the kid didn't find another tack. Ghosts creep us out. There is no doubt about that. But do you ever wonder if there is such a thing as an incompetent ghost? Like, is it the more competent crew members who died and stayed behind on the USS Constitution? Do keep generations of kids from scribbling on the walls and making sure the night watch isn't slacking off? Or do we think maybe it was like the loot tenants who always got lost, messed everything up, and when they eventually died, they became confused and just couldn't figure out where to go next, so they stayed on the boat. In competent ghosts. Well, living or not, if we want competent men keeping the Constitution and other important pieces of our nation's history in tip-top shape, what about our legal matters? We would want a competent attorney, right? Because not all law firms are the same. I are the wrong one and you're already sunk before you even start. Morgan and Morgan has been fighting for the people for over 35 years. The largest injury law firm in America with over a thousand lawyers and offices nationwide, and they've recovered over $30 billion for the clients. So if you're ever injured because of someone else's negligence, you can check out Morgan and Morgan. They will fight to get their clients the best results, and you pay nothing unless they win. For more information, you can go to forthepople.com/wartime. There's something about ship stories that hits a little different. Maybe because I've been on them. Because on the land, when somebody says they heard footsteps in an empty building, you can usually imagine a dozen explanations, old pipes, bad floors, wind, some random person being where they weren't supposed to be. But on a ship, especially below decks, that's a controlled space. There are only so many ways in and so many ways out. And only so many people who are supposed to be there at any given time. And if you ever spent time aboard one, you know that the ship already makes enough noise on its own. Sailors eat, sleep, and breathe that ship every day. So, like a guy out on post in the Middle East who hears footsteps and voices on the side of an otherwise empty mountain, when a sailor says something sounded wrong or move wrong or came from a place where nobody could have been, I tend to give them a little more room. So what do we have? We have a sailor aboard the bottomer shard who saw a chain moving by itself in the same area where a young sailor had previously taken his own life. We had a group of sailors down on the seventh deck who watched a figure moving around through a pump room, only to find the space empty moments later. Then we had Matt and Frank who experienced engineering guys stuck for hours listening to footsteps running around a restricted space that they knew better than anyone. We had a civilian on a carrier and counter a sailor dressed like he belonged to another era who turned a corner into a dead end and simply wasn't there anymore. And then all of the bumps and bangs of the old crew on the USS Constitution. Maybe these stories have normal explanations. Maybe ships are just strange places where sound travels weird, shadows move strangely, and tired people a night watch start to see things that aren't really there. That's possible. But after hearing enough of these accounts as at least one of these sailors mentioned in his story, I understand why so many sailors say the same thing. Every ship is haunted. Whether that is literal or figurative, I guess, is up to you. Some have accidents, some have tragedies, some have names etched into their history that never really leave. And maybe when you pack enough life, death, fear, boredom, exhaustion, violence, and loneliness into the same steel corridors for decades, eventually strange things start happening. The low decks. Stick around for the after-action of the credits if you want to hear another fun story. [Music] War Time Stories is created and hosted by me, Luke Lamana, written by Jake Howard and myself. Audio-editing sound design mixing and mastering by Alex Carpenter, with additional audio work by me. Animation and motion design and production coordination by David Williamson. Research by Jake Howard and myself. Artwork by Pacata and Radimir Isgarovic. Hey guys, thanks for sticking around here for the after-action in the credits. Oh boy. I get to talk about my favorite ship, the Bonhamer Shard, B-H-R, as we call it in short. Yeah, there's other stories about the B-H-R that I know I've read. I guess they got screened for this episode, so you'll see those in a future episode, so stay tuned. But I don't have any haunting stories. You know, I guess being a marine on ship, you don't really go anywhere except for your own birthing, the ship's gym, maybe the ship's barbershop to have them whack off your hair with some unlicensed, uh, Lance Corporal who got violent old, and so I learned how to cut my own hair. I mean, you got to be careful because if people see you cut your hair and you're doing a good job, they're like, hey bro, can you cut my hair for me? All the recon guys with their long shaggy hair. And they're like, bro, like my little fade, like you got to cut my hair. Jimmy, I know I've mentioned him. He had his golden hair boy, they call them, and yeah, he had me cut his hair. I just tried to do it privately, so nobody saw me, given free haircuts. But anyway, of all the stories I could tell, you know, that is true. I mean, from my time in service, some of the funniest and most memorable stories came from living on ship, and maybe that's just the result of being in confined quarters and living in close proximity to other people. It caused a lot of issues. I know I've talked about this in previous after-actions, all the weird things and funny things and stupid things that happen, especially when I became a sergeant on one of my last deployments, and I was the most senior guy in the birthing, and so then they made me responsible, and then I'm like, and I'm getting in trouble, or I'm like on the hook for a lot of the stuff that's happening, people steal in the toilet paper, because they want to have their own personal role, because they go to the toilet, and there's a toilet paper because somebody else stole it, so they steal it. So whoever the guy was in this store episode that says like every ship has one thief, yeah. Well, the Marine Corps birthing had many thieves, so I had to like take a sharpie marker and write, like, do not steal on the outside edge of the toilet paper, and it stopped it, because then you'd be that guy who goes back to your bunk, and people see you taking that, you can't lie, and say, "Oh, that's my toilet paper roll." But of all, I could go on forever about all the weird funny things that, you know, from sweat filling my shoes in the gym, when the AC was out, the clogged toilets, Marines clogged the toilets almost immediately, every time we got on ship, and all you want to think about that, the trash drama, because you got to sort your trash, drunken Marines coming back on after being out on shore leave, doing stupid things, boots going missing, because guys didn't like to wash their boots, and they left them out, and the birthing is confined space, and gets hot, and yeah, those boots just went away, because they smelled a high heaven arm, but the story I wanted to share with you, which is one of my favorites, and it's an inside story to me and my close group of marine buddies, you know, they go back, they were deployed together, and it's a story that I would have often, and will often repeat, you know, whenever I get the chance to talk about my time on ship. And I will title this story, what everybody else has titled it in my experience, maybe it was my friend Sean that did it, because he's involved, the avocado Nazi. Okay, so wherever they got the resupplies from, Okinawa, somewhere in Japan, avocados were a staple of our resupplies. When we went to some Southeast Asian countries, that might be replaced by mango steens or some sort of exotic fruit or something like that, but you had a wait a long time to get through the chow line. Sometimes you, you know, if you didn't line up on like, let's say, let's say chow in the morning started at 4am, or so I can't remember, started early, 4.35am, something like that. If you were down there by like three, you were going to be in line till six, like it was you were standing in line, and it's a cramped corridor, and you're kind of just, you could barely fit one guy on one side of the P-way, another guy on the other side of the P-way and have somebody walk between you without like bumping into you. So if you're standing there in the chow line trying to read a book or play a video game or something like people are bumping in knocking it out of your hand, that kind of thing. So really obnoxious to have to wait for chow. The Navy had their own chow line on one side, the Marines had their own chow line on the the other side, I'm looking through the windows and I see the navies getting like double portions and they're getting treated well. And I'm like, you know, after the fact is like, you know what, we're only on here for a couple of months, they're on here forever. So I guess I shouldn't have been so jealous. But anyway, so at the end of the chowline, they have like, you know, the mess stack where you sit down at the tables that are bolted to the ground, but they have like the salad bar. And sometimes if you didn't want to wait for your meager portion of tater tots and pancakes, you would just skip the line and go straight to the salad bar and they would have a selection of, you know, other items. Well, for the luncheon and dinner, sometimes they would put out avocados. And avocados, if you know, they're like, unripe, unripe, unripe, ripe, dead. Like, so they would, the avocados were the first thing to go. So long story short, they would put out these piles of avocados on the salad bar and guys who are in recon, guys who are doing a lot of weightlifting and training and stuff, that's like protein. So they would start filling their pockets with avocados. Now, everybody liked avocados for the most part. It wasn't like some rare exotic fruit that nobody knew how to eat. Like, when they got mango steams on the ship and nobody knew what they were, they're hard. And like, you just, anyway. So avocados were popular, but they went quick. So if you didn't get through the line quick enough, there's no more avocados, well. So I just kind of set up the vibe here for what happens. So me and my buddies, you know, my recon team, we get through the line. This is when I was a point man. I was in the team leader. I was just a point man. We get through the line and I'm a corporal. Maybe I'm a corporal at this point. And Sean, my buddy is a sergeant. He's my ATL, my assistant team leader. We sit down. I probably got like three avocados for myself. And I ate them at the table. I didn't take them back because guys who put them in their pocket taken back, put them in the bunk, you know, in the rack, and then they eat them after the gym, something like that. Well, I ate mine at the table and I went to go through my food. Now, when you take your tray to throw away your trash, you walk down the end of like the, you know, the beverage line and listening to a cafeteria so a tray slide, you know, tray platform, you slide it down, get your drink, or whatever, napkins, utensils, all that. Well, you get down to the end of that and they have three trash cans. And they have a guy who's voluntarily like some guy and his boots and uits, t-shirt and slacks. And he's just like telling you where to put everything. And it's trash sorting, okay, plastic, biodegradable, you know, waste. And then you have hard things like metals and avocados pits. So like the avocados skins would go and biodegradable. And they blend all that up into a slurry and I think they feed it to the fish. And then avocados pits, however, you put in that big blender machine, it breaks the machine, something like this. So everything hard would go, so you got to sort this. So this guy is watching for avocados. And he sees me come up and he sees I have three, the remnants of three avocados on my plate. And this guy's like a Lance Corporal, I'm a Corporal. I'm not big on like rank, but I felt like this kid just didn't give a crap about my rank at that moment. And he just, he goes like, oh, I see. Well, when the ship runs out of avocados, Corporal LaMana, I guess I'll know who to come talk to. Just like throwing an attitude. I was like, what did I do? I know you? Okay, so the background there is he feels like everybody should just take one, right? Like if you take three, that's you're taking avocados out of other Marines mouth or something like that. And I was like, this shut up. I probably skipped the line. I don't know. Shut up, like it first comes first, sir. You know what, I got down here before everybody else. Like, anyway, I dump my avocados into the trash. And now I'm kind of like ticked off by this guy. I was like, he didn't, he just, anyway. I go back and I sit down at the table and my buddy Sean, who we're still best friends, by the way, he's played voices on this show before. He, he sees like I'm upset about something. Or maybe I just, I was like, you won't believe what this mother effort just told me. I cursed a lot back then. And he goes, what happened? You know, he's looking back at the guy standing at the trash. Guy at the trash is still but heard about it. He's got this look on his face. So I tell him, I said, I brought, I went over there and he's all, you know, but heard about the avocados. So my buddy Sean was a sergeant. So he's one rank higher than I am. And he, he devises a plan. He looks on the table and say, hey, everybody give me your avocados. You know, as he's like piling. So he had eaten like three or four of himself. But now he's like piling everybody's avocados onto his plate. So he had a, you know, I don't know. Probably like two dozen avocados on his tray alone. And he's like, all right, everybody, watch this. So he gets up and he just, you know, shuckin' and jive and strollin' back towards the, the guy at the trash can. And this guy's kinda lookin' around, you know. He looks at my buddy Sean's face. Looks at the rank on his collar. And then looks at his tray. Looks back at the rank on his collar. And his face, like his face just turned beat red. Like he was about to explode. But he didn't say anything because he wasn't about to disrespect his sergeant. And we could hear Sean from the others because we were like sitting very close where the, the avocados were in like the, we're cross the whole room. And we hear Sean very loudly. Hey dude, where can I put like avocado pits or something? He's like, where can I put the, he just really boisterous and loud. And so the guy's like, you know, he's first sortin' all the pits or whatever. And he's like, thanks man, and walks back. And this guy just looks livin'. Like ruined his whole week, I'm sure. But that was the, the guy we then dubbed the avocado Nazi in perpetuity. And he lives on wherever you are. Are you, if you're listening to my show, I still am not sorry about eating three avocados. Oh man, good times on ship. Well, that being said, thank you so much for listening, for watching plenty more stories to come. Please stay tuned. Again, thank you for subscribing, liking, commenting, sharing, anything and everything you guys do to help support the show. We really appreciate it. As always, a huge shout out to both our patrons, our YouTube channel numbers for your incredible support. May God be with each and every one of you no matter what you're dealing with. And I will see you in the next episode.