As I settled into the routine of a bonafide sailor, I discovered my way of interacting socially didn’t match that of my shipmates. After a rather wild social time during my training in San Diego, I wanted ship life to feel more like a workplace. I had ambition and wanted to do things right. Most of the guys, however—and there were 300 of them, and only 30 women—liked to joke around and get far too personal. My old comforts of solitude, reading, and writing helped ground me in my true self, and in my purpose for joining in the first place.
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A Destroyer can weigh up to 9,300 tons and is over five hundred feet long, built for housing and transporting equipment, not for human comfort. This time I didn’t have a single roommate, but a dozen—almost all in technical ratings, all busy, all tired, all business. They were cordial but no one was friendly.
As an introvert, I could easily and happily keep to myself under those circumstances. I reported to my division, got a very brief welcome from the division officer and senior chief, who both happened to be on duty, and they said to report to quarters at 0800 sharp on Monday.
I’d learn about my workstation and other duties then. I went back below decks to the women’s berthing to settle in, which I did very quickly, slotting into the bustling routine.
Daily life onboard the ship consisted mostly of watch, chores, meetings, and maintenance, but it was anything but routine. Something was always changing; somebody was messing up or finding a way to joke around; somebody else got a new medal or SW—surface warfare—pin at a ceremony; there was a new POD, or Plan of the Day, to read and follow, often announcing new policies, new assignments, new arrivals, and new departures alongside events, menus, and the ship’s watch schedule.
The more adaptable you were, the less stress you felt. I considered myself pretty adaptable, but because I couldn’t get enough alone time, things started to feel too loud. Especially during the day, in contrast with the enforced and ominous night quiet, things started to feel more and more out of proportion in general, from our tiny racks to the size of the ship itself.
The more adaptable you were, the less stress you felt.
Our bunk beds, or racks, sported mattresses XL twin-sized in length but skinnier in width. Mine was the top rack of three, and I couldn’t sit up in it.
I had to climb the built-in metal ladder and slide in sideways, then try not to crack my skull on the overhead pipes when woken up by the reveille announcement just before sunrise. I also had to stand on the completely vertical ladder with my boots on—because the rounded steel rungs were definitely not made for bare feet—to strip the old sheets from the bed and remake it with clean linens.
Inside the rack was a built-in dresser of sorts, a set of compartments with a rack-length lid that you could lift and lock. When we were in port, even though there wasn’t much room, I tried to keep nonperish- able snacks in there because the food for enlisted people on board the ship was abysmal: Grade B meat and bruised, half-rotten fruit; stale bread and milk on the edge of spoil.
I was glad we had an upright locker, too; in addition to a couple of spare uniforms, which I washed, ironed and folded every Sunday, I had my civilian clothes and too many shoes locked in there, along with some books and notebooks I couldn’t fit into the overcrowded trunk of my car, which stayed parked in the base lot about a half-mile from the ship.
I didn’t leave anything out on the seats, nothing visible to tempt thieves. I’d brought books from home: favorite novels I could read over and over by Toni Morrison and Stephen King. Others I borrowed from the Norfolk Public Library on Ghent on liberty weekends. I had trouble adjusting to the stark difference from A school at first—a heavier workload, which started immediately; no social life whatsoever; and the complete absence of privacy.
Once I felt like I understood what they expected of me, and when I could afford to spend the money, I would shell out forty or fifty dollars I could barely spare to rent a motel room near base for the night, buy a bunch of snacks, and savor a weekend just reading and watching TV in my underwear, finally alone. Duty rotations were tighter on the ship, and sometimes weeks passed without a full day off.
You’re never alone for long on a ship; I started to feel crowded by the way that random things about me—the type of toothpaste I used, or what I said to someone offhand—would crop up in a stranger-shipmate’s comment to me. Nosy assholes popped up just as you got a chance to catch a free and quiet breath, fake friendliness interrupting any peace or beauty you could find in a fucking sunset.
Luckily, I could read fast; library patrons had only three weeks with a book, and if you wanted to renew and not pay a fine, you had to actually walk in and let them stamp the book again. I ended up keeping one book the librarian handed me: World History of Women at Sea. I thought it’d be like an encyclopedia, but nope. Slim and old, throwaway pamphlet style with cheesy illustrations.
I loved that book. The stories of women sailors kept me company, made me feel less like an anomaly, and helped me escape the familiar warring feelings of being both too much and not enough. I hid it in the glove box in my car instead of keeping it with me on the ship, because if the guys on the boat saw it, I had no idea how they’d react.
In school, boys would sometimes take my books and toss them around in a game of Monkey in the Middle. Others would tease me and read the book out loud in a fake feminine voice, or get mean, saying I was stuck up or that I thought I was smarter than or too good for them if the book proved too challenging for their reading skills.
Sometimes, they’d start crowding my personal space. I didn’t want to deal with that kind of confrontation, and what I read was none of their business. I just wanted to do my job and have a little time to myself in between.
*
I wrote poetry on the ship, in the rhyming forms I knew from school—sonnets, heroic couplets, a villanelle. I waited until I felt something I could express in complete sentences, in full stanzas, a moment turning toward its capture. A poem would contain in language what I struggled to control in life, what I could not let loose in the day-to-day routine of enlistment—rigorous, annoying, and definitely not as exciting as I’d expected.
I greased torpedo tubes and stood at attention or parade rest for morning meetings and swabbed the deck and read sonar manuals, all the while imagining myself at the end of my enlistment: full-time student again, carrying book stacks across campus, writing papers in my head and on notebooks before typing them up in the library.
Maybe I could apply to UCLA or USC when I got out. Or I could switch to officer training and do twenty, retire while still young and be a nontraditional student, buy myself a little house in Ladera Heights and fill built-in shelves with books, lace every empty wall space with colorful art from Leimert Park.
I’d steal a moment to write future me into existence, or to write my way through my feelings after another tedious day. After I wrote a poem, I could sleep. After I wrote a poem, I could wash my ass in the tiled community closet of a shower and ease my discomfort about the lack of privacy. I could get dressed in the dark morning, go back on watch, go back up the ladderwell, and endure jokes and comments I found repellent. After I wrote a poem, I could write letters to my family and tell them not to worry, I was fine.
If I wrote a poem that might seem too incendiary if discovered, I ripped it out of that notebook I had bought at the boot camp NEX and flushed it. Sometimes I would copy what I wrote in better handwriting, changing a word, a phrase, the order of lines, an ending, the start. What I couldn’t write my way into was belonging. I loved the prospect of being a sailor. I was young, fit, smart. I matched them in uniform and training and duty, but I felt painfully out of place.
In boot camp, one of the most valuable things we learned was to set concrete goals, break them down by actions, and keep track of progress.
And sometimes, I failed. Newly promoted and newly in charge of at-sea extra-duty assignments, a second class sonarman in my division named Duff switched me from quarterdeck watch with the 9mm to line detail. While I held the sidearm just fine, my hands were too small to grip the heavy lines tying the ship—”This is why I’m a tech, not a damn boatswain’s mate,” I told him—endangering the crew with the threat of snapback.
He sent me below decks to roll the line back up on a giant wheel instead, a task not unlike spinning thread back onto its spool, except you had to do it fast, and it burned your palms raw. My palms turned into mitts of hard flesh by the end of the day, and all softness peeled away.
When Duff saw me picking at the blisters, he smirked. “Sucks to be you, Queen,” he said, whistling as he tried to breeze past me. But Duff was heavyset and six foot five, so tall he had to duck to walk through the portholes, and he bumped his head on the overhead pipes for the umpteenth time. I laughed to myself. Did I even want to belong with these ignorant-ass dudes?
Maybe, I thought, trying to give myself a pep talk, I feel restless because I’m always on the ship. Norfolk held little appeal to me as a place to explore, other than the library; I had enough unwanted male attention on the ship and had no interest in the same ogling from civilians. Can’t let cabin fever beat me yet.
As kids in L.A., and even when we lived in the San Joaquin Valley, we roamed. We got into mischief. We played ding-dong ditch and put the living bugs we’d caught into random people’s mailboxes. We took shopping carts from grocery store parking lots and took joyrides up and down the street, staying outside until the streetlights came on. I loved going on adventures, and being on the ship started to feel like the opposite—a grind, especially since we were mostly in port.
Sucks to be you, I thought on one duty day, looking at myself in the mirror and soaking my aching hands in a sink full of hot water after hours of scrubbing rust from the torpedo deck in the hot sun, using just a steel wool pad, a spray bottle of water, a chamois cloth, and no gloves.
I didn’t mind the crappiness of the work so much as the absence of choice. If you got a shit assignment or an asshole supervisor, sucks to be you. Got the balls-to-two watch first while underway? Sucks to be you. Storekeepers lost your skivvies or turned them from white to gray by washing them with the colors? Sucks to be you.
Got orders to Iceland when you wanted Hawaii? Sucks to be you. Wanted to go home but got your enlistment extended involuntarily for another year, because war, because Needs of the Navy? Sucks. To. Be. You.
In boot camp, one of the most valuable things we learned was to set concrete goals, break them down by actions, and keep track of progress. If I stayed focused, if I leaned toward my imagination and away from the nonsense, I’d give myself a chance at success—if not in the Navy, then elsewhere.
It made me smile to mark the days as tick marks, like I saw cartoon figures do on animated prison walls, filling the inside back cover of my poetry notebook with uneven scratches. I had a long way to go, but I saw the tiny vertical lines as evidence I was moving, however slowly, toward the future I shaped in my mind.
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Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: A Veteran’s Memoir by Khadijah Queen is available via Legacy Lit.
