FIX BAYONETS!

Drunks are frequently royal pains, especially in these politically correct days; but there was a time when they were much more objects of entertainment.

We had a variety of drunks on the icebreaker cruises I was on in the Coast Guard. They weren’t drunk MUCH, because they couldn’t get their hands on a ready supply of alcohol. But, whatever they could get their hands on didn’t last long at all.

On my first cruise, in 1973, it was still legal to have something to drink. This boiled down to two beers per man per week, or 4800 beers to cover 200 guys for twelve weeks. Two beers a week isn’t much but I saw guys drunk. Why? Well, I didn’t drink. But I could still draw my beer. Soooooo, draw my beer and auction it off for soft drinks. Three for one was about the best trade I managed, which just goes to show how lousy I was at dickering. Dicker with several non drinkers and pretty soon you have enough to get blitzed, which some guys did. I don’t remember anyone getting in trouble, probably because on board ship, it’s too easy to get caught, so the drunks did it quietly and hit the rack.

The beer was stored in the only secure place on the ship. The brig. Good thing no one got in trouble or he would have been locked in with a reward.

Above the Arctic Circle we also had medicinal whiskey available through sick bay. If you were ‘off the ship’ (flying, operating a small boat, working aids to navigation or whatever) for over two hours, you qualified for a shot of whiskey. Nobody got drunk on this, as it was issued by the Corpsmen and consumed in front of them!

Trouble only started once you got ashore. Greenland in ‘73 had seen the impersonation of ‘Kernal Yernal’ by one of our aircrew and the destruction of an alert shack at Thule Air Force base by one of the deck apes. Alaska in ‘74 saw the advent of streaking, drunk shore patrol and a mass drunk/car theft incident.

Prices were high in Nome, so those who wanted to drink (or do anything else) ran out of money much faster than they expected. One of our Seamen ran out of cash before he had a good buzz on but after all good sense had departed.  The streaking craze had just got going good down in the States and one of his buddies offered him five dollars if he’d streak the bar. He bravely shucked his clothes at the front door and made the dash through the bar to exit at the back. In this sort of instance, Murphy is never your friend. Neither was the constable who happened to be standing in the way when our hero came barreling out of the back door.

A Second Class Petty Officer actually volunteered to be shore patrol for the first day of liberty in Nome, which I thought was odd but he freely explained that his motivation rested on the fact that, “All the guys buy drinks for the shore patrol.” By the next day he was a Third Class Petty Officer.

Crew from CGC Staten Island broke the bank that year, though. They obviously had enough money to get the job done because they had a large number of VERY drunk people.

One group amused themselves by rolling spools of cable off of the pier. A Damage Controlman found a bulldozer and began constructing some new road out through the tundra. They were the first to grace the local hoosegow and caused the constable to call in his part time backup for help.
This was a good thing, as the next problem was a spree of car thefts. Twenty one cars (and trucks) in the space of a couple of hours. All of which perpetrators were captured because, well, google up a map of Nome, Alaska. There is NO place to go.

The jail in Nome was designed for the occasional trouble maker, not an LA sized crime spree. The prisoners were literally jammed into the (only) cell so tightly they couldn’t sit and could barely move. When asked what he was going to do with them, the constable weighed his options and decided, “I guess I’ll have to remand you into the authority of your commanding officer.”

A perfectly rational decision. Get rid of the culprits, save the city some money, make the Coast Guard deal with the headache.

Until, that is, the CO shouldered his way out of the back of the crowd, saying, “Let’s go, boys…”

Staten Island was pleasantly invited to never return to Nome……