Sea Stories

Seaman Posey: Part I

By Al Bell

Hail to thee, blithe Spirit!

-- Percy Bysshe Shelley

In the spring of 1972 in the Battle of Dong Hoi, a guided-missile frigate, USS STERETT (DLG 31), was attacked while patrolling the Gulf of Tonkin.  In a surprise attack, the North Vietnamese sent out bomb-loaded Mig jets and anti-ship missile firing patrol boats.  STERETT fought off the Migs and patrol boats, downing a missile and a Mig with her antiaircraft Standard missiles.  The Mig downed by STERETT had dropped a bomb destroying USS HIGBEE’s after 5” gun mount.  HIGBEE was a World War II vintage destroyer accompanying STERETT. The STERETT's 5" 54 gun aft took out the suface targets as they headed away.

I was the Weapons Officer on USS REEVES (DLG 24), which deployed to the Tonkin Gulf in September of 1972 as a replacement just as STERETT was returning to the U.S.  The situation was very tense.  One cannot understand the stresses that people served under in that environment without having been there.  One who did serve there, P.T. Deutermann, a retired Navy captain, has written a novel about that environment called the Edge of Honor.  It was painful for me to read that book because it so accurately described one of the most unpleasant periods in my life.

However, into that hard life came comic relief in the form of Seaman Posey.  He became an important factor to me and is now my most enjoyable memory from that stress-filled time.  I don’t even remember his first name, but for reasons you will see, I will never forget his father’s full name.

Seaman Posey was a young sailor from Houston, Texas.  He reported on board REEVES when she was in Hawaii preparing for that upcoming deployment to the Tonkin Gulf.  It was immediately apparent that Seaman Posey hated any form of work, or regulation of where he was to be or what he was to do.  He made Beetle Bailey look like a go-getter.  Like the loveable but lazy Beetle, Posey had his nemesis, Chief Moravec.  Boatswain’s Mate Chief Moravec, however, was not the stupid, bloated Sgt. Snorkel of Beetle Bailey comics.  Chief Moravec was a bespectacled, intelligent fellow, who, if given a tweed jacket to wear and a pipe to hold, could have been mistaken for a scholarly New England prep school master.  Moravec had the thankless task of being the First Division Chief and thus responsible for the performance of Seaman Posey.  Up the chain of command a couple of notches, I was Posey’s Department Head. 

I had 175–200 other men in about five other divisions, and my main focus in life was ensuring the constant and continuous readiness of the ship’s missiles and guns, as well as being responsible for all seamanship evolutions.  I had received a year and three months of highly specialized training in four different Navy schools to prepare me for that task.  I had served during one previous Tonkin Gulf deployment as Weapons Officer of REEVES.  Now we were going back into harm’s way. 

Before our departure, Seaman Posey had managed to get into trouble, resulting in Captain’s Mast—the Navy’s term for commanding officer’s Article 15 non-judicial punishment under the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ).  This sounds a bit technical, but just like Posey, you will understand it.  The UCMJ replaced the Navy’s notorious “Rocks and Shoals,” Articles for the Government of the Navy, which had harsh punishments, but which prohibited flogging and other severe punishments common in the Navy before the twentieth century.  Under the UCMJ, commanding officers were like a judge and jury, meting out punishments such as restriction to the ship, reduction in rate, reduction in pay, extra duty, and, if you had a brig on board, up to three days in it with bread and water. Unlike enlisted men in the Army, Air Force, or Marine Corps, a sailor could not refuse Mast and request a court-martial. 

Posey’s offense was a day’s unauthorized absence from the ship.  He was restricted to the ship for a couple of weeks by the commanding officer, Captain Lee Baggett Jr.  Restricted men had to remain on the ship and appear for muster several times a day.  Often extra duty was tacked on the punishment.

During Posey’s restriction, he climbed down a mooring line to a “doughnut” (a float with a well in the center into which water discharged from the ship flows, containing any oil that might be in the water). From the doughnut he climbed up to the pier.  Now, at this point, he could have walked aft into the darkness of the pier in Pearl Harbor, and no one would have noticed him gone until morning muster.  Instead, he walked forward, directly past the Quarterdeck of the ship. The Officer of the Deck and other watchstanders saw Posey and ordered him to come back on board.  In what became an all too common mode of address, Posey defiantly uttered a bold non sequitur, “You can’t mess with me!  I’m on restriction!”  He continued walking in the direction of the Enlisted Men’s Club, where he was apprehended and returned to the ship.  He was placed “on report” again for a whole list of offenses: breaking restriction, unauthorized absence, violating a direct order of an officer, etc.  Posey was off to a very bad start.

Because one ends up spending ninety percent of one’s effort on the one percent of sailors who are screw-ups, I got to know Posey very well.  Every time that he committed an offense against the UCMJ, I had the pleasure of interviewing Posey.  I had once dreamed of becoming a clinical psychologist, and, to that end, I had majored in psychology at Duke University.  The Navy had converted me into an engineer, following Ivan the Terrible’s principle, “If beaten sufficiently, even a serf can learn to play an acceptable game of chess.”  Nevertheless, I believed that I could still draw upon my past education and reason with Seaman Posey to convince him of the error of his ways and to “square him away,” as we say in the Navy.

I was wrong.  He had an answer for everything.  The chief assigned him the wrong jobs; he wasn’t cut out for chipping and painting ships.  However, he did no better when assigned to mess cooking or other duties.  When there was work to be done, Posey wasn’t there.  He would hide from Chief Moravec.

The ship got underway from Pearl Harbor and headed for the Gulf of Tonkin.  One day at sea I was “managing by walking around” when I encountered Posey slinking along the main deck, hiding behind equipment and trying to stay out of view of someone, but clearly not me.  I stopped him and asked what he was doing.  He replied that he was hiding from the chief.  I reminded him that the chief worked for me and that I was no happier than the chief that he was trying to skate out of work.  He said, “Yeah, but you ain’t gonna hurt me.  That chief gonna hurt me.”  I assured him that the chief was not going to hurt him, but I was thinking, “Why did the Navy give up on flogging?”  I put him in the gentle hands of the chief and went on my way.

Another day I happened along as Chief Moravec was pulling Seaman Posey out of a fan room, a small compartment containing only a ventilation fan, but large enough for a man to hide.  Chief Moravec had just asked Seaman Posey what he was doing hiding in a fan room.  Posey asked, “Evahbody’s body different ain’t it, Chief?  Chief Moravec responded, “So?”  Posey then announced, “My body need mo’ sleep!”

The current method of producing ethanol in the United States reminds me of Posey.  Producing ethanol from corn, using a natural gas process, uses more energy than can be extracted from the ethanol.  Similarly, Seaman Posey exerted more effort to avoid work than would have been required to perform the work in the first place.  Certainly, his superiors put more work into Posey than they got out of him.

Continued below:

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• #1 Comment from mfdco246 
  6/22/08 12:19 PM | Permalink

  I was reading your account of the battle of Dong Hoi and noticed some  discrepencies. I was a GMM aboard the Sterett DLG-31 during that battle and this is what I recall of the battle.The Mig was shot down by our Terrier missle right after it bombed the Higbee.
  As we were protecting the other ships, our radar locked on to 2 surface  targets  ( NV Patrol boats)closing on us .A High speed target ( Styx Missle)came off those targets heading towards Sterett and was taken out by a salvo of our Terrrier missles. The 5" 54 gun aft took out the suface targets as we headed away.