I am ill every time it blows hard and nothing but my enthusiastic love for my profession keeps me an hour at sea. —Lord Nelson
Don’t feel bad about being seasick sir, it happens to all of us. —Sheppard, Bluewater Sailor
I never vomited in the compartment or puked in the head but I did retch in the passageway and eructate on the bridge wing. And of course, heave over the side, usually the port quarter. Laid-low on the non-skid. The North Atlantic was my roiling malefactor, queasy once underway, and above Beaufort Seven the harrowing of the inner ear meant another prolonged bout with mal-de–mer.
In the bad blows I would hole up in my bunk unless on watch and go days without eating. Off Narragansett Bay in a November gale that lasted the better part of ten days I dropped twenty-five pounds. Since I only weighed 145 on a 6’2” frame I was emaciated to the point of skin and bones. Brackish water from the scuttlebutt kept me in lifeboat extremis. The food aboard was awful in any case, try keeping it down in a large sea. Wop slop, my favorite, lasted all of five minutes. Once back at D&S Piers I wolfed down two Texas Burgers at the Rec Center. A big mistake. An emetic of famished consequence.
For a while there was talk of transferring me to the Tender. Pierside at Norfolk no thanks. I’d rather waste away in seagoing misery. I had already endured two weeks aboard one while the skipper commandeered the DASH hanger for his new purchase, a motorboat taken aboard in Port Everglades. Two weeks of avoiding the Master at Arms as I hunkered down to read and while the time to liberty call, which couldn’t come soon enough.
Two offloaded drones were up in the Dixie’s DASH hanger but their crack PO3 technician had been assigned to the trash burner deep in the massive hull. Dog down the hatch real tight and get some shuteye in the morning. Only once in two weeks was the slumber interrupted by an expletive-rich undogging followed by consternation that I was stashed away in DesDiv 222 limbo.
Shades of A School, when I aced the placement test and so was handed a push broom for a week while my classmates labored over algebra and trig. There was an actual mark thirty-eight sunk into the bay of a large room at the quiet end of the well-swept hall so I managed to spend most of the week squirreled away inside, daydreaming of being at sea locking-on to the enemy. A year later, finally liberated from the A School classroom and FRAM 1 drydock, I found myself in the director of DD879 fighting off—courtesy of the swells in Delaware Bay—the enemy within. An expletive all right, and an entreaty to the Eternal Father. Why me?
No mention of seasickness in the Navy Hymn. No sailor-take-warning in the Blujacket’s Manual. Those in peril on the sea are not subject to spilling their guts extempore. Just when I thought I would lose it the ship stopped and dropped anchor. We had lost the plant instead. The Philadelphia Naval Shipyard was responsible for this ship trial. In early December 1964, enveloped in a cold zero-visibility miasma out of a Poe story, ravening gulls everywhere, clang the ersatz foghorn every thirty seconds, the 879 sat in the middle of a busy shipping lane unable to move. Easy prey for a heedless tanker. At least the seasickness abated while the fear of collision increased by the hour. The overnight was a cold weather ordeal. Forget sleep. I can still hear the teeth-gnashing tattoo. Heavy metal.
The next trip down the river, on a frigid day, the plant produced ample steam, so out into the Atlantic we went, where I met my nemesis full-on, welcome to the motion-sickness like no other. Mal-de-mer. The Devil’s Island of maladies. Escape impossible. That first encounter with rough seas was a rude awakening.
While hugging the deckplates I realized that this would not lessen, that even as I acquired sea legs, I would still have to contend with the fact that I was not meant for the sea. At least the inner ear was not designed for the incessant roll and pitch of a destroyer. Too much gimbal not enough gyro. My boyhood had been marred with carsickness. So even though I loved everything about the sea I resigned myself to the fact that my glorious naval career would be consigned to a high school daydream. Sea duty was a reckoning with naval limitation. Grim and bear it. The big blows proved the scuttling of bluejacket ambition.
Reading about the sea was one thing, riding a destroyer quite another. The real Navy. Up down and sideways. Seasickness is in your head all right, solitary confinement in very tight quarters. The physiological toll is unnerving, your body become prey to sea state cruelty, every swell a torture. You register every inch of a nautical mile as an infinite jest. Too corporeal a being. A chew toy for the elements. Look to the horizon but the awful fatigue of navel-gazing looks askance. Look to the horizon with trepidation. The one-two assault of Cape Henry and Cape Hatteras.
For the first week underway the compartments will reek of communal retch while the sea harrowing begins in earnest for all but the favored few. At the mercy of the Beaufort Scale. A swabbie rite-of-passage, spill your guts in an emetic tour-de-force that begins as intestinal fortitude and ends as abject on-your-knees surrender.
Learning to walk again. On all fours puking over the side, baby steps at first, lurch from railing to the ladder, with effort acquire sea legs, still wobbly, the internal gyro being calibrated to the sea horizon, the sickening plunge and unnerving roll of sea state ten a gut-and-gait check. If you can’t master the Scale, you’re in good company: Sea Dogs Nelson and Spruance famously eructated their whole careers. Don Sheppard, destroyer captain extraordinaire, always carried a bucket with him.
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Lifers, with their foul cigars, loved to blow smoke in your etiolated face. The general merriment got off on your death wish. The only remedy in the days before patches and pills was to do your time in purgatory and hope for an early release. Somehow, I thought Alka-Seltzer would do the trick so I bought the jumbo size. Relief dissolved in metronomic dry heaves.
Three-quarters of those who venture out into the watery part of the world recover from the malady. Get their sea legs and their sea stomach. The best you could hope for if you were in the endemic quartile was to raise your Beaufort Number. Mine started at four and got up to nine. Within that range I could function. Above nine I was in trouble. And twelve was the ultima thule. But don’t worry, I was told, you’ll never see twelve. Not in 30 years at sea. Don’t worry about it, focus on ten. Eleven rarely.
So of course, we encountered twelve in the guise of Hurricane Betsy, Katrina before Katrina, a Cat 4 that submerged much of New Orleans. We crossed paths north and west of Puerto Rico, in early September 1965, returning from post-invasion Dominican Republic, where we spent the better part of August wallowing in heavy swells off Santo Domingo.
My introduction to the Caribbean was an invasion and a hurricane at sea. The swells and swelter of gendarme duty were bad enough but the hullabaloo seas and winds of Betsy meant real danger. Batten down and pray. Even the iron stomached one’s betrayed fear. Betsy had come out of nowhere to blow up to a Cat 2 when we ran across it, lay eyes on the eyewall. Twenty minutes of buddha bliss. I roused from my bunk long enough to see a sight you never want to see at sea. Talk about a chew toy. At the limit of rollover, shades of the Typhoon of 1944. Thank God the Shipyard had fixed the problem with the plant. So long as the screws turned, we had a good shot at coming through the other side.
The Tempest was hell for the better part of a day while The Great Gale of March 1966 was agony for the better part of a week as we endeavored to cross the Atlantic in one piece. The hullabaloo seas and winds—just below hurricane strength—began the other side of the Bay-Bridge Tunnel and didn’t let up until we were inside Gibraltar, 3500 nautical miles of gimbal gambol, can the human body be anymore harrowed.
Since aftersteering, my watch station, was all of six feet away from my bunk, I could drag myself to and fro, though there was a half-foot of seawater sloshing back and forth thanks to an improperly seized hatch. An ad-hoc vomitorium. Unable to sleep while recumbent I binge-read Shakespeare, devouring Julius Caesar, Othello, Macbeth, Hamlet in a five-day span. I finished Hamlet just as we entered the Straits, going topside for the first-time since leaving Norfolk. Safe to say my trans-Atlantic companions got me through the worst. The Bard and The Barf. I had never read like my life depended on it, suspended over the abyss, so they became all too real in the mind’s eye. Banquo was no ghost. Good thing I saved Hamlet to last else I would not have mustered the courage to do tragedy in. Life restored. String the Med lights. Enjoy Liberty Call in Palma by breaking your week-long fast in the best restaurant in Majorca. The solo bluejacket, all skin and bones. was given the royal treatment por favor. This five-course meal stayed down.
The Med, it turned out, held curative powers. No more seasickness. So long as I could eat ashore (midrats were the staple at sea) I was good to go, as a Bastille Day Mistral proved off Bandol. As the Petty Officer in charge of the midships highline the all-night replenishment, seas going to twenty feet in no time, was a rite-of-passage. I had conquered Beaufort Ten.
The Old Man refused to give into the sea state and this young man, just turned 21 in Malta, was not about to yield to the siren song. Even though two of the three stations were abandoned as too dangerous there was no breaking-off as the refrigerator ship, the ammunition ship, and the tanker were obliged to come alongside. No Quarter indeed. Even though a good fraction of what they sent-over went into the drink the new skipper was determined to demonstrate consummate seamanship, so the midships hung-in there until well after dawn. Elation that we had pulled it off. Leary meet Commander Leary, US Maritime Academy, destroyer captain extraordinaire.
In March Beaufort Eleven. In August Beaufort Zero. Zero for 3500 nautical miles. Not a hint of wind on the crossing. None. The Atlantic like I had never seen before, as glassy and placid as a lake. Another extreme wonder. Three years of sea duty had piled-up the seasick stories, so by the time I saluted the quarterdeck for the last time, good luck with the WestPac, I was embarked on a literary adventure every bit as topsy-turvy and malady inducing. Struggle to get your footing. Quiet your distress. Cease navel-gazing. Focus on the horizon. Seasickness of another sort.
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Logorrhea announces your landlocked career. At sea all right. Seasick all over again. The literary profession is a demanding one, sink or swim, and until you can overcome the emetic urge you will be prey to the mind games of solitary confinement. Welcome to Devil’s Island. To escape takes resolve and an unbending focus on the horizon. And lots of time at sea, learning the craft, honing the authority, finding your voice. Your sea legs. Going from Beaufort Four to Beaufort Nine or Ten. Becoming a master mariner with thirty years in. Knowing how to navigate your way through a zero-visibility miasma. If you don’t want to quit there is something wrong with you, yet you love this profession enough to remain at it even though you suffer from acute impostor syndrome. Why me?
And now, all these years later, you take up where you left the 879, on the pier at Norfolk, and take her on that WestPac, all the way to the gunline of Operation Sea Dragon. Your Vietnam novel—better late than never—is reliant for “authenticity” on all those times being seasick. Your memories of being at sea are visceral, organic even, not subject to the redactions of a fugitive remembrance of things past. Intrinsic, part and parcel of your very being. The inner ear recorded it all. All the better that you were not there in the Pacific. The imagination doesn’t have to go far to conjure life at sea aboard a destroyer in June 1967.
Of course, you want to test yourself against the best. The ultima thule. Beaufort Twelve and Joseph Conrad. The 879 will encounter a typhoon that comes out of nowhere. Batten down and pray. Pray that you don’t lose control of the narrative, succumb to cliché and stock-framing. Handling that Mistral was a revelation. How you handle a Typhoon will determine your fitness for command of the language. Hang on and hang in there, being chronically seasick was the best learning curve for writing about being at sea.
