Ernie:. Ernest Borgnine
I got up on the canvas to get the feel of things I was scared stiff. I didn’t know what to do.
This chief machinist mate was our instructor. He said, “Easy does it, kid. Just keep your arms up, try to block incoming punches when you can. Don’t think about it, just do it.”
I must have done something right because I knocked the guy out in four swings. He went down and started to turn white, with blood pouring from his nose and ears. It frightened the devil out of me and I never got back in the ring. Ironically, twenty years later, I’d make a movie called From Here to Eternity in which Monty Clift refused to box after killing a man in the ring. Let me tell you, I really felt for the character he was playing.
Chapter 7
Adventures at Sea
When I finished boot camp, I shipped out on the Chaumont, a double-ended son of a gun that navigated through the Panama Canal and on to the Pacific Coast. They worked us hard the whole trip.
The first time that I got off the Chaumont was in Balboa in Panama. I found I was walking funny and I wondered aloud, “What the heck’s wrong with me?”
A shipmate said, “That’s because of the wave motion at sea.”
My legs still thought we were at sea and I was walking like I would onboard ship. It was the funniest sensation. The second thing someone said to me after reaching port was, “Hey, kid, you ever been with a woman?”
“Oh sure,” I lied. I had never been with any girl.
Back in Connecticut, I was always afraid to approach the fairer sex. For one thing, I didn’t know what the devil to talk to them about. I only knew the women in my family, and mostly what we talked about was family business. There was no get-to-know-you small talk. Being an average kid, there were times I felt like putting my arm around a girl and wondering what it would feel like. But, heck, that was just too terrifying to contemplate. What if she screamed? What if she didn’t like me? What if she did like me and wanted more? My mother and grandmother had taught me to respect all women. My very confused desires left me pretty much paralyzed.
Clearly, my fellow sailor had no such reservations. He said, “Let’s get a whore.”
I said, “Okay, let’s go.” I figured, What did I have to lose other than my virginity?
Then he said, “You take this here with you and when it’s your turn you have to put that on.”
I looked at the little square envelope he’d handed me. I had seen condoms one time in my father’s drawer, stacked in a little plastic container. But I didn’t know what they were for.
“Yeah, okay,” I replied. “Thanks.”
We walked over to a wooden shack with a corrugated tin roof. As I waited outside I heard grunts and groans. After they quieted, the girl came out and looked at me and said, “You’re next, sailor.”
I stuttered, “Okay, sure, I’m coming,” and a few other inanities.
We went in and she was all business. Time is money, as the saying goes. She told me to leave the money on the counter—it was five bucks—then said, “Come on, pull down your pants and let’s go.” I opened my trousers, suddenly realizing that this is where the thing in the envelope went. It was rolled up tight and I started to stretch it out. I thought you had to put it on like a boot.
She looked at me and said, “You’re kind of a greenhorn, huh, sailor?” She laughed and I was mortified, but she put it on for me. The minute she did, bam! it was over.
When I came out, my buddy looked over his cigarette and said “How was it?”
I told him it was great. And it was. I’d even gotten to see the girl’s breasts, which was as undressed as she’d gotten before I finished.
“Well, listen,” he went on. “We got to go get some Salvarsan, then take a shower and get cleaned up.”
I had no idea what Salvarsan was, but we went down to the gym at the YMCA and took a pill. Then we went back to the ship, reported to the officer on deck that we had been with a whore and were told to take another Salvarsan. The pharmacist told me why, and I admit being a little shocked hearing that I’d been exposed to syphilis. The guys kidded me for months.
“Boy, you’re going to get it now, you’re going to get the clap.”
I lived in dread for months until I finally woke up and realized, “Hell, I never even touched her!”
We made our way up the coast to San Diego, California. A bunch of us were taken on a little boat to our assigned ships. We saw all these destroyers and light cruisers and everything else. We finally got to the ship to which I’d been assigned. My God, it was huge. Destroyers were, and are, beautiful ships. They don’t call them the “greyhounds of the sea” for nothing. Mine was an old four-stacker, which meant she was from World War I. She was actually built in 1917, the same year that I was born, and her name was the USS Lamberton.
I was told to take my stuff down below and get rid of the hammock. Here, you got a mattress and bunk. We were three deep, bunk style, but the beds hung from chains: one high, one middle and one on the bottom. I got there first and took the bottom. Easier to get in and out.
Most of the time we were towing targets for the fleet. By targets, I mean huge bull’s-eyes that they could shoot at with their big guns. Sometimes the targets would overturn and we’d have to go out with a whaleboat and try to turn them back over again. That was risky work, since it was easy to slip overboard. We also had to take care never to go behind the target once it was set up, for obvious reasons.
That’s no joke. Accidents happen. One day we were towing a target for these big aircraft carriers and suddenly we heard a whistle we weren’t accustomed to. There was an airplane above us. A spotter, we called them. Instead of giving directions to hit the target, he had targeted the ship! The chief radioman darted for the radio and shouted for the ships to cease fire. What the hell. The military actually has a pretty good safety record, when you consider how many orders are going to so many people, most of whom are armed.
Apart from being shot at, the only thing that we grumbled about were the long boots we had to wear. If you got caught in the water with long boots on they’d fill up and take you down like a stone. We often made holes in the soles, just in case.
Hauling targets wasn’t our only job, of course. We’d polish brass or scrub the sides of the ship to get rid of the rust or we’d paint the sides of the ship to cover the rust we couldn’t scrape away. I was particularly interested in knowing what made this ship go, and took the wheel whenever I could. Today, they steer with a tiny lever that they just push or pull. But on my ship we had a great big wheel. You stood there for a two-hour shift, trying to keep it on course. Believe me, if that ship was working against a storm or any kind of waves you had to compensate all the time. It was really hard work. But there were times when the sea was calm and you’d steam right along and it was perfect. I was pretty good at manning the wheel and they put me on it when we were coming through the Panama Canal, both ways. Those were two of the greatest trips of my life!
But by far the biggest job most of us had was swabbing the deck. You need to keep it clean because you don’t want people slipping on oil or little puddles of seawater—or vomit. Losing your lunch was a way of life. Our vessel only had a beam of about nineteen or twenty feet, which meant that when it hit a wave you got bounced around from side to side and up and down pretty good. It wasn’t even a sign of weakness to throw up. The destroyer had a way of surprising you with new moves, and even seasoned sailors would lose their lunch.
A lot of the guys got sick right off the bat. We had one poor ensign who used to grab a box of crackers and sit over the hatch of the engine room to keep steady and warm. The captain would come by and just shake his head. There was never any question about whether he was faking it. The guy’s skin color was lime green.
Me, I didn’t get sick at all. Ever since that experience on the Dante Alighieri, my body seemed to