(This isn’t mine- I have no idea where the one I had framed wound up. Perhaps it is in that stack of art I will never look at again in the office off the garage at Refuge Farm. I hope the mice treat it with due respect.)

Mission Statement from Commander Salamander:
“PROACTIVELY “FROM THE SEA”; LEVERAGING THE LITTORAL BEST PRACTICES FOR A PARADIGM BREAKING SIX-SIGMA BEST BUSINESS CASE TO SYNERGIZE A CONSISTENT DESIGN IN THE GLOBAL COMMONS, RIGHTSIZING THE CORE VALUES SUPPORTING OUR MISSION STATEMENT VIA THE 5-VECTOR MODEL THROUGH CULTURAL DIVERSITY.”

The Commander is on a roll this morning. He starts out by mourning the passing of one of the great Military Spouses of all time, Phyllis Galanti. She passed this week after being married to her Airdale husband for 51 years. She rose to greatness after Paul was shot down over North Vietnam in 1966. I don’t know if you recall, but in that asymmetric struggle, keeping the status and identity of the POWs was part of a concerted information strategy designed to extract concessions from the US, and Phyllis spent all the days of Paul’s captivity organizing and publicizing the plight of the men held hostage as “war criminals.”

Anyway, old wars were on my mind after the story from yesterday, and the obituary for Phyllis drew my attention to CDR Salamander’s blog.

He is a great source for current reporting on the madness that currently infects the sea service. That was the direct entrée into a longer discussion about foreign policy disasters (you can pick the top few, take your choice) and the decision from SCOTUS about the constitutionality of the Michigan law banning affirmative action on university admissions and a host of other government activities (it is legal, 6-2).

The dissenting opinion was drafted by Sonia Sotomayor, which is an interesting read if you have a chance to look at it. That exercise in twisted reasoning led directly to an involved discussion of how the Michigan law came to be passed by 58% of the electorate who voted on the referendum, and that goes back a couple of decades and frankly, I am too close to be objective about it. So, that led to the alarming reference to a Naval tradition that I was informed was a “Homosocial Ritual.”

Not that there is anything wrong with it, of course.

The Commander cited a request from the staff at the University of Bristol in the UK to solicit stories about the Crossing the Line ceremony as practiced in the Blue Water Navies. I sighed in relief. This is a line of inquiry that is non-controversial, as opposed to everything else these days, or at least would be if you did not push things too far and start railing about how things were tougher (and presumably more authentic) in the Old Navy.

That is the moral equivalent of standing on my porch, yelling at kids to “stay off my yard!” and I don’t have the energy to go there. One thing I have decided is that I don’t like pain. Travel hurts. Participating in anything that requires an initiation probably hurts. I am done with that- thinking back on the ritual harassment of numerous organizations- the Scouts, the Frat, the Marine Drill Instructors, the Crossing the Line thing. I think I decided after successfully transitioning from Pollywog to salty Shellback that anything that required humiliation and pain was out of the question, and I was having no more of it.

As I made the resolution, my torso was covered in garbage, my lips smeared with Vaseline from kissing the Master Chief’s belly and blood was dripping off my knees from crawling on the flight deck on the way to wading through the slops in The Coffin.

The line-crossing tradition dates back to at least to the sixteenth century, and takes place on various kinds of vessel, military and merchant, when a ship passes over the invisible line of the equator, usually from north to south.
The ceremony both inverted and strengthened shipboard hierarchies, since the enlisted troops were often in charge of the initiation of their officers, which offers them the rare opportunity for pay-back.

(Slimy Woggs crawl forward under the watchful eyes of seasoned Shellbacks. USS Midway, 1979).

I crossed the line in 1979 on the Good Ship Midway. It had been a while since they let Ma stray that far south, so there were thousands of us Polliwogs. We outnumbered the Shellbacks, but there was still a fair amount of old-school casual brutality. I was crawling on the non-skid of the flight deck behind my Skipper, CDR Denny “Rattler” Wisely, a Silver Star winner in the SE Asian War Games.

As we crawled along, we were encouraged in our forward process by blows to the posterior with short lengths of canvas fire hose. One of the Shellback troops got Rattler with a well-struck snap and he jumped up, lectured the sailor, and then dropped back to his knees to continue the slog to the garbage swim and the unsettling Kissing of the Baby.

Woe betide the poor kids who showed up after that ceremony in the Indian Ocean- the next time the ship was almost 100% Shellback- not the ratio you want as a new guy.

But looking back on it, I recall tossing the shorts and t-shirt I had been wearing for the ordeal over the side. I then walked aft, naked as a Jaybird, with the endless vistas of the pale-blue Indian Ocean empty as far as the eye could see.

Last initiation, I said to no one in particular. The very last.

They give you a little card with fancy script on it that provides the date and longitude of the crossing. I had mine laminated, and carried it in my wallet for years just in case any slimy Shellbacks tried to accuse me of being a Pollywog and force me to do the ritual again.

A sailor has to set standards someplace, you know?

Copyright 2014 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303