21st Birthday 

by Paul "PEP" Perris

I was riding Bonefish at the time of my 21st birthday. I think we were either going to or coming off station and I think we must have been on the surface for all this to have happen. How many times has anyone ever just grabbed onto the rails and with your feet lifted just swooshed down to midships from the attack center? 100's of times maybe thousands and never had a mishap that is until my 21st birthday.

Well when I got off watch I got into sonar and put just a little bit of Gilley in the bottom of a coffee cup and filled the rest with tang and figured I'd get a slight birthday buzz before heading for the rack. Made sense to me at the time. Well I drank my birthday drink and was BS'ing the attack center with the guys still on watch and I didn't feel any different only a little sleepy so I went over to the rails and prepared for the ride of a lifetime tho I didn't know it at the time.

There's about a 2" lip at the top to keep any seawater you could get from the bridge hatch from going down below and into the batterywells. Just as I did my swing and began to take flight the boat did a slight up angle and caught both of my toes on that lip. I already had 200+lbs in motion that wasn't gonna stop anytime soon so I went swooching down that ladder headfirst and landed on my right side of my face on those razorblades called "non-skid" which tore chunks of my beard out and immediately broke my glasses and made quite abit of racket on top of that.

Now I felt drunk AND stupid! I hopped up and stood flat against the bulkhead and was thinking "I hope nobody saw me do that" then I made my way to my rack and crawled in with some ice in a t-shirt to help with the swelling and tried to go to sleep but my face stung something fierce!

Word already got back to crews mess and here comes Doc Boozeney with iodine in hand and then the pain really began! ! !

Scruffy (Chief Strauss) took 2 of my watches while I slept it off and I had the most ungodly headache in my life for the next 3 days along with one ugly beard and I had to squint to see what I was doing until we got back into Yoko to get another pair of glasses. Naturally everybody knew what I did but nothing was ever said about it by my Chief or any of the officers.

That was one birthday I will never ever forget in my entire life! No shit!

Published July 2006 - A Doc Gardner's 2006 Sea Story award winner (1 of 3)