Voyage Nine
SS Sturdy Beggar - Page 2
It was sweltering and humid in the Philippines . I was soaked in sweat all of the time. The temperature down in the engine room was horrible. I am sure that in some places down there it must have been 140 degrees. We were sleeping out on deck on top the hatch covers. They wouldn't let us go ashore for some reason and after a while the crew was about to mutiny. The mates went to the Captain and told him that he had to let us off the ship or there would be trouble. So they finally started letting us go ashore.
The Military Police came out and warned us to be careful of food and water and especially the local rot-gut liquor. They said that a lot of military had gotten really sick from drinking the stuff; some had died and a Navy nurse had lost her eyesight. Of course the first thing we did was go buy some homemade drink. It was sold it in Coke bottles for $5 and it was terrible. It was made from distilled yams. It didn't kill or blind us, but it was rugged stuff. They handed out lists of approved bars and those off limits. It turned out that all of the approved bars and brothels were paying off the military police officials or were owned and run by them outright. Some of these officers were making a fortune off the war. There was this Navy nurse, a very good looking girl, who had been turning tricks with officers. She was taking home a suitcase full of dollars.
I went swimming while in Leyte, in the bay in salt water where I got a fungus or something. I had a rash from my waste down and it was miserable. I was raw and bleeding and they had to take me off the ship to the hospital. This Army doctor, a major, told me it was "jungle rot". They had whole wards full of military with it. He gave me a couple of quarts of calamine lotion and told me to try to keep it dry. He said it wouldn't clear up until I got to a cooler climate. When he found out that I worked in the engine room he said that it would never clear up in that environment. He wrote me a letter to the Captain that I shouldn't work for at least ten days.
This brought a bad situation to a head. I had been wiping but I didn't get along with the Chief Engineer. He wasn't old - maybe in his thirties but he already had grey at his temples. He was an arrogant Yankee bastard who never smiled. He just didn't like me from the first. We had been having words since we left Texas. The final straw was when he told me that he was going to have me paint the entire engine room. I told him off - said that I wouldn't do it. Right after that I got sick. When I got back from the hospital with that letter he hit the ceiling. But with the doctor's letter there was nothing he could do. The Captain asked me if I would trade jobs with one of the messmen. The Chief said that he had a guy who wanted to work below. I said "Hell yes I'll trade. " I wanted out of that guy's engine room. I told him that now he could paint the goddamn place himself. The Captain called me and the messman up before him and the chief mate and they had us formally sign off on the switch as he entered it in the log. I figure he wanted it all proper so there would be no problems with the company or the union. The rash got better after I was working above deck and improved even more when we go to Japan, but didn't go away completely until I was back home several months later. I switched duties the day before we sailed from Leyte to Manila.
I had never seen anything like Manila. It was completely destroyed. The Japanese were suicidal and they had fought house to house there. Hardly anything was left of the place. People were living in rubble. The smell of rot and putrefaction took your breath away. There wasn't any public sanitation. I never saw so many soldiers in one place during the entire war like I saw around Manila. It looked like they had the whole U.S. Army there. They had a big Catholic convent in Manila filled with nurses and WAC's.
After all these years, I can't remember just where it was in the Philippines - think Manila, but I had a few drinks and had strayed away from town and it was dark and starting to rain. I was walking down a muddy road and a Navy truck came by; and the sailors stopped and asked me where I was headed. I said was trying to get back to my ship. They told me that it was several miles away and to get in the truck and they would give me a ride.