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Tuesday, 6 January, 2004
 
Mark iii

This is the third of three short vignettes written about Mark Edmunds my best friend from my Navy days. I knew Mark for about two years. When I first conceived a few weeks ago about a trilogy of short impressions, I pulled a handful memories off the top of my head, settling on three before I had put much thought into it. Not a lot happens in these stories, but then what needs too? I call this one

Mark vs. the Suds

The period following our cruise was a very strange disquieting time. In informal Navy jargon we had just completed "our Westpac on the Ranger". Normally it would a quiet time, virtually the entire unit would cycle through leave at first, new sailors would be brought in to replace those leaving just as Mark and myself had come in a year and a half earlier to replace Chris Healy and Mark Schwartz, Later it would progress through a series of increasingly complex training cycles culminating in short "workup ops" deployments on the aircraft carrier the squadron would attached to for the next cruise. Generally this would be known even before you got off your previous ship or shortly after. The workups we did with the USS Ranger were in and around the islands of the Santa Barbara Channel. None of that happened after the Ranger Westpac. The decision had been made to junk the RA5C as obsolete and to decommission all the squadrons that flew it because there was no plane to replace it. The idea was that F-14s from existing squadrons would be rigged to perform tactical photo-reconnaisance. We decommissioned a few weeks after getting back to Key west. Most of the squadron transferred out quickly, many stuck with begging leave from their next command. We were the last Vigi squadron the others decommissioning through the spring and summer as they finished their last deployments.

Those of us that were left after four weeks were scarcely noticeable in a large empty fleet hanger. We were in different quarters too, being placed in the building which had formerly held the Army unit which had manned Key West's Hawk anti-aircraft missile batteries; which had pulled up stakes and left town at some point while we were gone. There was no real work to be done by day and fewer friends to hang out with each night. Mark had gone home on leave to see his girlfriend (whom he married the next year). On the particular evening of this story, a bunch of us younger sailors too filled with ennui to even go into town decided to head over to the EM club with the idea of getting really hammered. Just as we were heading out the door, Mark arrives back from leave, with a suitcase and a seabag. I remember we all thought after a long flight from Ohio, switching planes in Miami and tooth jarring final leg on a Air Sunshine DC3 down to Key West Mark would just want to crash. No. He went to his room opened his door just wide enough to jam his luggage through. turned on his heels and headed out with us.

The next hour is filled with Boilermakers and conversation forever forgotten. Somewhere around 9pm in a fit of reasonable forethought Mark decided to head back to the BEQ to do laundry. The seabag had been full of dirty clothes- his room was full of dirty clothes. I eventually peeled myself off the bar about and hour later leaving the others to close the place down. It was about a half mile across base to our BEQ, less if you cut through the athletic fields, It was a beatiful fall night some time in late October. As I walked across the softball field I saw a figure sitting alone on first base side bench. I recognized that it was Mark and went up to him.
"Hey Mark, what're doing?"
"I don't really know" he says, "I was walking across the field here and I stopped to look at the moon."
I turned and looked up at the moon as well. It was a full moon or nearly full. Everything is painted white or bleached out in Key West (Boca Chica Key) in the daytime everything was too bright to look at. I have no solid memories of what the middle part of that base looked like, just directions from one point to another and which buildings were next to which. Even in the moonlight the landscape seemed to glow with more light than the moon should have had, it didn't look familiar at all but it seemed quiet nice. For a minute or so we both just sat there on the bench and looked up at the moon and stars. Teetoring on the brink of self mesmerization I thought to ask Mark if he had finished his laundry. I had assumed he had done the wash, gotten it in a dryer and was heading back over to catch up with us. At the mention of laundry Mark leapt to his feet and exclaimed "Laundry!"
"Mark", I said, feeling genuine surprise, which was difficult because I was numbed to no small degree at that point of the evening, "you left the club at nine, have you been just sitting here for an hour and a half."
"Well you see", he started, "after I stopped to look at the moon I couldn't remember whether I was walking across the field this way or that way; so I thought I would just sit here until I could remember, and thats what I'm gonna do."

I had to think about this for a moment. It didn't appear to make any sense, but I didn't want to overlook anything. On the ship - despite the fact that we looked completely different, had different regional accents, and had different last names - Mark had convinced several people that we were brothers. He would simply tell a story to address the lack of facts he had at hand. Despite the abounding implausibility of these explanations people would believe. Mark almost never played things completely straight. I don't think he thought that was something one ought to do for strangers.
"You were headed back to the BEQ", I said (as definitely as I could), "laundry remember." Objects at rest tend to stay at rest, but about this time the next wave of people leaving the EM club came by and after a period of checks and observations of the moon, we obeyed the dictates of the hour and followed the flowing current back to the BEQ.

There is a coda to this story which I considered not going into. It's my favorite part, but its too cliched and destroys the story maims the narrative thrust. Mark did start a load of laundry when we got back, I remember him setting about it with the taking-care-of -business so stay out of my way demeonor he adopted when he didn't know what he was doing. I called it a day and went to bed, I was woken up by my roommates about thirty minutes later, because some had struck them as so funny everybody on the floor had to get up. there was water covering the floor of the main hall around the laundry room door. The laundry room itself was full of soap suds up to peoples knees. Mark was in the center of it (having poured an entire box of detergent in a single wash) with a mop and bucket shouting at everyone who came near him that everything was under control and he was taking care of it. The unfortunate who was on watch that night was trying to push all the suds down the drain with a broom. I think some of the older petty officers eventually broke out the firehose and washed out the whole room. I like the coda to this story because it contains the implicit practical advice not to mix laundry and alcohol, which is too often tragically ignored.
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