Solitary Confinement

I put my utilities on and was escorted to the master at arms shack. They had rounded up four others from berthing. All four of them had been participating in the drinking and gaming. I had been there, watching, and smoking cigarettes, but I wasn't drinking. What mattered was that I was out of my rack past 2200 hrs. That one infraction was enough to earn me a ticket to Captain's Mast, which is more non-judicial punishment, which just means there isn't a lawyer involved. A week or so went by and then it was time to go to the navy's kangaroo court to defend myself against my terrible crime of being found out of my rack past 2200 hours while on restriction.

When I got down to the lair of the ship where the Captain's Kangaroo Court was located there were about 30 of my shipmates standing in formation waiting. There were so many of us, in fact, that the Captain was cycling us through four at a time. I guess they figured we were all guilty of the same thing, being shit bags. They march us in to stand in front of the captain and he read off our charges. All four of us were being charged with drinking and gambling (I was honestly just watching). The captain then asked if we had anything to say. I did. "Sir, I was not drinking or gambling. I was in the shower while all of that was going on (which was a lie, cause I was watching, but they didn't know any different). I was caught returning to my rack." By this point the captain was familiar with me. He no doubt remembered me from my "rainbow chit" and I had been to mast once before upon returning to the boat from being UA and missing ships movement. This was the third time I had been before him for being a shitbag. The captain pointed his finger at me and said "fireman McCarty, you will not win, you will lose, three days bread and water in solitary confinement." I couldn't believe it.

The next thing I knew I was being hand cuffed by a master at arms. I was escorted up to the hanger bay and paraded by the ships crew. I was cuffed with my hands behind my back. There were three master at arms escorting me to berthing where I was to acquire the items on a list under direct supervision. Toothbrush, white t-shirts, skivvies, utilities, socks. Once all of the items were acquired I was escorted off of the ship and into a prison van that was waiting for me. I was driven to naval base Kitsap in Bangor Washington where they have a military penitentiary. The place has maximum security capabilities. That's where they were taking my happy ass. We arrived and I got processed in. I had to strip naked so that prison staff could inspect my body. They even noted where my tattoos and scares were located. I had to bend over and spread my butt cheeks so they could have a look see up my ass hole. I had to take a physical with a physician so that he could verify that my body was fit for three days of bread and water.

I was given five minutes to take a cold shower, and I was informed that it would be the last shower I would receive while there. From there I was taken past the main control center for the prison. There were several halls I could see to my right because the upper walls were made of glass. Through the halls I could see a large area with inmates milling about (general population), and I could also see a circular command and control structure in the center. I was taken into a large room that had lockers and a picnic table in it. The stuff that I had gathered was placed in one of these lockers. I wouldn't see that stuff until I left, so I don't know why they had me gather it. Before they stuffed me in the cell they took my belt and my boot laces. They didn't want me opting out. I guess they had a problem with people on bread and water killing themselves in the past. There were four cells in this room all adjacent to one another. I had one other guy to the left and two to my right. There were already two prisoners present. Me and another guy that was awarded solitary from that night would be filling up their solitary capabilities.

I was shuffled into the small cell and quickly shown around. The guard with the duty of acclimating me to my new home said, "There's the sink with a styrofoam cup for drinking tap water, the overhead fluorescent stays on 24 hours a day. You are not allowed to lay on the bed until 2200 hrs, you can sit on it. You are not allowed to cover your head while sleeping. We will be by three times a day to give you your bread. Here is your reading material." He handed me a copy of the prisons "rules and regulations." "Any questions?" I just looked at him until he decided to close the door, lock it, and leave. There was a sink, a toilet, a metal rack with a very thin cushion, a thin military wool blanket, a feather pillow, a window that was about two inches wide by three feet long that I could see through by getting on my tip toes on the rack (which was not allowed, and would have gotten me a couple more days of solitary if caught), and the door to the cell that had a slit in it big enough to pass a loaf of bread through with a window that was about a foot square. I had three days and three nights to go.

I learned what it was like to be locked away by the machine while I was in that cell. I knew that it was only for a short period of time. I knew that it would pass, and I would eventually be free from this nightmare that the navy had become for me. I was angry about why I was in that cell. It did not feel justified to me to have to endure three days of solitary confinement bread and water style over such a small infraction. The Captain was using me as an example to all would be restrictee offenders. He had grown to not like me for obvious reasons. I was 22 years old. I decided that I would make the best of it and treat this like training for monastery life. I sat down on the bed and began meditating. I could meditate for an hour or two at a time before needing to get up and move around a bit. Eventually I learned that I could hear the door to the outer room open and shut when the guard would enter to check on us. It was a very faint sound, and I had to stand at the window and watch the guard to identify it. Once I knew the sound, I knew when I was not being watched. I would lay on the bed for hours and try to keep a feather suspended in the air as long as possible by blowing up in it's direction. Time slowed to a grinding halt and it seemed like I would never get out of there.

Sleeping was difficult because the fluorescent light was just above my rack. Three times a day they would come by and give me a white loaf of bread through the door and allow me fifteen minutes to eat as much of it as I wanted. They give you a choice between white and wheat. I chose wheat and they gave me white. I confronted the guard about it and he said "sure enough, you did ask for wheat...you want this white bread or not?" I think it was just more psychological games. I would roll the slices of bread up as tightly as possible and make gooey bread sticks out of them. Keep in mind that they fed their best servicemen food that had "not fit for human consumption, prisoner and military use only" stamped on the box. This wasn't your grandma's homemade bread. One can only eat so much white bread no matter how hungry one is. I would eat about seven to eight slices per feeding before I would no longer want to eat. Sometimes I didn't eat at all. I didn't shit for weeks after I got out of there.

At one point the dude in the cell next to me lost his mind. He started screaming and yelling wildly and would not shut up. I also remember that he was singing songs from Pink Floyd's "The Wall." This got the other two inmates screaming for him to shut the hell up. It sounded like a bunch of wild rabid zombie chimpanzees. I think the dude losing his mind was in there bashing his head against the walls. At least that's what I assume those dull thumps I heard were. His name was Guideon, and he was on restriction with me, but he had more time to do then I did. I saw them cart him off to somewhere. He was fighting and thrashing against the guards to no avail. There was blood present. I don't know what happened to him, but I never saw him or heard from him again. There is no telling what happened to him. They kept us in line by threatening more solitary confinement. They made it clear that if you were caught breaking any of the rules you would have weeks and months tacked on. We were informed that there was no limit to the amount of time they would keep us locked up if we did not behave. That's how they kept us in line. Knowing Guideon's stupid ass, he's probably still in that fucking prison in solitary confinement.

This was the climax for me in the Navy. This was my most precious and deep message. I was lucky to learn it as easily as I did. I now know what it is to be locked away by the defenders of our hologram. I experienced the tyranny that is perpetuated by one man at a time. I saw it in the way the guards looked at me and in the tones of their voices. I experienced it as the beginning level of the depravity that they were more than happy to perpetuate for me. It was an environment where nobody cared about you in the least. They really did not care if I rotted my life away in that cell. There was no compassion to be had anywhere in that place. My family had no idea I was in that cell. The feeling was that I could be left to rot, and my family would just wonder what had become of me. I'm sure the navy would have just told them that there was a training accident. That's what it's like in the military. My stay in that brig was a very surreal experience of what the military industrial complex considers a person. We are numbers, nothing more, and nothing less. I know this in my bones now.

Restriction

When I got back to the states I instantly became a military police "person of interest." I'm not sure if they framed it in those exact words, but there you have it. The country was nothing like before I left for Westpac. It was like there had been an epidemic of patriotism fervor that infected every citizen of the United States. There were more god damned American flag bumper stickers than there were fast food restaurants. If you were in the military everybody wanted to personally thank you, shake your hand, and buy your lunch. Before I left nobody gave a shit about enlisted personal...not even enlisted personal gave a shit about enlisted personal, and nobody cared about American Pride bumper stickers. I found myself in a bit of a pickle seeing as how I was UA (unauthorized absence). I only bring this up to help explain what it was like to be a deserter at that time in our countries history. I imagine it would have been about like being a Nazi sympathizer during WW11, or a communist during the McCarthy era, or a witch during the Salem Witch Trials. I had become a pariah even in the eyes of my own family. So when the Master Chief of Reactor Department handed me my military I.D. back, and I was free to go spend time with my family, it wasn't exactly a welcomed homecoming. Never mind the fact that I had been at war for the country during the last six months.

After two weeks of trying to get my family to understand my actions, it was time to report back to the ship and begin reaping my idealistic harvest. It was a lovely harvest that offered me all manner of tailored bull shit in the key of USN. The reason I had chosen to go UA was because I knew that there was a zero tolerance drug policy that applied even to the nuclear navy. I knew that the captain wasn't going to be able to ignore the fact that my piss test was positive for herb. I think the Master At Arms that watched me flip my wanker out and piss in the cup got high from the marijuana smell of my urine. I handed him my green piss while smiling ear to ear, for here was my ticket out of this mess. After the piss test the Master Chief began to counsel me on how my life wasn't over, and if I played my cards right it wouldn't ruin my navy career, and that I could rebound from it and even prosper. I just looked him in the eyes and said "my piss test is going to come back positive for marijuana." At that point he realized that there was nothing that could be done to salvage this nuke.

Once my positive piss test came back, it was on to the punishment portion of my processing out of the navy. They were kicking me out, but first they had to punish me. I was rewarded a demotion from E-4 to E-3 (which seemed sort of ridiculous since I was getting processed out of the navy) and had to spend 60 days on "restriction." That meant that I had to wear orange coveralls over my "utilities" which is what we called our work uniform. I wasn't allowed to leave the ship, and I had to muster five times a day with the rest of the restrictees so that the master at arm douche bags could incessantly fuck with us. Master at arms are in charge of the security on the boat...they're like the police men. Every department had to offer up some of these douche bags to fill the positions on the boat. It was a second duty that was performed. People volunteered to be a master at arms because they wanted their egos inflated as much as possible. They got to carry around a nine millimeter and wear camouflage BDS's (I always thought that was odd since our environment was a ship, not a jungle, but so goes military intelligence). At any rate, the point is that these guys were from all ten dimensions of ass hole, and they all aspired to the eleventh. They got their rocks off fuckin' with restrictees.

The muster that we had to do five times a day was so that they could make us stand in formation at attention while they walked up to each one of us and personally inspected our hair cut, shave, uniform, orange jail coveralls, and sphincter sizes to ensure they were all in line with military specifications. The last place I wanted to be was on that god damn ship after spending pretty much every day all day for the last six months on it. I couldn't leave. Imagine having to live where you work. We also had to wear steel toed boots, a hard hat and safety glasses all day long unless we were in berthing because we were in an industrial zone. When a ship pulls in after a deployment there are a lot of things that have to get done to maintain a metal ship that lives in salt water. There's all manner of grinding, and tubing, and ventilation piping, and chemicals and painting and grinding and on and on...and that's what we lived in. The rest of the ships crew were living in barracks on the base or off base in their own apartment or house. There was only one berthing area that was even functional and that was the forward berthing where the air wing slept during deployment.

During the work day, from 0800 to 1700, the restrictees all reported to their respective departments. Seeing as how I was no longer allowed in either of the power plants because I had lost my TLD (thermal luminescent dosimeter, the device that measures radiation exposure); I was essentially useless to reactor department. However, not completely useless. Apparently while we were at sea one of the conventional mechanics on the boat had been gaffing his logs (not actually doing them). He was supposed to be checking on the status of a very large water heater (the size of a midsize truck) that was located in a room that nobody would even know existed had it not been for this water heater. To get to it you had to go up several ladders, through female berthing, into another room that had nothing but large ventilation pipes, and finally through another water tight door into this room that had only this water heater. At some point the heater developed a small leak, and by the time we pulled into port and somebody actually went to the trouble of checking on it, it was discovered that the heater had been swimming in several feet of water for some time. Everything was rusted all to shit. The entire room, which was nothing but metal, was rusted out. Somebody had to fix this mess...enter me, and several other fuck ups from reactor department that were on restriction for doing drugs to deal with their consciences.

That became my job while on restriction for those 60 days. We were to deck grind and needle gun the entire room (git rid of all of the rust, corrosion, and muck to restore the room to serviceability). Due to the fact that deck grinding in a rusted out water tight room can be hazardous to your health, we had to have an air ejector installed in the room. The room was located as far starboard as possible and the outer skin of the ship made one of the walls. The air ejectors job was to eject all of the crap that went airborne overboard so that we didn't have to inhale any of it. Due to the hidden nature of this room, it was quite easy to get to it and not have to worry about being found (since pretty much nobody on the ship, with the exception of a couple of reactor department personal, even knew of it's existence, and only one of them actually knew how to get to it). When the work day was over, the only people who gave a shit about our whereabouts were the master at arms, and they hardly knew where they were located half of the time.

So me and a few of my fuck up buddies decided that, seeing as how we were already getting kicked out of the navy for "wrongful use of marijuana" (which I always wondered what they supposed the proper use of marijuana was), we would start smuggling herb onto the boat, and then we decided we would use this room to smoke it in seeing as how we had an air ejector to rid of the pungent evidence. After a few weeks of us using this space during the work day, we began hearing rumors about some chiefs in a space above the room we were in smelling the scent of marijuana. The air ejector was doing it's job nicely, it was just that they had a cat walk outside of their work space on the outside of the ship where the smoke would pass them from time to time. We weren't about to stop smoking herb, and getting to this space after the work day without detection by the master at arms would be difficult. We began searching for new weed smoking real estate on the ship. A large portion of the 40 or so restrictees all wanted to smoke herb, and they were from all different departments capable of supplying us with all manner of hidey holes to smoke a toke. I found myself in some pretty interesting places on that ship with the explicit purpose of getting stoned with five or six other guys. I happened to be the only restrictee stupid enough to have a glass pipe in my rack, and so I happened to be included frequently in these weed smoking gallivants. None of us ever got caught smoking on board while I was on restriction. Although there were many close calls, and they were onto us.

It's important to understand how restrictees were viewed by the rest of the ship to completely understand my situation. Restriction was the navy's way to punish non-judiciously. If you were on restriction it's because you were a "shit bag", and that was the end of the story. If you were on restriction and you were just waiting to be kicked out of the navy, then you were beyond a shit bag. You were a shit bag fuck up that was found in a pile of whale shit at the bottom of the deepest ocean, and you were treated as such by pretty much everybody. Nobody gave two shits about a restrictee, and they damn sure didn't care about one that was getting kicked out. They started doing things like locking the only head (bathroom) accessible to us while everybody else on the ship was gone so that we had to either piss ourselves or hold it all night. They would turn all of the hot water off so that we had to take cold showers. I wasn't about to abide that type of treatment, and so I went to war with the Master at Arms.

I began demeaning the head master at arms by pointing these indiscretions out during our various musters. He basically told me that I, and all of the other restrictees, could go fuck ourselves, and that we would just have to hold it or piss ourselves for all he cared. No sir, this aggression will not stand, and so I, and several other restrictees, decided that we would take matters into our own hands. About fifteen of us wrote short letters about how shitty our conditions were and dropped them off in the Captain's suggestion box. Nobody ever put anything in that box because it would mean that you were going around the chain of command. You didn't go around the chain of command and have any kind of life on a ship, because the chain of command would make sure that you had no life. We were brain washed with fear into not using that suggestion box. It was simply there for show and not to be used. I didn't give a damn about any chain of command any longer because I was getting separated from the Navy.

One night, shortly after we turned in our suggestions regarding how we wanted to be treated while on restriction, we were all up in the small lounge area in berthing playing cards, drinking, and smoking cigarettes. This was a problem because we were not supposed to be out of our racks past 2200 hrs (well and the smokes and boos). The only other people that used this berthing on the ship were people that had to stand watch very early in the morning. Some of the restrictees started gettin' kind of loud with the card game due to the copious amount of "bilge wine" that was being consumed (this is illegal alcohol that is made by sailors at sea by concealing the ferment in bilges). Apparently there was a non-restrictee staying in our berthing that night, and he didn't appreciate the fact that we were making noise. He decided he'd put an end to our shenanigans and call the on duty master at arms. Minutes before the master at arms descended on us with all of their egomaniac rage, one of the restrictees bursted into the lounge to warn everybody. We dispersed like cockroaches when the lights switch is turned on in the middle of the night. Except we were drunk cockroaches so we weren't nearly as efficient. Maybe more like drunk rats.

I had the bright idea to strip naked, wrap a towel around myself, grab my shower bag, and head for the head. I ducked into the shower and turned the water on in an attempt to hide from the douche bags. After ten minutes or so, I figured it was safe and got out of the shower. I opened the head door slightly and peaked out into berthing to have a clandestine look see. Nothing, dark, no master at arms. I quickly scurried to my rack and just as I slipped into my rack a rogue master at arms, with nothing better to do, shined his flashlight down my isle and saw my foot going into my rack.

"Hey, you..." as he waddled on over to my rack, "aren't you a restrictee?"

"Yes sir."

"Get dressed, you're coming with me."