The USS Point Defiance (LSD-31)

Stevie Joe Payne 2008 at age 64

Watch #1

My name is Stephen Joe Payne and I am originally from Pawhuska, Oklahoma.  I served aboard the USS Point Defiance (LSD-31) from December 28, 1961 until January 22, 1965.  Navy enlisted personnel rarely use their first names and so we become known to each other as just Wherry, Sigwing, Jones, Smith and so on.  To most men aboard my ship, I was just Payne but I also had a nickname of "Huck" or sometimes even "Huckleberry Hound."  I got the nickname from two things.  First, I had made friends with the Philippine people I had met and there was a guerrilla group known as the Huks.  I had nothing to do with the guerrilla group but the nickname of Huk was often applied to any Philippine citizen as a derogatory term so I was called a Huk lover by someone and then just Huk which became Huck.  Secondly, I have a tattoo on my lower left arm of a small cartoon dog that was popular on television before I enlisted in the navy.  He was one of my favorite cartoon characters so when I decided to get a tattoo, I saw Huckleberry Hound on the wall and I got it.  I preferred the popular cartoon character Yogi Bear but my big Indian friend, Jess Paul Tomey, also from Pawhuska had already been tattooed with Yogi and I didn't want to copy him.  He suggested the sidekick bear for Yogi which was a rather unintelligent fellow named Boo Boo.  I actually saw myself as the leader and I did not want to be Boo Boo, so I was tattooed with Huck, the cartoon character and his name "Huck" spelled out just below it.  Few people in the civilian world have called me Huck so if someone does use that, I know they were from the Point Defiance.  Jess and I got our twin tattoos, meaning that we got them at the same time, he first, and then I, in a parlor in Long Beach, California and I think they cost around $16.00 then.  They were not expensive, I know that, or I would not have gotten one.

There will be more about me subsequently so I will talk about the Point Defiance now and I plan to blog a lot and share with any of my shipmates, former shipmates now, of course, but I still think of them as shipmates.  The USS Point Defiance was a Dock Landing Ship, and the navy does many things backwards for classification so she was identified as a Landing Ship, Dock, or LSD and her hull number was 31.  In Japan we said "sanjuuichi" for 31 which the Japanese taxicab drivers knew as our hull number and they could get us back to our ship no matter how drunk we were, and I'm embarrassed to say it, but sometimes we were drunk.  The better known LST ships of the navy were Landing Ship, Tank.  The keel for the Point Defiance was laid down in Pascagoula, Mississippi in 1953 and she was commissioned as a ship of the United States Navy in 1955 so you can see that she was not a very old ship when I came aboard.  But she had a lot of nautical miles under her belt then.  Those are the first facts about her and I'll talk about my first day aboard the Point Defiance in my next segment.  Ships' name are too long for sailors who must repeat them often and we all gravitated towards nicknames for our ships.  Ours became just The PD for most of us.  The PD was my home for three years.

More on the next watch.

Stevie Joe Payne