The Night Before Life Goes On

Watch #9

Chief Petty Officer Hall was a pleasant man, tall with a nice face, a thin mustache that looked good on him, smiling eyes, and a jovial nature.  He tried to identify with us, but he didn't try too hard, the way some adults did.  We didn't hang out together and Jess and I were too young to drink beer, legally.  But when we were at his office, we did share jokes, any experiences we had and we smoked cigarettes together.  We asked as many questions as we could but movies were really all we knew.  We knew few nautical terms beyond ship, and anchor.  In spite of how little we really had in common, we were getting along well, our visits were more regular and I was gradually leaning towards the navy, just because of Edgar and this strange new friendship I was developing.  I have not yet mentioned it but I was not raised by my father.  My mother and he had divorced in the months before I was born and I was raised by my mother and my grandmother, until her death in 1961.  I had never met my father, nor talked to him on the telephone, nor exchanged any letters.  This alone left me hungry for male roles, for father figures and I think Chief Hall filled one of those at this moment.

I remember the feeling of being in his Ponca office with Jess and other boys who dropped by, the look of his uniform, the general feeling of the atmosphere, many visual details.  I do not remember any specific things we discussed.  I do not remember any programs we discussed, any promises, seeing a recruiting form or contracts of any kind.  I do not remember when he made the first venture to talk to my mother.  I remember a long talk with her one evening in which she grilled me about what I wanted to do.  I did not honestly know.  I knew I had to find a way out of the downward spiral that I knew I was in.  I knew that if I did not do something, make a big change to get hold of my self, I would only experience more trouble.  Somehow, we pretty well agreed and she gave me permission to enlist in the navy; as we brave sailors would say, "In this man's navy," although I have never figured out what that meant but I've heard John Wayne say it too.

There were some papers signed, I signed a few, my mother signed a few, Chief Hall signed all of them and then some more.  He was in our home, with my mother and me, explaining many things, at a dizzying pace, and I was understanding very little of it.  I felt a whirlwind of emotions: excitement, anticipation, anxiety, joy, sadness and an uncommon amount of fear.  It was not the kind of fear I had felt when I knew I was going to be beat up by a bully, or get a whipping from a teacher; nor was it the same fear I had felt in the last seconds before I had crashed a bicycle, a motor scooter, or fallen out of a tree.  It was deep fear, about the future, and yes, I had buyer's remorse, without even knowing what it was; a nagging feeling in my stomach that I had done something wrong.

It was, as Carie Underwood sang, "The night before life goes on."

More on the next watch.

Stevie Joe Payne

Further Along the Journey to the Point Defiance

Watch #8

I wasn't running with bad kids.  But all of us had problems and especially two of my friends.  One of them we often called the Big Indian, even when he was sitting there with us.  He used to kid me heavily after a movie we had seen called "I Passed for White."  He would say, "Well, Payne passes for white so let's send him in."   The "in" was a restaurant or store where we joked that they might not let Indians in.  Jess Paul Tomey, the Big Indian, said he was a Pottawatomie Indian and I never doubted it.  Most of my friends in Pawhuska were Osage Indians, including many of my relatives.  I am Cherokee and only one-eighth Cherokee, but I have always been more interested in my one-eighth Cherokee than my seven-eighths everything else.  David Meriable was an Osage and our friend Charley Edgar, who would have a lasting impact upon Jess and me, by what he did, never mentioned Indian in his heritage.  Charley Edgar was the oldest among us and with a confusing romantic situation with his girlfriend, he was lost.  His parents had divorced, adding to his confusion and Charley was talking to military recruiters although he barely shared that with us.  I don't remember what season it was, but suddenly, Charley had enlisted in the navy on what was called a "Kiddie Cruise."    The navy minority enlistment worked this way:  A sailor enlisted after he was seventeen years of age, but less than eighteen.  Then, he was discharged from the enlistment one day before his twenty-first, or majority birthday.  Hence, it was called a minority enlistment and got nicknamed the "Kiddie Cruise."  Edgar did good research and exercised even better timing so he enlisted one day before his eighteenth birthday; that meant he would leave the navy with just three years of service while receiving credit for four years.

Edgar had gone to Ponca City, forty miles west of Pawhuska along Highway 60 and a much larger town than Pawhuska to meet the recruiter.  Pawhuska had a population of about 5,000 in 1960 while Ponca City had a population of nearly 30,000.  Through Edgar, I met the recruiter, a nice fellow named Hall.  When I understood more, I would learn why he wore a bus driver's uniform instead of the sailor suit I had known. Hall was a Chief Petty Officer and a radarman to boot.  Jess Paul and I made several trips to Ponca with Edgar and, without any intention of joining the navy, we were talking to him more each time.  By then, he knew us by sight and by name.  He was rapidly becoming our new best friend.

More on the next watch

Stevie Joe Payne

How I Got to The USS Point Defiance (LSD-31)

Watch #7

I want to go back over the path that I took to reach the Point Defiance.  Naturally, I received orders, probably from BUNAVPERS which was the Bureau of Naval Personnel, while I was still in Radar "A" School at Treasure Island.  But the path began long before that.  Back when I was very young I had a friend, Jackie Manley, whose father operated the Army/Navy Surplus Store in Pawhuska, Oklahoma so, naturally, a bit like Ron Kovic (Born on the Fourth of July), we played army.  With some of the artifacts we could acquire, helmets, utility belts, folding spades, canvas, we could imitate a fairly good soldier.  We did not have everything; we lacked real rifles, grenades, other things.  I remember having an army canteen for drinking water with a canvas container that fit on a utility belt.  Most of the things we acquired still had the odor of a soldier, which was a bit of a negative part, but not enough to discourage us.  We assumed some rank, lined up together against some unseen enemy and made daring charges over a hill, courageously in the face of enemy fire, which we basically created with the sounds coming from our mouths.  We could make the sounds of rifles, machine guns, grenades and even some heavy artillery with amazing accuracy, especially for never having heard these sounds in real life.  Somehow, the boys around me and the movies were creating a deep military culture within me.  My friend Jackie was in a severe automobile accident when he was around nineteen or so, and never recovered from it.  He lay with brain damage for the rest of his life and died from the effects of his injuries many years after the accident.

 As I got a little older, somehow my attention shifted to the United States Marine Corps, where I came to believe that the roughest, toughest and most daring men alive dwelt and that's what I wanted to be:  A Marine.  My friend Jerry Traylor and I even developed what we thought was our own code; the code of Semper Fidelis.  We may not have understood it was Latin and translated to "Always Faithful" but we grasped that it was a code and a very serious one; one of honor, of duty, of commitment and mostly, of deep and lasting brotherhood.  Like all boys, sometimes as we got older and found new viewpoints, we changed friends some and Jerry and I did.  But we still knew each other, still saw each other now and then.

As I got older and I became more interested in motor scooters, motor cycles, cars, and other things, I was not thinking about the Marines so much but about life in high school and having fun.  Around ages fourteen to sixteen, some of us were smoking, talking tough, thinking we were tough, and acting cool.  We didn't know what cool was but we thought we did.  Some of us got a little wild, some wilder than others and as we moved into relationships with young women, sometimes life became very complicated.  The complications included jealousy, heart break, anger, love, loneliness, betrayal, possessiveness, pain, teenage angst, "Problems, problems" as the Everly Brothers sang.  I had them, and most problems related to my girl friend and our relationship.  But I was also influenced by some of my friends and the looming thing in front of us by a few years:  The Draft.  If we didn't go on to college, marry, find certain jobs, the draft board was out there, looking for us and would one day send us a letter requiring us to serve and for most, that meant the United States Army.  That wasn't bad.  Let me put it this way.  Audie L. Murphy was in the army, and he was always my hero.

More on the next watch.

Stevie Joe Payne