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Most sailors think women aboard ship are unlucky. I don't know. Like everything else about women, you can prove it both ways. Take what happened with Chief Martin and C. J. P. Skoalski and that lady anthrio-pologist on the USS Polaris.
The Polaris was station ship at a Navy island named Gahanoa. It was a lazy place, with surf beating white along the reef and coconut palms bending over white sand beaches and green hills up behind. We wore dungarees all day and lazed topside in the afternoons or went ashore to swim and drink beer. The bull chief of the black gang was my boss in the fireroom, Chief Martin. I came aboard a raw recruit and the first thing guys told me was how Martin stood up to officers and got the breaks for his men and so we all had to back him to the hilt. The tour of duty was two years, but Martin had been aboard twelve years and he acted like he owned the ship. Lots of guys had been aboard five or six years. I knew right off I wanted to stay. You'd never know it in Gahanoa that a depression was going on in the States.
Well, we did know it, in a way. Our engineering quarterly allowance was cut and our engineer officer was troublesome about signing too many chits for engineering stores. Martin always beat him down, of course. He'd tear a pump apart and swear he couldn't put it back together without he got wiping rags or whatever else he wanted. Every quarter Lieutenant Robbins overspent his allowance, and maybe that helped him go haywire. Martin liked to say an engineer officer's place was in the log room, not on the floor plates, and Joe Martin was just the guy that knew how to keep 'em in their place. He was a big, red-faced man with black hair and a gold tooth and a laugh like a donkey. He liked to sit on the fireroom workbench and have coffee brought to him and slap his leg and laugh at his own jokes. Everybody else had to laugh, too. You got no favors and all the dirt unless Martin liked you.
He was a joker,...