Cheating Death

[suicidalmaniac39]

I recently wrote this essay for my English 101 class. I hope you take from it what I truly meant to say. Feedback is greatly appreciated.

(BTW, this is a long read as it was five typewritten pages.)

This story begins as many do- “It was a dark and stormy night.”

The ship steamed through the night on a stormy sea, pitching and rolling, salt spray flying and the wind whistling through the mast and yard arms. The Boatswain’s Mate of the Watch was keeping an eye on his junior sailors on the midnight bridge watch. Port and starboard lookouts were fine and in view. The helmsman was awake. The aft lookout, however, was not answering the calls being made to him on the phones he wore.

“Officer of the Deck,” he called.

“Yes, Boats?” came the reply.

“I am going to check on the aft lookout.”

“Roger that.”

The sailor stepped onto the starboard bridge wing and began the long trek aft. Though he had developed good sea legs from his years at sea, he still made his way carefully, picking his way along the exterior deck, relying on his excellent night vision instead of a flashlight. The deck surged beneath his feet and the wind buffeted his body as he descended first one ladder then another.

He reached the main deck and found comfort the shelter of the superstructure gave from the wind. He strode beneath the boat deck and along the superstructure. The lowered nets of the flight deck appeared above him. The flight deck was dark and empty, the assigned helicopter in the hangar. Just a few more feet and the superstructure ended and the aft missile deck began.

“Just one more ladder,” he thought.

Stepping onto the missile deck, the wind grew more furious. Faster and faster it went, more than he had ever experienced. His ballcap threatened to fly from his head and he grabbed it to keep from losing it to the sea. He found it more difficult to stand. Flattening himself against the aft bulkhead of the flight deck he hung on to the ladder leading from it. The wind roared in his ears.

Just as quickly as it had begun, it was over. Shaking his head he, began walking aft again. Reaching the aftermost ladder he looked to his left, out to sea, and saw a disturbance on the water he quickly recognized; the tell-tale spray of a water spout- the equivalent of a small tornado at sea. His heart pounded in his chest as he realized just how lucky he had been. Had the water spout been any stronger he could easily have been lifted from the deck and dropped into the ocean. No one would have known where he had gone. He would have been lost at sea.

The ship would have called man overboard just as soon as they knew he was gone. It would have been a death sentence to be lost in the dark, stormy sea.

He went down the final ladder and to the aft lookout’s station just behind the harpoons.

“Hey, didn’t you hear us calling you?”

“No.”

“I want you to relocate to just inside the aft starboard break. It’s not safe for you to be back here unsheltered.”

“Aye-aye, boats.”

The sailor began the long trudge back to the bridge but decided that perhaps he should take the internal route instead.

“Much safer this way,” he thought, “even if it does destroy my night vision.”

As he made his way back to the bridge he remembered another time when he had come close to losing his life, on another ship years earlier on another dark, though calm, night. That ship had been on patrol in the Persian Gulf in early 1991, months before Saddam Hussein was to order his troops to invade Kuwait. The US military was more worried about threats from Iran and the sailor’s ship was to be the last of the “Earnest Will” missions- protecting US flagged tankers from Iranian attack.

Part of this protection was embarked onboard in the guise of two helicopters operated by the US Army. They were small, quiet, and designed to fly at night with the aid of night vision goggles- the goggles being something new at that point. On this particular evening the helicopters were to do a flight and weapons demo. The captain made an announcement to the crew about the upcoming display and invited the crew topside to watch.

The sailor, having only just reported aboard a few days earlier, was intrigued and began to use his scant knowledge of the ship’s layout to make his way from the bright, white light of the living quarters into the red-lighted passageways. Up ladders and through passageways he went until he found himself in the gunnery space. One more ladder, through a scuttle and he would be at the designated viewing level.

Pushing out of the scuttle he left the bright red space and stepped into the pitch black of the Persian Gulf night. Standing on top of the hatch into which the scuttle was mounted he could feel the cool night air and smell the fumes from the stacks and the flight deck. He heard the gentle whine of the ship’s gas turbine engines and the light slap of the sea against the hull. Perhaps more than anything, he had no night vision. He was completely blind.

“I know where I am,” he thought as he stepped off the hatch onto the gun deck.

Stepping forward tentatively he made a decisive turn to the left and took a couple of more steps before suddenly realizing that there was nothing beneath his foot as he toppled into black space.

“Ooooohhhhh shiiiitttt!” he screamed as he fell.

The fall seemed to last forever and then it ended abruptly with a sharp pain in his left thigh. He heard the shouts of alarmed sailors as they came running in response to his cry of distress.

“Here he is!” someone called as hands reached out and pulled him free of the liferails into which he had tumbled.

He thanked the shipmates that had helped him and decided that perhaps it was better that he just retired for the night, so he went below and found his rack.

The next morning he awoke to the familiar strains of the bosun’s pipe calling reveille. Getting dressed he decided to take a look at where his misadventures the night before had ended. Retracing his route he limped through the ship- his left thigh complaining of a charley horse that was to be with him for several days- and soon climbed through same scuttle as the night before, into the brilliant sunshine and rising heat of the Persian Gulf.

Stepping from the hatch he looked to where he had gone and at the liferails, lowered so they wouldn’t interfere with the ship’s 76mm gun should it be needed for emergency use. Two feet further aft there was a vertical ladder that led to the main deck some 25 feet below. Dangling in the empty space at the top of the ladder were the temporary lifelines that were supposed to keep someone from falling to the deck below and landing on the 40mm deck gun. Had he fallen through that unsecured gap and hit the gun below one of two things could have happened; he could have bounced off the gun and onto the deck or he could bounced into the warm, snake infested waters of the Persian Gulf.

Stepping back onto the bridge he could feel the pitch of the deck beneath him and hear the winds howling outside. He knew he was safe from weather and missteps. He told the Officer of the Deck he had returned and about the change of location for the aft lookout. He finished his watch uneventfully.

We often think of death as happening to someone else, or as something we won’t have to deal with until we are old and withered with our grand-children and great grand-children around us. Don’t fool yourself. Death is always lurking in the shadows, waiting for the right moment to take you from this mortal coil. Whether the moment is a storm at sea, a simple misstep, or a deranged shooter in a darkened theater; death is there.

I have been lucky. I know this. I have cheated death at least twice and contemplated suicide more than once. I lost a shipmate to a tragic scooter accident and my mother to a drunk driver. Death lurks everywhere.
One of the victims of the Aurora, Colorado theater shooting was, ironically, a survivor of another mass shooting at a shopping mall in Toronto, Canada. Jessica Gahwi writing about the Toronto shooting said it best, "I was reminded that we don't know when or where our time on Earth will end. When or where we will breathe our last breath." Know this and accept it, but live your life without fear because you never know when you will breathe your last breath.