A Carefully Guarded Secret

Before my Captain’s Mast, I pulled two days of shore leave in Japan. While the conversation for many of the crew gravitated down around sampling some of the finest p—y to be found anywhere on the Asian Continent, I looked forward to stepping out into the first foreign country I’d ever visited. I was disappointed, though, when I found out that both Marty ’n’ Greg had pulled duty for the weekend. Only later, did I learn why Harold had declined to go ashore with me, for he had evidently sent most of his meager pay back home to his wife for child support. And so did I go ashore alone.

Having just gotten paid, I decided to spend the first day rummaging through the Navy Exchange in Yokuska where I’d heard I could find some good bargains. While I struggled to work up the courage to venture out into the countryside by myself, I went looking for gifts to give to my mother and Mary. With so much to choose from, I opted to buy my mother a beautiful set of china and a set of silverware, to boot. For Mary, I bought a Japanese doll adorned in the traditional dress of a woman living in the Japan of yesteryear. After seeing to it that these gifts were wrapped and shipped off, I realized how much I needed to do something for myself too. Thus did I finally make up my mind to go sightseeing in Tokyo on the morrow.

That evening, word reached us warning of a possible demonstration in front of the main gate to the shipyards at Yokuska. Ever since the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, have a growing number of Japanese adamantly opposed port of entry to any foreign vessel suspected of carrying nuclear weapons. Because the whereabouts of our nuclear arsenal was such a carefully guarded secret known to only a select few, they had no way of ascertaining whether we were actually carrying nuclear warheads on the tips of our torpedoes or not. For some reason, though, the demonstrators drew upon my sympathies, so much so, that had I been more aware of my own position on nuclear weapons, I might’ve joined them.