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.