The Galloping Ghost by Carl P. LaVO

to pump the control room bilges, unbeknownst to me,” he wrote Marjorie. “In doing this, they have to take up the central section of thedeck—about two feet behind the place I was standing. With the noise in the boat, I didn’t hear them lift up the deck, and being warm, I took off my shirt, then stepped back to hang it up on a valve wheel—but there just wasn’t any deck to step back on and I went tumbling down into the bilges. Nevertheless, I didn’t even break a leg, nor nary a bone. I luckily got off with a hunk out of my skin and a sliced thigh.”
    Among the reasons the lieutenant chose undersea duty was to escape the sun, which had left him terribly burned on the destroyer. Alas, even sub duty had its moments. In a letter to his family, now relocated to Coco Solo, he sighed, “So far this cruise, sunburn just comes and goes—first I get burnt, then we dive and I sweat it out. . . . I’m as red as a spanked fanny. A few more freckles will probably be the ultimate outcome. How I wish I’d tan for once.”
    Fluckey was away from his family far more than he had anticipated. His first mission lasted more than three months. At times, he wrote of Division 11 being forgotten by the Navy. “All the other ships are making some of the big ports around here ’cept good old subdiv eleven. We’re just like a bunch of old drag horses plodding around working for everybody and nobody realizes we’re here when it comes to a decent liberty port or going home.” There were times far out at sea when Fluckey was mesmerized by submarine duty, however, like when the S-42 arrived on station 1,100 miles east of Coco Solo. “It was so darn calm we passed our day of leisure swimming over the side, a real treat to splash around in water crystal clean and so deep it would take a person over an hour to reach the bottom at a fast trot.”
    The sub docked periodically at the U.S. naval base of Guantanamo, Cuba, and in Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, and Haiti, where Fluckey couldn’t believe conditions. “I thought I had seen the low in poverty but this takes the cake,” he wrote Marjorie. “The people have nothing, have never had anything and the land seems to produce only dried up peanuts with an orange or so now and then.” In the Virgin Islands, officers and sailors of the Fleet went ashore in St. Thomas. It was there that Fluckey became an accidental ambassador for the Navy at the governor’s house.
    He had been relaxing on the veranda of the city hotel when a fellow officer arrived, dressed in white service and under the impression that the officers had to attend a reception at the governor’s mansion. “I told him I would gladly hop up to the governor’s with him save for the sad fact that the two suits of white I had were dirty,” Fluckey wrote to his wife. “The situation was cleared up by my returning to the ship, squeezing into one of the [officer’s] suits and returning ashore to kill the fatted calf.” Arriving outside the mansion, he noticed officers milling about in the road and in the gardens,not wanting to be first to enter the home. When Cdr. W. T. Waldschmidt entered the home, Fluckey strolled inside, signed the guest registry, and started up the stairway, expecting others to follow. He hadn’t realized that the officers were to first go to a room on the first floor. The governor and his wife were on the second floor and dashed forward to greet the young lieutenant, who looked around with a jolt.
    A great big empty room, and I the first arrival with lots of officers down below but only the governor, his wife, her grandmother and I above to start things off. However, they were very amiable and we had a few minutes chat to ourselves before the thundering horde arrived. Honestly, hon, I’m going to be the first to arrive at anything like that from now on, for it’s much nicer getting to know