In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Two Everyone can kiss my ass. Joe, commenting on his attitude toward life Joe Hooper had a pair of lips tattooed on his right buttock. The lips, he said, were a symbol that “everyone can kiss my ass.”1 Joe and his good friend Gary Foster were in Hong Kong, enjoying shore leave from the uss Hancock, and they took a taxi to the skid row area along the Kowloon waterfront, where they walked around, swilled too much cheap beer, and then got “stenciled.” Gary got two tattoos on his back, another on his arm. Joe settled for just one—the lips. When Joe and Roy Miller appeared at the naval recruiting station in Moses Lake, Joe, of course, had no idea he would end up in exotic Asiatic locales.2 He just knew he was getting out of Moses Lake, which was triumph enough for a young man with a limited education and no marketable skills. Because Joe was only seventeen, his father signed a parental consent form allowing his son to volunteer. Enlisting at such a young age was not unusual. For example , in December 1955, four Moses Lake boys joined the Navy, and at least two of them were only seventeen.3 Joe’s enlistment obligated him to serve six years. However, he only needed to remain in the Regular Navy for his minority (that is, until August 7, 1959, which was the day before he turned twenty-one); he could complete his obligation in the Naval Reserve. As with all recruits during the Cold War era of hyperpatriotism, Joe attested that he did not belong to any of a long list of organizations that the attorney general deemed totalitarian, fascist, Communist, or subversive. These ranged from the American Peace Crusade and the Central Council of American Women of Croatian Descent to the Santa Barbara Peace Forum and the Pittsburgh Arts Club—and several hundred more. Two weeks after being accepted for enlistment at Moses Lake, Joe and Roy received bus tickets to Seattle, spent the night in the ymca there, and took their physicals at the Armed Forces Examining Station the next morning . The medical examination report indicated Joe was auburn-haired and blue-eyed, thin and wiry with only 148 pounds clinging to his 5 foot 9 1/2 inch frame, and had perfect 20/20 vision.4 After passing the physical they took a train, packed with other recruits, to San Diego. Joe enjoyed the train ride, shooting dice almost the entire trip and doing quite well, but neither he nor Roy liked the reception at the U.S. Naval Training Center (the equivalent of “boot camp”) at San Diego. No sooner had the recruits stepped off the train than the drill instructors were “in our face like you wouldn’t believe. They called us everything but white people. And even the black people they called them white. It was a horrible shock.” Followed quickly by another one: a visit to the barber. Proud of his red hair, Joe always carried a comb with him to keep it immaculately neat. With a shaved head he looked terrible, like a cue ball with two big blue eyes staring out of it. And then “we really got the shock when we started through boot camp and all the things they wanted us to do.” Boot camp was tough, tougher than either Joe or Roy had imagined. Their drill instructors had “the nastiest mouths” Roy ever encountered, bellowed an unending array of obscenities at the recruits, and oftentimes “were quite brutal.” Yet Joe undoubtedly liked boot camp. It brought structure and stability into his life for the first time, and for someone with Joe’s temperament, the outdoor physical activity was fun. Between periods of what seemed to them like verbal and physical abuse, recruits took a battery of occupational tests, which indicated that Joe was average in all categories except for clerical work, where he ranked toward the low end of the spectrum. He typed only fifteen words a minute, a severe handicap. When Joe filled out forms during his military career it con- firmed his bottom-rung clerical rating; close attention to paperwork was never among his better attributes. When Hooper and Miller finally got one day a week off from boot camp they savored the experience, spending those precious days of liberty in San Diego. They went to the movies, strolled up and down Broadway, stopped at local restaurants to get some decent food...

Share