Summary Chapter 1

MILITARY SECRET
Dirty Laundry From The Combat Zone
By Robert David Graham
CHAPTER SUMMARIES:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21

15 JUL 90
Onboard Ranger off the SOCAL coast.

In chapter one we meet Robert David Graham, a Second Class Petty Officer trained to enhance the Personnel department of Wolfpack, the US Navy’s best fighter squadron. But as Bob is discovering, the cronies in charge of today's Navy make everyone feel second class. Bob has just been assigned to "temporary additional duty" in the forward galley of the famous aircraft carrier USS Ranger (transferred, that is, out of the personnel office) because he is a nonsmoker with a chain-smoking of command in The Smoke Free Navy.

Graham attacks Navy jargon with you in mind. He was a hippy as a teenager and didn’t join Uncle Sam's Navy until age 31, so he'll never lose his free spirit, or his civilian mindset. Bob teaches you to sound-out military terms (0800 = oh-eight hundred) arming you with the vocabulary you need to experience the fast world of military operations, on the "cutting edge" of America's national defense.

And we meet Sweet Pea who at 19 is the youngest looking sailor aboard: he's a mixed bag of macho Puritanical grooming with a taut belly! "Sweets" is Ship’s Company (as opposed to Air Wing). Bob is playing with fire, straddling a line between bisexual attraction and Administrative Discharge.

Ranger pulls back in to San Diego for a brief respite between “work-up” exercises as the battle group gears up for a 6-month deployment (and rumors of war against Iraq). In port Wolfpack is homeported in the Top Gun hangar at Naval Air Station, Miramar.

Graham lives in a two-bedroom pad at Mission Beach. It is just around the corner from a drug haven for California's terminally adolescent -- the boardwalk. Arrogant roommate That Guy works in Admin at the Top Gun school. He loves girls and if he has AIDS, doesn't want to know. Bob has promised himself not to get involved with homeless beach bums, but it turns out different.

Giant Dipper at Belmont Park (Mission Beach) San Diego CA For example, we soon meet Bob’s pal Louie, homeless Vietnam vet and chief acid dealer along the boardwalk; and of course Louie's colorful cohorts.

George Herbert Walker Bush has begun sending American troops to the Persian Gulf, but we still have time to savor the nightlife at Mission Beach, the hottest hang-out along the San Diego Bay!