The case of the terminal crabs....Or...How bubbles almost met his maker.

A hearty good evening to everyone that has the nerve to read this post. Welcome and welcome. I'm glad to have you and hope you make yourself at home and enjoy. I have in store tonight, something that was not, at the time, funny in the least. Now though, with the perspective that the passage of time permits , it is hilarious. It was in the autumn of 1971 in the Mediterranean sea. We were on the aircraft carrier U.S.S. America. We'd been for some weeks sailing up and down the coast of Israel, Egypt and Lebanon trying to avert another middle east war. (and had some success at that point in time) We'd been relieved temporarily from that task by the U.S.S. Saratoga (another carrier flotilla ). Our next port of call just happened to be Naples, Italy, the cesspool of ports. At that time at least. We'd pulled into port and most of the squadron had gotten liberty to go ashore. Some of us, having been there, had no desire to leave the ship to go into Naples. One of the ones that did go though, was a second class parachute rigger named .......Well.....Lets just give his nickname. It was, you guessed it, Bubbles. Mostly because he was shaped so very much like one. Another reason was because we sometime thought that maybe that's what he had in his head. In other words, not the sharpest knife in the drawer. I've been thankful for years that I didn't have to use the parachutes that he packed. ( :-D ) Across the aisle from his bunk was the bunk used be a good friend and buddy of mine. His name just also happened to be Mike. Bubbles came in from liberty the first night in port and had (we didn't want to know how and where from) gotten the worst case of crabs in the modern annuls of history. Now, for those of you that don't know about the kind of crabs I'm talking about, let me fill you in. These are very small (you can hardly see one by itself) parasites that attach themselves to the root of the hair shaft. Oh yeah,.....They multiply by the hundreds. Make that the thousands. If you got two today, tomorrow you had, literally, thousands. Oh yeah, they only attached to hair that the sun couldn't shine on. ( :-D ) Anyway, Bubbles had gotten himself a royal serving of them. A couple of mornings later, at reveille, Bubbles rolled out of his rack (that's what we called our beds) and removed his blankets and sheets. Instead of rolling them up as did the rest of us, He grabbed his by the end seam and POPPED it into the air. There was, at that point, a whole cloud of the little critters floating through the air in search of a new home. It seemed Bubbles wanted to share the itch and did so with greatest of ease. It was at that point that Mike came rolling out of his rack and looked with disbelief at the scene before him. It was at this point that the action picked up to a fast blur. Mike, realizing that he'd just been given a case of crabs became quite suddenly.....The word livid comes to mind. I have to interject right here, that we all (several hundred sailors) were dumbstruck with admiration and awe at the articulate way that Mike took all of the four letter words that we'd ever heard, combined them into compound words, and then combined the compound words he'd just created into bigger and better compound words. It was like a tapestry of color unfolding right out in front of our ears. It was the topic of admiration and conversation for several weeks in the mess hall (the place we ate) After Mike finished verbally, he got more angry than ever and started toward the now incredulous and frightened Bubbles, but thankfully, some of us were able to restrain him till Bubbles beat a hasty retreat. After the turmoil had died down a bit, the medical officer showed up and sent us all to sick bay where we were treated for the little vermin that Bubbles had so generously shared with the whole compartment. We also had to move for two days so everything in there could be fumigated. By the time we were back in our compartment we were all angry at Bubbles so the Skipper (our Commanding officer) reassigned him to another place until the end of the cruise. On a closing note, I forgot to say thanks to Bubbles so I will here. Thank you Bubbles, for the worst case of crabs known to mankind. ..........and so it went........