Last Turn on Deck
By Richard Scott
Sometimes, the most mystical experience of one’s life can occur as an everyday matter-of-fact thing. I was in the Navy on my first deployment when it happened to me. As a sailor and the son and grandson of merchant seamen, I can tell you that seafarers are a notoriously superstitious lot. The lore of the sea is full of stories of ghost ships, haunted or hoodoo ships & apparitions of the great briny. I had read & heard many of these stories growing up but had never taken them seriously until what I am about to relate occurred.
We were 3 weeks out of San Diego aboard USS Schofield (DEG-3), one of those fleet greyhounds of the sea. After stops in Honolulu & Midway we were approaching the San Bernardino Straits off the island of Samar in the Philippines. We would take the northern channel up to Luzon and Subic Bay on the west coast of the Bataan peninsula. During the transit, I had gotten into the habit of having a last smoke on the Foc’sle at night before turning in. So I was sitting there on one of the bollards where we tie up the mooring lines the night of the incident.
It was a moonless night in December of 1973. The kind of night when it takes you a good ½ hour for your night vision to adjust. In addition, the comet Kahoutek was low in the northwestern sky, it’s bright quasi-starlight casting gibbous shadows across the gently rolling, pitching deck. Winter in the tropics meant calm seas, the only other light the phosphorescence of the curling bow wake as we knifed through the swells at a sedate 17 knots. From time to time you could make out the dark shapes of dolphins surfing the wake as they swam in formation with us.
Not long after taps had been sounded, I was sitting quietly on the bollards watching the dolphins when I saw the door open on the port brake and a man step through. As he closed the door, I could tell there was something not quite right about him. In the first place, he was dressed in the old stovepipe dungarees & was wearing a white hat instead of the uniform ballcap. At the same time, I could feel the hairs on my arms stand on end as he walked towards where I was sitting.
As he began to walk by me going forward towards the bow, I challenged him saying, “How ya doing?”
He stopped & turned to slowly regard me. I couldn’t make out any facial features in the night so I had no idea who he was. At that moment, he walked over and asked me, “You got a spare smoke?”
“Sure!”, I replied, fishing in my pocket for a couple of Marlboros and handing one to him.
As I went back into my pocket for a lighter, he said, “That’s OK, I’ve got a light.”
He opened his Zippo and struck the striker as the flame lit up the night. He lit both our smokes and took a seat on the other bollard stand next to me. We proceeded to enjoy our cigarettes over the next few minutes. All the time this was going on, I couldn’t escape feeling a chill up my spine while my arm hairs remained at attention. The other thing was, even when he struck the lighter, I couldn’t make out his facial features. They remained in shadow & unrecognizable.
After 5 minutes or so, he finished his smoke & tossed the butt over the side. Then he rose to his feet and started forward.
“Thanks for the smoke. I gotta go.”, he said in passing and walked swiftly forward up past the ASROC launcher & around the forward 5” 38 gun mount towards the bow. I rose to follow him as he rounded the mount but at that moment, the bow went under a particularly large swell and as the water cascaded along the foc’sle, I ran behind the ASROC launcher to stay dry. When I came back around 5 seconds later, I was all alone. I ran up to the bridge yelling Man Overboard, but when I got there, everyone on the bridge thought I was nuts. The Officer of the Deck, the Boatswain’s Mate of the Watch and the Forward Lookout all told me they had only seen me up on the bow the entire time. Scratching my head, I went below to sleep until the 4-8 watch in the morning. It wasn’t until I had gone into the Combat Information Center from Sonar Control on my watch that I realized how eerie the whole episode had been.
I was talking to one of the Operations Specialists in CIC about the whole experience when he stopped & asked me what time the incident occurred. When I told him the time, he took me over to the Dead Reckoning Table, where the ships course and track are plotted on the chart and showed me the chart. Directly under the track at the time was a mark and the name USS Johnston(DD-557).
In 1944 at the Leyte Gulf Invasion, 7 destroyers including Johnston and 5 escort carriers faced Japanese Admiral Kurita’s center force of 4 Battleships including the Yamato, 5 heavy cruisers and 11 destroyers. Over the next 4-6 hours, these plucky little ships fought that force to a standstill and convinced Kurita that they were actually Adm. Halsey’s Task Force 58 causing Kurita to withdraw thus saving the Leyte landings from certain annihilation. Of that force, 2 carriers and 5 destroyers were sent to the bottom including USS Johnston. However I knew all of this without him telling me.
You understand I could never see the other sailor’s face or the name on his shirt but I did see something. Zippo, the lighter company, makes personalized lighters for every ship in the fleet & had done so since World War 2. Each lighter has the ship’s name and a small picture of it outlined on the side of the lighter. When he lit our cigarettes, I could clearly see his lighter in the light of it. There, on the side, was stenciled USS Johnston DD-557 with a small outline of a Fletcher class Destroyer. Oh yeah, the night I saw him, was the anniversary of her sinking 29 years before.
Copyright 2004 Richard Scott all rights reserved
