The Gundecker

My favorite part of the Navy, the thing that led me to reenlist way too many times, is the people. The lifelong friends that become family, the mentors you look up to, the proteges that you helped become hatchet-wielding degenerates just like you.

Of course, there’s also the stories of people doing shit so absolutely bananas that you go cross-eyed just thinking about it. It far surpasses “What the fuck were you thinking,” it crosses into “What kind of just and loving God let you come up with that shit?”

For me, the person that personified that was Seaman Banjo. The shit that kid got into was nothing short of poetry in motion. He was like a golden retriever got body-switched with a young Sailor and let loose upon an unsuspecting ship, and I loved every minute of it.

2020: A Navy in Peril

In 2020, COVID was skull-fucking the Navy. Everybody has their own tale to tell about how exactly that time went for them, and it ranges drastically. If you were one of the poor bastards on deployment, you spent the whole time losing your absolute shit not pulling into a single port, just drifting aimlessly around the sea hoping nobody got sick a la Castaway.

We were fortunate that we were in a shipyard availability in San Diego. That means the entirety of 2020, we were undergoing maintenance at a civilian shipyard. We dropped down to three duty sections, but we were duty section-only, meaning that you spent 24 hours on the ship for your duty day, then two days at home. That’s a screaming goddamn deal.

Just like the rest of the military, though, we had some pretty heavy restrictions. No leaving your house unless going somewhere immediately necessary, like medical or the grocery store, no contact with anybody, and no travel outside of 50 miles. For a while, we were even told to wear our uniforms to and from work so the police knew we were military, and they wouldn’t pull us over for being out and about during the pandemic.

I don’t think that was actually a thing, but it’s what we were told.

Imagine our surprise, then, when word came down the grapevine that someone had gotten caught in a most spectacular fashion coming back from San Francisco, which is 500 miles away.

That surprise immediately subsided when we heard who it was, because who the fuck else would it have been.

Chariot of the Gods

Banjo had a car, a 2012 Kia Optima. This, in itself, is not outrageous: Lots of junior Sailors have cars. But of course, since it was Banjo, there was more to the stupid fucking story.

We had already been at the shipyard for a while by the time he bought it. One of the worst things about being at the NASSCO shipyard, aside from all of it, was that there’s nowhere to park your car unless you park on base, so you’re looking at a 1-mile trek from the front gate of the shipyard to the base gate, and another half a mile to where we were allowed to park.

One day, while making that long-ass walk (editor’s note: nobody failed their PRT that cycle), I was with a coworker when a black mustang came screaming down the road and stopped right next to us.

Being that this was Main Street close to Barrio Logan and National City, I began to think of my loved ones and reflect on the life that I’d led up to that point, got right mentally with the lord, and prepared to get shot multiple times in the chest and groin.

“You guys wanna buy a car?” said the greasy, sleaze-ball dude sitting in the driver’s seat of this very expensive-looking car.

“…Nah dude,” we said, both of us in unison. Then the dude drove off, without another word. It was the strangest fucking sales pitch I’d ever heard in my life.

As I wondered aloud to my coworker who the fuck just buys a car from a guy unsolicited on the side of a sketchy-ass road, I heard a very unsurprising answer.

“Banjo did,” my coworker said with a chuckle.

Because of course he fucking did. My coworker had seen it happen, too. The car pulled up to Banjo in a group with a bunch of other junior Sailors, the driver talked to him for all of 30 seconds, then Banjo hopped into the car and they drove off down the road to National City’s Mile of Cars, where many a Sailor goes to make poor financial decisions.

For a moment, I’d like to make sure everybody reading this is onboard with the curriculum: Do not just get in a fucking car when somebody you don’t know asks you to. That’s shit you’re supposed to learn in like first grade.

That car was a source of significant friction with Banjo’s chain of command. Obviously he couldn’t afford it, even as shitty as the thing was. What’s more, he managed to successfully finish Junior Sailor Bingo (he didn’t even need the free space in the middle!) by getting it at a 27% interest rate.

At that time, I didn’t even know it was legal to allow someone to sign a contract that included a 27% interest rate. I had always heard of dumb E-2’s getting a car with absurdly high interest rates, but I’d never actually seen it.

But, I suppose if anyone was going to do it…

He also got pulled over multiple times on base, and was about to lose base parking privileges, because he didn’t have insurance, because of course he fucking didn’t.

For the uninitiated, parking on base is treated as a privilege. You have to abide by the rules of the road, because more than a couple traffic or parking violations in a certain period of time flags you at the gate and you won’t be allowed to take your car through, so now your ass is walking the long, sad road to the ship every morning.

Not having insurance, of course, is one of those violations that loses you your privilege to park on base. When you’re driving uninsured (don’t), generally it’s advisable to not exceed the speed limit so you don’t get pulled over.

Banjo didn’t give one fine fuck about the laws of men or admirals, because he sped habitually on base. By a lot. Not the good ol’ fashioned 1-3 miles over the limit, which can and will get you pulled over by some power-tripped Master at Arms, but like 20 miles over the limit, genuinely a hazard to yourself and others kind of speeding.

So he’d been told that he wasn’t allowed to drive his car. He agreed enthusiastically, of course. He understood that driving without insurance was extremely stupid, especially when you have the speeding habits of a Formula 1 racer and the driving skills of a gerbil addicted to amphetamines.

Lucky for everybody except for himself and the chain of command, he was a huge liar. He drove that car every day. He got caught multiple times. He wasn’t what one would call “popular,” and other Sailors in his division would take pictures of him while he was driving the thing, send them to their Leading Petty Officer (LPO) and their Chief, and then of course send them to their buddies because that shit’s hilarious.

When confronted, aggressively, by his Chief with the picture of him driving the uninsured automobile, more hilarity ensued.

“Is this you, you fucking idiot?” his Chief would say.

He’d look at it, not in the way that a person is trying to assess whether or not it’s them in the picture, but in the way a person from an uncontacted tribe in the Amazon seeing a photograph for the first time would, then say “Uhhhh, nope Chief, not me.”

I’d like to point out, ain’t nobody on God’s green earth looked like Banjo. A small, blonde, redneck-looking kid with thick glasses and a 13-year old’s mustache, you can see this dude from space and still know it’s him.

He’d get called on his bullshit, screamed at, told how stupid he was for driving an uninsured car, then tossed out of the office like old laundry. Then he’d do it again, and again.

That’s what made what happened next pretty unsurprising.

The San Francisco Escapade

One fateful day, the summer of 2020, Banjo slipped into a girl’s DMs.

“Good for him!” you might say.

And I’d agree. Banjo was such a goofy, weird guy that if he managed to get a girl interested for more than a passing glance out of curiosity, it was his prerogative to jump on that opportunity like a hobo on a hot dog.

But a problem arose. This girl lived in San Francisco, which, as I said earlier, is 500 miles away from our ship in San Diego, during a time when we weren’t allowed to be outside of our 50 mile radius by penalty of 45 days of restriction, reduction in rank, and half month’s pay times two.

“This is a conundrum,” Banjo probably didn’t say.

“I should probably wait until the restrictions are lifted, that I might travel to see this maiden fair,” he absolutely didn’t say.

He didn’t even try to be slick by paying for her to come down to San Diego and see her at a hotel in secret. Fuck, sneaking her into his barracks room might even have been preferable.

Nah, my man went for broke and decided to drive his ass up there.

Being that he was too broke to afford insurance, he decided to bring another knucklehead, whom we’ll refer to as Accomplice, with him to help pay for gas.

To be honest, not much is known about his trip up there. Presumably, it went well, because he didn’t get in trouble en route to San Francisco, nor did he get in trouble while in San Francisco.

The Incident in Question

Banjo departed San Francisco the evening of Sunday that week. That was already pretty dumb, because he was due to be at work the next morning.

Late into the night, his LPO got a phone call.

“Hey, BM1, I ain’t gonna make it to work on time, I got in an accident.”

“What? You’re not supposed to be driving your car, man,” his LPO said, groggily. “Where are you?”

“Uhhhh I ain’t really sure, probably about a hundred miles north of LA.”

Crickets, for a moment. His LPO knew how absolutely fucked this dude was about to be. “Are you all right?”

“Yeah, so what had happened was I flipped my car, and Accomplice ran off, not sure where he went.”

Not only had he broken the cardinal rule of being somewhere you’re not supposed to be (don’t crash the fucking car), he’d flipped the fucking thing in an accident with a Greyhound bus.

So, let’s take stock of his situation: Banjo is now trapped about 200 miles from the ship (300% further than he was allowed to go) with no transportation back to San Diego, his accomplice (who he just dry-snitched on) abandoned him almost immediately after the accident and was nowhere to be found, he’s broke as fuck, his car is inoperable and uninsured, and he’s now informed his chain of command (the one right move he made), so he’s irredeemably fucked.

The LPO, being a good dude, bought him a train ticket to get back to San Diego. His car was actually fixable, which beggars belief, but being that he had no insurance, he also had no way to pay for repairs, so he abandoned it to some tow company’s financial benefit.

Would you think this is close to the end of the story? Of course you would, because you’re a reasonable person. It wasn’t.

The Train Derails and Crashes While Banjo is Onboard

You read that right. The train he was on derailed and crashed, and he was injured because of it. I shit you not. Like some straight-up Planes, Trains, and Automobiles shit.

Not this one, though.

The train he was on encountered a vehicle stopped on the tracks, and in the process of braking, popped off the rails (not the full-blown holy shit everybody’s dead derailing, but one requiring heavy machinery to put it back on the track), which caused everybody on the train to get jolted forward.

Banjo was one of the few passengers that actually got hurt, by way of his head hitting the wall in front of him when the train popped off the rails. He wasn’t hurt very seriously, just a concussion. The train company, however, encouraged him to go to the hospital, which was a good idea, and he spent about 6 hours there getting checked up.

Now, obviously none of this was Banjo’s fault. He wasn’t the one that parked a van on the rails, and he wasn’t the train’s engineer. But I can’t help but think that maybe when you put a bunch of weird energy into the universe, sometimes that energy comes back to you in the form of your train derailing and smoking your head against a divider.

In any case, the company comped him another ticket, and he returned to San Diego less than a day after the train incident.

From what I understand, his Chief, LPO, and Division Officer were all waiting for him when he got off the train in sunny San Diego, ready to clap him in figurative irons and drag him back to the ship for his just rewards.

A week or so later, he and his Accomplice (who actually made it back to work on time, and nobody would have been the wiser had Banjo not dry-snitched on him) were at Captain’s Mast in front of the old man.

Predictably, they both got 45 days of restriction, half month’s pay times two, but didn’t get reduced in rank, since they let the command know what had happened.

Let that be a lesson to you: When you’re doing shady shit and you’ve gotten in too far over your head, let your command know. You’re still gonna get the dry nonskid-weenie (no lube), but you might get a little clemency because you decided to do one thing right.

I talked to him about a week later, him wearing his red restricted badge of shame onboard the ship one morning.

“Did you hook up?” I asked.

He smiled, a little sheepishly. “Oh yeah.”