Good Days & Better Days

By Stan Stoops

This is a collection of stories provided from personal experiences of Stan Stoops. The stories take place on the east and west coasts of the United States, the Hawiian Islands, the Filipino Islands, and the now nonexistent South Vietnam and finally end up where it all started, in Southeast Iowa. The topics range from stories about inmates, stories about women, and the most preferred subject of all, fishing. There are a few other topics thrown into the mix, hopefully for the enjoyment of the reader. The author's mentality in writing these stories was to crowd the element of humor and to take the best out of each day no matter what the day may have had to offer. So make it a better day, and enjoy reading

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: May 12, 2021
• ISBN: 9781662411328

Book preview

The Octopus’s Garden

The year was 1969, the month was either April or May, and I was now home from a year’s tour in Vietnam. I was initially stationed at Cherry Point, North Carolina, when I had returned home. Cherry Point was a Marine air wing. I was a radio humper by trade in the Corps, a ground pounder and certainly not an air winger. Being fresh out of the Nam, I began what would turn out to be a little longer than fifteen years’ worth of a drinking habit—well, probably closer to twenty years than fifteen. There was not a whole lot of work for me to do as a radio humper in an air wing. Actually, there was no work for me in the Marines stateside. It was kind of like I didn’t get killed off, so now I had two and a half years of nothing to do, which was the remainder of a four-year tour in the Marines. We played a lot of cards during the daytime and went drinking at night. It was a good existence—except that I was drinking too much and was too stupid or too inexperienced to drink socially, so we always drank to get drunk. Always. My little circle of friends was made up of all veterans at the ripe old age of nineteen and twenty years. And twenty was the legal drinking age in North Carolina. We drank. Those that were nineteen years old had good friends who were twenty years old, and we took care of one another. I’m sure you get my drift on that, but if you don’t, well, in other words, no one was gonna go home sober.

You can’t do that for long though without it catching up to you. I was getting into trouble in small ways, and trouble was gonna come in a big way if I didn’t quit drinking. And I didn’t see that happening. I now had a total of six months at Cherry Point, North Carolina, and a complete total of two years in the Corps. Before I had six months in the Corps, I was boots on the ground in sunny Vietnam then thirteen months in-country then six months in Cherry Point.

Anyway, one day, following some thought on the subject of how I was gonna quit drinking and stay out of trouble, I came up with the idea that I had to get out of there—that maybe a different duty station would solve the problem. And that was just another bad idea that wasn’t gonna work out, no matter what, but I didn’t know that at the time. I approached the company gunnery sergeant on the first opportunity I had. It was at the end of the day and the end of the work week. I’d seen him coming across the grinder, so I hailed him to wait up. I caught up and informed him I wanted the next volunteer orders in my MOS (military occupational specialty) to go back to Vietnam. His reply was that it was okay, but this being a Friday, he wasn’t going to tell me that orders had come in for me until Monday. Really! I asked him if he knew where I was going, figuring I would be doing something in communications—you know, something in the field I’d been trained for. Not the case. I was being sent to Kaneohe Bay, Hawaii, and the gunny did not know what I would be doing for work for sure. He said it was an MOS number he didn’t recognize, said it was something new for the Corps.

Back at the barracks, I told the vets what had transpired, and one of the fellows—a guy I had gotten in trouble with on account of our drinking habits from the night before, who was a fast thinker and smooth talker, and who got both of us out of the trouble we’d gotten into together through a compliment for the captain we were standing in front of for our disciplinary hearing—said the MOS number had something to do with security, but he wasn’t sure what kind of security it would be. I didn’t want anything to do with security. Security to me meant dressing up in those Marine Corps dress blues and standing at attention or at parade rest for four hours at a stretch, not smiling, just standing there stone-faced so some civilian could ooh and aah over you and how pretty you looked. In other words, I had reservations about what might be coming down the pike. There were guys who liked standing there looking pretty, and I was glad those kinds of guys existed because that meant there was less of a chance I was going to be assigned that sort of duty. In the Corps, those guys—all dressed up in their dress blues, white barracks cover, white gloves, and white duty belt with a big brass belt buckle and a screwed on Marine Corps emblem on it—were referred to by the rest of us as sea-goin’ bell hops, and yes, it was an insult, and yes, it was meant to be such.

So I shipped out again, checked in at the commanding officer’s office in Kaneohe Bay, which—wouldn’t you know it—was another air wing. I was told to take a seat, that there would be someone in to talk to me shortly. The person that came to see me was a gunnery sergeant by the name of Cook. Gunny Cook was the warden at the base brig. He said he always liked to interview a new guard before taking them in because if they really didn’t think they would like the job, then they probably wouldn’t do the required job and he’d just save himself a whole lot of future grief by getting them placed elsewhere. So there I was, in an MOS that was brand-new to the Marine Corps—the reason the gunnery sergeant at Cherry Point didn’t recognize the MOS number.

In one way, this was great duty: two days on and two days off for the next two years. In another way, this was bad duty because it left me with plenty of time to drink. And I did. The lion’s share of drinking in Hawaii was going to bars, and ordering wine coolers, which were cheap wine mixed fifty-fifty in a glass or plastic pitcher with 7 Up. This was an inexpensive way to get a girl and yourself sloshed. Now every once in a while, someone would order a round of shots to help speed up the process, and to this day, I still don’t know what the hurry was. But you know, life was good anyway.

The next order of business was getting married while I was still in the Marines. Oops. I wouldn’t say getting married was a mistake, but I will say getting married while I was still in the Marines was certainly a mistake, and there was this drinking problem in full bloom. Not good at all.

Nowadays, following Desert Shield, Desert Storm, Iraq, and Afghanistan, they have a name for the attitude of returnees of war. It’s called PTSD, post traumatic stress disorder, and I’m sure the reader knows all about that. We didn’t have PTSD when I returned from the Nam as it wasn’t invented yet. I don’t think we really needed it anyway because we had alcohol and some other things, and I didn’t feel like I had any problems anyway. I had a new wife, both of us young. And being in the Marines, well, when called to duty, you went to duty. Wherever, whatever you were ordered to do, you just went. It wasn’t like it was open for discussion. I’m sure my young wife thought it was some kind of a communist plot to break us up, but we were to survive this marriage for a total of the next sixteen years.

Things went well, considering both of the issues I had. I could well shoulder the responsibility of being at fault. We had our first Christmas together, and I don’t remember what gift I got for my wife but I do remember what she got me. She had gone to the army navy surplus store and got me a two-man survival raft, complete with oars and a nice set of fins, mask, and snorkel outfit. She couldn’t have done me nicer. That girl knew what I really liked to do, and she probably figured it would help me stay away from the juice. But it didn’t! Any idea to that thought was just a myth. Still, it was a nice gift.

I don’t remember if she or I purchased the Hawaiian sling. The sling is a spear, a six-foot fiberglass stick about one and a half inches in diameter, with three metal rods about twelve inches long sticking out of one end of the stick and clamped to the fiberglass with a piece of aluminum that was about three inches long. The rods were sharpened but not barbed, and when they passed through a fish’s body, the rods naturally spread out, and the fish could not wiggle off the spread-out rods. I did have a moray eel get off the sling though and also had an eel get off a speargun, which I thought was quite a feat. It scared the heck out of me when that happened. I had the speargun and saw the eel below me about six feet down. I leveled off the gun and saw the spear go through the eel. Immediately, the eel knotted itself around the spear, a mass of bubbles came up at me, and I could see nothing. I froze. The bubbles went away, and the eel was just plain down gone. It was just gone. The reason I thought that was quite a feat was because the end of the spear (where the tip was) was a hinged metal barb that lay against the spear, and when the spear stopped, the hinged barb came out, keeping a fish from wiggling off the spear. The moray eel is all muscle and would have been a good piece of meat to eat, but it also was able to pry itself off the spear.

Let’s get back to the garden. The garden would be from the title of this story and what the story is all about.

Now on the top end of this six-foot stick, there was a plastic cap over the end of the stick. A small hole was drilled just below the plastic cap. Inserted through this hole was a piece of braided nylon cord, approximately six inches long, knotted at each end, and a piece of surgical hose approximately eighteen to twenty inches long, with each end of the surgical hose slipped over the knots of the braided nylon cord and clamped tight so as to not pull off the nylon knots—done with what appeared to this Midwest boy: hog rings. That’s what it looked like to me. Hog rings. Then when you were underwater and leveled off to spear a fish, you put the loop of the surgical hose between your thumb and index finger, stretched the cord almost down to the rods, and gripped the stick, then you would kind of aim the spear. When ready, just release your grip, and the spear would go flying. And zap, you would have impaled the fish.

Now later on in life in the brig, I had a friend we all called Lucky. Lucky was a good thief. Most, well, all the stuff Lucky ripped off—he didn’t need them. He just liked ripping stuff off just to get away with ripping it off. What I also mean by that good thief thing is the Marine Corps mentality, which was If you weren’t caught, you weren’t wrong! I’m serious about that. Anyway, later on in my tour on the bay, Lucky found himself in a position to be able to rip off a high-powered speargun off a naval helicopter on base, and he did not get caught. He didn’t mess around on the ocean, so he souvenired the gun to me. After all, he’d already had his fun. That gun was hard to cock and even had some recoil when you squeezed the trigger. It was a piece to be reckoned with, but so was the sling. I preferred using the sling. As a matter of fact, I still have the sling hanging from a beam in my living room as I write this story. The cord and surgical hose have both gone years ago, but it wouldn’t take much to put it back in working condition. Here in Iowa, I still have a small supply of hog rings along with the tool to clamp them down tight. The speargun was the same gun I’d shot the moray eel with. The gun, by the way, is gone.

Anyway, I spent a lot of time in the ocean snorkeling, and I loved it. Most of my time in the water was spent very locally in Kailua Beach as Kailua was the small town where we lived just off base, so I’d stuff the raft in the snout (trunk) of the ’62 VW Beetle we owned and would head for the beach with my fins, mask, snorkel, and sling. Life was good. I was out there so much that I’d recognize different rock formations as I paddled about, pulling my raft behind me as I looked for something worthwhile to spear.

Kailua Beach is pretty long and is protected by the reef a couple of hundred yards off shore so the lion’s share of the time, the water was pretty much crystal clear. In those two years of living down there, I really can only remember the water being cloudy from riled-up sand one time, which was probably because of a serious storm out in the ocean somewhere.

The only other place I patronized was Hanauma Bay. That bay was just gorgeous, and it was a preserve, so you couldn’t spear anything out there. But the wildlife—oh my, both fishes and those lovely tourist girls dressed in the skimpiest of bikinis liked to go there also. You see, Hanauma Bay was where Elvis Presley had filmed the movie Blue Hawaii, so it was particularly interesting to the tourist chicks who liked to go back home and tell their friends they had been to Hanauma Bay where Elvis had filmed Blue Hawaii. And we were particularly interested in checking those girls out. It all has something to do with romance, I think! If you’ve never seen the magnification of a girl in a bikini underwater, you’ve really missed out. That was always a serious subject of discussion back in the barracks for us old vets. Enough of all that. Back to the garden.

The garden was located on Kailua Beach. The reason I came up with the title to this story is because the rock band the Beatles had a song, which I believe was from the album Abbey Road. I could have labeled this story The Octopus I Shot or Hunted or something similar, boring, or vain, but because of that song, well, it’s named now, and I think it’s appropriate.

I was out snorkeling alone this day. Most of the time, I was alone because that was the way I preferred to snorkel. I was paddling along, pulling my raft behind me while watching the seafloor below me. I suppose I was in ten to twelve feet of water while fishing, or hunting for something to spear. I’d passed a familiar rock that was so big around and tall, the top of it barely below the surface of the water. It stood all by itself. No other rocks or rock formations stood around it. I’d seen the rock before and had even stood on it, but I’d never ever seen it above the surface of the ocean, even in low tide. I kept moving on. The ocean floor in this area of the beach was pretty bare—no vegetation and no other rock formations other than the big one I’d just passed. Just a sandy seafloor, like a desert.

In a very short time, following the big rock, I saw two rocks on the floor of the ocean. These rocks were about the size of bowling balls, one being a little smaller than the other. They were about two feet apart, and in between them was a hole in the sand that appeared to this midwestern boy to look like a gopher hole. I just lay there on the surface of the ocean, examining this setup, when a puff of sand flew or blew out of the gopher hole. Something was in that hole, and it sure couldn’t be a gopher. I had a need to find out what the heck it was.

I dropped my sling to mark my spot as the bright-yellow stick was gonna be a lot easier to spot than a few normal rocks because the ocean was crystal clear. I turned and paddled off in the direction I hoped the big rock was so that I could tie my raft and it wouldn’t float away on me. I didn’t know how long this thing was gonna take me. Fortunately, I found the rock fairly quick and tied my raft then took off in what I hoped to be the direction I’d dropped my sling. I was doing a lot of hoping that day, and my hope was true. In no time, I spotted the sling lying there on the ocean floor.

I want to inject here that all my training for snorkeling was on the job. The only thing I knew about snorkeling—from reading books in high school—was to spit on the inside of the face mask and rub the saliva all over the inside of the mask then rinse it out with seawater. This would keep the mask from fogging over from some of your breath coming out of your nose. The rest I had to learn on my own, and some of that learning could have been fatal. The most important example is that one has to exhale before diving so as not to be so buoyant. Now the other thing is to not exhale completely so when you surface, even though the first item on your agenda is to inhale, you have to have just enough wind in your lungs to blow out and clear your snorkel tube so you can inhale fresh air and not a snorkel tube full of seawater. That would be fatal. Depending on how deep you dive, there were times I’ve really wanted to just inhale but knew that it could not be the first item on the agenda. I had to clear the tube of seawater first, so I had to blow that first little puff of air to clear the tube then inhale. I’d just lie there afloat, breathing in that sweet, sweet oxygen. That snorkel tube I had had no automatic shutoff valve when you dived. The truth was, a shutoff valve could get you laughed right off the beach. That kind of item put the greenhorn label clear across your shoulders. The true islanders called us white boys haole boys. A fella might as well have one of those two phrases tattooed on his back, showin’ up with a snorkel with a shutoff valve. Oh my. Another danger that I gained from my experience at Hanauma Bay. The water was so clear in Hawaii most of the time so that you couldn’t, or at least I couldn’t, judge depth. There was a time I was snorkeling at Hanauma Bay outside the reef, and I spotted the head of a parrotfish lying on the ocean floor. It was sheared off clean, so I figured a shark nailed the fish. Anyway, I went through my breathing techniques, got my wind exhaled, and dived for the fish. It was way too far down, and I had no idea how close I was to the fish when I realized I had to surface and surface fast. It was too far from the surface too because since I couldn’t judge depth, I couldn’t judge how far it was to the surface I was looking at. I really did come close to passing out when I broke the surface. Clearing my tube, I lay there for the longest time, sucking in on that sweet, sweet oxygen. That lesson was well learned and never ever forgotten!

Okay, so back to the garden again. I’d spotted that yellow sling below me, close to the gopher hole, and I just lay there on the surface of the ocean, getting my wind and making an attempt to calm down for the possible forthcoming fight with