I wondered where the contraband smokes came from. And I couldn’t make accusations without evidence. He flushed his tobacco down the toilet before I could capture him.
I couldn’t sneak up on the offending convict. But one evening I caught drifts of tobacco smoke coming from the direction of one of the murderer’s cells. The smoking lamp was never lit on the isolation row. Sometimes, I’d take a good gander at the slabs of ham, the fried spuds, the white bread.Īn hour or so later, the delivery prisoner would return and pick up the empty tray, or sometimes not so empty, depending on whether the chow could be stomached. Three times a day a detainee delivered a tray of chow to each of my Westpac Murderers, set the big silver tray on the deck, then stepped back. My duty at the time consisted of pacing from one end of the long, thin row and back again, listening to echoes of my footsteps on the concrete deck and the metal walls of the cells, watching the reflection of the overhead lights bounce off the deck, smelling the chow when it arrived, as well as the faint scent of feces from the heads. Deemed dangerous and a threat to good order, they spent their time locked in, no windows, one overhead light, let out once a day to shower and once a day for a few minutes of exercise. That initial time, we confined two of them there. 32nd Street Naval Station, photo courtesy of Wikipedia We locked tough guys, rabble-rousers, rule-breakers on the isolation row and certain Westpac Murderers. The first time the murderers appeared in the sally port, ball-and-chained and surly, I was working the brig’s isolation row which contained cells with a wall-mounted metal rack and thin mattress for sleeping, a washbasin and toilet. Most of the regular prisoners inhabited our brig for hating the Navy, going over the hill to get away, disobeying orders but these Westpac prisoners toted a different import.
Convicted by courts-martial, the worst of the worst: murderers among our troops in Vietnam. The Westpac Murderers arrived from Okinawa and we screened them before shipping them on to Portsmouth Naval Prison. I woke yesterday thinking of long-gone days, youth, the USMC, my time serving at the brig, 32 nd Street Naval Station, San Diego. Like the gangs we saw in movies set in Alabama and Florida and Texas. Blue skies, warships in the harbor-bells, engines, clangs, horns, scent of diesel fuel, the rasps of claxons, tang of the ocean’s ebb and flow-and standing inside the sally port of the brig, the Westpac Murderers who, every couple of months, appeared at our facility.
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