In 1983 I began a tour of duty as Executive Officer (XO) and second in command of Naval Station Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. The command consisted of about 600 sailors, 500 civil service civilians, and 400 non-appropriated fund employees. The last group operated clubs and recreation activities.The others operated all of the functions of a busy port: tugboats, pilots, water transportation, enlisted and officers’ quarters, etc. – everything needed to house, feed, train, and entertain tens of thousands of sailors and to accommodate dozens of ships and shore commands.
We had a Family Services Center whose mission was to provide a wide variety of counseling programs, training classes and support services to Navy, Marine Corps and Coast Guard personnel, retirees, and family members. Sailors living in Hawaii experienced great difficulty coping with the high cost of living in Hawaii, especially if they were lower ranked sailors who were married.
Problems for these lowest ranked sailors were compounded by the fact that they were at the time not entitled to housing and living allowances. They were expected to be single, living in barracks. Unfortunately, many did marry and did bring wives to Hawaii, forcing families into sometimes desperate circumstances.
For this reason, the Family Services Center employed a budget counselor to advise the sailors on methods of living within their means. The counselor assisted them in applying for food stamps, welfare, and other benefits. Spouses were assisted in finding jobs. General information on where to shop and what to purchase to stay within family budgets was offered. In order to reach a larger population of enlisted people, the budget counselor was tasked with writing a weekly column in "Hawaii Navy News" (HNN), a newspaper with a circulation of about 18,000 readers, on how to economize with daily living expenses.
The budget counselor was the wife of a Navy captain, and her newspaper columns began drifting off course, becoming more like "Hints from Heloise" for senior officers' wives. It was my unfortunate duty to get her back on track.
The Command Master Chief, a Master Chief Hartford, whose job it was to look after the well-being of the sailors assigned to our command, finally invited my attention to a column Carol had written on how to create a floral centerpiece for one’s formal dinners of eight to twelve people. This was great for admirals’ wives, but not in any way helpful to sailors on welfare.
I invited Carol in and discussed changing the focus back on helping the sailors. She agreed to do so. Sure enough, her next column was how to economize by buying beef by the whole carcass! On the face of it this was ludicrous, but, looking into it, I found that you could, indeed, save money on the cost per pound of beef buying it that way, but you ended up paying much more money for the butchering and cold storage of the beef. It was basically a popular scam at that time in Hawaii. If you were a rich Hawaiian with a big freezer and planning a big luau, maybe, just maybe, buying beef by the whole carcass was a good idea.
I didn’t want to counsel Carol again, so I found a better way to make her see the errors of her ways. As Seaman Jonathan Swift, I wrote in to the editor of HNN:
Dear Editor,
As a seaman stationed here in Hawaii, I really appreciated Mrs. Seipel’s timely article on
saving money by buying beef by the whole carcass (June 6 issue).
My wife and kids and I are really suffering as we are not eligible for Rent Plus or quarters. Naturally, we are always looking for tips on making ends meet.
My question is, can food coupons be used to buy the carcass? Also, we don’t have a freezer, so we need to know how long it will last hanging in the living room of our studio apartment, which is not air-conditioned.
Keep up the good work, Mrs. Seipel! We are looking forward to your upcoming articles,
“How to economize by purchasing a new turbo-diesel Mercedes” and “Where to hide gold Krugerrands in your Navy housing.”
SN Jonathan Swift
When that letter was published in late June 1985 people rushed to get HNN at the newsstands. Livid at the “attack” on his wife, Captain Seipel rushed to the Commander In Chief, U.S, Pacific Fleet locator computer to track down Seaman Swift! On the night after the paper came out, one of the tall ships in Pearl Harbor for a port call, Chile’s La Esmeralda, had a reception on board for local military dignitaries. On board La Esmeralda all of the big shots and their wives were wondering who Seaman Swift was.
My boss, Captain Mike Clarity, the Naval Station Commander, was often asked, but he did not reveal my secret. My wife Marla and I got a kick out of the stir that letter caused. Every group that we approached was laughing and talking about nothing but the Swift letter – every group, that is, except Captain Seipel’s. The Seipels were not laughing.
The letter by Swift had received much support, but he had a relentless enemy in Captain Seipel, who used his position as Chief of Staff to Rear Admiral Conrad J. Rorie, Commander of the Naval Surface Group, Mid-Pacific, to force identification of Swift by those in the know. Admiral Rorie summoned Captain Clarity, Frank De Silva the editor of Hawaii Navy News, and me into his office.
He acted angry over the Swift letter and demanded that Mr. De Silva reveal who Swift really was. (That “Jonathan Swift” was now known to be a nom de plume represented great progress on the part of his staff, for the main frame computers were no longer being searched for the location of a real sailor. Someone, perhaps the staff “intelligence” officer, had clued them in on who the original Swift was.)
Frank began sweating bullets under the angry glare of the admiral. At that moment, I had no choice but to admit that I had written the letter as a humorous effort to get Carol’s columns back on track.
The admiral was not amused, and I was summarily chastised. I did not learn until recently that he had confided in Captain Clarity in private that he thought that the letter was hilarious, but that he had to support his chief of staff in public.
The funniest footnote occurred two weeks after the letter had been published. A Public Health Service doctor, a captain who was assigned to the Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard, called me, telling me he had to contact Seaman Swift right away. He told me he wanted to warn Swift that eating the un-refrigerated beef would be very dangerous. I resisted the urge to say that, alas, he had called too late. Jonathan Swift had died already – in 1745!
Since Frank De Silva had mentioned that the letter had aroused a great deal of interest in his paper, I offered to write a regular column for the paper under that pseudonym. He eagerly agreed.
He came up with the drawing of a sailor wearing a sailor’s white hat to head every column. The columns were entitled “Modest Proposals.” This was a tip of the hat to my inspiration, the real Jonathan Swift.
All of the Seaman Swift columns were inspired by A Modest Proposal: For Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland from Being a Burden to Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Publick [sic], a satirical pamphlet written by the cleric, Jonathan Swift, in 1729. Swift modestly proposed that poor Irish families sell their children to grace the dinner tables of rich English lords, thereby earning income for themselves and solving the melancholy problem of women begging in the streets, followed by their starving urchins.
“A Modest Proposal” was a scathing attack on the uncaring English landlords concerning the state of their tenants and on the economists’ schemes to raise income. Swift used the same language and style of calculations showing the financial benefits of his suggestion as the political economists of his time to support his argument, including recipes and serving suggestions for the children. He cited the authority of “a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London” who suggested that a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and “I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee or a ragout.”
I used the Seaman Swift column to attack the problems that I saw from around the Naval Station to around the globe. Although I used the same style of exaggerated irony and satire as the real Jonathan Swift, my ultimate undoing was failure to consider the lack of sophistication of some readers, some of whom had no concept of satire.
Despite the admiral’s scolding, I began writing the Swift columns. The first was triggered by the notorious Walker espionage case, where a naval officer had betrayed secrets to the Soviets. People were calling for his head, so Swift discussed the issue of capital punishment. Seaman Swift’s modest proposal was to create a fund to pay for the care and feeding of people on death row. Swift wrote that prisoners should be executed on a first-in, first out (FIFO) basis. If anyone objected to the death penalty, he or she could donate to a fund that would keep the condemned prisoners alive. The fund would grow if people felt murderers were wrongly convicted; however, heinous crimes would cause people to withhold money from the fund. The newspapers would publish periodically a Dow Jones of Death to show how the fund was doing. Prisoners’ needs would all be paid for from the fund. If this process caused stress, psychiatrists would provide counseling – paid for by the fund.
A single parent survey conducted in 1985 on the Pearl Harbor Naval Base, encompassing 32 separate commands, stimulated the next effort by Seaman Jonathan Swift. The survey had revealed that the tough American fighting man of the day was often a pregnant female or single parent. There was a culture developing on the naval base that because single parenthood no longer had any stigma attached, it was okay to have unprotected sex. This made running a naval base tough. For example, if half the sailors assigned to an activity were women, and fifteen percent of them were pregnant on limited duty (LIMDU), or on maternity leave, or Jonnie was sick etc., the tugboats that they were to maintain and operate could not get underway to do their work.
Swift admitted that he had become a single parent when his wife left him after his purchase of the whole carcass of beef, then hanging from his ceiling, had not only broken them financially, but also nearly poisoned them. He proposed that LIMDU sailors and single parents be housed in one barracks with a play area. The LIMDU’s and pregnant sailors could baby-sit for children of the single parents so that the single parents would be free to do their jobs. He felt that the 200 children living in this barracks would create a bedlam that would have the side benefit of encouraging birth control.
A few single parents wrote to the editor outraged at the satire. Just as the original Swift had deliberately used crude terminology normally associated with animal husbandry such as “a child just dropped from its dam may be supported by her milk for a solar year,” my humble efforts at imitation roused fierce anger for talking about kids as if they were “litters.” Fortunately, a large group of supporters who were more “hip” developed. Their letters to the editor explained satire and its function to the thicker readers. One, who wrote that the column was outrageously funny, said that it takes making people a little mad to get them started thinking about these issues. The paper jokingly established a Satire Crisis Hotline for people to call if they were upset about Swift’s columns. Many people actually called the number to vent or to be comforted.
At a charity carnival, a dunk tank with Seaman Swift (me) as the dunkee was very popular. A pet peeve of mine as XO of NAVSTA was that sailors would claim knee injuries to avoid duty on ships. Then they would walk around the base doing nothing but twirling their canes to thumb their noses at the Navy. Swift’s next column began with an Editor’s note: “SN Swift, claiming a knee injury, is now a LIMDU (limited duty) “worker” on a local staff. His job is to type ‘Readdressed and Returned’ endorsements on all letters from commands subordinate to his headquarters (This staff bureaucratic method of stonewalling requests from subordinate commands also infuriated me.). He spends half his off-duty time break dancing, bull riding, and playing basketball. He says his medical chit says only, “No shipboard duty, no climbing ladders, no prolonged standing, and no useful work.”
Since the ERA amendment had only recently failed to be ratified, Swift and his buddies, Yeoman (YN) Fuddy and Boatswain’s Mate Seaman (BMSN) Neanderthal, discussed the issue in the next column. Fuddy thought that there should be a More Than Equal Rights Amendment (MTERA) to codify what was the reality of the day, namely that women have more rights based on the fact that they control certain goods and services that men, by nature value highly. Under MTERA women would continue to control the majority of the wealth of the country because they live longer than their husbands, who die from stress. They would remain the majority of the electorate and would continue to get everything in divorce settlements.
BMSN Neanderthal disagreed, saying that what was needed was a Less Than Equal Rights Amendment (LTERA), for in all of history examples of great accomplishments by women were rarer than examples of women taller than Wilt Chamberlain or women stronger than Arnold Schwarzenegger. Since women were fundamentally inferior, Neanderthal reasoned that the amendment should only guarantee women fair and humane treatment. A man should not be allowed to beat a woman with a stick any thicker than his thumb, and, certainly, never without cause. He said, “A man should treat his woman with the same love and respect that she deserves as one of his prized possessions, like his car or his dog.”
Swift, himself, favored a Combination Rights Amendment (CRA) that recognizes our gratitude to women, who, at great pain and suffering, are our mothers. Under CRA, women would be free to do anything a man can do, no holds barred. If she fails, she should be free to say, “After all, I’m only a woman!”
During that summer every issue of HNN had a “Modest Proposals” column. Swift dealt with two major subjects of great interest with one column. He felt nuclear winter could cure the greenhouse effect in global warming. There were many places where nuclear explosions would lift dust into the upper atmosphere and block the sun’s rays. He suggested controlling global warming by periodically blowing up places like Libya, Iraq, Iran, North Korea, etc.
Of greater importance than global warming was the crisis that occurred when the Coca Cola Company changed their formula. Swift told how this crisis put BMSN Neanderthal, who stubbornly refused to drink the new concoction, in the military hospital due to excessive loss of body fat (he dropped to 36%). Everything turned out fine though, when Coke Classic was created in the nick of time to save him.
In another column Swift used satire to resolve a problem at the main gate of the naval station. Drunken sailors were always picking fights with the Marine guards. This ruined expensive dress uniforms of the Marines and put sailors in the hospital and in front of courts-martial. Swift talked about how, as a computer whiz, he was going against the mainstream of folks working on artificial intelligence (AI). Swift was working, instead, on artificial stupidity systems (ASS). Swift’s computer, for example,when asked to do something, would respond, “Who, Me?” His computer, while being brought on base in the back of a pickup truck, began mouthing off to the Marine guard in exactly the same manner as many sailors had done recently. Brouhaha ensued. Swift concluded the account of the incident by saying that there was no need for artificial stupidity because there was already plenty of the real stuff around. He recognized that part of the problem was the immaturity of the sailors, and he modestly proposed that only people over forty be recruited.
Swift ridiculed smokers’ ridiculous efforts to use cigarettes to look cool. He also attacked the problem of obesity and lack of fitness. He had a column on the trade problems with Asia, bemoaning the fact that even baseball was becoming as American as “Akiko’s Appuru Pie.”
By popular demand of readers, Swift returned from a long lull in writing to attack Senator Nunn of Georgia for suggesting that service members (like the traitor Walker) got involved in spying because the military overemphasized pay and allowances. Swift excoriated Nunn and modestly proposed that pay and allowance be inversely related to access to classified information. This was the logical meaning of what Nunn had said, “They sell secrets because we pay them too much.”
Swift therefore proposed that admirals, who receive daily briefings on the most highly classified information, receive the current pay of seamen. Sure, they would have to supplement their income by selling Amway products door-to-door, but our secrets would be safe. Seaman Swift, who had no access to classified information, would be paid as admirals had been. One of the ironies of this Swift column was that my cousin, Bob Bell, was then the senior staffer on Senator Nunn’s Armed Services Committee. I soon received a nice letter from Senator Nunn and one from my cousin with the usual “taken out of context/ misquoted” BS.
The column petered out after that because the Base Commander, Rear Admiral Robert Reiman insisted that he edit (read “censor”) the controversial column in advance of printing. That killed my spirit. I stopped writing. The editor of HNN began receiving letters asking what had happened to SN Jonathan Swift’s column. Frank responded that Swift had been very busy lately. “Like many creative talents, he is extremely sensitive and moody.” He asked readers to be patient and hope that Swift would again be inspired to offer more insights.
Swift’s final effort came in the winter of 1986, after a prolonged period of silence. There was an event that, admiral or no admiral, Swift could not let pass un-satirized. Two politically controversial foreign activities conducted by the Reagan administration: the arming of Nicaraguan “freedom fighters” (the Contras) after Congress had banned such aid, and the selling of weapons to the government of Iran in order to secure the release of U.S. citizens held hostage in Lebanon. Press reports on the Iranian operation in November 1986 had linked the two activities, when a Justice Department review turned up evidence that millions of dollars in profits from the sale of arms to Iran had been diverted to fund the Contra rebels. The revelations mushroomed into the greatest U.S. political scandal since Watergate, raising constitutional, legal, and ethical issues concerning the congressional role in foreign policy and the conduct of administration officials.
Seaman Jonathan Swift dealt with the Iran Contra Scandal by confessing his part in it to a reporter in an interview. Unfortunately, Rear Admiral Reimann censored the draft column so heavily that it was not worth the effort to rewrite it into something coherent and still funny. I admit I did cross the line for what an officer and a gentleman should say; however, this was lowly Seaman Swift writing!
Swift claimed in the interview that he had run the coffee mess for the National Security Council. To please his superiors, Swift had dealt directly with Juan Valdez because Major Ollie North and Admiral Poindexter wanted the ‘reecheest’ kind of mountain grown coffee. Juan’s burro trains of Colombian coffee had to pass through Nicaragua en route to Washington. Because of the fighting there, Juan literally lost his ass (RADM Reimann thought that in bad taste). Swift bought and sold arms from moderate Iranians to aid Juan and free hostages in Lebanon. The reporter interviewing Swift asked how Swift knew which Iranians were “moderate.” Swift replied that you could tell by their faces. For example, everyone would agree that the “Ayatollah was fully Shiite” (RADM Reimann thought that in bad taste). As you could tell by looking at him, he was “Shiite-faced” (RADM Reimann thought that in bad taste). I gave up writing the column entirely after that.
Alas, SeamanJonathan Swift had died!