Dale Scherfling
Dale Scherfling
Dale Scherfling is a fulltime writer/poet, creative writing instructor, and retired U.S. Navy photojournalist. A former newspaper sportswriter, editor, and photographer, he is the recipient of three U.S. Army Front Page Journalism Awards. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in publications including Chiron Review, Close to the Bone, Yellow Mama, San Diego Poetry Annual, Monterey Poetry Review, and Mangrove Review, among others. He has more than one-hundred accepted publications across literary journals and magazines.
navy Chow
All my life I heard war stories from my dad, uncles, and their friends—infantrymen all. Their advice was simple: Join the Navy. Four hots and a cot.
They’d describe K-rations like punishment, or worse, sitting in a jungle foxhole with bombs bursting overhead and centipedes crawling over your boots in the tropical heat. The draft was still alive then; sooner or later we knew we’d be wearing somebody’s uniform. World War II and Korea weren’t history to us—they were the family soundtrack. So I joined up and chose the Navy.
And like every recruit, I hated it.
Great Lakes in March was a kind of sanctioned cruelty. Company commanders and aides lived to scream in your face. Clothing issues were incomplete. Winter gloves were “on back order,” followed immediately by, “Get your hands out of those pockets, now!”
After being battered from stem to stern, port and starboard, I found myself in a pre-dawn chow line, shuffling toward my first Navy meal in hip-hop work shoes and oversized dungarees. The mess hall radiators hissed like they were boiling alive—ancient WWII iron pumping out steam through sweating pipes that ran along the walls like overworked arteries. The place smelled of scorched grease, wet wool, and whatever the boilers were burning to stay upright. The nonstop cooking made a heavy fog of heat—eggs, burnt toast, something fried into geological strata—and the clatter was almost deafening until, much later, you learned to take it for granted the way prisoners get used to chains.
Before I could think about food, the barrage began.
“Hold that tray here, sailor!” “Get that tray out of my face!” “Move it! Hurry, hurry, hurry!”
Shoved and spun in a sea of clattering utensils and voices pitched two octaves above human, I staggered to a seat and took inventory. On my battered tray sat a bowl of dry cereal, a glass of water, and a fork.
Across the room, the milk station was guarded like a war prize. Mess hall staff screamed at recruits who milled about in confusion. A few feet away, others were catching hell for trying to dump uneaten food. Going there wasn’t an option.
So I made do—cereal soaked in water, eaten with a fork, my first Navy meal —and found myself longing for a foxhole somewhere warm, wet, crawling with creatures, and still preferable to this circus. At least in a foxhole nobody yelled at you for wanting milk. Centipedes didn’t scream; they just minded their own business.
I slipped into survival mode, reconnoitering the layout, learning the routines, planning wiser choices for future meals.
And grabbed an apple on the way out.