Some Highlights for the WAVES

One of the highlights of boot training happened off schedule. Our entire regiment assembled on the parade ground to observe the “dishonorable discharge” of a WAVE. I put that in quotation marks, for it wasn’t really a discharge at all, but just kicking out an underage kid who had crashed the party. Sixteen, we heard. The officer who had the duty ripped off the “U. S. Navy” strip from her bonnet and removed her jacket’s slide-in buttons, which showed an anchor on them, and handed the girl a small envelope of ordinary buttons she would have to sew on. I say this in a moment of time, but the ceremony lasted a good while. I never knew if the girl suspected what was up or not. She might have been totally surprised. But those of us who watched were so well entrenched in serving our country well that it was an extremely sad occasion. At least she was not in my platoon and I didn’t know her.

Another exciting time during boot was the week of “work detail.” Again everything happened in alphabetical order. The list of jobs lined up with the list of our names. The eight girls in my living quarters had the last initials of H, J, K, and L. Six got K-P, or kitchen detail. The one other L, by the name of Lewis, got Laundry. Want to take a guess at what I got with my L? Library! That deserves a whole row of exclamation points. How could I be so lucky! My roommates got up at 5:00, wore galoshes in the kitchen and the laundry while I could sleep in till 6:00. I didn’t sleep after they left, however, for fear that I might oversleep.

The girls never complained about working in such areas, so they must have had fun enough. I might complain (but I didn’t) that not a single WAVE came into the library to read anything or to get something to read. Of course not, who had the time for that? My days passed with my association with two persons, the Red Cross lady and the Padre, or Catholic Chaplain. Like me, they had time on their hands and we spent part of that conversing with each other.

We marched to meals, picked up our metal divided tray, stuffed our flatware in our pockets, held out the tray to be filled, rolled up our raincoat’s sleeves, ate in seventeen minutes even while talking, took our empty trays to a big trough where we dipped them and ran a long-handled brush over them, then placed them in the stack to go into a big electric dish washer. We individually moseyed back outside to get into platoon formation once more. In a tiny pocket at the top of our seersucker dresses we carried a lipstick. Standing in line, we served as each other’s mirrors to get the red on just right. Our pit stop was back at the barracks. We enjoyed life, even when it served us mutton.

♥