Word: sailorful
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...food production dropped by more than 2%. Nixon's chosen executor of this policy, Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz, performed zealously. "You won't get me to apologize for high meat prices," Butz told North Dakota wheat growers last year. "I'm spending money like a drunken sailor...
...country" for about a week when I saw my first American dead. It was a bright, sunny afternoon on a branch of the muddy Mekong. I was on one of the Navy's small converted landing craft used as staging points in the watery interior. Suddenly a sailor casually noted, "There's a floater off the stern. Hell, where's the boat hook...
...against some forgotten bit of swamp. Almost in shock, I helped drag the corpse on board and into a body bag. The only other corpse I had ever seen was that of a distant and elderly relative in an open-casket funeral service in Virginia. The nonchalance of the sailor was almost as dissonant as the confrontation with the dead man. I soon learned that in war it was the only reaction one could afford...
...replaced Owen Oberg, a popular commanding officer who was given to moving among his crew and not above on occasion going over the side of the ship in a bosun's chair to wield a symbolic chip hammer. "He treated everyone as a minority of one," explained one sailor. Oberg had a way of sympathizing with the crew even when passing out an unpopular order, like the frequent extensions to the ship's tour of duty off the coast of Viet Nam. Recalled one crew member: "Ob would say, 'Hey, we're going back...
Noting that men were more important than hardware, Zumwalt issued a series of broad commands, know to the sailors as "Z-grams." Zumwalt himself called them "people programs," his personal attempt to humanize a service soured by the war in Vietnam. Z-gram number 57 stated that "Mickey Mouse" regulations that are "demeaning and debasing" must go. Another announced a back-room deal Zumwalt made with the Pentagon diverting $40 million from the equipment budget for the construction of homes for servicemen. Zumwalt also ordered that no sailor should ever wait in line more than 15 minutes for anything. Other...