What Castro Was Smoking
Dec 30, 2011
We have received another posting from The Ensign™, who is still bobbing around out in the Pacific Ocean aboard the USS Ingraham. This time, he confesses to taking up a habit that mama sez will ruin the headliner and upholstery and even the plastic of the dashboard in his car. . . .
So I thought it would be cool to buy a box of really nice Cohiba cigars when I was in Panama. All the engineering officers were doing it, and they told me that they could get a better deal if more people got in on the purchase. So I decided to get a box for myself. The problem with this is that I don't really like cigars, and now I have a $120 box of eight-inch-long, super thick cigars. I have tried to be a man and smoke them, but I feel like I'm being punished for something. I have already given a couple of them away. And I traded the Chief Engineer two of them for his old LTJG shoulder boards. (I know it is a bit presumptuous of me to assume that I'll get promoted, but I like my odds.)
Even though I do not enjoy the actual smoking of said cigar, I do take pleasure in the act of smoking on a ship. Today I got off the reveille watch from two to seven in the morning, and although tired I began my day. I went to quarters, did an electrical safety walk-through of Radio division, ordered some parts for a broken coffee maker (this thing is HUGE and apparently has a lot of electrical components), emailed our shore engineer to coordinate some post-deployment electrical work, validated a bunch of jobs that my guys have written up that came back to me for grammatical errors (Yay! My English degree is slowly paying dividends...), ensured that some of my guys helped to secure the electrical power to a food storage freezer that needs to have work done, went to departmental training on the mess decks, and located a ground in the B phase. It was a standard day.
Anyways, after dinner, and a short nap, I went out to the weather decks (the designated smoke area) and lit up a cigar. Watching the sun dip below the horizon, and talking to smokers as they came and went, I couldn't help but laugh. Even though I felt like I was smoking a flaming cucumber, it was pretty cool to be out there. As the breeze whipped back my hair and rippled through my grease stained coveralls, as I tried not to embarrass myself by coughing amongst veteran smokers, and as I contemplated how small we humans are as the stars started to poke needle holes through the clouds, I couldn't help but laugh. This deployment, this job, it's kind of funny sometimes for no particular reason.
Well, I'm off to stand the evening watch and to try and come up with more excuses to give away my expensive cohiba cigars.