Gabby_ A Story of Courage and Hope - Alison Hanson [46]
The Merchant Marine Academy was a demanding institution with high academic standards. When my class of 350 midshipmen gathered together for the first time, we were given that old line “Look to your left. Look to your right. One of you won’t make it to graduation.” That turned out to be true.
I really buckled down when I was there and was near the top of my class academically. As a senior, I was named the regimental executive officer, which was the second-highest position in the military command structure among students. One of my duties was to oversee the indoctrination of the new midshipmen.
The first year was tough for them, along the lines of boot camp. My job as executive officer was to motivate them, to let them know what was expected, to hold them to high standards. My message was this: They were capable and smart, and if they followed instructions and worked hard, we’d all succeed together. (Decades later, I’d command the space shuttle using similar motivational tactics. And I’d spend countless hours reminding Gabby that, despite her injury, she was still capable and smart, and the harder she worked, the more she’d improve.)
What I loved best about the Merchant Marine Academy was that we were required to spend six months of our sophomore and junior years at sea aboard commercial ships. I made two trips through the North Atlantic on a container ship, carrying U.S. goods to Europe and then returning with European products for American consumers.
Long before I saw the world from space, I saw the world from these ships, and it was a great adventure—sort of like Gabby’s forays through Mexico. I worked diligently, but I still hadn’t shaken all of my juvenile-delinquent tendencies. One day, off the coast of Egypt, our ship was tied to a Saudi Arabian merchant ship so we could unload grain onto it. Late that night, the other midshipman at sea with me said, “I dare you to sneak onto that ship and steal the Saudi Arabian flag from the mast.”
“You’re on,” I replied. I climbed on the Saudi ship, carefully avoiding the crew member on watch on the bridge. I quietly walked behind the pilothouse and up the stairs that went to the mast. I lowered the flag, stuffed it in my shirt, and got the hell out of there as fast as I could.
I’m lucky I wasn’t caught, arrested, and sent off to Chop Chop Square in the Saudi capital, Riyadh, where public beheadings are conducted. They also cut off hands there, a bigger concern for a flag thief like me. (I kept that flag for years as a tangible keepsake of some of the idiotic things I did when I was young.)
On another ship, with twenty-five crew members, I made two trips through the Panama Canal to the west coast of South America. This was a six-hundred-foot-long “break-bulk” ship, which meant it carried cargo that needed to be loaded and unloaded individually, rather than in large freight containers. We’d head south with barrels of chemicals, a few cars, and someone’s grandmother’s junk in a trunk, and we’d return with a hold filled with bananas.
I learned how business was conducted in South America, at least back in the 1980s. The bananas could have been boxed up, put on large pallets, and loaded by crane onto our ship. That would have been quick and efficient. Instead, there’d be a string of guys loading two boxes at a time by hand, and it took forever. It was a way to keep more people employed, but it was maddening to watch. My experiences on those trips also taught me to always wash bananas. There weren’t necessarily restrooms on the docks, so workers would disappear into a stack of thousands of boxes of bananas to relieve themselves.
I had considered myself street-smart as a teen, but in