Editors note: The following text contains content intended for mature audiences. If you are under 18 or anticipate feeling discomfort or offense, we respectfully urge you to discontinue reading. Given its potentially sensitive nature, this material may not align with everyone’s taste or values. We strongly advise that you do not read this and risk being offended. 

———-

It was my first time overseas, and the carrier pulled into Hong Kong, and I was kinda like Dorothy in Oz…we ain’t in Kansas anymore.

I still remember giving $5 cash to the Navy Federal rep so I could open up my account. Our shop chief made sure all the newbies got their accounts. To be honest, it’s a great bank. I still have the account all these years later, but I digress.

Back to the story.

Once pier side, like great US ambassadors of freedom, me and the guys skipped the cultural museum tour and headed to the local British pub keeping up the drunken sailor tradition.

I was going out with a hot MS (that’s the navy job or rather rating code for, “cook”) from Wyoming. She was a hot little brunette, and most of my friends were jealous I had a steady piece whenever we pulled into port.

I was a broke E4 at the time and didn’t have the money for a hotel room, so I was kinda frustrated as I was tired of pull-starting my unit for the last month at sea. But the reality of my banking account being smoking airplane wreckage was settling in. I had a few hundred to spend with the boys on beer, and that was about it. Like most junior military, by the 5th of each month, my paycheck had gone up in flames like a dumpster fire.