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One of the most fascinating things I did in the Navy was to land with the Marines a couple of times, as a fire control spotter.

This one time we landed on the Akrotiri Peninsula that defines Soudha Bay on the island of Crete. I was Petty Officer in Charge of a small contingent of sailors from our ship, part of a much larger landing party charged with being Beach Master, Supply, and Fire Control, all under command of an officer off of one of the other ships.

We transferred to an assault boat from our ship's boat, which was an adventure in itself, and two of my party immediately became seasick - the way a boat bounces around is very different from the way a destroyer does.

The landing itself was pretty much uneventful, not quite a walk in the park, but not far off. Our fire control party was assigned to the top of a ridge on the right flank of the beachhead and off we went armed with various small arms and a radio. We served dual duty, intended both as spotters during the shooting and as right flank pickets in adjunct to the Marines (yeah right!) who let us know that we were not really needed.

We set up our little camp and, not having much to do until we were required to spot, we decided to rustle up a meal. Anyone who has ever eaten military field rations can appreciate that our meal was a little disappointing compared to the fare that we were used to aboard ship, so some effort was made to enhance our meal with some of the abundant game present.

Actually, there wasn't much in the way of abundant game, but there were some scrawny chickens running around that we assumed were wild.

We posted an armed guard, a young kid who had grown up in the Jewish enclave of Brooklyn, NY without ever traveling more than a few blocks from home, and armed with his favorite gun, an M1A1 Thompson submachine gun. In the manner of such things, we had tagged this young lad "Wacky" based on his surname, and everyone knew him by that nickname, even people who didn't know his real name.

There was a merry chase going on, a couple of guys had cornered one of the chickens and were attempting to capture it, without getting too badly bitten - mean birds! The chase took the bird past our hapless lookout, who had probably never seen a live chicken before in his life, and the merry chasers yelled to the lookout "Wacky, kill the bird, kill the bird" at which point Wacky lowered his Thompson and did so, instantly field stripping the bird.

There wasn't even enough left to cook.

The gunfire caused the entire beachhead to go on full alert, which made the beachmaster pretty mad and new regulations were published about "indiscriminate" gunfire during landing exercises.

Wacky claimed that he didn't know that .45ACPs would do that kind of thing to the bird.