Assault and Battery

I was in Seattle in 1978, still wet behind the ears and had not started drinking. By the way, I do not drink now, but seem to talk a lot about when I did. Seattle was to be the jumping off point for an around the world cruise on a destroyer. I was pretty excited about it.

We had about a month to goof off because the ship was undergoing repairs. We worked all day, but at night were free to go out. One night four of us went to the small China town in downtown to a theatre to watch kung fu movies. It was an all night slugfest. We sat there from about 4pm until 3am and watched one movie after the other. It was all in Chinese, and we could not understand a word, but hey, who cared? Well, at some point even Bruce Lee has to eat, so we stepped out and headed for a store. A sack full of burritos and a 12 pack of beer seemed like a good idea, so that’s what we had.

We stood in the alley in a bad part of town and gobbled down the burritos and drank the beer. Only one of us was old enough or experienced enough to be drinking in the first place. Our young eyes watched our surroundings carefully while we ate and drank hurriedly. No one said it, but each of us secretly hoped we would be attacked. We had just watched several hours of violence, and believed ourselves to be supermen. After a few beers and burritos, we were probably as close to it as we had ever been. With the buzz, only a novice drinker can get out of two or three beers, we decided to walk the ten miles back to the boat instead of getting a cab.

We moved through the roughest part of the city at 4am, openly dragging for someone to mug us. We talked excitedly as we moved along and indeed we were strung pretty tightly. I believed then, and I believe now, we could have given a street gang a run for their money. We were fresh out of boot camp and I had been taking karate for a couple of years before joining. The city moved on as we passed through it and soon we were on the waterfront, which was pretty much deserted at that time of night. We felt cheated as we moved along. Fighting each other was about all we had left and we weren’t going to do that. We had just walked through the roughest part of town, the part you would never walk through at night, unmolested.

Our buzz was just starting to wear off a little when the guy in front, Judd was his name, he was short, redheaded and from New York City. He was the oldest and meanest of the four of us. He jumped up and placed a perfect roundhouse kick right to the head of a telephone pole. I have no idea what the pole did to provoke him, but he sure picked the wrong one to mess with. Instantly the four of us attacked the pole. We put up an admirable fight for what must have been 15 minutes, kicking and punching this poor pole, trying to beat it into submission. At some point, we heard something and looked across the road. There was the coast guard base and at the gate sat a little glass shack with two Coast Guard guys in it. They were laughing so hard they were rolling around on the road outside of the building.

Feeling pretty stupid, we moved off toward the ship assessing our wounds. We had tar all over our clothes, cuts and bruises all over our legs and fists. Somehow one of us had gotten, the start of a pretty solid black eye from the encounter and another had a broken nose. The pole had been tougher than we thought. We nearly made it to the ship before the Seattle police picked us up. I guess we weren’t too hard to spot; the pole had beaten us up pretty badly. We were not drunk and had only hurt ourselves, but the officers had no sense of humor. Standing on the quarterdeck of our ship they arrested us for assault and battery.

It seemed no one in Seattle had a sense of humor, because they pushed it for two weeks before a judge threw it out. We were released to leave on the ship when it pulled out. All charges were dropped, but we left the courtroom with a stern warning to never assault a telephone pole in Seattle again. I never have, I cannot speak for the others.