A couple of years ago, I told you about my friend Tim Perkins who grew up in North Dakota and enlisted in the Navy in 1993 at age 19. Serving aboard the carrier USS Nimitz, Perkins was soon far from those frozen, North Dakotan fields and off to see the world.
Deployed sailors worked long shifts for weeks, so they were excited to go ashore for port calls. As the Nimitz docked in Singapore, the word came down the chain of command: A Russian ship had docked, and Russian sailors were on shore leave. The Soviet Union had fallen less than two years earlier. These American sailors had grown up and trained for service during the Cold War.
AN AFGHANISTAN WAR VETERAN REVIEWS THE COVENANT
“The Russians might want to rumble,” the Nimitz leadership warned. “Just walk away.”
When thousands of Nimitz sailors were released on that 1993 day for recreation ashore, the scene on the pier was chaotic, a situation exacerbated by the presence of at least hundreds of Russian sailors waiting for the Americans.
But Seaman Apprentice Perkins and the other Americans soon realized the Russians didn’t want a fight. They wanted a party! Many of them carried bottles of vodka, already drinking. “We can be friends now!” shouted one Russian.
Carts selling beer, soda, and other treats were all over the pier. Perkins’s fellow sailor Paul Fowler had purchased a can of Coke. When a Russian offered him some vodka, Fowler thanked him and poured some into his soda.
“Nyet!” the Russians shouted. They thought a real man drank vodka straight.
Fowler wasn’t about to let these former rivals impugn the honor and fortitude of a real American sailor. After all, America had won the Cold War. Fowler took a deep slug of vodka, coughed a little, and blew out against the burn.
“What do you think, Perkins?” asked Fowler. “Should we party with these guys?”
Tim Perkins may have been young and inexperienced, but he knew enough to sense trouble with these former red comrades. “Never try to outdrink a Russian,” Perkins told me. “Especially not with vodka.”
Perkins headed for the comforting familiarity of the local Hard Rock Cafe, where there was a waiter named Michael Fay, who would become famous the following year for receiving a sentence of prison and caning after pleading guilty to vandalism charges. Perhaps the harshness of Fay’s sentence was due, in part, to the authorities in Singapore being weary of misbehaving Americans.
The night did not go well for Perkins’s friend Seaman Apprentice Fowler. Fowler and his vodka-laden comrades were drunk and rowdy in a club. When the police arrived, Fowler and the Russians decided to fight. “But it was Asia,” Perkins said. “They don’t run out of people.”
Eventually, a mass of police beat down and locked up Fowler and the Russians. So began a weeklong negotiation for Fowler’s release. The Nimitz had to carry on her mission and left port. Eventually, an aircraft had to be sent back to retrieve Fowler. He returned to the ship wearing only the underwear he’d worn on the night of his arrest. His nose was broken, hooked to the side. He served some time in the Nimitz brig and was confined to the ship for the duration of the deployment.
The Russians who were arrested with Fowler? They were released almost at once. Rumor had it, the Russian captain had threatened to shell the city. Was this true? We’ll never know, and it ultimately doesn’t matter. In the military, the rumor is often more powerful than truth.
“The point is,” Perkins told me, talking vodka and international conflict, “if you want to party with Russians, you better know how to party, and we Americans don’t. Russia and other countries don’t care about our strongly worded statements.” He sometimes wishes America would choose, as Perkins did that night in 1993, to stay out of troublesome international situations. Failing that, he said, America must be strong enough to act decisively.
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Trent Reedy, author of several books including Enduring Freedom, served as a combat engineer in the Iowa National Guard from 1999 to 2005, including a tour of duty in Afghanistan.
*Some names and call signs in this story may have been changed due to operational security or privacy concerns.
