is one step in the Navy's great campaign of preventive medicine.
Aboard ship every man of the crew is needed all of the time. If half a dozen of them are on the sick list due to food poisoning or some other illness resulting from neglect and insanitary living conditions, their work must be divided among the other men.
The Medical Department of the Navy is officially pledged: "To keep as many men at as many guns as many days as possible."
In addition to the three messes a day which are now served cafeteria style on all ships, and at which a man can have as much of anything as he wants, each ship has its "gedunk" stand. This is the canteen where the men buy ice cream, soft drinks, candy, sweet cakes, cigarettes, et cetera. To their 4,000 daily calories of Navy ration the lads frequently add 6,000 calories from the gedunk stand. Considering the unholy combination of sweets they stuff themselves with, between watches, it is extraordinary there aren't more cases of illness than there are. At all times, and in all places in the ship, pots of Java are brewing. A seaman will stuff himself at the gedunk stand before going on watch, drink several cups of scalding-hot coffee, and at the end of his four hours' duty take another cup or two of coffee before turning in to his hammock, to sleep like a baby.
At Panama and in all the ports of Central America and the West Indies, the bumboats are a familiar and welcome sight. Tempting, indeed, are the pineapples, mangoes, and fresh coconuts which they carry. In the West Indies it used to be the custom for the bumboat men to drill holes in coconuts, empty out the milk, and fill the shells with good Haitian rum. Those coconuts were greatly in demand among sailors who had been in those waters before. They would drain the liquor from the nut in a long pull. "Sucking the monkey," we called it. Every junior Line officer has gone through the experience of suddenly finding some of his men, who seemed to have been innocently enjoying a few drinks of coconut milk, staggering around about the deck, dead drunk!
