My disgrace: The day the music died

December 8th 1999:

I was on the boat that night, not really sure what I wanted to do. It was a Wednesday night and I had to work the next day so I couldn't do anything crazy. I had made friends with a couple of the new guys in my division on the boat. I was pretty sure one of them was very gay (Greene), the other one was just so cute and I figured he liked gay guys cuz I was gay and he knew and he still liked me and wanted to hang out (Romanowski). I ran into another friend of mine on the dock that I knew from the gay bars (Dustin) and he said we could all chill at his place that night if we wanted. So the four of us were off, we stocked up on liquor and movies, including a couple porno's, and went over to Dustin's house.

All in all the night went by pretty uneventful. Romanowski and I were just a couple gigglers and Dustin and Green were doing this weird whose-more-manly thing, also know as flirting. It was a fun night. When it became apparent that Green wasn't really a drinker, we picked him up and took him to Dustin's bedroom and put him to bed. The three of us stayed up for another hour or so and then finally we all went to bed. Dustin to his room to watch Greene and Romanowski and I into the other bedroom. Some time passed while we fooled around a bit and then Dustin came bursting in saying that Greene was having involuntary personal protein spills... all over his good sheets!!!

Dustin and I helped him up and put him directly into the shower. He still had his boxers on when we turned the water on him. He sobered up a little bit almost at once. When he was talking coherently we turned the water off and helped him out. He sat on the floor giggling, and asked for some dry underwear which Dustin ran to get. We helped him change and then all four of us went back to bed. The next morning the four of us got up with heads pounding. We all sat around the kitchen table and tried to eat something while giving a recap of the previous night. Greene and Dustin seemed to be getting on fantastically. They were touching knees under the table like you do with someone you like. After breakfast and what seemed like Greene and Dustin taking a long time to get dressed, we managed to make our way back to the boat. That is when everything exploded.


Greene was still drunk and he passed out as soon as we got back to the boat, missing the morning muster. When the chief heard that Greene was sleeping and that was why he missed muster he headed straight down to give him a good yelling at. Neither of them had come back by the time we were given our assignments and I figured that Greene had been yelled at and Chief had gone on to other things. I was doing my maintenance work in one of the main hallways inside the ship when the Chief Master at Arms (the cop of the boat, basically) approached me. He started asking me about this Dustin person that I had hung out with the night before. I asked why he wanted to know and he said in a rather loud voice, so that anyone else in the hallway would hear, that this Dustin person had raped Greene the previous night. When I told him that he most certainly did not, the MAA got even angrier. He started talking about Faggots and what happens to them in the military and then in accusing tones he said I had to tell him everything about what happened.

I had gotten pretty riled up during this tirade, and when he put it to me like he was ordering me to disclose not only who Dustin was but whether or not he was a faggot. I stood up straight, dwarfing him in the process, and said that he could go directly to hell and while he was there he could direct his ignorant illegal questions to my attorney. Then, while he was still in shock at being talked to that way, I turned and walked away from him. That day turned out to be an all around nightmare. At lunch instead of the usual time to eat and relax, our division officer forced us all to go on a mile and a half run. If you know me, you know that running is probably my least favorite thing in the world.

By the time we got back to the boat after the run everyone but the die hards were pretty exhausted. We all started walking toward the gangway to get back on the boat when our LT. said that we were going to do the same run again, right now. I turned back to him to see if I had heard him right, as did everyone. He was totally serious. So the division started filing back onto the pier to run again, with one exception. I was done running. I turned toward the boat and kept walking to the gangway. He called my name and I pretended that I didn't hear him. When I didn't respond he ran over to cut me off.

"Where are you going?" he asked

"To eat lunch" I responded, trying as hard as I could not to scream.

"We are doing this run again, right now. The entire division, and that includes you, so come on..."

"No."

"Excuse me?"

"The navy requirement is that I be able to run a mile and a half, which I just did. I am not skipping lunch, and I am not running another mile and a half."

"Yes, you are. That is an order. We are a team and we will do this as a team."

"Sir, you can go fuck yourself. It's not one for the navy and one for you. I am going back on the boat, eating lunch, and then going back to work."

If he had a response to that, I never heard it. That was when the MAA saw me on the pier and came running.

"Kroll, what the hell are you doing off the boat?"

"I was running with my division, why?"

"Because the Officer of the Deck has orders not to allow you to leave the boat. You need to come with me, right now."


So without another look back at my LT I walked to the gangway, onto the boat and down to the MAA's office. I had no idea what was going on now. He sat me down in his office doing his best Nazi impersonation, and started questioning me again. And again I told him that if he wanted to talk to me about legal matters he could consult my attorney for I had nothing to say to him. It felt good defying this man who seemed to think that he could do whatever the hell he wanted. For one brief moment I belonged to me again. We sat there in silence, him filling out papers, and me arms crossed waiting.

Finally he looked up at me and asked if I was going to tell him anything. I told him that Greene was lying through his teeth if he says he was raped. He asked if I had anything more substantial to say, and I said yeah, attorney. Then he picked up a stack of paperwork, stapled it and told me to follow him. We went down to the berthing that I called home and he asked me to take him to my rack and my locker. Once there he asked to see my seabag and when I got it out, he said "fill it".

"With what?" I asked

"All your belongings" he said. I looked at him in confusion and his reply was "as of today you are to be removed from this ship and placed under disciplinary restriction in the Transient Personnel Unit Disciplinary Barracks." What the fuck!!

So while people filed around in the berthing trying to figure out what was going on, I packed everything I owned into that seabag. When I was packed the MAA took me up to the quarterdeck and entered into the log book that Kroll had been disembarked from the USS Shiloh and was on temporary assignment to TPU Disciplinary Barracks.

It took me a few days to get my feet back on the ground. I was so thrown for a loop when it came to what to do. The first thing I did was go to the JAG office and get myself an attorney. I explained everything, carefully leaving out the part the morning after that looked like two lovers reliving the night before. NCIS came to question me, and again I told them they could speak to my attorney. It all got very tense. The rumor mill on the boat had started flying. The worst and most widely believed was that I raped Greene. So anytime I ran into someone from my boat I got an evil eye. When it was someone I considered a friend that gave me the cold shoulder I would be pissed and yell at them saying "Seriously? You think I raped that fuckwad? Him? If I could rape someone, why on earth would I have chosen him?" Not a very convincing argument I know, but it was all I could think of. I mean, he wasn't an attractive guy, to me at least.