A while back, I told you about my friend David Pingenot, who, in the late 1960s, left his small Iowa farm town seeking a wider view of the world by enlisting in the Navy. I talked to him again recently, and he laughed even before he started telling me this story. He told me, “This is one of the highlights of my Navy career.”
When he was a junior enlisted sailor, he was stationed on Grand Turk Island, about 140 miles north of the Dominican Republic. The Navy facility there had about 100 enlisted men and 15 officers operating a then-classified Sound Surveillance System using passive sonar to track Soviet submarines in the North Atlantic.
On the base was an enlisted club, and behind the club lived a donkey named Folly. “Folly was very tame,” Pingenot told me. “But she liked Budweiser. She thought that was the greatest s*** in the world. Pop a can, and she’d just swallow it down.”
Folly can be forgiven for her taste in beer. She had no money of her own, and options were limited. She had to take what the sailors were willing to pour into her mouth.
The weather on Grand Turk Island was very nice, with temperatures in the 80s all year round, facilitating an outdoor theater. At 1900, they’d show movies on a big screen. Enlisted men sat on benches near the front, and officers used chairs on a platform in the back. “One night, we were sitting there watching this movie. We heard this awful braying sound. Here comes Folly, drunker than hell, running through the theater,” Pingenot said. “She was drunk out of her mind. She was running, staggering every step, three to the left, then five to the right. She went right through the middle of the theater.” Men scrambled out of the way; chairs went flying. The movie was stopped until Folly ran off and order was restored.
And so the tale may have ended. But as any hard-drinking sailor or sailor’s donkey knows, there’s got to be a morning after.
The base commander held the rank of lieutenant commander, a solid, reasonable man who maintained his calm dignity in the finest tradition of the service. But early on the day after Folly interrupted the movie, he might have been forgiven for a lapse in his professional military bearing. “Get this f***ing donkey out here!” His shout echoed throughout the base. “She’s s***ing and pissing all over my floor!”
Poor Folly. That donkey had somehow staggered into the CO’s quarters and passed out on his living room floor. There she vomited and otherwise relieved herself. A truly terrible mess. Pingenot and his fellow junior enlisted men, not being the ones who had to clean it up, reacted with all due sympathy. “I was an E3 at the time, and us peasants were laughing our heads off.” He was still laughing, 50 years after the event, as he told me the story.
In the military, when something like this happens, the officers drop a series of orders in an attempt to prevent future occurrences. (You might be wondering what else “like this” could possibly happen, but you’d be surprised. Bringing you this inside look at the service is the mission of this column.) The CO promptly issued the decree, “Nobody will feed that donkey Budweiser ever again!”
Of course, this order was instantly obeyed. The sailors stopped giving the animal Budweiser. That’s how Folly discovered Miller.
MAGAZINE: STAFF SGT. MAC MCARTHUR
“He said Budweiser,” Pingenot said. “He didn’t say beer.” Solid junior enlisted logic.
David Pingenot served on Grand Turk for about a year, and when the time came for him to move on to his next duty station, Folly was still on Grand Turk Island, drinking away. “She was a fixture. She was the base mascot.”
Trent Reedy, author of several books including Enduring Freedom, served as a combat engineer in the Iowa Army 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.
