Have you ever-

Have you ever been to the Burmuda Triangle?

I have. 

Three times.

My ship was stationed at Charleston, South Carolina, and we regularly sailed in the Carribean to the south and the mid-atlantic to the east.  Most of the time, it was just another uneventful, boring transit.  Being at sea could be crushingly dull – there is nothing out there but you and your ship and the people on it.  I found it totally ironic that our dungerees and chambrey shirts looks so much like the prison uniforms I’ve seen.  We saw the same tapes over and over and over.  I’ve seen Mel Gibson’s "Mad Max" 4000 times.  Almost, anyways.

Nothing happened the other two times I sailed through the Burmuda Triangle, but the third time was, like, spooky.

We had spent most of the month operating out of Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.  We were a new crew on a new ship, so we drilled for everything that might happen and some things that probably wouldn’t – but if they did, we’d know what to do.  As an engineer, I had to deal with all sorts of engineering faults with my divison, General Quarters drills, man over-board drills, fires, flooding- the whole nine yards.

We had been busy busy busy.  I was mostly concerned with keeping the ship underway, but our ship was armed too, and those guys had their drills to do too.

It was totally cool to watch ’em shoot a missle off my ship!  It was like, the biggest bottle rocket you ever saw, and it like, rocketed off the ship and into the clouds and was gone.  Wicked cool.  We had a 76mm gun too, an automatic that fired (got to see that too) up to 80 rounds a minute up to seven miles away.  I grabbed a pair of shell cases from that gun and gave them to my brother, along with a couple of the 20mm anti-aircraft gun shells I picked up.

The 20mm gun was the neatest, I thought.  It was totally automatic.  It had it’s own radar and guidance systems, and would lock onto a target and fire until the target wasn’t there any more.  It was a chain gun, a type of machine gun that fired up to 3000 rounds a minute.  Ever blown a short sharp note on a kazoo?  That’s what this gun sounded like when they fired it in short 80 – 100 round burts.  Buuuuurrrrpppp.  I watched it one time – they sent three targets at it, a couple of drones and a jet, and the gun swiveled this way and that and rattled it’s barrels (not loaded, of course, then) at the different targets as it figured out which was closer and thus the greater threat and "shot" it down.

It was the missle guys that fucked up this time though.  See, when they fire target drones at your ship, you are supposed to make a close miss and call it a hit.  Saves millions on drones.  Our guys nailed that drone dead center and dropped it in the drink.  Hit something hard enough, even if its with a target missle, and it falls down dead.

And you’re not supposed to do that.

We left Cuba under a cloud, as it were.  The Engineers?  We had performed well and gotten the ship an "E" to paint on it’s side, but those misslers were in the doghouse.  Officially. 

Unofficially, they were the ship’s heros.

We sailed into the Burmuda Triangle on our way back to Charleston.  Previously, there had been no problems – it was just another lonesome spot in the ocean, unremarkable.  Nowhere.

That time, all three gyroscopes on the ship spun wildly or didn’t read at all.  If it hadn’t been for the satellite navigation systems and the by-the-hand log the ships always keep, we would have not had a clue as to where we were.

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So yeah.  I’ve been to the Burmuda Triangle.

Where’s the wierdest place you’ve ever been?

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one last thing, at the moment my OD Plus membership expires next year on the 9th annniversary of wrecking my car.  I’m sorta superstitious and I’m kinda broke, so for now I’ll just do the OD Plus thing…but that lifetime gig sounds good too, elitist that I tend to be……

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