Becoming a Shellback: Crossing the Line on the USS Belleau Wood

Every sailor who has crossed the equator the hard way carries the same title for the rest of his life: Shellback. You don’t get it for showing up. You earn it in front of King Neptune himself, and nobody hands it to you easy.

On April 27, 1989, I crossed the line aboard the USS Belleau Wood (LHA-3), at Longitude 141° 19′ East, steaming south from Subic Bay in the Philippines on our way to Sydney, Australia. I was a seaman in Deck Department. By the end of that day, I was a Trusty Shellback of the Ancient Order of the Deep.

What a Shellback Is

In the Navy, there’s two kinds of sailors: those who have crossed the equator, and those who haven’t. If you haven’t, you’re a pollywog — a “wog,” the lowest form of life in Neptune’s ocean. The tradition goes back centuries, to the days of sail, when crossing the line was a real milestone on a ship. The pollywogs have to be presented to the court of Neptunus Rex, Ruler of the Raging Main, with his scribe Davy Jones, the Royal Baby, the Royal Barber, and the rest of his court — all played by Shellbacks who went through it before you and have been waiting their turn to pay it back.

The night before, Davy Jones comes aboard and delivers the summons. The next day is Wog Day, and the wogs get initiated through every miserable, hilarious ordeal the Shellbacks can dream up. Survive it, and you get presented to the King, washed clean, and issued your Shellback certificate — suitable for framing, and you’d better keep it, because if you can’t prove you’re a Shellback on your next crossing, you go through it all again.

How I Made Myself a Special Case

Most wogs had the sense to lay low. Not me.

A week or two before we crossed, I saw a couple of engineers walking the catwalk carrying a full section of fire hose. I knew exactly what they were up to. They were making shillelaghs — about a two-foot piece of fire hose, the first six inches tied off with line for a handle, soaked in salt water. In the days leading up to the crossing, the Shellbacks would beat those things on the decks just to intimidate us dirty, filthy wogs.

So I jumped them. I wrestled both of those engineers, got the hose away from them, and threw the whole section over the side.

That pissed them off properly, and it put a mark on me. I became what they call a special case — a wog singled out for extra attention on Wog Day.

Wog Day

I woke up that morning to chaos. The engineers busted into Deck Department’s berthing looking for their special cases, and I was at the top of the list.

They put eggs down the back of our pants and swatted us until they broke. They made us walk on our hands and knees with all our clothes turned backwards and our underwear pulled on outside our dungarees. Then they took us to a small room where they had “breakfast” waiting — green spaghetti, green pancakes, and green eggs. The whole time we were getting hit with shillelaghs, Shellbacks yelling and screaming, and siccing the wog dogs on us — special cases put on a leash and made to jump on the other wogs.

Then they took us up to the flight deck, where the regular initiation was going on. On our ship, if you didn’t want to participate, you didn’t have to — but you spent the day in the brig. I’d rather take the initiation.

So there I was, blowing water out of the pad eyes on the flight deck and calling for Flipper off the edge of the deck, my nose and face smothered in lard in the Royal Baby’s fat belly, getting stuffed into coffin-sized boxes filled with two weeks of mess deck scraps.

Over the Side

And when it was over — when we were Shellbacks — we threw all our clothes and boots over the side. Every stitch we’d crawled through that day in went into the ocean at the equator.

I still say there’s a big pile of Navy uniforms down there on the equator.

I lost my original Shellback certificate somewhere over the years, so the one at the top of this story is a faithful reproduction — same ship, same date, same longitude, straight out of the Belleau Wood’s WestPac ’89 cruise book. The paper can get lost. The title can’t. Once a Shellback, always a Shellback.

I’ve got a lot of Navy stories from those years. This is the first one I’m telling here — there’ll be more.

— Tattoo Mike