To DMS wherever you are...Thanks

This as you may have already guessed is a two Piso note from the Philippines.




Altogether not really amazing on its own, the story of how it came into my possession is what I can only compare to divine intervention with a little blind luck thrown in for good measure.




I like so many other young American boys had the amazingly brilliant idea of joining the Navy. Now to be completly honest with you, school was never really my cup of tea. My father had been in the Navy, as had my sister, and numerous other distant relations that i did not know. So after graduating high school but what can only be considered the skin of my teeth, I was off to boot camp. I want to make it clear before we go any further that I joined the Navy with full enthusiasm and it was something that I wanted do to and to this day still believe it was a great choice. It was during my time in the Navy that I was stationed aboard the U.S.S. Enterprise.

And like all Navy ships do we went out to sea...for seven months. It was only supposed to be six, but there just happened to be a little hitch in that plan, "Operation Enduring Freedom". It was during this time out to sea that a few of my shipmates and I were chosen to help clean out our berthing (for those of you who are nautically challenged, thats the place we slept). It would be a good idea for me to back track a bit here so that you can really grasp how interesting this story is. The Enterprise is now stationed in Norfolk Va, however years before it was stationed on the west coast. Just give me some time and you will see why that's important. During our time out the majority of the crew worked for twelve hours on, and than had twelve hours off. By the end of the seven months we were all getting very board, and more than a little anxious to be home with our loved ones. In my case starting the day before I left i had been emailing, and calling a certain young woman who I had become totally infatuated with. ( and yes we could even make phone calls back to the states from out there, it just cost us a dollar a minute). It was a living remake of the Bill Murry Movie, Ground Hogs Day. So Now we come to it, a group of us in the berthing. Not a single one of thinking about what we were really doing; instead we had our minds on things like a warm hot dog at the ball game, seeing our families, having a day off. No one was talking, we didn't need to. We had said everything that we could have ever wanted to say to each other over the last six months. Instead we all stood in silence, staring of into space. The silence hung in the thick hot air full of thoughts. It was as if you could reach out and feel the thoughts of the guy next to you. We wanted to go home. In my work induced trance of all that i missed, I was slowly wiping out the inside of a foot locker. As i was wiping, I came to a small lip on the inside of the locker, and was pulled out of my trance as my fingers caught hold of something that didn't belong there. It was just sitting on the lip tucked away out of sight. It was a roll of tightly bound notes, much like the one above. On every single note this was written.

CVN-65 is the hull number for the Enterprise. DMS would have been someones' initials, and the last part, FEB 27 83 is of course the date. That would mean that those rolled up notes had been sitting there untouched since 1983, when the ship was stationed on the west coast and would have made trips to the Philippines. On a ship of five thousand people this small thing had been undisturbed for almost twenty years until i blindly found it. I called the others over to see what I had stumbled across, they too felt an instant connection to that brother sailor who had been in our shoes. Who ever it had been must have meant to take the money, or to spend it and had simply forgot it was ever there. It was an odd feeling, almost like that old sailor had secretly been watching over us and all the others since. We each took one of the bills and went back to cleaning. later when no one was watching i took the remaining bills neatly rolled them back up, put the rubber band back on and gently placed it back where I had found it. Those bills had sat there for years and would continue to sit there long after I was gone, Forever a reminder that DMS had been there.