"Crazy Navy"

Rutgers University professor Michael Aaron Rockland never intended to end up in the Navy.

Drafted in 1955, Rockland intended to enter the Army. But at the enlisting station at 39 Whitehall St. in Manhattan, all of that changed when he was ordered down to "Room D."

A "tough looking guy in army uniform with sergeant's stripes" came into the room where Rockland was one of about 100 men waiting around.

It was announced that 30 men were needed to enlist in the Navy, due to low enrollment numbers. They were given 30 seconds to decide.

"I thought of great, grey ships parting the waves, of seeing the world, of those thirteen button bell bottom pants that reportedly drove women wild," Rockland wrote. "I thought abvout how in the Navy there would be no dirty foxholes, no jungles, no crotch rot. Also, I had been on the swimming team in college. Water, the Navy, seemed like a more natural element to me than dirt and sand."

This story begins Rockland's "Crazy Navy", a memoir of his time spent in the Navy as a medical corpsman in a psychiatric hospital in Yokosuka, Japan.

Rockland worked for a year and a half as a young man in the ward, which bore the nickname "Blueberry Hill" named after the Fats Domino song played incessantly on a record player by one of the patients there, he said.

A professor with and founder of the Department of American Studies at Rutgers, Rockland has published a number of fiction and nonfiction books, including "Looking for America on the New Jersey Turnpike" with fellow professor Angus Gillespie and "Reminisces of Spain" which contains a chapter discussing the time he spent a day with Martin Luther King Jr. while serving as a cultural attache in Madrid.

Following his time with the Navy, Rockland served as a cultural attaché in Argentina and Spain, before becoming a longtime professor at Rutgers.

In the yet-to-be-published "Crazy Navy," Rockland writes of the historical and the bizarre colored with black humor, a book that he calls "Both humble and funny at the same time."

A corpsman in the hospital's locked down ward, Rockland dealt with seriously ill or dangerous Navy and Military patients, as well as gay men who were institutionalized, as homosexuality was considered a disease back then, Rockland said.

Tales of two murder attempts at the hands of patients and assisting with electroshock therapy given to the gay patients, a particular source of personal shame for Rockland, are a few of the anecdotes written about.

He is quick to say that his book is not meant to be representative of Navy practices as a whole - just his experience in the Navy.

While previewing some of the stories from the book at a Navy League meeting at Rutgers, Rockland told the room of Navy men and women that his account is not meant to be nostalgic or prideful. It is just an account of what was.

"You probably have some loyalty to and fond memories of the Navy. So let me say at once that I have neither. I did my time and that was it," he said.

Rockland said he never even "got on a ship," having been flown to Japan.

"So maybe I don't know what the real Navy is. But the book I am finishing up was my Navy," he said.

He said that the tales of the ward evoke memories of the book "One Flew Over the Cukoo's Nest, but is even "cukoo-ier".

Rockland wrote about a patient who he struck up a friendship with after being convinced the young man was "normal", but was fooled when the man ended up in a serious medical predicament after ingesting four razor blades at Rockland's request to "eat something."

"Working in the locked ward offered few pleasures. You wanted to occasionally feel you had made progress with a patient-you weren't just his "keeper," you'd made a difference," he wrote in a chapter entitled "The Gilette Kid."

"And if I could do that with Billy, who I liked so much-perhaps even set him on the road to getting out of Blueberry Hill-it would be especially satisfying."

For more information on Michael Aaron Rockland and "Crazy Navy" visit www.michaelrockland.com.