Beppu

 Beppu is a resort town in the south of Japan. It’s a family resort on the southern major island, Kyushu. It’s known for beaches, hot springs, hot mud baths and beautiful gardens, and in particular hundreds of Japanese Macaques (also known as Snow Monkeys). A little more than 50 years ago the destroyer I was on made a short visit to Beppu where we anchored off-shore and enjoyed shore leave. I had the shore patrol duty one night, and that was another story in itself, but I did have one day off to walk around and take in the sights. I was with 3 or 4 other officers from the ship.

   The usual distribution of officers on a destroyer is this: The skipper is a Commander (3 stripes), the Executive Officer is a Lieutenant Commander (2 ½ stripes), the department heads are Lieutenants (2 stripes), and the other officers are Lieutenants Junior Grade (1 ½ stripes) or Ensigns (1 stripe). The department heads usually have two or three assistants. I happened to be the Operations department head and also the senior Lieutenant although this was coincidence and meant that I made out the watch lists. The other Lieutenants and I worked together well and in general we treated our assistants with respect.

   The engineering department head (the Chief Engineer) was a good friend of mine; he had an assistant (LTJG) who considered himself the smartest and best. That was bad enough, and it was worse that he treated the enlisted men with disrespect. The Chief Engineer lectured him and tried to teach him by example, but couldn’t seem to make a dent.

   Now back to the story, where I was strolling around with a few other officers - including the Chief Engineer and his troublesome assistant whom I will refer to as “JG”. One of the attractions of Beppu was to watch the snow monkeys playing with each other and begging food from tourists. The very well behaved Japanese children would hold out a peanut, and a snow monkey would politely take it.

   JG for some unknown reason decided to irritate the monkeys. He would hold out a peanut and when a monkey reached out JG would pull the peanut back and laugh. The monkey would try again 2 or 3 times and JG would pull it back every time. Eventually the monkey would look dejected and give up. As I remember, it seemed that only the smaller and younger monkeys were the ones who were begging, and the older larger monkeys were just doing their own things. In the case of JG we observed an older larger monkey who had been watching. He came up to JG who was once again holding out a peanut. As JG pulled back the peanut, the big monkey was too fast for JG. The monkey grabbed JG’s hand and

bit both the peanut and JG’s fingers; then slowly walked away. JG’s first finger was bitten to the bone. If the big monkey had bitten a little harder he would have severed the finger.

   We had no first aid equipment, so we tied his finger with a handkerchief and headed back to the ship. We took him to our duty hospital corpsman and explained what had happened. The corpsman shook his head and said something about really serious results getting into JG’s bloodstream, and he prescribed a series of shots. The Chief Engineer and I observed the first shot, which required exposing JG’s bare butt. The corpsman clearly used the largest needle he had, and I’m pretty sure he was smiling as he injected the “magic serum”. He then told JG that he had to have a shot every day for at least a week, and then they could determine if more were needed.

   Word spread through the ship practically instantaneously, and for the remainder of the cruise JG was subdued. A few weeks later the word spread through the ship that the corpsman could have treated the wound with some antibiotic pills, but he just happened to be out of them.