THE SHIP WITH THE FLAT TIRE

Flat Tire relates the misadventures of the U.S.S. Carnation, an Auxiliary Submarine Supportship (ASS-1), and of its farcical crew. The Carnation is a converted LST now used for delivering torpedoes to submarines at sea. As for the ardboard officers and crew, they make P.G. Wodehouse's characters seem Shakespearean in dimension and substance. There is, for instance, Commander Nord, who has fourteen children, each named after a ship type or naval station. His Executive officer is Lt. Albert Armageddon Schwetzbaum, whose consuming ambition is to create a public Image for the Carnation and take credit for the ship's Navy Bean Soup ecipe Contest. (Winner of the contest is Lt. (jg.) Allison, a peanut butter maniac, whose recipe includes of course...) Central figure is a Jack Lemmon-sign Pulver schnook named J. Roger Westbury, Ensign. The Carnation, whose missions may include transportation of space monkeys, is under threat of imminent decommission from the service. When the ship is finally ordered to cruise down the Carolinas, it has to head back to port because a rubber inner tube used as a substitute shock absorber for the clutch assembly blows flat. Well, it's all pretty lat.