Remember the movie, "Ghostbusters"? Maybe you're too young, but there's a point where the giant Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man is raging through Manhattan, and Bill Murray says, "Hey, he's a sailor - get him drunk, get him laid, he'll be no problem."

That sounds like a literary trope, but this retired Navy man assures you it's well-founded in history. Thing is, when sailors hit port, it's not so much a *need* to get drunk and laid, but the feeling that we were *expected* to do so. Peer pressure, really, but backed up by literally millennia of tradition.

Sailors - at least American sailors - are not quite so bad now. When they hit port, the local bar girls' trade is not nearly as lucrative as before. What made the change? AIDS - the HIV epidemic.

Before then, when we left port, there was always a line outside of Sick Bay - this was the "clap line", where sailors stood waiting to get that *very* uncomfortable "short-arm exam" to see if that stuff dripping and staining their shorts was indeed gonorrhea (or at least that's what I heard - it never happened to me - honest! And we retired sailors never, ever lie).

But then we pulled in to Mombasa, Kenya, and a local English-language newspaper proclaimed, "25% of local prostitutes test positive for HIV!"

Beginning with that port visit, I never again saw (much less stood in) a clap line.

Anyway, the point is, sailors will likely always *want* to get drunk and laid in overseas ports (again, tradition), but they've been forced to change their ways in what is probably the only positive outcome of the HIV epidemic.