[Sailor Steve]

Not a joke, per se, but a true story.

When my ship got back from Vietnam, my girlfriend was driven to meet me by a friend of hers (also female). There was the usual 'welcome home' stuff - much hugging and kissing. I then gave them a tour of the ship. At one point my girlfriend's friend asked me "What's that big box up there?".

I answered "That's the ASROC housing."

"What's ASROC?"

"Anti-Submarine Rocket." I replied.

"What's an Anti-Submarine Rocket?" She asked.

I was about to give a straight answer when I suddenly thought of a joke I had read as a kid, about submarines and anti-aircraft guns. It was easy to change it in my head, so I told her "We have on board a group of specialists known as the 'Green Paint' Division. When we're driving over a suspected enemy submarine we dump a thousand gallons of green paint in the water. Then we go a couple of miles away and turn our engines off. The submarine thinks we've gone, and comes up for a look around. When he puts his periscope up it gets coated with green paint, and, thinking he's still under water, he keeps coming up. We wait until he's about a thousand feet in the air, and then we shoot him down with an Anti-Submarine Rocket!"

My girlfriend, being a good BS sniffer, was just shaking her head, but her friend actually looked at me with wide eyes and said "Really?"

And that, friends, is my really true-life ASROC story.