When me and my mate were travelling around Australia in our early 20’s (both of us are Northern English, with unusual accents) we were trying to woo a couple of delightful ladies (limited success!) that were part of the crew of a US Navy aircraft carrier who were on shore leave whilst visiting Sydney.

They were loading and offloading crew at the Darling Harbour area of Sydney (there was lots of bars there) via tenders. Now there was hundreds of crew milling about as they had a curfew to get back onboard so they were all gathering waiting for the next tender.

At this point the Navy police (I don’t know what the proper name for them is, I’ll call them provosts) started to coral all these young men and women and started to process them onto the tenders. This is when we realised we had accidentally been herded into the pack, so me and my mate decided to make our farewells and disappear into the night for more dirty deeds elsewhere.

We managed to get about ten paces from the herd when we were manhandled to the floor by a group of burly Navy Provosts, who started aggressively demanding we hand over our ID and suggesting we’d been really stupid to blatantly disobey the curfew order, going ashore without ID and being too drunk to speak properly (we weren’t, we just had weird northern English accents).

Well we were both English, hadn’t done a single hour in any military service, and very much not part of the crew of an American aircraft carrier. We were cuffed with zip ties and led to a waiting tender when the officer in charge quickly realised that we were just a pair of drunk Brits looking for some tush in the wrong place at the wrong time and promptly released us.

That is my story of how I was captured by the US Navy!