Why there are drawings of a cow god aboard the USS Wisconsin

NORFOLK

James Carroll was a fire controlman aboard the USS Wisconsin after the battleship returned from the Persian Gulf War and was awaiting decommissioning.

Even though the storied warship was preparing for retirement, Caroll and others in his unit had to continue training and carry out other daily tasks they didn't always believe made sense. It was frustrating, but they had to keep their complaints to themselves.

At least that's what others aboard the Wisconsin thought they did. While their bosses weren't around to listen, Carroll and others in his department mocked their orders by saying they were ordained from the "cow god."

"As the orders often seemed illogical, so it was that the Cow God was mysterious in his ways. We would drone in a worshiping manner 'yes master' and then go about performing the task required," Carroll wrote in an email.

The "cow god" is a reference to the golden calf from the Bible that Israelites fashioned into a god while Moses was away on a mountain. Eventually, sailors started making drawings of the "cow god" in protest. The drawing was based off a prop that a punk rock band in California used during a concert.

Art on the USS Wisconsin — A cow god is shown on a status board on the USS Wisconsin during a tour led by Clayton Allen, battleship operations manager, in Norfolk, Va., on Thursday, March 29, 2018.
Kristen Zeis | The Virginian-Pilot

At first, they drew the "cow god" on their ball caps and clipboards. But as the ship got ever closer to leaving the fleet, the drawings became larger and started appearing on the ship itself. One drawing on a piece of wood includes the caption "Your master is omnipotent, do not offend him!! His words are law, yet his ways are a mystery. He lives for all times. Obey pig!!"

The drawings were discovered decades later by the staff at Nauticus, where the Wisconsin is now a floating museum.

"I thought that when the ship was potentially recommissioned, or used as a museum, people would get a kick out of it," Caroll wrote of the drawings.

Clayton Allen, battleship operations manager for Nauticus, said he's found about five of the drawings throughout the ship. One is in the officer's wardroom near a public exhibit, while others are in less-visible spaces.

"Here we are right below the XO’s ladder. The XO is the number two in command, and the cow god that we see here on this beam is about as close as you can get to the brass, if you will, and thumb your nose at the plan to keep training over and over again without going into his room and drawing on the bulkhead," Allen said.

Carroll said he chose out of the way places so they wouldn't be readily obvious, to make it more interesting.

Eventually, Allen hopes to incorporate the cow god drawings into a ship tour that focuses on various paintings and other art incorporated into the ship. He said he first got the idea for an art tour in 2013 when he discovered a several-feet-tall painting of the cartoon character Popeye holding a mop in an air intake area in a part of a ship that neither he or others at Nauticus had seen before.