SEA CHANGES : Look for the Revenge of the Cetaceans as Dolphins Join Military’s Unemployed

We don’t yet have the faintest inkling how cataclysmic military downsizing will be in California, nor just how far down the chain of command it will reach. The nation is dismantling an armory of decades’ standing, closing bases from Sunnyvale to Long Beach, mustering out thousands of cold warriors to the world--artisans, techies, test pilots, the slide-rule set.

But it’s not just cold warriors. Cold and wet warriors are being discharged, too: dolphins, cetaceans with brains about the size of ours and twice the convolutions, the MENSA set of marine mammals.

Since the 1960s, at Navy facilities up and down the California coast, we have schooled them to recover training mines, intercept enemy frogmen, undertake search-and-demolition missions. We’ve taught them a harsh trade, fed them on sea-rations, and now we are discharging at least 30 of them into a cruel and unrelenting civilian job market.

Let us recall some history here. Victorious troops of every age freebooted and looted at war’s end. After the 1918 Armistice, veterans from demobilized German army units organized Freikorps, unofficial police that sometimes turned into nasty little militias answerable to no one.

The breakup of the Soviet state left nuclear weapons in the hands of countries about as big as the Santa Clarita Valley and as tractable as Pelican Bay State Prison.

So, as history shows us, idle fins are the devil’s playground.

What are these dolphins fit for after a military career? Security guards at Sea World? Hiring out at “Take a Swim With the Dolphin” amusement park tanks, enduring the water antics of some Velveeta-bellied tourist pretending he’s Captain Ahab for the benefit of the family camcorder?

Don’t bet on it. These dolphins are trained professionals. They’ll likelier be running classified ads in Soldier of Fortune: “Have blowhole, will travel. Can handle underwater explosives, minesweeping, etc.”

Failing that, I expect them to form militias; the way their rights have been infringed on over the centuries, they certainly have enough grievances.

For starters, they might hunt down tuna boats and destroy the illicit mile-long gill nets that have scooped up their brethren. They could storm the beach in La Jolla to protest Scripps Institution of Oceanography plans to test global warming with underwater loudspeakers off Big Sur that would sound to sensitive cetacean ears like a bowling ball rolling a strike every four hours for the next nine years.

They can liberate their comrades from petting zoos and performance tanks like those at Knott’s Berry Farm, from sanctuaries like the one in the Red Sea, where a half-dozen pregnant Englishwomen not long ago sought to give birth among dolphins.

They might strike off Santa Monica, capturing and sending to re-education camps those weekend boaters who take potshots at dolphins because they mistake their dorsal fins for sharks’. They could hit Florida and execute guerrilla attacks on powerboats whose engine blades make ratatouille out of endangered manatees.

And they are not leaderless. Expect a communique any day from Subcomandante Pumpkin (yclept name: Pumpkin the Navy sea lion). Until he went AWOL last year on his 2,000th-something military exercise off Santa Cruz Island, he had spent 15 of his 16 years with the Navy, and don’t think he won’t put that training to good use.

These sea creatures are not just finned, they are armed. Ocean waters are iron-rich with the confiscated guns discarded by police. San Diego police dumped 700 a while back. And most alarming--you don’t need an opposable thumb to push the big red button--Great Britain recently dumped thousands of tons of unused bombs, shells and grenades into the Atlantic.

Bye-bye, dances with wolves; hello, SALT talks with dolphins.