If I may interject a slight hijack…
I’ve never served in the military myself, but I’ve often heard statements like those made in this thread: address officers as “Sir” and NCOs by their rank. Here’s what I don’t understand:
Imagine I’m a PFC. Someone is walking toward me in a hallway. He probably outranks me, but I can’t see the insignia of rank on his sleeves. He addresses me. What do I do? Can you just fall back on calling everybody of higher rank “sir” at that point?
Probably. We do in the CG all the time. It all depends on the situation, and who your audience is, but it’s certainly not that uncommon. Identifying yourself by your rate seemed to be much more common on cutters. For example, if I’m the only BMC aboard (remember - cutters are much smaller than Navy ships), and the internal phone rings, I’d answer it “Bridge, BMC”. Petty Officers will do the same thing: “ECC, MK1”. If there’s more than one MK1 aboard, they’ll add the last name.
My guess for the third one would be while piping the side on a bos’n pipe.
In the CG, the E1s, E2s and E3s wear this insignia on all of their covers. Notice it has a gold center. As a result, they get saluted a awful lot by members of other branches who have no idea who they are. As a Seaman, I once went to medical at the Navy base in Orlando. For the first 3 or 4 salutes I explained that I was just an E3. After that, I just started returning salutes and must have returned about 25 salutes that day from E6s on down.
Scruloose, if you were ever in Monterey, I probably saluted you!
Remember one funny exchange. As I was walking back to the dorms, there was a multi-strrped Marine sergeant in BDUs approaching. The Marines, being the badasses they were, never would wear their shiny insignia on their BDU caps as everyone else would. I was in my Blues and was wearing the bus-driver cap that day, which has a shiny front. We’re approaching each other, and you could see both of us trying to figure out if the other was an officer, hands cocked and ready to salute. He got much closer to snapping off a salute to me, a lowly one-striper, than I did to him. Left him with a nice, “Good afternoon” as we passed one another.
There’s an old saw in the Navy: “If it moves, salute it. If it doesn’t move, paint it.”
Your question reminds me of an incident that happened to a friend and me in the late 50’s.
We were in NYC after having just returned from Morocco. We’d only been in the Navy for a couple of years, but we imagined ourselves “old salts”. We were walking down the street in our bell bottoms w/ our dixie cups tilted on the back of our heads and our neckerchief ties pulled up tight, both uniform violations. We saw this Marine approaching, but we both figured he was another enlisted man out on the town. Wrong, he was a major and he stopped us and gave us the lecture about saluting and squaring away our uniforms. There were a couple of guys unloading a truck who witnessed our “ass chewing” and they got a big kick out of it. Very embarassing.
OK, but still. The Army SPC doesn’t bear Navy E-7 insignia and does not have the acronym “SPC” anywhere on her uniform. In the story, how would someone have drawn attention to their “C” and gained enough deference that someone would take a chewing-out from them, without having any kind of rank or insignia explicitly or implicitly referring to a “C”? Are Navy people that stupid that you can walk up in any uniform, announce your self as XXC, and take a spicy ass-chewing on that basis alone? That’s my point, this story just has all the hallmarks of a military urban legend.
In the bad old days when half a million young men (and a relative handful of women) were flopping around Southeast Asia in an attempt to combat monolithic communism and bring freedom and peace to the locals by shooting them, the conversational address of non-commissioned officers was a delicate matter. Just about every senior NCO was addressed by his full title. It was almost always “Sergeant Major Edwards” or “First Sergeant Morris” or Master Sergeant Washington.” Only of your own first sergeant was ever called “Top.” and then only in the relative privacy of the orderly room or in moments of high stress, as when you were being actively shot at. Lower ranking NCOs, Sergeants First Class, Staff Sergeants and ordinary old E-5 Sergeants could generally just be called “Sergeant,” but never “Sarge.” Any NCO acting as a platoon sergeant could, and should, be called “Platoon Sergeant,” even though that rank was fading away.
The same was true of specialist grades which back then went up to SP7 – generally grizzled old court reporters and maintenance or food service wizards who chose not to qualify for a warrant or had a serious drinking problem. Ordinary old SP4s were called “Specialist,” but seniors were called by their full title, e.g., Specialist Six Trumbly.
It was a simple matter of affording these people the same respect you expected from them. There was no need to call them “sir.” you called them by the title they had earned. You expected them to call you by the title you had earned and few put up with being called El Tea or Cap or Skipper as if a combat battalion was some God-damned handshake boys club. That doesn’t mean that you didn’t love them or grieve for them when they got hurt of worse. It just meant that there were formalities that had to be observed. You could call an NCO “sir” in ordinary conversation and no umbrage would be taken, but better far better, to do it the Army way.
Some time it got pretty close to the line. In my presence a new first sergeant explained to a company formation that he was the real power in the outfit by saying “If that dempsey-dumpster could sign a morning report we would not need a company commander.” His attitude was adjusted in pretty short order. He did turn out to be a good and loyal first sergeant.
Yeah, but back to my unanswered question: First Sergeant Morris is walking down the corridor toward you. You don’t know him, and you can’t see his sleeve from that angle to tell his rank. He says something to you. How the heck do you address him if you can’t call him “Sir”?
I don’t think it could be put any better. As I read the first part of the word problem I thought 'tell the NCO ‘get it up’ and sit back out of their way.
My Dad always put it as, “If it moves, salute it. If it doesn’t move, pick it up. If you can’t pick it up, paint it.”
He was USNA '43.
What does Morris say? If all s/he says is hello, then I’d think a simple “Good morning/afternoon/evening” would suffice, if you absolutely had no opportunity to glance the insignia or stripes. If they trip off the line for not addressing them properly, then I’d politely explain that I couldn’t tell their grade and apologize. If they still had heartache with it, I’d think it’s more their problem than mine, be done with it and move on.
Fact is, we all start out junior in one way or another and anyone with half a melon on their shoulders will realize that sometimes we can’t always see the grade of others that are approaching.
There should be some kind of insignia visible from the front, either on the collar or epaulets.
Other than that, it’s kind of situational. Either 1SG Morris is the only first sergeant around, so of course you’re going to know him, or the place is so thick with rank that everybody is over it, a 1SG is low on the totem pole, and if you’re less than E6 it’s like you’re not even there.
Regardless of service branch, US warrant officers are intermediate between E-9 and O-1.
WO-1 is a special warrant issued by the Secretary of the appropriate service, CW-2 through CW-5 are warrants issued by the President, hence are effectively commissioned officers.
The distinction is that the warrant officer is not in the command line: a warrant officer is a technical leader, providing expertise in highly specialised, career class fields.
The reason that the Air Force discontinued their warrant officers is two-fold: the supermajority of jobs in the Air Force, enlisted or otherwise, are technically oriented, and the creation of permanent E-7 through E-9 grades.
In the Army, Marine Corps and Navy, there are much larger enlisted forces than in the Air Force, and in these services there are lots of non-technical jobs.
As for the CW-5 grade: The original plans called for six grades of warrant officer, paralleling the commissioned grades O-1 through O-6. CW-5 relieves the inevitable career compression experienced by the limited number of promotions and salary jumps allowed warrant officers.
In the Army, warrant officers are in abundance as helicopter pilots and CID investigators. They also serve in certain highly technical fields. They might be present in cryptography and medical support also. The original Army warrant officers worked in explosives and ordnance.
In the Marine Corps, they have warrant grades WO-1 through CW-5. In the Navy and Coast Guard, they only have grades 2 through 5 (no WO-1). I have not a freaking clue as to what they do, though I suspect that the Marine Corps warrant officers have some involvement in ordnance.
In the UK services, the original warrant officers were the sailors who ran the ships staffed by army officers in the early Royal Navy. Warrant officers in the UK services are merged in with the senior sergeant grades, and are viewed as senior NCOs, as opposed to the officer status of warrant officers in the US services.
Mods, please remove ^this^ post. I have copied it into the actual Warrant Officer thread.
Ah, didn’t realize that. Thanks!
The SPC in this instance was taking advantage of her opportunity to wear civilian clothes (one of my gripes at that shore station was that customers were not required to wear uniforms). She would say “I’m Ess-Pee-Cee Soldier” and continue from then on.
You’ll notice that I did not assert in my earlier post that she was in uniform. I will also notice that I did not mention that she wasn’t in uniform. :smack:
p.s. I don’t do military urban legends.
