“I was never on board a ship” might also mean stationed on board a ship. Let’s ask Chefguy.
~Max
I have a relative who got in trouble with some Vietnam veterans’ organizations because he claimed to be one of them. He was indeed a Vietnam-ERA veteran, but all of his service was stateside.
I’m a Spanish chemical engineer and I know them to be the source of American reactions to “my” old factory’s attitude: “ah! The difficult we do at once, the impossible takes a bit longer?”
(Us, not recognizing the quote): “Nah, the difficult already got done, the impossible yeah it’ll take us a few hours.”
As mentioned above by me, in the old days the 'Bees got to where they were going by boat; and by ‘old days’, I mean WWII. By the early 70s, there were no deployment sites that couldn’t be reached by aircraft. The only boat trips were when teams were sent to some of the smaller Polynesian islands from places like Guam.
When I say ‘never on board a ship’, I mean I never set foot on one. My deployments were all on land and I got there via commercial aircraft chartered by the military. There are some exceptions; I knew an Engineering Aide (surveyor) who had a tour on an oceanographic survey ship. And any Seabee attached to a UDT would, of course, have had boat travel in his job description. By the way, the Seabee underwater demolition teams were the forerunners of the SEAL teams. The closest I ever got to being on a boat was when I flew from Puerto Rico to St. Thomas on a Grumman Goose.
In his defense, I’ve seen fact sheets for stolen valor and its not a common MO to make up such a dull back story. 23 years in CE? In the Air Force? Not jumping at an opportunity to talk up Red Horse experience? (Aside, I’ve somehow made it 18 years without being familiar with red horse, but then I’ve never deployed and I’m not CE). Anyway, it doesn’t sound like a textbook stolen valor scenario.
I’d guess he did 23 years in the guard and never got out much.
At first read, I thought the guy might have been an Air Force civilian who was trying to sneakily make his career sound like military service. If so, what he said might have been technically accurate, if misleading.
But the next couple of bumbling responses make me wonder if he’s making the whole thing up.
In the “Police Academy” movie where Tackleberry meets the parents of the girl he loves, he learns that her father was middleweight champion of the Seabees.
Yeah that has to be the most boring Stolen Valor story ever.
Take a page from this complete phony. If you’re going to steal valor then give yourself a Silver Star and repel out of helicopters the save wounded soldiers.
How does that work? Do you have to make the helicopter not like you or something?
It has something to do with magnets. Sorry I’m not a scientist.
I dunno how interesting it is. In filling in a man’s backstory, saying he was in a particular branch of the service would have been little more than filler, like a TV character today offhand mentioning he went to UCLA. Twenty percent of all American males were in uniform; in the right age range, it was more than half.
In fact, I’d guess that in the mid fifties, a man serving in WWII would have been more likely than having gone to university.
In the audio commentary of one of the Mad Men boxsets, the writers described listening to a group of men from that era talking about their lives. They said that military experiences were like adults today talking about high school. It was assumed basically everybody had them.
You’re probably right. It just seemed hinky to me. He also told the server than he spent his first four years in the Army.
That is what I was pointing out, it’s not a matter of course to put military service in the background of a character anymore. It might be done for a cop or some characters, but not your typical dad character.
Only if you want to give them a passing excuse to be an expert in all manner of firearms and hand-to-hand (because all members of the military are combat hardened), or to inject “PTSD” into their back story. Because of course all veterans—and certainly all Iraq/Afghanistan veterans—have PTSD which selectively causes them to become dissociative and need a dramatic moment to “snap out of it” before the final push.
Describes me perfectly. 
Sometimes I wonder if I’m the only normal person to ever come out of a combat zone. I may have the very mildest form of PTSD (loud noises bother me), but otherwise no issues other than repetitive dreams of missing a troop movement flight. I know which end of a gun the bullet comes out of and qualified expert on some. All Seabees who deploy with a construction battalion are trained in defensive combat by Marine trainers. I have no hand-to-hand training to speak of.
I enjoyed a lot of my time in the military, hated some of it, and don’t regret any of it other than lost income for all those years. I also don’t dwell on it or go sit in a vets’ bar pissing and moaning about how badly we’re all treated. I don’t belong to a vet motorcycle club, wear old uniform bits, or a hat proclaiming VIETNAM VETERAN. I don’t put my hand over my heart at ball games, nor do I sing the anthem. I fly the flag on certain holidays, but feel no need to stick fake patriotism in others’ faces like I saw recently on our vacation to rural PA and NY. I have issues with the military worship over the last 20 years, and I do have big problems with people who are poseurs.
More info than any of you care about, I’m sure.
Do you complain on Facebook that some people in the military are allowed to have beards now and how it will ruin the military for all time?
That’s really a thing?
I had a beard at different points in my career. In 1970, Adm Elmo Zumwalt (who was then CNO) famously relaxed grooming standards and started a series of “Z-Grams” intended to reduce racism and sexism. Unfortunately, this made grooming standards difficult to enforce, as the rules were a bit fuzzy (as were the troops). Coincidentally or not, that was a time when there was a certain amount of rebelliousness going on in the Navy that included the riot that occurred on the USS Kittyhawk. Drug use was also on the upswing. When Zumwalt left the Navy, beards survived, but the regs became more strict. In 1984 a reg was issued that said persons in positions of “high visibility” would not be allowed to grow a beard. Commanding officers interpreted this very widely, and most senior petty officers had to shave. In 1985 the CNO banned all beards (people engaged in ops with the CIA, etc., exempted).
I put my hat over my heart but not my bare hand. Neither do I sing – the idea is to honor, not to blaspheme. Being non-combat, I deflect those well-meaning “thank you for your service” people. Save it for those guys who were running around with a rifle.
But—but—as a trophy-hounding millennial, I’ve been assured that the Navy of your generation was inestimably superior to that of my own generation, and that discipline has suffered horribly as a result of stress cards, safety timeouts, and “diversity” initiatives.
Oh yeah. At least once a week in my Retired AF group, someone posts an article about a Sikh soldier or airman and starts screaming bloody murder about how beards aren’t allowed and this is the ruination of the military and blah blah blah…
One time it was a woman with a head scarf, you’d have thought the world was going to end.