Just face it, what someone told you “ring knocker” means doesn’t necessarily match reality. I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: wouldn’t be the first time a new sailor got passed down bad gouge. Again, what were you going to do, call them on it?
Right. Again, just an enlisted puke, and no “gentleman”.
No. You are coming in, saying “someone told me a thing,” and expecting us to take it as the unimpeachable truth. That is simply not how this place works, particularly in Factual Questions.
You aren’t even coming in saying “I saw a thing.” Literally just “someone told me a thing.”
And as we Snipes & Squids all know, the Chiefs actually run the Ships.
I hated when we got a new Ensign who didn’t know that yet.
FTR: I was not a Chief, just an E4 Petty Officer 3rd Class. Though if I reenlisted I was due for E5, passed the test, but I wanted out. I was 4 and out, an really good choice the way everything work out for me.
Then you misread my tone. I didn’t think you were making it up. I do think that whoever told you that was passing on an urban legend. I don’t think you were being dishonest. I spent 27 years in uniform. I never once saw or even heard of anyone trying to use where they went to college in that way. Whether or not it helped when they went in front of a promotion board is an entirely different thing.
The E-7s in my unit certainly enjoyed it. That kind of thing is hard to maintain when you are eating chow on the hood of the same HMMWV.
This in itself implies that I have no right to comment here. Is that what you are saying? And if so, on what basis?
I never said either explicitly or implicitly that this was anything more than hearsay. If I thought that anyone reading the comment would be expected to be familiar with the term “Ring Knocker” I wouldn’t have felt compelled to provide that hearsay as background information, but since the OP was asking about Naval traditions and culture I thought it necessary to provide background information for the uninitiated. Because that’s how I perceived that “this place works.”
Forgive me. I’ll crawl back under my rock.
Then it clearly never happened. I retract my statement in full.
Gentlemen! You can’t fight here; this is the War Room! 
IME USAF had a divide about like Army. Everybody didn’t live in their workplace like USN shipboard so thevphysical separation wasn’t hermetic, but E7 & up were a distictly different layer of the hierarchy. And carried themselves that way.
USAF not having Warrants, the E7+ crowd were sorta that socially if not functionally.
The good ones, and very few were anything less, were respected more for their experience and functional wisdom than their stripes. The stripes were just how you recognized them at first meeting.
When I was in the navy I was stationed at direction-finding stations ashore as opposed to being on board a ship. About half the enlisted personnel worked weekdays 8 to 4 (daybeggers) and half rotating shifts (watchstanders), two eight-hour day watches, eight hours off, two mid watches then eight hours off, and two eve watches and eighty hours off. Six shifts in five days then three days and an extra eight hours off, 2-2-2-80.*
SOP was to put the watchstanders on commuted rations since they often would miss meals during the doublebacks and it relieved the command of having to supply midrats to a remote location; the working station was a ways away from the administration part to cut down on EF noise. Except NSGA Okinawa.
There we were a tenant command living on an army communications station and I was told our CO asked several times to put our watchstanders on ComRats the army officer in charge of the mess refused. There were enough people working weekdays they’d fetch lunch from the army chow hall – in insulated mass containers to be ladled out on site at what I was sure less than 140F. Weekends and midrats we were SOL. We did not have the time or the spare people to drive eight miles down a dirt road, eat, and get back.
Since Corry Field where’d I’d come from had won a Ney award two years running this was particularly galling, but at least I wasn’t eating cold C-rations.
*At locations where eighty hours might hang heavy like Diego Garcia or Adak it was 1-1-1-56. I was told your tour goes by real fast, especially since a big chunk of those 56 hours were spent asleep.
Had a roommate in the barracks at Pearl who was approaching EAOS, and there was nothing the command could do to get him to re-enlist. They made him take the E6 exam anyway – one of the few times someone walked out of a rating exam before I did. He told me that if he knew the answer to a question right off the bat, he selected that answer, but if he had to think about it, he just selected ‘C’. (“When in doubt, Charlie out,” right?) A month or two later he left for home, and a few months later the results came back. He’d been selected.
Something delayed the test or results in my case, I don’t remember which, or I was just confused on the timing. I thought I would get the 2nd rocker with a few months left but instead needed like 6 more weeks.
I was gong home. Drove up to Mt Shasta first, back to San Diego and drove home to NJ in 5 days, visiting 2 friends on the way home.
My 3rd time crossing the USA in my Camaro, but my first solo drive doing it.
Oh… is that what comrats stood for?
It did. You were swapping food for cash, or vice-versa if you did eat at the mess.
Oh, the comradery is always there, but there is almost always a line that doesn’t get crossed. After all, you not only often live together and eat together, you also fight together and orders must be followed without hesitation. I’m guessing things are getting off track here a bit.
I can see how the construction/layout of a ship would influence serving styles. Reminds me of Missileers “stuck” down in the LCCs 24/7 for their shifts, and have to order meals to be brought down from them from topside.
taking some liberties with concise quotes to capitalize on a question here . . .
So, reading these two paragraphs in their entirety, but zeroing in on these points, can I assume that ‘messing styles’ and communities evolve to fill the physical space provided? As in,
- on a SSN, in cramped quarters, there’s a Crew mess & Wardroom, no Chief’s mess, and the skipper is part of the Wardroom . . .
- compared to a flattop where the skipper has a mess, the CVN’s Officers have a mess, the onboard aviation wings have a mess, there’s a CVN Chief’s mess, the E-4 Mafia probably has a geedunk, and there’s a larger crew mess . . . all because there’s available space for these to exist?
That is an asshole move. Destroyers aren’t that big, right? I reckon the culture of each wardroom/mess is as unique as the ship/boat and its Officers & crew, right?
Uffdah, really? The only thing I can compare this to is that 20+ years ago, as an O-1 in Minot AFB, Officers were “encouraged” by Group & Wing leadership to become AF Club members. It cost about $10 / month back then and got you a buck off a beverage and/or meal, when the Club was operating (usually for quarterly functions of wings & beer on Friday nights) but it wasn’t legally enforceable. This is about the time that Clubs started losing patronage because their offerings were cut back, in a weird Catch-22 because they couldn’t keep up with ‘downtown services.’ Once I got to Malmstrom AFB om '03, and wasn’t assigned to the host Wing, I let that Membership expire. I was overseas more that I was home that assignment , and didn’t have a need/use for Club membership nor ‘Mandatory Fun.’
. . . Thinking back to my deployments, I don’t ever recall having BAS suspended while I was in the Middle East. Huh. . . Chow Halls* were available, but i will now have to see if I can dig up an old LES (that is, if I can find 'em since the ex-wife destroyed 'em all). * Note: AF Force Support Sqns insist they’re “Dining Facilities,” but that’s like exaggerating a Burger King into a Gourmet Steak & Sandwich Shoppe.
I gotta run, but I’ve got half more of the thread to read, and I’m slipping in Internet time between ‘Honey-Do’ list items where I can.
Tripler
Still soooooo many questions I want to ask . . .
On an SSN, that is all true regarding the crew’s mess, wardroom, and the CO being a member of the wardroom. The Chief Petty Officers did have their own quarters (the “Goat Locker”) that included a small table, but I don’t recall if they ate meals in there or not. (I think not.)
I’ve never served aboard an aircraft carrier, but I was on a largish cruiser when I was a midshipman. I know it had a crew’s mess, wardroom, and the CO had his own mess. He always invited others to dine with him, though…and it was one of those invitations you couldn’t refuse.
Well, yeah. Obviously. Why is that so surprising?
Well, yes. Even aircraft carriers are relatively cramped/uncomfortable by civilian standards, so naturally there is plenty to do with any additional space that a given hull-type might allow. On both the destroyer and the MCM, the wardroom was just that: a single room. With a single table. The room/table on the destroyer was just a little (but not that much!) bigger than in the MCM. And neither could accommodate all the officers at once (couldn’t even necessarily accommodate all officers not on watch at sea, let alone in port).
The wardrooms on the CVN, by contrast, were comparatively large and had multiple smaller tables to allow for something closer to a small group dining experience (half a dozen friends/co-workers could sit down at their own table without having to sit across from the XO or even people from other departments if they didn’t want to).
That said…
- compared to a flattop where the skipper has a mess, the CVN’s Officers have a mess, the onboard aviation wings have a mess, there’s a CVN Chief’s mess, the E-4 Mafia probably has a geedunk, and there’s a larger crew mess . . . all because there’s available space for these to exist?
There is no special space for E-4. Not that I know of, anyway. But you know, it is close. I have seen, on at least one CVN (I believe it was Enterprise, since decommissioned), that the E-6s succeeded in getting a cordoned off “First Class Petty Officers Mess” on the regular mess decks. But it really was just that: a segregated seating area (not even its own compartment) on the mess decks.
FWIW, Nimitz class carriers have… let’s say two wardrooms (inexplicably, while wardroom three is distinct enough, wardrooms one and two are one right in front of the other with a single bulkhead and no door between them and use the same galley/serving line, so they really are just a single wardroom) and two messdecks. Plus the chief’s mess, plus a flag officers mess (for the admiral and their staff). Oh, and I vaguely recall there might be a serving line (but no galley) in the island, on the same level as the flight deck? Honestly, I could be misremembering that, but I have (vague) memories of seeing such a thing to allow members of the flight deck crew (officer and enlisted) to get some food between launch/recovery cycles during long shifts with flight operations.
That said, the wardrooms (one/two and three) and the messdecks (forward and aft) are not formally segregated by ship’s company vs. air wing or department. However, there is some practical segregation in the wardrooms at least because wardroom one/two is located just below the ship’s flight deck, while wardroom three is located closer to the waterline and on the same deck as the forward and aft mess decks. And the officers associated with the air wing and the ship’s air department likewise tend to be berthed just below the flight deck, while nuclear engineers like myself tend to be berthed lower down in the ship (my first tour on a CVN, I was berthed on the same deck as and just outboard of wardroom three, while on my second I was berthed just aft of and one deck down from wardroom three, and the entrances to the propulsion plants are likewise set on the same deck as wardroom three).
All that to say, while no formal regulation would have prevented a nuke like me from eating in wardroom one/two, time, distance, and gravity provided a strong practical incentive to eat exclusively in wardroom three. Plus the mild social pressure of all the people you closely work with making the same calculation (although, then agin, that might create an incentive to go on a journey for food if you don’t particularly like the people you work with—I certainly would have appreciated a second wardroom I could go to hide in when I was on my destroyer, but alas, no such promised land exists).
Oh, but you know, wardroom three did have a lounge, which was kind of neat…
At the Naval Nuclear Power School, the specialized officer instructors who were directly hired to teach technical subjects such as math, physics and engineering were known as Direct Input Limited Duty Officers. I’m not sure if the obvious acronym was official or not, but it was widely and quietly used at least.