When I was in high school in the '90s, I did three years of Navy JROTC - partly because it got me out of having to take gym, and partly because I was considering going into the military after high school. (I wound up graduating a few months after 9/11, and decided not to.) JROTC cadets hold ranks as if they were actually in the military - you start as an E-1, up to E-7, after which you join the officer corps, and can make it as high as O-5 by your senior year if you’re chosen as the student company commander (we had one O-6 in the entire school district, who was the student batallion commander). I never made it higher than E-6 myself.
Anyway, as part of the process towards advancing to E-3, you had to complete “seaman correspondence”, which was an older version of the self-guided course actual sailors had to complete to earn the same rank. I believe the version we used was written either during or just after the Vietnam war. I found myself recalling a story earlier today that I’m pretty sure I read in that course, and I’m wondering if it sounds familiar to anyone else out there.
The point of the lesson was how to survive if stuck behind enemy lines, and this section of it emphasized that, if you found yourself in a civilian area, it was important to act like a local. It supplied an anecdote from a soldier who’d served in World War II and had somehow got stuck either in Germany itself or in occupied France, and found his way to an urban area, and needed to urinate. He asked someone where the nearest bathroom was, and they pointed him to an open-air urinal that was just mounted on the wall of a building or something similar to that. Ultimately, his being too embarrassed to expose himself in public tipped someone off that he didn’t belong there and lead to him being captured.
Does this anecdote sound familiar to anyone, in particular Navy veterans of a certain age? I’m trying to find a source for it online and so far I’ve come up empty.