Me too. 25 January 1980.
I enlisted in the Navy in 1973 pretty much on a whim because I was sick of going to school and I didn’t know what I wanted to be when I grew up (I was 19 at the time.) Naturally, the first thing the Navy did after boot camp was send me to school - I was to be an avionics technician.
After many months of assorted schools, I ended up in VS-41 where the then-brand-new S-3A was being introduced. We were the training squadron so everyone transitioning from the S-2 was coming thru learning all about the Viking.
At the time, women were still pretty new in technical billets, and absolutely not sent to sea, so training squadrons were where many women ended up. And we heard a lot of grousing from the guys about “taking our shore billets” as if we did it deliberately to mess with them. Yeah, there was some tension. It got to where the women banded together and helped each other, refusing to turn to the guys, even when their strength would have been valuable. Some of the radar components were really heavy and it might take 3 of us to wrestle them in or out of the plane.
I worked mids - 2300-0700 - and we mostly did preflights and maintenance so the pilot trainees had planes to train in. The S-3A was computerized - whoa!!! - and systems preflights started with running a program on board that looked at pretty much everything electronic. Standard practice was if the computer said a particular component was defective, we’d get one from a nearby grounded aircraft, swap it in, and if that fixed it, we’d do the paperwork to document everything. We also knew in a lot of cases if the computer told us something, chances are, the actual problem was something else and we’d proceed accordingly.
One night, I was on Pete’s crew, and the preflight program indicated a problem with a particular system that was notorious for not giving accurate error indications. I suggested we change the power supply, but Pete insisted it’s never the power supply. So we swapped out this and that, before he finally decided we should try the power supply. Yep, I was right. The girl knew what she was talking about.
Not only was Pete really cool about the whole thing, even telling our shift leader that I’d figured it out, he paid me what I thought was an amazing compliment, saying he’d be OK going to sea with me. Wow! Admitting the shore-billet-stealing soft-sailor was actually an asset!!!
A few years after that, I became an officer and I requested Surface Warfare Officer school, since women were finally starting to go to sea. But no, I was sent to Communications Officer school and then to the Pentagon… as an Ensign… It was an eye-opening experience.
My last tour was in a P-3C squadron where I realized that I sucked as an officer, and with 11 years and some months of service, I submitted my resignation. Yet I continued to work for the Navy for another 26 years as an engineer, then for contractors who supported the Navy for 8 more years after that. My entire career was based on an initial whim.
I’ve never served (though the Navy came after me pretty hard my whole senior year), but my father was in the Army Reserve for several years in the 60s, and literally the only thing he ever told us about his time in the military was that once he had to drive across Texas as part of some convoy, and it was really boring.
One day some of the guys in my unit decided they were going to have a contest to see who could grow the best zit on their nose. They did various things like rubbing vaseline and dirt on their skin, squeezing and pinching and pressing, just anything to make it sore and inflamed.
When the 2-week deadline had arrived, one by one they squeezed the zits to see who could make the most impressive spectacle. When the last contestant did his performance, it squeezed out a cyst the size of a small blueberry accompanied with some blood and yellow-green fluid. A few hours later he was rushed to the infirmary with a fever and nausea. We never heard from him again but we were told they amputated half his nose.
“Joe’s gonna joe” is what the Drill Sergeant had to say about it.
I assume Joe had the trophy named after him.
Mine comes from my time in the Navy. I was a nuclear submarine junior officer.
I wasn’t a direct witness to every part of this screw up, but I was onboard at the time and read the final incident reports in the aftermath to learn exactly what happened in places I wasn’t there to see.
So we’re heading into a port in the Persian Gulf. It’s the middle of the night and we’re on the surface. We’re ahead of schedule, so we’re going very slowly (about 5 knots) towards the port. On a surfaced submarine, you have an Officer of the Deck (OOD) in charge of the boat (gives the orders to the helm to ‘drive’) on the bridge (with a junior watchstander, the Lookout), which is open-air on top of the Sail (the Sail of a submarine is the big protuberance upwards on top of the hull) of the sub. You also have the Contact Coordination team, which is in the Control Room and consists of the Contact Coordinator (CC), Fire Control technician of the watch (FTOW), and Sonar team – they are responsible, using the periscopes, radar, and sonar (and some other minor electronic systems), for keeping track of all the other ships on the surface to avoid collisions. Providing overall senior guidance and leadership is the Command Duty Officer (CDO), a senior officer watch-station only assigned when the Commanding Officer (CO) needs an uninterrupted night of sleep. In this case, the CDO was the Executive Officer (XO).
A few days before, the Commanding Officer was having a conversation with one of the Department Heads about the officer watchbill (the schedule that delineates which officers will be on watch as OOD, CC, and other watch-stations at all times). The Dept Head expressed concern about this particular night, saying that the assigned OOD (another Dept Head) was not a particularly strong OOD, and the assigned CC was a very junior officer with limited experience, and this would be a more difficult watch in the busy shipping lanes of the Persian Gulf at night – he suggested pairing up a weak OOD with an experienced CC, or vice versa. But the CO wanted his strongest officers to get a good night of sleep before the somewhat challenging evolution of pulling into port the next day, so he vetoed the Dept Head’s concerns.
So back to that night. We’re proceeding in port, on the surface, very slowly. A surfaced submarine is difficult to see at night because of our much smaller profile and reduced height of our Sail and masts. In the Control Room, the CC and the FTOW are alternating time on the periscope – and the FTOW, a junior young man, alerts the CC of a new contact on the horizon. He expresses concern that it may be heading towards us. The CC looks through the periscope at the contact and tells the XO (CDO) – but the XO looks through briefly and brushes it off, saying that the contact is on a parallel course and not heading for us. They inform the OOD but the CDO reports that the contact is of no concern. The radar operator is another very inexperienced watchstander and fails to notice that the contact is getting closer on the radar screen.
Minutes pass. The OOD and Lookout think the contact appears to be closing, and ask the CC and CDO for a recommended new course. They say “stand by”, and continue to look through the periscope. At this point, the OOD could have literally given nearly any order – turn right or left, speed up, or slow down, and that would have probably been enough to avoid a collision. But he did nothing – waiting for a recommendation from the CC and CDO, who for some reason never provided a recommendation. He finally gives an order to turn, but it’s too late – the contact, a 50-thousand-ton Turkish freighter, literally runs over us (waking me up with an incredible clatter and almost hurling me out of my bunk), such that the front of their hull is over the top of the back of ours, with our screw (propeller) tearing gouges out of the skin of the freighter. The officer that climbed up to the bridge to relieve the incompetent OOD later told me that the scene was so bizarre, and the freighter was so enormous, that it took several seconds for his mind to interpret what he was seeing – at first it just looked like some Picasso-esque amalgamation of metal and night-sky.
At this point we are in deadly peril – if the freighter sinks, it will almost certainly bring us down with it, and we have little time to properly rig the ship for submergence. To get us free, a senior enlisted engineering technician suggests that we release the air (and fill with water) in the aft Main Ballast Tanks – a maneuver usually reserved for submerging the ship, in the hope that this will lower the aft-end of the submarine beneath the hull of the freighter and allow us to get free. To aid this, all off-watch personnel are sent to the aft-end of the ship to assist in ballasting (using the weight of all of us, including me, to further push down the ass-end of the boat). This is extremely dangerous – the weight of personnel and the water in the aft Main Ballast Tanks could sink us if not done carefully.
But it works, and we got free.
And a bunch of officers got fired in the aftermath – including the CO, XO, and the OOD at the time. They were mostly hated and the crew was glad to see them go. In my view, the OOD was entirely incompetent, the XO was partially incompetent, and the CO was competent but an asshole with poor people skills.
I hope that that person was significantly rewarded for their quick thinking.
Not an actual guy named Joe. “Joe” is a generic term for rank-and-file soldiers.
Joe is well-known for hatching elaborate and somewhat risky strategies for doing everything except the documented procedure for the task at hand. He has questionable judgment and is famously unlucky, but is suprisingly resilient.
We had open squadbays in Marine boot camp. It was during second phase and I had just finished a fire watch and been relieved maybe two minutes earlier at 03:00. During that two minute changing of the guard interval, one of the recruits had snuck up to another recruit’s rack and attempted to choke him out while sleeping. It took four of us including a drill instructor to pry the psychotic recruit off of him. The choked out recruit was taken immediately to the infirmary, but it seems his injuries must have been fairly serious, as he never rejoined our platoon. The psycho who attempted to kill the other recruit was hauled off to the brig and I don’t know what ever became of him.
I was one of the last draftees, and I didn’t take it as seriously as I should have. When I first got to my duty station after AIT, I was tasked to paint a shower stall. I started off by painting a huge peace sign. The sergeant that came in to check on me got pissed. Peace was bad for business, I guess.
As a died-in-the-wool civilian, those all sound like “deployments” to me.
One unit I was in was B 1/14, the reserve artillery battery in Los Angeles. Pico Rivera to be accurate. I was in the FDC, the fire direction control center, and one of the other FDC guys was from Somalia. He was an engineering student at Cal State Los Angeles in the late 1980s / early 1990s. In 1990 we mobilized for Desert Storm together.
It turns out that his father, Mohamed Farrah Aidid, was the Somali warlord and main combatant against the US during the incident described in the movie Blackhawk Down in the 1993 raid on Mogadishu.
At the time of Operation Restore Hope, the B 1/14 FDC Marine was the only person in the entire Marine Corps who could speak Somali, so he was mobilized as an individual and went to Somalia to assist in operations there. In the following years he was chosen to be the leader of the SNA (Somali National Alliance), he became the Interim President of Somalia, and he founded and led the Somali Reconciliation and Restoration Council among other positions. He has worked with at least one POTUS.
On wiki his name is Hussein Farrah Aidid.
Here is a picture with him and me at a field exercise in 29 Palms, CA, around 1989 IIRC. He was a Lance Corporal and is in the middle, and I was a Staff Sergeant and am on the right.
My eldest sister enlisted in the Marines in '68 for pretty much the same reasons. She’s an artist and spent her entire tour in Public Relations at Quantico then left when her tour was up.
I’ve never done anything remotely military but my Grandfather was a career Royal Engineer through WW2 and Korea, had many stories. Some of my favorites:
Decking someone in a bar (the only fight had ever been in, he claimed) as they dissed the Gurhkas (and probably been very racist about them too, though he’ d never use the term.) He had fought alongside Gurhkas in Korea, when he’d been invovled in the most intense fighting in his career.
The story of a drinking buddy who’d been fairly senior in the Suez invasion, but (as a result of the US letting the British political leadership know they can’t pull that shit any more) was now a washed up bitter alcoholic, bemoaning the cowardly politicians who’d ruined everything after the military side was so perfectly planned and executed. The story finished with “he must have got better though, as they made him Field Marshall” 
Traveling to Israel right after one of the Arab-Israeli wars (like just after, there was still the danger of ammunition popping off in the smoldering tanks) to pick up a track from a destroyed soviet tank, so it could be used to design an anti-tank mine. Only for an overly officious Sargent major to be like “Look at this place its a disgrace, there’s crap lying everywhere! Throw out these old tank tracks!” a few weeks later.
I joined the Air Force in the early 70s. I slept on a regular bed with box springs in a double room that had individual AC and heat controls that WORKED.
Suck it up Jarheads!!!
More power to ya @JaneDoe42.
My husband has been a member of the Leathernecks Motor Club for years. As the only AF rider in the pack, I learned fast to give it out before they started bringing it.
Tell me about sleeping under a plane wing in the sand box and I’ll share the story of that horrible weekend our AC went out in the middle of an Okinawa summer. I suffered for THREE whole days!
The stories are fading now. Not sure what would be interesting.
2 stories in 1 Bootcamp
I brought this up recently, I never have fired a gun despite being in the Navy. But everyone had to fire a gun at least once in Basic Training. So how did this work out? Well first the Navy tried to kill me. I got pneumonia while in bootcamp at Great Lakes Training Camp (RTC) near Chicago. It was close to the coldest winter on record I believe and we did suffer through the coldest day in Chicago’s history.
Somewhere along the way I got sick and then very dehydrated and went to sick call and after hours almost got sent back to the barracks until I mentioned I had a lot of pain in my lower back to each side. Then the Doc asked about my liquid intake, realized I was dangerously dehydrated and sent me to the Base Hospital on the Training side of the base.
They got me rehydrated and mostly back to normal. But I was put on light duty for 3 days and got ASMOED to another company a week behind mine.
So I recovered and the CC (Company Command, think Navy Drill Sgt) was happy to get me and made me the Training PO. I did a very good job of getting everyone through quals and testing and was pretty trusted by the CC. So when it was time for the gun qual or whatever it was called, I simply adjusted my record to completed. That’s it, kind of boring without the almost killing me part.
Pearl Harbor : Back in 1986, I had a very brief visit to Pearl Harbor and O’ahu. We found the local beaches and town to be a mob scene. It was wall to wall and practically shoulder to shoulder squids* and tourists. Three friends and I were disgusted with the crowds. After several weeks at sea going stir crazy with 5000 other men packed onto a Carrier, we did not need more crowding. It had been a very stressful sea period as we were prepping for engineering drills. In fact that is why we had such a short time at Hawaii. The Ranger was actually there for a week but we had only about 2½ days of liberty. We decided to rent a car and drive around the Island. This was a brilliant and happy decision.
We visited the beautiful park Nuuanu Pali on the side of Koolau, one of the two volcanoes that formed O’ahu. The park was breathtaking in its view. There was a cliff side where the trade winds always blew and blew hard enough to support your weight if you leaned out. I saw others try it and tried it myself. It was quite a rush, the exhilarating feeling of falling and flying at the same time. One of my friends insisted we were crazy. He might have been right, but not about this.
We wandered around the Island and found the most incredible beach I’ve ever seen. It was mostly empty with hot white sand and warm, clear blue water. There was enough of a breeze to make it perfect. The few girls on the beach were beautiful and bikini clad. Not that any of us got beyond small talk but after weeks at sea it was wonderful just to be in their presence and away from the crowds of tourist and sailors. That day on the beach, I felt the stress of several weeks melt away. It was so odd to find this empty gem after the hopeless crowding of Honolulu and Waikiki Beach.
We tried the food off the beaten trail and had fresh sugar cane and vanilla ice cream for dessert. The fare was excellent and tasty and the people were friendly. It felt very homey and welcoming on the North Side of the Isle.
The next day I went snorkeling for the only time in my life and it was incredible. The colors were brilliant and left me a little dazed. I felt as though I was swimming in a giant psychedelic fish tank. It was enchanting and I found Octopus’s Garden (by the Beatles) running through my head.
We did some touristy things the final day and stayed out very late marshalling our little remaining time. Due to a poorly communicated ship’s balancing a few hundred of the Ranger’s sailors including yours truly ended up sleeping out in the open. The shock of finding the boat closed off to us took the edge off a very happy buzz I was feeling. But, it really wasn’t bad at all as we were on the soft grass near the carrier dock of Pearl Harbor and the temperature was perfect if a little dewy by dawn. They came through and woke us all up by 6:00 am so we could shit, shower and shave in time for muster for yet more engineering drills and duty. Thus ended my 2½ days in Paradise.
* is a common term for sailors.
Korea : While in the Navy I went to Korea twice, the trips blurred together a bit and I had a lot of fun both times. We drank and partied and drank and shopped and took a few tours while drinking and even saw the DMZ while drunk. I bought Reeboks for $10 and large furry blankets for $15 that all these years later my kids use as their blankets; a lion and a tiger. My daughter has said, “It is like being wrapped up in a stuff animal”.
Back to Korea, my friends Dan, Greg and Monty and I were drinking in a large bar with another bar next to it. We were all enjoying ourselves and getting buzzed on the cheap. Our bar was playing Rock and the other Country and Western. They both played “American Pie” at the same time and the two bars tried to out sing/shout the other. It was an incredible aural experience. 200 drunken sailors all seemed to know the words. I was probably singing the loudest and probably the most off key. It is a an odd thing but I have since found myself butchering, “Drove my Chevy to the Levee but the Levee was dry” three more times over the years, drunk each time of course.
I remember being young and stupid and feeling very unsure of myself and this whole Navy thing the first time I was there. Fresh from A-school where the Navy trained me to be an electrician mate, it was my first trip out to sea. I was one of the boots but I won over the old timers (20-25 year old “salts”). The boots or newer sailors on our first long cruise were Greg, Craig, Doug, Shane and I. The salts numbered about 8 and were led by Maddog and Cox. This cruise was two months out to sea and the only ports were Pusan Korea and Vancouver. How I won them over was by my capacity to drink and willingness to open beer bottles with my teeth. I did say I was young and stupid. I remember no pain and suffered no damage at least. Maddog was a second class petty officer and after my dopiness he proclaimed, “Well I guess we’ll keep Jim, at least he makes a handy opener, so Greg has to go.” Four guys grabbed Greg and tossed him out into the light but cold rain. They let him back in a few minutes later. I doubt I have drunk as much before or since.
The second time I was at Korea I was hanging out with Greg and Craig again and Dan and Monty two other friends. We headed to the new casinos just opened in preparation for the upcoming Olympics. I had never been in a casino before but I was a fair Black Jack player. We all ended up at a cheaper Black Jack table and were having fun. I enjoyed the free drinks and sandwiches they plied us with. Eventually it paid off for the house as after being up about $80 I finished down $40. As I said at the time to Craig who lost about $50, “We would have spent more at the bars and had less fun.” We had spent 6 hours playing. Monty lost about $200 but he joked, “I came out ahead, I planned to lose up to $250.” Greg was the happiest this time, “Losers, I won $50!”