probably so; the US military is far less “tribal” than some others I’ve seen and worked with in the past. A superior is a superior, regardless of whether he’s in YOUR chain of command.
You can relax more or less anywhere you want as an officer. The O club really has nothing to do with any of this, although its origin may. Nowadays the O club is more of a little-used relic on the Navy and AF bases I’ve seen, and I think that combined clubs are becoming the norm. There’s nothing wrong with knocking back a few with E’s, as long as you’re not (as an O) singling an E out. If I tell my E’s that I’ll meet them at the E Club after work, all is well. If I tell Petty Officer Jones that I’ll meet him (or her) at the E Club after work, I can get in big trouble.
This whole discussion boils down to killing and being killed, which is what the military does. You need to kill but in doing so risk being killed. You then need someone to make sure the killing happens (vice simply cowering in a foxhole), and behind that authority you must have some sort of penal system.
This has evolved over the years into the Officers being better educated and having a broader scope of responsibility and knowledge. The E’s are more narrow in their expertise, and their knowledge well is deep. Relative to that, the O’s know a little about a lot and will move between very different types of jobs, each of which may require its own training and qualifications.
Also, in every day life, you will not see O’s ordering E’s outside of their chain of command. If official duty interaction occurs between an O and an E (each in a separate CoC), and there is some sort of problem which the O wants addressed, he’ll find out who the O is that oversees that E and have a discussion (of course, there are situations which’ll dictate immediate addressing of the problem).
Not “Bones”?
As for orders from a superior not in your chain of command… Dean, a friend of mine, was an Ohio National Guard infantry corporal, and was once in Honduras on a training exercise. Dean was told to guard a gate to the base one night and, after a certain hour, not let anyone in. After that hour, a brigadier general (!) whom he didn’t even know demanded to be let in. Then he ordered Dean to let him in. Dean refused, despite the general’s blustering, and his C.O. praised him in the morning.
This is a great thread. I’ve learned a lot - thanks.
And probably once he calmed down, the BG probably would have congratulated him on following standing orders too… it’s the sort of thing you hear a lot about when you’re in - a junior rank standing up to a senior rank and holding to the standing orders he was given regardless of pressure and bluster. We were even trained to do this during basic, although lots of people folded under the pressure when it came about for real 
Further on the “culture” differences between the US and the Commonwealth, I remember a scene in the “Thin Red Line” (1998) where a commander orders a junior to take a hill via frontal assualt, which he refuses. Usually in British-inspired militaries there is great deferrance to “the man on the ground” and the general thinking is “order him to do something, leave it up to him how to do it.” Its very possible that the afore-mentioned commander would have been relieved unless there were very compelling reasons for his meddling in that way.
So, it seems the streotypes are wrong. The class consious Brits have a looser style, the classless yanks, an officer is an officer.
That’s usually the way with the US military as well - the officer orders someone to do something (take the hill) then it’s up to the guy on the ground to do it, or in other words senior officers discuss strategy and leave the tactics to their juniors. Our squadron commander said ‘make the jets 80% mission capable across the squadron’; it was down to our junior officers (captains and majors) to get us the gear for us to work, and down to our sergeants to boss their elements (flightline, weapons, ammo, logistics, crew chiefs, etc…) to make it so.
The moral behind that incident in The Thin Red Line was that the senior commander (Nick Nolte) was a martinet who was willing to sacrifice his soldiers unnecessarily just to look tough to higher command (John Travolta) and get promoted, and the captain (Elias Koteas) cared too much about his soldiers to order them into battle where he knew many of them would die. Neither officer was a ‘good’ officer, and although the junior officer was removed from command, the senior officer should have been removed as well for his stupidity and incompetence.
If thats the way it is now, then great. The one complaint I have read in memoirs and official publications about the US Army and Marines in Vietnam was the fact that senior commanders, like Brigade and even division commanders were getting too involved in a company or battalion level fight. Both David Hackworth and Colin Powell mention that. There are times that a senior officer needs to get involved, needs to be at the front, but in Vietnam it seemed to go beyond all measures of reasonableness. Hackworth described one company engagement where the battalion, brigade and division commanders were all overhead in helicopters directing the show. Feel really sorry for that Coy commander.
LBJ personally picked Vietnam bombing targets late in his term. President Ford was speaking directly to fighter pilots during the Mayaguez incident. With excellent telecommunications comes the danger that a decision will get passed too high up the chain of command.
Officers struggle to get promoted without ‘combat’ experience and sometimes manufacture that experience where they weren’t actually required. Bad things happen.
But it’s not the way it’s supposed to work.
Thats a problem with all armies unfortunatly. 
The thing is though, one of the many things I like about the US Military is that while combat time is obviously the primary qualifier for promotion, a talented and capable officer is not precluded form higher command just based on a lack or paucity of combat time. Gen Ike and Bradley in WWII are the obvious examples, but take Pretaus these days. The first time he was in action was as a division commander in the '03 invasion, yet he has been by far the best MNF-I commander. In a British or commonwealth army, an officer with his career profile; esp with the lack of combat time, would never advance past battalion commander (and he would be lucky to get that too.).