A Senior Chief Petty Officer I had the opportunity to work with during a CPO Selectee training day once asked a Selectee when did he (or she) become a Chief Petty Officer.
” I was selected this year, Senior Chief.”
“Do you know when I became a Chief Petty Officer, Selectee?”, he then asked.
“When I decided to act and take responsibility as a Chief Petty Officer. I simply waited for the uniform to catch up.”
The article here honors the example and sacrifice of SEAL operator Michael Monsoor, whose example will be remembered in his namesake naval vessel and her crew.
Thirty years ago, I read several of Norman Mailer’s work. It was a time of controversy during the maturing of society in the post-Vietnam era. The Death Penalty, scandals in Government, Presidents and Senators losing their positions. Foreign revolutions. Domestic terrorism. Sex. Religious charlatans. While my thoughts today run to the passing of an old letch, Hugh Hefner, yesterday, the impact of Hefner’s life’s work cannot be left unmentioned. Playboy followed the American culture in the last half of the Twentieth Century, and over fifty years the culture, unfortunately for Hefner, matured past him. But military lockers, battlefields, firehouses, and little boy’s attic cubbyholes in the 1960s and 1970s were adorned with centerfold images. Some stolen from their dad’s collection. With the sexual revolution of the Flower Children which became the hedonistic ’80s, the age of AIDS, and then the gay culture, everything about the onetime bedroom subject can now be taught in grade school. Talk about a real life satire.
I was in the 1980’s a fan of satire, particularly on the military. M.A.S.H was still popular on television, Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, the war movie Kelly’s Heroes was often on television. In the mid-1980s, I had several friends ( some I regularly talk with today) who served in Vietnam. I was mentored by World War II and Korean War vets. I spent twenty-six years over a thirty-two year span in a Navy uniform. I saw a lot of things about bureaucracy, opportunists, and the occasional subject satirized in these stories happening through the experiences of my friends and from my personal observation.
Hefner’s Playboy – and then its competitors, and with new technology, brought sex out into the mainstream, made it a commodity, and cheapened it, from a wonderful bonding relationship between two under God’s blessing, to a mainstream yardstick for judging maturity. As America matured, women and men very often were colleagues or competed in the same profession, and just as the race identity was removed by the military, the gender barrier also came down. This is not to say that it was a smooth transition. Change takes a generation or two to fully be accepted. And perhaps, the nation is on the verge or putting it back into the bedroom. When “taboo” becomes the mainstream, a new counter-culture icon may find a new audience. Hefner is dead. The Playboy Mansion, already sold, has lost its previous occupant. And now, with a few truckloads of Lysol, scrub brushes, and an army of health control professionals can sanitize fifty years of the “cosmopolitan” stains away. Wonder if Helen Gurly Brown or Hilary Clinton might shed a tear. There’s one less Neanderthal in the world.
Saturday morning, 3 AM, and I am awake. I really do not want to be; when I was in my twenties and thirties, I was able to be very productive on four hours sleep. Six hours would have been “vacation mode”. For some reason I am reminded of many times I stood watch on the Quarterdeck in the middle of the night while our ship was in port. Whether aboard the USS TEXAS – the cruiser, not the present submarine, on the West Coast; or in Norfolk, Virginia aboard the USS PETERSON, a Spruance-Class Destroyer, it was often very cold standing watch at this time of the morning.
I still remember the sound of the exhaust fans, the deafening, steel rattling as warm air was blown out onto the weatherdeck from the ship’s interior. Standing at a podium, partly exposed to the wind, I remember on more than one occasion wrapping my peacoat tighter around me, and sending the Messenger to get me more hot, very black coffee. The “balls to four” watch, midnight till 4 AM, is one of the more difficult watches since there are few comings and goings, the ship’s commander is either ashore or asleep since getting his last passdown report. It was a good time to quiz ourselves and study for qualification tests. At that time, the ESWS qualification was a big boost to a junior Sailor seeking advancement. The landline rarely rang at that time unless it was to report a member of ship’s company going on or off- leave. Sometimes it was the base security reporting a member was being written up for being intoxicated and belligerent or trying to drive onto the base. We would have to rouse a master-at-arms to go retrieve him. Normally, unless we were in a period called a Intermediate Maintenance AVailablity ( IMAV) when welders and other contractors were coming and going all night, it was often a dull period of duty. This was in the decade before 9/11, so the occasional drunk Sailor returning from Liberty and a visit by the base Command Duty Officer might be our only interruption on the Quarterdeck.
Overseas in the Mediterranean in the period following the Gulf War and Bosnian conflict, the middle of the night was a time we did not have security forces in heightened vigilance as we had once on the other side of the Suez Canal. On a six-month deployment, our ship might spend a month patrolling in the Med with several port visits. It was often a blessing to be on duty in port. One of my shipmates was never interested in going out on liberty – he had been to these same ports several times. He bankrolled a lot of money on these cruises.
Saving money when overseas was never a strong skill of mine. Had I not stood midwatch overseas though, I might never have believed stories I read about mariners, ships, and rats. When I was standing the Quarterdeck midwatch in Trieste, Italy in the early 1990s, I remember looking down to the head of the pier at some dog rooting around the dumpster just off the pier. It was dark, foggy, and things illuminated by the yellow lamps of the pier were not distinct. But I realized that dog was not a dog. What would a dog be doing here anyway? It was a wharf rat, about the size of a terrier – the largest rat I have ever seen. And now I know why ships mooring lines have “rat guards” on them. For good reason.
For those who might be amused, or assume I was exaggerating, I found an article online of a rat that obviously was well-fed up until his untimely end.
1 mid-rats is the term we use in the Navy for the late night meal prepared for the watchstanders. RATs is short for “rations”, not an item on the menu.
“I’m cap’n here by ‘lection. I’m cap’n here because I’m the best man by a long sea-mile. You won’t fight, as gentlemen o’ fortune should; then, by thunder, you’ll obey, and you may lay to it! I like that boy, now; I never seen a better boy than that. He’s more a man than any pair of rats of you in this here house, and what I say is this: let me see him that’ll lay a hand on him–that’s what I say, and you may lay to it.”
Some days I feel like I’m walking the plank. Willingly. And sometimes I wish I was a pirate. Like my co-worker. The one dressed here like Long John Silver. Technologist during the week. Pirate on weekends. Better than being a superhero. No tights.
As a Navy technician, a graduate of electronic schools where I learned the theory of operation, maintenance and repair of digital and analog (vacuum tubes and relays) equipment, I also had experience in the maintenance of diesel-power emergency generators and battery backup systems. I’ve crawled under raised flooring ( computer -decking) to run bundled cables from a telephone cabinet, when cables were wire-wrapped in large panels, to equipment in vault-like enclosed rooms. In my off-time, I helped fellow trainees swap big block V-8 engines from an 1973 El Camino into a 1970 Chevelle. But I will always remember one Spring at a base near Washington, D.C. when I got the military to fund my repair of a golf cart.
a 1980’s era golf cart
There was a golf cart with a broken axle and missing (scavenged) parts rusting away in the back lot behind my building. It was forgotten. I was motivated by an idea, that a running cart might serve me and my shopmates travel between one end of the base to the other; however, we had weekly tasks in several buildings at that facility. Every week we had to bring equipment to take measurements and perform maintenance, and it was annoying to hand-carry everything between the two. It was a ten-minute walk each way lugging gear in a hand-cart.
That particular model of golf cart was no longer being serviced by any company in the metro area. And parts were difficult to come by. This was more than a decade before the Internet was available so no Ebay nor Amazon was around to query. And finding a catalog was impossible. I called machine shops until I found one that would build the parts to repair the axle and a bearing manufacturer that would take my measurements to make a wheel bearing. I became a skilled negotiator with the finance office lady in charge of petty funds. After some weeks of dealing, I was able to get these items approved.
Two months later we rolled out the now -running golf cart, and was set to do the next round of maintenance at the far end of the base. My workcenter supervisor was pleased. My fellow technicians who earlier thought me crazy, were also looking forward to using the “shop cart”. But no good deed goes unpunished.
My shop Chief announced the repaired vehicle was needed by the Department Head. My Chief also intended to use it to perform audits of the maintenance checks in all the buildings we serviced. I never used it after that. I spent the next year working at the Pentagon communications center, so the “Golf Cart Bravo Zulu” was actually my opportunity to support the Director of Naval Intelligence and stepping stone to the next adventure in my Navy career.
What is the most unusual thing you have repaired while in the military?
Among my peers in the world of Navy cryptologic operations, we enjoyed a sense of humor that few civilians might understand. To this very day, when friends or family ask me about my work, I will likely smile, then say, “I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you.” I do not get asked very much about my work.
Today, when recalcitrant equipment that I either test or provide customer with needed support and repair, I always have a smart-aleck response as my double-secret probation/ inside-voice, final debug plan. Put it in a barrel and light off some Thermite. But then, I am hired to fix it; it is up to my bosses to determine when the expense outweighs the continued troubleshooting.
Very early in the 1990’s, particularly as some hotspots in the world – where intelligence-gathering was not collected from 60,000 feet or a hundred miles in altitude as it may be today, but on the ground – my unit held a demonstration of classified material emergency disposal. This was the chemical destruction capability of THERMITE. Given a few minutes to dispose of the contents of a large safe, personnel might not have time to shred documents; some equipment that shouldn’t fall into the wrong hands could not be physically destroyed by physical effort. Ergo, a thermite grenade could be ignited, placed in or on it, and the object would be reduced to ash and molten slag.
However, history taught me that this material might have been more for show than practical use. When the U.S. Embassy in Tehran was seized in 1979, if some stories are to be believed, shredded documents were reassembled by people working furiously over months. When the Iranians again seized our personnel during the Obama Presidency, was there Thermite to obliterate our crypto gear on board? was it destroyed? If jettisoned overboard, was it recovered?
And in the digital world of identity theft, credit reporting thefts, and hacking, there’s nothing to render data irretrievable but for military-grade encryption. And yet it often depends on human beings to practice security. Of course my mind runs to a different form of “thermite”, but if we cannot find the provocateurs, cannot render them sanitized.
I’m having trouble sleeping a few nights in recent weeks. My go-to on those nights was a night-cap of a little bourbon, or perhaps a beer, or a nip of scotch. But too much of a good thing can affect the waistline – and have the opposite effect on me: keeping me awake and wanting to write late at night. I was going to a Bible study tonight, so I neither feel like a nightcap afterward nor do I want to toss and turn again tonight thinking about Work. It was so much easier twenty (or more) years ago when I could sleep in rotating snatches of a few hours, work or train for several, then snooze a few hours again, and then back at my Navy duties.
Heading to my church group this evening, I stopped at the pharmacy for some sleep-aid liquid – the drowsy cough medicine without the medicine. Just then I recognize the manner and buzz haircut of an elder military vet walking ahead of me into the store. Marine. Pretty solid shape still for I presume his late sixties. He resembled my old family doc – a Vietnam Vet who sported the same “look”. (Poor Doc. He’d been diagnosed with cancer and one day wandered off by himself – with a pistol – into the mountains.)
I’m fairly certain that both this Marine and my old Doc would guffaw seeing me there to get Zquil. I imagine either one providing me with the Corps’ helpful remedy for insomnia. A hundred -twenty push-ups, and then a little double-time marching not walking – the dogs. Perhaps include a mile swim ( the base and the local gym have a pool) to tucker out a young guy like me.
Exiting the store with my purple medication, I see a white minivan parked in the one space, next to, but not in, the handicap spot between me and my car. I instantly know its owner. A little faded, somewhat banged up, dependable-looking, with a weathered U.S. Marine Corps emblem, meticulously centered, on the driver’s door.
Just like the elder Devil Dog I saw inside. I straighten up. Suck my gut in a little.
There were three sucker punches the United States of America suffered – within her borders – in history. August 24, 1814, when the British burned the White House during the War of 1812. The attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii on December 7, 1941. And within the lifetime of most Americans now living, New York’s World Trade Center, the Pentagon and the thwarted attack, probably destined for the White House, on September 11, 2001.
America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves. Abraham Lincoln
brainyquote.com
Out of World War II, one-time enemies became friends and Allies. From the early Nineteenth Century, the world entered the Modern Era, mostly due to the inventiveness and creativity of people coming to these United States. From turbines and cotton gins, to aircraft and space exploration, ideas germinated here or were improved on and flourished, the gift of immigrants who were united in pride for this nation.
Blood has been shed defending a free people. Ideas that flourished here have gone out into the rest of the world. From medicine to Microsoft, a melting -pot in America fostered new ideas and directions in the world. Freedoms that had not been prevalent to societies in the Old World worked here.
But in the late 1940s and continuing through today, three forces have gathered in opposition to Americanism. Socialism, atheism, and equivocation. A failed idea of mid-19th century European intellectuals that the Industrial Revolution created oppression was embraced first by Russia, China, and imposed or embraced by nations in Europe, Asia, and some Latin American states. It resulted in a mediocre existence, little pride in workmanship, and ironically, a small elite oppressing a majority. It continues today due to control of information, education, and government services by an elite over a majority. Atheism, fostered by the same socialist elites, highlights the weaknesses of mankind as being the result of and not a remedy through the Christian faith. All the other religious orders are unopposed, generally, by the elites – for whom, power is religion- to confound and isolate people into manageable groups.
And from dictionary. com,
equivocation: “the use of ambiguous language to conceal the truth or to avoid committing oneself; prevarication.”
Leaders formerly stood upon principles, Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln; Martin Luther King, Winston Churchill and Nelson Mandela. Today, masses follow sound bites, imagery, and shed blood based on half-truths, lies and backroom deals. And in the U.S., most politicians have only one purpose – to gain and remain in power.
On this 16th anniversary of the murder of 3,000 people, at the hands of fanatics -propelled by a religion where the very mention of their prophet’s name can instigate murder – I pray for everyone here to embrace unity, discourse, freedom, and respect for law and for the Constitution.
In a matter of hours, an awesome and terrifying force of Nature, Hurricane “Irma” will batter Florida. Like another deadly storm twenty-five years earlier, Andrew, this one has a bead on southern Florida – yet the entire Atlantic coastline and perhaps some of the Gulf along the Panhandle may suffer. This storm has already obliterated some of the eastern Caribbean islands including Barbuda, and damaged Puerto Rico and is heading toward the mainland. Potentially, a large swath of human activity will be reduced to rubble and debris. A week earlier Hurricane Harvey churned into the Gulf Coast of Texas and Louisiana and dumped a record four feet of rain, flooding cities and towns and creating tens of thousands of people needing shelter. With Irma yet to make landfall in the continental U.S., the toll in property and on lives is not yet known. And then there is a third storm, Jose, which may follow his siblings from the western Atlantic and into the Caribbean behind Irma and Harvey.
With the passage of millennia, the ability to prepare for the predictable storm season, and to track storms through technology has saved countless lives. And if not able to accurately predict when or where an earthquake will strike, systems are being improved to give adequate warning – and to survive. One thing is certain, in times of crisis, our community of nations does manage to put aside animosities and rivalries and provide assistance to those in need.
Except some Hollywood actors. I heard today that actress Jennifer Lawrence thinks hurricanes are the byproduct of Donald Trump’s election. Sounds a bit like some movie she might have acted in – man-made natural forces controlled by a dictator. Perhaps Hollywood can offer a virgin for sacrifice – which is how some ancient cultures attempted to appease the Natural forces threatening them. However, it wouldn’t work with these bloviating types – no virgins to be found.
The world should join in prayer to protect and to relieve those now suffering and for those in harm’s way.
All this hulabaloo over DACA, immigration, and healthcare. Most of us are very charitable and supportive people. Our blood has been shed the world over to help unfortunate peoples have a chance to improve their lot. But some here go too far. The noisiest protests come from noise-makers: media, celebrities, lobbyists, and unemployable hangers-on; from the insincere: the uber-wealthy political-influence peddlers who may send a few shoes but demand “action” from Government (while they profit from their pocket-politicians) ; and the machiavellian: professional politicians who manipulate the public and government for their own purposes.
A simple proposition. Everyone (including the influence-peddler and politician alike) who opposes American nationalism, opposes U.S. state and national laws being enforced, and opposes citizens’ -only rights for citizens – our citizens and not contrived citizenship, I would ask YOU to (contractually) sponsor one or more “guests” within our borders. In perpetuity.
Exchange your citizenship for your sponsorship of an illegal guest. If they act criminally, you take their punishment. If they are illiterate or unskilled, you teach them. If they have medical conditions, you pay for their care. Do not demand that others who are already charitable to the less-fortunate, be forced to support the non-citizen and the civilly disobedient, demand we comply when you change the rules of the game, and demand the lawful bend to the unlawful. Otherwise, the hell you create here is no better than the purported hell our “guests” left.
At the Starbucks today, I had a great chat with a police officer as we both were waiting on our orders. He is probably ten years my junior, but I had the sense, a “vibe” Californians generally would call it, that this man was formerly military. The bearing of a military veteran is different; I’ve talked with religious leaders whom I got that same sense and I then find confirmed they served in the military. And having the acquaintance of cops from other backgrounds, and cops who transitioned from the military, I think there is subtle differences. But I digress. This officer acknowledged that he transitioned into blue uniform of a police officer. However, his Army career and his public service had been in tandem: while recently retired from the Army National Guard, he was and is a 20-plus years veteran police officer civilian and military police.
In contrast, I got a different sort of vibe from a conversation I wandered into recently. It suggested (to me) a child’s encounter with a member of law enforcement was either embellished by the storyteller’s negative opinion of civil authority and biases, or a child’s encounter with a greenhorn LEO; the described first impression of flashing lights, and a rehearsed, “politically-sensitive” introduction to a preteen would have been handled differently by my Starbuck’s patron LEO. But in a time when it can be as hazardous for an officer – whether a conflict or a civil rights violation, in a suburb in the Southwestern U.S. as in Southwest Asia (aka the Middle East), tact might be a secondary concern.
In my childhood, a police officer would see my bike run over in the middle of the street, check to see that I was unhurt, and then bring me home to my parents in the squad car. Even a decade ago when my preteens were goofing off in the neighborhood and cops were called, my wife came out to find my kid and his friends placed against a squad car. They all were “released to the custody” of one really ticked-off Mom. It was a different time. But children of military veterans, and families where the military and law enforcement are family tradition, there is more respect given to those in authority. I’ve generally only known times when the community relied on law enforcement as much as the other way around.
I would prefer to think that a poor impression made on this young man, would be the outcome of a lack of mentoring. In the military, the best units have a reputation for building leaders and subject experts, through the years of mentoring and feedback. Such was my experience. And several of my mentors, and those who came after me excelled militarily and professionally. Several were law enforcement officers, federal marshals and agents. I’ve known a few servicemen who were an ego in a uniform, but most of the leaders I knew were humble. Such was this professional I encountered today.
But I may be biased. I support the fraternal orders of law enforcement. I am a Life member of the Veterans of Foreign Wars. I am grateful for these citizen-soldiers who continue to serve our communities. Who serve our nation. Who raise sons and daughters to be responsible, thinking adults. Some choose other careers, hold different views, but treasure the country, respect its laws and order, and respect people who respect others in return. Among old warriors, a recognition and camaraderie, an appreciation of shared experience, discipline and service. Thanks for serving.
Truths, Half-truths, and Sea Stories 