Old Navy-New Navy

Wooden Ships and Iron Men - My Navy vs. Today's Navy  O.K.  Now this is a long read, but if you're former Navy, or any military type from the 60s and 70s, you'll find a lot of resonance in it.  The guy's "voice" and style are so similar to mine that I wondered for a while if I'd written it and forgot about it. The home site has more stories for anyone interested. Ron "I Metzger in St. Louis" Before you get all up in my face 'bout what I'm 'bout to ramble on about, lemme first say that I know the human memory tends to heavily discriminate the stuff it stores, cataloguing things the way it wants to and reserving special places for certain select events, sounds, sights, smells, and scenes. And not only does it selectively edit things in and out, but it tends to embellish events with its individualized set of filters, ethics, morals, priorities, and tastes, magnifying some episodes and minimizing others. O.K. That said, I recently came across something that triggered memories of my early experiences in the Navy. 'Smatterafact, lotsa things do that as I get older. My holistic retrospect on my 24 years in the USN is quite positive, and I often willingly go back to relive what were my most exciting and satisfying times . . . all the way from a raw unranked boot in San Diego to the guy responsible for maintenance and repair of elex comm & crypto equipment for CincPac, SubPac, CinCPacFlt, Com7thFlt, and several other high-powered commands in Hawaii. Hair all shaved off. Personal effects confiscated. Clothes that didn't fit. Strangers yelling stuff at me I didn't fully understand. Food that tasted like stewed dirt. Beds that spoke of the hundreds who'd slept in 'em before. Marching in formation with guys wearing exactly the same clothes I had to wear, carrying an out-of-date rifle with which I had to master and demonstrate skills useful in no situation my fertile imagination could conceive. My entire personality dragged out, ridiculed, abused, and tossed on a scrap heap only to be replaced by one that knee-jerked instantly to commands and single-mindedly carried out lawful orders, even though no one had ever explained to me what exactly an unlawful order might have been. No longer was I a college boy pursuing liberal arts and intellectual growth but a cog in a 72-man machine dedicating every single waking moment to causing no demerits to the company during inspections, drills, skill training, or parades. Home was a narrow cot in an open-bay barracks featuring gang showers and rows of sinks, urinals, and commodes with no provisions for individuality, much less privacy. Lights out happened when the Company Commander decided we'd absorbed enough humiliation for that day, that our lockers were properly stowed, that our shoes were properly shined, our barrack was properly cleaned, and that we clearly understood that we were still useless raw meat that some unfortunate Chief Petty Officer would one day be burdened with molding into halfway decent sailors. Reveille was 0500, even before the seagulls which swooped down to pick up the lungers off the grinder were up yet. Formation was 20 minutes later, after shaving and dressing and fixing bunks and being reminded that the coming night would indeed be damned short if we screwed up ANYthing that day. Breakfast was hard-boiled eggs and beans and soggy toast one day, chipped-something-or-other on soggy toast the next, greasy fried mystery stuff with soggy toast the next, hamburger with tomato sauce on soggy toast the next, and all served with something vaguely white called "reconstituted milk" and a dark, vile, burnt-smelling but otherwise tasteless fluid some would-be comedian labeled "Coffee." One good thing, though . . . [Full Article] ”