Honor,
Courage,
Commitment
Honor,
Courage,
Commitment
Navy Boot Camp
J. F. Leahy
Naval Institute Press Annapolis, Maryland
The latest edition of this book has been brought to publication with the generous assistance of Marguerite and Gerry Lenfest.
Naval Institute Press
291 Wood Road
Annapolis, MD 21402
© 2002 by J. F. Leahy
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
First Naval Institute Press paperback edition published in 2013.
ISBN: 978-1-61251-372-0
The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:
Leahy, J. F.
Honor, courage, commitment : Navy boot camp / J. F. Leahy.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Naval education—United States. 2. Sailors—Training of—United States. 3. United States. Navy—Recruiting, enlistment, etc.
I. Title.
V433.L43 2002
359.5’0973—dc21
2002019761
This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).
212019181716151413987654321
First printing
For the Red Ropes past, present, and those to come The Navy and the nation are forever in your debt Keep pushing, shipmates
Contents
Foreword
Preface
Acknowledgments
1In the Beginning
2The Recruit Division Commanders
3Reporting Aboard
4Orientation
5Raise High the Guidon
6The Early Weeks of Training
7A Sailor’s Life for Me
8The Right Way, the Wrong Way, the Navy Way
9The Warrior Weeks
10Confronting Fear
11Body and Soul
12Battle Stations! Fighting the Good Fight
13Battle Stations! Finishing the Course
14Battle Stations! Keeping Faith
15Dangers, Great and Small
16They Make It Happen
17Bravo Zulu, Young Sailors—Well Done!
18A Sailor Remembers
Appendix: Division 01-005 Recruit Roster
Glossary
Index
Foreword
Honor, courage, commitment—these words were adopted by Navy leadership in early 1993 to replace our previous watchwords. This change was made by a group led by the Secretary of the Navy, the Chief of Naval Operations, the Commandant of the Marine Corps, myself, and a dozen other leaders and civilian advisers and was a response to some troubling conduct. In the end there was a general agreement that honor, courage, and commitment were aptly chosen (they had been serving the Marine Corps well for many years already). I agreed to this change, but I left the meeting fully aware that the easy part was done. The really difficult task of making these words truly meaningful to sailors (and therefore to our Navy) lay ahead. In order for them to have real and lasting impact on our Navy these words must be taught with clarity and intensity.
In truth, the previous watchwords—integrity, tradition, and professionalism—had great potential, but they had never been taught to sailors or even well-publicized in the Navy. Instead they were relegated to the occasional quarterdeck banner or command logo, rarely seen and even more rarely used to inspire, motivate, or provoke sailors to contemplate the importance of naval service and their own personal conduct, both on and off duty. Although these are fine-sounding words with noble connotations, they are, in fact, just words. And as every ethics and values teacher knows, memorizing words isn’t enough. To be effective they must be learned in the context of naval heritage and tradition. Jack Leahy has identified one place—Recruit Training Command, popularly known as “boot camp”—where every waking moment is dedicated toward instilling those values into fifty thousand or more young men and women every year.
Preparing sailors to live and fight at sea in a shore-based training environment has always been challenging and, as Jack Leahy’s work will make clear to you, it hasn’t gotten any easier. Although this book is a recording of the comments of recruits and their trainers with minimal amplifying commentary by Leahy, it illuminates the three main ingredients of the recruit training experience in an honest and straightforward way: recruits, recruit division commanders (RDCs), and the boot camp itself—Great Lakes Naval Training Center.
I believe recruit training is better now than at any time in my memory. Recruit training works. That it does work is attributable exclusively to RDCs, the “Red Ropers.” I join in the sentiments contained in Jack’s dedication: “For the Red Ropes—past, present, and those to come—the Navy and the nation are forever in your debt.” We are! We have been, and God willing, we always will be.
We were in their debt following Pearl Harbor when, outnumbered and outgunned, sailors demonstrated great valor and sacrifice all across the Pacific, taking fearsome losses, holding the line, remaining outwardly confident of victory through the darkest hours of that conflict. And in October 2000, when young sailors—most in their teens and early twenties—working under the most horrific situations imaginable, saved the USS Cole in Yemen. And most recently, we were in their debt in February 2002 when the USS Theodore Roosevelt set the all-time Navy record for continuous time away at sea, launching nearly one hundred long-range air missions every day. We are in their debt today for, as you read this book, young men and women—trained by these recruit division commanders—are guarding our freedom somewhere, everywhere, in this troubled world.
No sailor, ever, ever, forgets his boot camp company commander (now RDC). My memories of BM1 Jones (Company 649, San Diego, 1965) are crystal clear these many years later. Known and addressed only as Mr. Jones (in the training style of the day), he was small, wiry, and tough. He was intense and profane. Most impressive, he was omnipresent. He was present at reveille and taps, and every moment in between. There were regular sightings during the mid watch as well. He was, in a salty and perverse kind of way, extremely witty and wise. On one occasion during an outbreak of spinal meningitis we were all given preventive medication daily to take after meals. When BM1 Jones found several of the yellow pills on the head floor he was enraged, and we all began to anticipate the rifle drills or other such punishment in store for us. Instead he made us all take a sheet of stationery and write a brief letter. Beginning “Dear Mom and Dad,” he dictated a short note on the facts of the meningitis outbreak and the several deaths that had already occurred. His dictation noted that the Navy was conscientiously providing lifesaving medicine to us every day and concluded by informing them that we threw our medicine away instead of taking it as ordered. He had us conclude “With love, your son” and sign our names. He then collected the letters and stamped the addressed envelopes. He apparently never mailed the letters, but nearly all our mothers received a strange letter we wrote later that night attempting to explain. No more discarded medicine was ever found on the deck.
Strangely, I intensely disliked and feared him, but somehow I respected and trusted him at the same time. These many years later I realize that he was the very epitome of duty and reliability; his commitment to prepare us was beyond doubt. We might not have been happy in his charge, but we learned respect for authority, loyalty to the institution, and the absolute importance of following orders.
In my mind’s album are many snapshots of boot camp that have not faded over the years. In one, BM1 Jones is marching off with a half dozen other company commanders from our battalion, all in dress uniforms, to take the E-7 examination. That small group departing in military formation was the symbol of all Navy authority and structure for me. While I knew nothing about the advancement system or the near mystical importance of selection to chief, I knew there was something special about that scene. Over the years, all the negative feelings gave way to respect and even affection for BM1 Jones. Wherever you are today, Boats—good luck and smooth sailing, shipmate.
I laughed when I read the debate about the differences between today’s recruits and earlier generations, whether they are “less fit” or “smarter” than before. That debate has been going on in the Chief’s Mess and Wardroom since Noah first set sail. Truth, like beauty, has to be in the eye of the beholder, I’m afraid. It is hard for me to accept either assertion. In my day, for example, beyond the perpetual marching and rifle drills in preparation for pass-in-review, there was very little physical activity, and my RDC never led or participated in it. Today there is a real effort to include regular, meaningful physical activity, and the RDCs—like Chief Marty Zeller at the gas house—are required to lead from the front. So if recruits are less fit, the Navy has taken some steps to meet the deficiency. As to whether or not today’s youngster is smarter, I am skeptical. The brightest have been exposed to lots of technology and are exceptionally competent, but most, even some with college degrees, write poorly and may not understand basic civics or geography. The most obvious differences over earlier generations are diversity and the near certainty of extensive media exposure to popular culture. There are many other differences: More are married or single parents, and there are fewer stigmas attached to failure and more propensity to openly question authority. But in the all-important categories of motivation and potential, the similarities with earlier generations of recruits likely outnumber the differences. Like the recruits of my day, most are just young folks looking for a place to fit in and succeed.
Jack’s work captures the frustrations and the pride shared by all the players in the recruit training experience. It is both thought provoking and reassuring to listen to the recruits as they are by turns fearful, playful, irreverent, proud, or confident and to hear their RDCs speak in a straightforward manner about the challenges they contend with as they turn recruits into sailors. Bravo Zulu, Jack. Bravo Zulu, Division 005. Bravo Zulu, Recruit Training Command, Great Lakes, Illinois.
John Hagan
Master Chief Petty Officer of the Navy (Retired)
Preface
It was one of those Cape Cod evenings that make me wish I weren’t a midwesterner. Four old friends, Navy shipmates nearly thirty years ago, had finally reconnected through the magic of the Internet. Mary Ann and Jack King had opted for Navy careers, married, and retired after twenty years; Jim Rose and I had returned to civilian lives after four years’ service. Over excellent seafood risottos at Barolo’s in Hyannis, we reminisced, and as often happens among sailors, the talk turned to our earliest Navy experiences. What were things like now, we wondered? In the long summer twilight we talked of pranks played and watches stood, of liberty runs and inspections, of boot camps and company commanders, and things both silly and significant, until, as often happens, one of us remarked, “You know, somebody ought to write a book.”
And so I did.
The timing, if not perfect, was at least favorable. My long-planned retirement from a major research and development organization was imminent. And even though I’d hung up my navy white hat in 1970, in a way I’d never strayed far from the fleet. I had spent nearly a decade as a civilian consultant in the intelligence community, often enough side by side with sailors. I’d visited and worked in over forty countries—many more than I had ever seen on active duty—and I had developed a dozen or more technical manuals, some still in use throughout the fleet. Anytime my boss had a project evenly slightly nautical, he’d remind me of my Navy roots.
Those roots stretched back to a dark winter night in 1966, and to a Roman Catholic seminary in Baltimore. I’d been called in yet again by the rector, who gently reminded me that sneaking off to date nurses at Bon Secours Hospital was not career-enhancing, at least not in the eyes of the celibate Paulist fathers. Wearily, he gave me thirty dollars—I resisted the temptation to ask for pieces of silver—and a train ticket home. He reminded me that my draft status would soon revert to 1-A, and said that if I wanted to avoid stomping through the bush in Vietnam, I might consider other, more sociable arrangements as quickly as I could. I did—and three weeks later arrived in Navy boot camp. It was three years before I got to Vietnam.
I did have a leg up on the other recruits, though: Having just emerged from an authoritarian, hierarchical, highly structured life, I couldn’t see what all the fuss was about at Recruit Training Command, Great Lakes. Sharing living spaces, toilet facilities, and showers with eighty other guys my age, while being yelled at constantly, seemed natural enough to me. I muddled through the mildly challenging physical exercises and, I suppose, departed at least marginally more fit than when I arrived. After eight weeks of hiding behind stanchions every time a working party was called, I passed from boot camp into the fleet. The dress blue uniform was a distinct advantage when courting student nurses, I happily discovered.
I pondered all this as I flew home to Ohio after my visit to Cape Cod. Surely, there must be dozens of books on Navy boot camp, I thought. I had devoured Tom Rick’s excellent work Making the Corps, of course, but that was about Marines and Parris Island. Surely someone had taken the time to tell the story of Navy recruit training, particularly in view of the recent changes in public policy dictating complete gender integration at all levels of training. I decided to find out.
I returned to the university where I teach part-time and researched the literature. I was surprised to find that outside of some recent newspaper and magazine articles, there appeared to be few recent books on Navy recruit training. A flurry of e-mails and, finally, a book proposal to Navy Public Affairs at the Pentagon provoked an encouraging response. “If the Naval Institute agrees to publish the book, we’ll grant you access.” Concurrent conversations with the U.S. Naval Institute Press were also encouraging, in a catch-22 sort of way. “If the Navy grants access first, we’ll be delighted to publish the manuscript.” Bill Dermody of the public affairs staff at the Naval Training Center, Great Lakes, had the most encouraging advice of all: “Gee, what you really need is someone with enough horsepower to cut through the bureaucracy and get this show on the road. Why not give Mike McCalip a call?”
Command Master Chief Petty Officer Mike McCalip is the senior enlisted sailor at Great Lakes. As the CMC, Mike is the command’s enlisted leader, but he’s much more than that. As one sailor told me, “He’s not the top guy in the Navy, but I bet he’s got his phone number.” His billet, competitively staffed with the active participation of the chief of naval personnel, is a key post, much sought after in the fleet. His cadre of seven hundred recruit division commanders man the “Quarterdeck of the Navy,” the first port of call for the Navy’s newest sailors. Part of a staff of twelve hundred, they are the backbone of an operation that converts fifty-three thousand green, scared kids into fleet sailors each year. Mike is a tough, no-nonsense, fleet-minded warrior of the old school. And, like good chief petty officers everywhere, Mike makes things happen.
Did he ever. Master Chief McCalip quickly arranged meetings for me with Capt. Ed Gantt, the commanding officer of Recruit Training Command (RTC), and the members of his wardroom. With their enthusiastic support, I was soon granted unlimited access to RTC for as long as needed. No area was off limits; I could come and go freely, observe anything, participate when I felt comfortable, interview whoever was willing to chat, and record whatever I thought significant. “This is a place where old sailors make new sailors,” Mike said over coffee one day. “It’s where we
pass on our culture, our ‘sailorness.’ Capture that, and you’ve captured the essence of the place.” I couldn’t have said it better.
You’ll find no bayonet charges, pugil sticks, or hand-to-hand combat at Great Lakes. Navy boot camp differs greatly from that of the other services, because the Navy mission is different. It’s the rare sailor (SEALS, Seabees, and Special Boats Units excepted) who will ever have to rely on physical strength to overcome an enemy in single combat. The Navy trains the way it fights. These days, most sailors are technicians or operators; they maintain weapons systems, operate communications systems, or manage dozens of logistical tasks afloat and ashore. And so today’s sailor undergoes solid aerobic conditioning to sharpen reflexes and develop the stamina necessary to stay fit for extended periods in cramped, stressful, but often sedentary, pursuits. The system aims to provide basically trained, physically fit, mentally tough sailors, conditioned to keep warships on station for extended periods, yet ready to fight at a moment’s notice. Every waking moment is dedicated to that goal.
Together, Master Chief McCalip and I decided that the boot camp story could best be told by following a typical division “from bus to bus”—that is, from the moment the recruits first arrived until they departed for the fleet, nine weeks later. Since Great Lakes is now the Navy’s only boot camp, and trains both male and female recruits, it made sense to focus on a gender-integrated division. (Because only 18 percent of Navy recruits are female, four of every five divisions are still all-male.) We agreed that Division 01-005, the first gender-integrated division to form after the start of the new fiscal year on 1 October, would fit the bill. These are the stories of the recruits of that division, as they told them to me. All names are real, and—except for minor editing to smooth the transition between speech and the written page—the stories are told in their words. With the exception of those who operate under the presumption of confidentiality, such as chaplains, physicians, or psychologists, all participants gave formal permission for me to quote them directly in this book.
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