Williams I know I’ve changed since I’ve been here. Back home you can do whatever you want, but here you have to follow the routine. I think that’s why we did so good today, the guys were all figuring out ways to beat the system, and we just did what we were told.
Hattrich I was getting used to being away from my family, but once we were able to make that first phone call home, I realized that I was missing it all over again. You get used to it, but it comes back.
Wirsch You know what I miss? I miss music! We haven’t heard any music since we’ve been here. [Others agreeing.] I sing in the shower when I can. I had all of these tunes going through my head when we were standing waiting to go aboard the ship. When we’re in the compartment, I’ll have all these oldies going through my mind, or I’ll be really, really tired, and I’ll just have to sit there and start singing some cheesy song, some Britney Spears song, or some Madonna song, and everybody will all start dancing and fooling around, and it wakes us up and all.
Williams I think music helps out the division everywhere. On Ricky Sunday, when the RDCs leave us alone, we’ll just get together in the corner, and sing songs, and dance to ’em and stuff. That’s a group thing that we all do, we sing. And we sing anything and everything! We sing Disney songs. We were singing “The Little Mermaid” the other day.
Hattrich It’s great. On Ricky Sunday we get a chance to take long showers, alone, and write letters, and we sing and talk and just enjoy ourselves for the morning.
Wirsch I was just thinking about that last time. After church I was ironing my clothes and shining my boots, and I thought, what a relief. But I mean—who at home would believe that doing laundry and shining shoes would be a great way to spend your Sunday morning, huh?
That evening, Petty Officer Dan Kent sat in the RDC’s office. Wirsch, Adams, and Smith-Comma-Mary were busily working on division correspondence. “Has anyone ever told you recruits the difference between a fairy tale and a sea story?” he asked. All shook their heads no. “It’s easy. Fairy tales usually begin ‘Once upon a time . ..’; sea stories always begin ‘No kiddin’, this really happened . . .’”
RDCs, especially those with a few pushes behind them, have a wealth of “sea stories” about recruit training. Some are hilarious, some bizarre, and some are tragic. But no kiddin’, these really happened ...
Petty Officer Dan Kent The oddest thing I have seen since I got here was one day after we had just finished battle stations. The division was beat; most had been awake for at least thirty-five hours. Some of them had been up for over forty-eight. We were marching back from Galley 1128, and we go to make the turn into our ship, and one recruit keeps marching straight ahead. I think to myself, what is with this knucklehead? So I catch up to him, and I scream at him, and he keeps going. So I grab him by the shoulder, and give him a shake. He had been fast asleep. Fast asleep, and marching down Illinois St. That’s how tired he was. Can you believe it?
Chief Mike Lucas I was coming into work; it was daylight, so it must have been in the fall. But it was cold outside, maybe, oh, right around freezing. Chief Hennessy catches me on the grinder, so I roll down the window, and he’s talking to me in my car. And along comes this recruit, dressed in running shorts and a tee shirt. Now, remember, it’s freezing outside. So Jim sort of does a double take and says, “Did you see that?” So I get out of the car, and we catch up with this sucker. And Jim asks what does he think he’s doing out on the grinder, dressed like that. “I’m sick of all this place, and I’m leaving.” He even had his ditty-sock tucked into the waistband of his shorts. So Jim says, “Well, where do you think you’re going?” And the kid says to the bus stop. “Do you know where the bus stop is? You’ll freeze to death before you get half way.” So Jim took the guy back to his compartment, and both of us saw him at pass-in-review a couple months later. [Shaking his head.] Recruits . . .
Senior Chief Atkinson I was LCPO at Ship Ten when we got one of those “All available RDCs, muster on the quarterdeck, ASAP!” alerts over the 1MC. So you know right away something is going down. And there’s an incident going on over at the drill hall. I take off at a run, and I see this crowd over there. And there on the roof, naked as a jaybird, is SR So-and-So. Throwing rocks, and cussing out everybody around him. It took about an hour to get him down and over to 5E [the naval hospital psychiatric ward]. Guys were ragging me for months: “Can’t control the recruits in your ship, eh, Senior Chief?”
Chief Lucas Oh, I’ve got thousands of ’em. I’m outside one day, standing on Illinois St., right by the gate, and this car with two civilians and a kid in Navy sweats pulls in. The woman driver stops right by me, saying, “We just gave this young man a ride back to the base.” So this guy gets out—he has bright red hair and glasses—and I start to ream him, because no way is a recruit ever supposed to go outside those gates. “Just what, exactly, do you think you’re doing, knucklehead?” “Oh, I just went out to Burger King. We just got here, and I didn’t know if you guys were going to feed us. The nice lady gave me a ride back to the base.” I lost it—for the only time since I’ve been here, I actually lost my military bearing. I was laughing so hard, I just took him over through the tunnel and deposited him at 1405. Now, I knew the RDC that picked him up, so, a while later I asked about him. “Oh, yeah, that kid, B.K.—that’s what we call him, B.K., for Burger King. He wound up over at REU. That kid had more problems that anybody around here was ready to deal with.”
Petty Officer Russell The best one recently has got to be the recruit who got fed up with the place, and snuck out of his ship one afternoon. Now, there was a civilian contractor outside, up in a bucket truck, working on the phone lines. And this recruit hops in the truck, with the guy still up in the bucket, screaming and waving his arms, and heads off base. They caught up with him over in a civilian housing area, down in some guy’s basement, holding off the cops with a trashcan lid and a toilet plunger.
Not every story that RDCs tell is quite so humorous, unfortunately.
Chief Zeller I’ve had recruits who really work hard, and get all the way through boot camp, but just can’t pass battle stations, regardless of what they do. They try and retry, and yet they can’t graduate with their division. And it happens so late in the training schedule—we give them every chance to pass that we can—that their parents get up here to see them graduate, and their kid isn’t there because he or she got set back. The RDC is usually the one who has to explain to mom and dad why their child isn’t out there on the drill deck. It’s not fun.
Petty Officer Kent We have, oh, maybe five deaths per year here. I had a recruit die in my very first division. We were running PT-2, and this guy just collapses right there in Drill Hall 1400. They started CPR immediately, and the duty corpsman was right there, but the recruit’s heart just gave out, and he died on the way to the hospital. The hardest part was taking the division back to the compartment. They kept asking what had happened, was he all right, and stuff. Now, we got a call right when we came back, but they told us not to tell the recruits till the chaplains could get over and break the news. That was a tough hour or so, waiting for the chaplains to come. The recruits wound up putting his name on their division flag, and dedicating battle stations and their cruise book to him. But it was awful.
Every RDC takes inspiration from those recruits who overcome tremendous odds and keep on fighting till they reach their goal.
Chief Zeller We had one recruit in the last division—man, this kid was lost. Just a soup-sandwich when we got him. We figured he’d be gone in a week, but he worked hard, and his section leader took him under his wing, and—what do you know?—he graduated on time. We had another one in my first division, a guy that weighed probably 240 pounds, and by the time he left here, I think he had lost 50 or 60 pounds, he became a real lean, mean fighting machine. We had to call the ambulance for him the first time we did PT, though. I thought we were going to lose that kid. And he wasn’t faking it, either. His eyes rolled back and he was huffin’ and puffin
’. But he kept trying, and he was a real outstanding example of a guy who really wanted to make it. His mom came up to me at graduation and said that she was worried because she didn’t see him in the division when we marched in. Well, he was there, it’s just that he looked so good his own mother didn’t recognize him.
Petty Officer Kent The best thing is seeing a guy who, when he walks in, looks like he won’t make it past his first week, but then something happens, and he changes, and he comes up to you and shakes your hand at graduation, and tells you that you were the motivation to do it. I had a female with a broken foot, who ran battle stations with it, and who had a cast on her foot the next day. She didn’t want to let her shipmates down. And I had one who was shining his boondockers and crying—because these were the first pair of shoes that he had ever had for his very own. All his others were hand-me-downs from his brothers or whatever.
Petty Officer Russell There is one kid here who must have weighed 230 when he got here. I know he was 28 percent body fat, because I stood right next to him when they did the measurements. He’s not going to make it out of here with this division, but then, he knew that back on day one. But he’s lost a ton already, and he’ll make it out, I know he will. The others used to laugh at him when he first got here, but now they look up to him and treat him with a lot of respect. Their boot camp is hard; his is horrible. But he wants to be a sailor, and a guy with that much heart—you just know he’s going to make it.*
Petty Officer Kent The payoff in this job—even with the long hours and the frustration from the recruits—is when one of the parents comes up to you at graduation, and shakes your hand, and says, “What have you done to my Johnny? I was never able to get him to do anything I asked—he had a terrible attitude, was on his way to prison or whatever, and now he’s yes sir, no ma’am, and standing up straight and all. I just want to thank you for what you’ve done.” That’s the payoff.
*Chief Lucas is a chief aviation ordinanceman (E7), with air warfare qualifications.
*By chance, the forward line-handling party on the Marlinespike was all female.
*And he did.
8
The Right Way, the Wrong Way, the Navy Way
The end of the recruits’ fourth week of training brought heavy rains and squally winds to Great Lakes. On Thursday, 9 November, they crossed through the tunnel for their second boot camp haircut. By the time they returned that afternoon, the slow, steady rain had turned into a freezing downpour.
Ricky Davis, 19, Chicago, Illinois
Man, I live here, and it gets cold around this time, you know? When it rains like today, it’s like an ice-cold shower. And when we got back through the tunnel, we had to wait for, like, twenty minutes so the civilians could get across the street for graduation. I was soaked. We all were.
Senior Chief Atkinson looked out the window of MCPON Hall. Named in honor of the Master Chief Petty Officers of the Navy, it houses the base Visitor Center. “I feel bad for those recruits out there in this weather,” he said. “They got caught in the traffic. It’s coming up on time for Thursday graduation. This time of year, we run two separate ceremonies: Thursday afternoon and Friday morning. It’s not unusual to have three thousand guests each day. And there’s no way we can fit three thousand people into this building. Usually, they wind up out on the grinder, waiting to get in here, but in this driving rain we’re moving them as fast as we can to Drill Hall 1200 for the ceremony. When it’s in Drill Hall 1200, we have to time it perfectly, because when we release the people to go over there, it stops all southbound traffic. And recruit divisions coming from the other side of the tunnel get stacked up.
“Visitors will come up to the desk, and they’re really agitated. How can the Navy let things be so messed up? I just point them to the large posters on the wall, and tell them that we’re in the process of redesigning the base from the ground up. It won’t help their recruit, and it’s not going to do anything for those kids out in that downpour, but it will make things easier down the road.”
The recapitalization plan for the base is extensive. By fiscal year 2008, the command will replace inadequate, outdated buildings, including existing barracks, drill halls, and support facilities. Base layout will be reversed, with separate areas for in-processing, berthing, training, and public access. Problems that the Navy has endured for decades will finally be corrected. Known deficiencies in the barracks include the following:
Inadequate space (50 square feet per recruit rather than DOD standard of 72 square feet)
Inadequate ventilation and no air conditioning
No fire sprinklers
Asbestos and lead-based paint throughout the buildings
Inadequate temperature controls for existing heating system
Structure not designed for existing live load (100 pounds per square foot)
Inadequate wastewater capacity
Inadequate water pressure
Exterior windows and walls not energy efficient
Low ceilings inadequate for fire sprinklers, heating, and air conditioning
Inadequate number of water closets (male/female)
Inadequate number of shower heads (male/female)
Lack of space to expand mechanical rooms
Inadequate electrical outlets in berthing compartments and bathrooms
Stairs and veneer mortar joists deteriorated
Existing lighting inadequate, not energy efficient
Lighting replacement parts not available for repairs
The situation at the four drill halls is even worse than this list would indicate. Built in 1942 as temporary buildings with an intended useful life of five years, they have been under continuous repair since 1943. Wooden arches are delaminating and decomposing. A near catastrophic failure of several arches occurred in 1982, causing one drill hall to collapse. While major renovations in 1984 extended their useful life for fifteen years, by 1998 accelerated wood rot, delamination of the arches, and deterioration of roof decking and beams were obvious. New drill halls are a priority of the recapitalization plan.
Because of weather, most physical training is conducted at one of the deficient drill halls or in the barracks. A new gym will provide a single, purpose-built platform for PT. And because of the large number of visitors at MCPON, the Navy is planning a new visitor facility, adequately sized for its mission.
Battle stations, the Navy’s crucible, now consists of twelve separate events conducted over a twelve-hour period. These events are currently conducted at different venues, requiring recruits to double-time from event to event. The existing facilities do not provide full naval replication, nor does the weather often cooperate. The command plans a single, high-tech simulator, designed to replicate a realistic shipboard environment.
Finally, the existing galleys are based on outdated and labor-intensive technology. New systems produce better food with less labor. A new food service system will use bulk cooking and chilling processes, with food produced in a central facility and delivered to receiving kitchens in the new barracks.
These plans might be of interest to Division 005, but the recruits had more immediate concerns. “We were drowning out there. I was beginning to worry about the NQSs [nonqualified swimmers],” Petty Officer Russell joked later.
Sensing a break in the pedestrian traffic between MCPON and Drill Hall 1200, Petty Officer Russell hustled her division down First Ave., and, by cutting through the grinders separating Ships One and Two, outflanked most of the guests scurrying from the visitor center to the drill hall. “We have strict traffic rules as to where we can lead the division,” she said later. “Some streets are one-way for marching, on some you have to stick to a certain sidewalk, there are places where you can sing, and places where you can’t. It takes a lot of study in RDC school just to figure how to get around this place. But on a rainy day, and with us late for Service Week briefing, I figured getting out of the rain was more important than catching an SI [street infraction].”
The Servi
ce Week assignments were critical to the division’s morale over the next week or so. Explaining Service Week, Senior Chief Atkinson noted that during their fifth week of training recruits assist with simple logistics. Typical of naval usage, the term “Service Week” applies both to the process and to the recruits participating. “With these outdated galleys, the food service people need nearly four hundred recruits each day just to serve the divisions,” he said, “and two to three hundred are needed in other service areas, such as routine cleanup and base maintenance. But that’s not the most important reason to maintain the Service Week tradition. For their first four weeks, recruits have everything done for them. Someone gives them a haircut, or gives them their shots, or serves them food. But that’s not the way it is in the fleet. It’s the same on every ship, from a yard tug to a carrier—everybody pitches in, all the time. If you’re doing an underway replenishment at sea, it doesn’t matter what your rating is; the deck crew gets augmented by yeomen, dental technicians, musicians, whatever. Recruits need to appreciate that before they go to sea. This is the first opportunity for these recruits to learn the discipline of doing a job the Navy’s way.”
Division 005’s first surprise came when they found that Service Week might extend from four to thirteen days, depending on the number of divisions aboard and the dates of formation and graduation. Division 005 was lucky. Although their Service Week period began Friday, 10 November, and continued through Sunday, 18 November, having two full weekends during the period meant a more relaxed and laid-back atmosphere on many jobs. That could be critical to a recruit’s happiness during this hiatus in training.
Chief Zeller explained, “There are really four different types of assignments. Recruits can be assigned to one of the galleys, and most usually are. But others get assigned to ship’s crew, or house crew, and are responsible for building and compartment maintenance. Those that really luck out are assigned as ‘general billets,’ and these can be interesting assignments as messengers, assisting in various departments, working in the chapel, or whatever.” He went on to explain that manning requirements were sent to each division during the fourth week of training, and that the RDCs had significant discretion as to who went where. “I usually keep the recruit petty officers out of the galley if I can,” he continued. “While I can’t be sure what job the general billet people will get, it’s a safe bet that it beats scrubbing pots and pans, or cleaning the grease trap at Galley 928. And it gives them a good idea of what kind of Navy jobs are out there. I’ve had recruits who were scheduled for, say, fireman apprenticeship, who, after working at the photo lab or garage, came back and wanted to become photographer’s mates or construction mechanics. So it’s good exposure, at least for some of them.”
Honor, Courage, Commitment Page 11