On my first boat, that was an acronym for People Against People Ever Re-enlisting - Civilian Life Is Preferred. We had other anti-retention organizations as well, like "HORMONAL". I'd like to say that it was like an 80's "us-verses-the-lifers" comedy, but really it was just organized whining. The lifers had all the power, so the lifers won most of the battles. In fact, the only time we won anything of consequence was when we played the game their way (using a procedure or a regulation to our benefit, for example).
There was a lot of anti-command sentiment floating around back then - half because it was fashionable and half because it was self-perpetuating. Personally, I showed up ready to go, only to find out a pro-Navy attitude closed a *lot* of doors and made being a NUB suck twice as hard. I quickly switched sides. The Navy itself recognized this problem early on; I remember seeing a training movie during some leadership class that addressed this very issue. But, oddly enough, they never did anything to fix it.
But what surprises me, twenty years later, is that all the dedicated "lifers" I knew seem to have done their time and vanished, whereas all the so-called "cancerous cells" are still trying to relive the glory days. Every time I join a new social web site, like Military.com or Facebook, the only members to be found in the boat groups are the paper clip gang. It seems sort of hypocritical to me, but not in any specific way. Maybe the lifers don't bother seeking out such sites because the got whatever they needed while they were in and can now let it go.
Or maybe the lifers just didn't make any friends worth connecting with.
People tend to equate morality with religion, even if they have personal doubts about the whole validity of religion themselves. In the same way, people in the Navy seem to equate being good at your job with being a lifer. The two are not synonymous, but you wouldn't know it the way that good deals, awards, and promotions seem to be handed out. On the other hand, WTF do I know?
The cancerous cells your COB whines about.
We are collectors of sea stories from submariners everywhere. All these stories are 100% true... except when they're not, in which case at least one of us was there when they were made up. Feel free to add your own tale with the link below, but please: no last names, and no NNPI.
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2009
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March
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- TMI-2
- "PAPER CLIP"
- Another Dumbass Sub Movie
- Purposeless Required Test (PRT)
- LEAN that!
- The Phone Sex Girl
- Recognizing Art
- LEAN this!
- My Wife, She...
- The Shaved Hampster
- America’s Navy – The Video Game
- Another PI Story
- Navy Picnics
- In Honor of Racks
- The Burner
- Fun With Liquid Nitrogen
- Housing
- The Lieutenant
- The Backpack Incident
- Military Financing
- Married With Dependents
- The Brow
- Foreign Women
- The Evals, Part II
- The RO Board Scandal
- Blue Poofy Folders
- A Little Snopes of my Own
- To Catch A Thief
- Mail on the Boat
- The Guam Bomb
- The Delta Force Rescue
- NR & NRRO
- My Hitch in the Sea Cadets
- The Chief’s Anchor
- Radio Free Smallwood
- Underway Boxes
- Horseplay Leads to Sickbay
- The Seabees in Guam
- The Neighbor’s Dog
- The Sub Base Nazis
- An Anti-C Story
- Tales of the Occult
- Maid for the Barracks
- The Recirc Pump
- The VIP Tour
- Why We Can’t Afford Tools: Relamping
- Zapped
- The Great Cereal Caper
- The Oly in Oly
- My Philosophy On Supply
- Electrostatic Precipitators
- The Post-Tailhook Flogging
- The Worst Sub Movie, Ever
- An Open Letter
- Lair of the White Worm
- The Middi Run
- Sibling Rivalry
- The Long Underway
- My First Blog Comment, Ever
- Skimmer Hell
- Torpedo’d by the Wives Club
- Serious as a Heart Attack
- Mea Culpa
- Bob’s Coffee Cup
- The Ransom
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10 comments:
I did my 20 and left. I had fun for a while but the attitude when I did my time was that it was a job. We did what we had to til the job was done. My first sea tour was on the Fulton. One weekend we had to bust nuts and really put in the time to get a boat under way. The division officer (a W4) mustered us on the pier and marched out to the nearest bar to State Pier New London and bought the first round. We worked hard for him.
Personally I did not find many of the jerks you continually describe. The boats I served on had good crews and even the goat locker was pretty good. A few dunderheads for officers but...
I always found that, whether you planned on getting out, or staying in, it was always best to pretend that you're a lifer. I was junior to a guy in my division by time in grade and time on the boat, and he always counted down his days left in the Navy aloud. When the CAP results came out, and I was to be the recipient of said CAP, he didn't understand why. Play the game, and be rewarded. At the time, I had no intentions of staying in, but I was damn sure never to tell anyone on the boat that. Those guys on the boat that wore giant paper clips on their poopy suits were just asking to get shit on by the command and were surprised when they did which in turn made them more disgruntled. Hooyah Submarines!
We shit on people who reenlisted on my boat. We had an understanding in the engineroom that the CO's policy of "hurry up and reenlist them before they know what's going on" was unfair.
I was pretty gun-ho on reenlisting when I showed up to the boat. The LELT said he wouldn't approve of it until I had either been there a year, or had my dolphins.
That guy saved my life. Sure he was a dirt-bag, and yes definitely a dick, but he saved me the horror of another 2 years in the Navy.
Thanks for something Ed!
I was on JOHN MARSHALL in the mid-80's. Worst command climate on the waterfront; the boat was a penal colony and insane asylum encased in HY-80.
Command saw me as a reinlistment candidate and the crew (all PAPER CLIP) saw me differently. I got pulled in different directions and each side made my life worse and worse until an opportunity came up for me to cross deck. The morale to this story is; if the Navy isn't for you, fine get out knowing you have served you country, learned some skills, and earned you paycheck. Don't make other people's lives miserable because you have an axe to grind against the command.
About the Lifer's not being seen in public; I think they prefer to loiter around the Fleet Reserve Club and generally stay away from Military.com and the "We were Shipmates" outfit.
I did 20 years and got out because of the political climate of 1996. I had fun while I was in and I never thought of myself as a lifer. I just had a job for 20 years. One of the things I didn’t want was a retirement ceremony. I felt that I came in without one and I’d go out without one. That was until I talked to a friend of mine, Mike Legg. Mike and were on the La Jolla together and he went on to be a COB and CAG CMC. I always respected him. To paraphrase, he said that a retirement ceremony was an end and a beginning. The end of the Navy and a beginning of a civilian life. He said that you could see someone who never retired at the end of the bar at any military club, American Legion or VFW. They go to those places and talk about the glory days, recapping things from days-gone-by and never really letting go of the past. I took his advice, had the ceremony and moved on.
Now this is not to say that everybody who belongs to one of these fine organizations is the drunk at the end of the bar. These organizations perform an honorable service to all veterans. I am a life member of the VFW but that does not mean that I have stepped into one very often.
Some of these people who never let go had a miserable time while they were in. They were the loudest whiners, bitchers and moaners and on the most part, they all did their job pretty well. They just bitched while they were doing it. In one of my last posts, I mentioned that the bitchers usually bitched because they cared and I believe that. The problem was that while they were bitching, they were usually in a developmental period in their lives and they had a level of comfort they might not have been able to get anywhere else or since they got out. That being said, they go back to their comfort zones and the period of time in their lives where they were comfortable.
EM Log, keep up the good work.
That Damn Good Looking Aganger From Iowa
I guess I'm one of the few who doesn't fit the mold. I got to the boat and quickly realized that everyone just wanted to justify their own life decisions by trying to convince you to make the same ones they did. The PAPER CLIP gang would treat you like garbage if you were seen talking to the CCC, and the lifers would do the same when they saw you having beers with the PAPER CLIP gang. I thought that I wanted to re-enlist, but decided to wait a year, just to be sure. This coincidentally helped me "play" the game (though it wasn't intentional), because during the year I waited, I was treated better by both sides because they wanted to recruit me to their ranks. Nobody had a beef against me, so I was able to get checkouts from everyone. By the time I decided to go through with the re-enlistment, many of the hardcore PAPER CLIP guys had left the boat, or were leaving soon. The few that were left didn't really matter to me anyway because I was qualified by that point... I didn't have to impress anyone anymore.
When I was on shore duty, the one piece of advice I would always give my students when they asked about re-enlisting was this: When you get to the boat, don't listen to anyone's "advice" about reenlisting. YOU know what YOU want to do, everyone else has an agenda. DO NOT make the wrong decision because you want to make somebody else happy.
After my 9 years was up, I got out. Not because I was disgruntled or pissed at the Navy, it was just time for me to move on and I've never regretted it. I've also never regretted the 9 years I spent in the Navy.
I did 26 years, and I never considered myself a "diggit" or "lifer". I had a job I enjoyed. Yes, it had more than it's fair share of B.S., and there were some real idiots I had to work with, but I have that right here, right now. I got along fine with the PAPER CLIP crowd, and with the "diggit" crowd. I didn't judge either. Everyone has their reasons for the positions they take, and I tried to accept them as best as I could.
My son is currently a nuke on a boat. I didn't browbeat him into following in Dad's footsteps, nor did I try to scare him away. The only advice I gave him was to ignore advice, unless it was directly job-related. I encouraged him to wait one year before considering reenlistment, to ensure that he can stand the thought of 2 more years in uniform. I also told him that if he wants to be considered a superstar, just do things by the deadlines assigned. So few folks actually meet deadlines, it puts him ahead of the game if he simply does what he's supposed to do.
I was a nuke 'lectrician on Indy and Psycago. I got diabetes in '90 and got "surfaced" to the USS Long Beach (CGN-9). I had no idea just how good it was on the boats until I got to a skimmer. They are really, really FUBAR! I did two very miserable years there. And, that included a decommissioning Caribbean cruise. I ended up bailing after twelve years when I found out that my detailer was gonna put me on the Enterprise (8 plants) off the coast of Bosnia.
I really missed boat crews. You don't know what you got until you lose it. There are damn few professions where your life depends on your co-worker's competence. And, they depend on you similarly. I mean, shit, it doesn't get a lot more intense than chasing a new soviet boat at a flank bell at test depth...way out of our operating envelope but not real worried cuz the hand on the planes was a "senior" 20 yr old and the lower level watch knew exactly what was going on in shaft alley and the hydraulic plants. Just another day at office.
Or, having the eng come back and scram the plant when we are deep. At the time we all thought "he's fucking with us again". Twenty years later it seems kinda insane.
All the drills, ORSE, PCO ops, shipyard, bullshit maintenance really sucked at the time. But, I'm now real glad I did it. Regular jobs seem too easy and everyone seems like a slacker :)
I always wondered why on my first boat (SSN-604) so many walked around with a paper clip attached to their shirt. I was never let in on the secret acronym.
And that was back in 1978.
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