The Lieutenant

My first real shore duty was at radcon in Pearl Harbor as a RCT. I honestly don’t know how I got tapped for the admin officer job, since this was a considerably better deal than being an RCT and I had only been there about six months. The other guys who had the job before me were all senior firsts who had earned a break from the horribly long hours, whereas I had only recently qualified and was one of the few E-5s.

I was actually pretty good at this job, but I think that was mainly because I put so much effort into it. With everyone else doing real work for 10 – 12 hours a day, I always made sure my weenie ass was the last one out the door. I also took on as many collateral duties as I could. I hadn’t suddenly become a born-again lifer; I just wanted to head off any criticism that I wasn’t pulling my weight, since I stayed in the office the whole time. Sometimes that even meant sleeping under my desk… go Navy!

As the admin weenie, I worked directly for the RCO, though there was an MMCM somewhere in the chain as well. I was normally on independent ops for most of the day, which suited me just fine. But something about this really bugged one of the officers, who I’ll just call The Lieutenant. Even though I wasn’t in his group, he made numerous attempts to “absorb” the admin section (there were actually four of us, but the others dealt with supply and worked out of a warehouse).

He never was able to convince the RCO that things would be better with Admin working for him, but that didn’t stop him from occasionally trying to give me rudder orders on projects that didn’t concern him. Most of the time I’d protect him from himself (the duty of every enlisted man), but towards the end of our time together I’d had enough and let him dangle on one of them.

The division was working on the mother of all projects, and one of my jobs was to document stages of the work with a Polaroid camera. The RCO explained my job in detail, as there’d be no second chance to get some of those photos. This meant I was working all sorts of weird hours (the project was going on during all three shifts), and The Lieutenant was bothered to no end when he saw me leaving at lunchtime one day. We got into it, and I explained that I was more or less covering all three shifts, so I had to sleep when I could. His answer? The guys at the photo lab should be taking the photos, and I should be at my desk so I could get whatever it was he needed at that moment.

He flat-out ordered me to stop taking the photos, and informed me he would make arrangements with the photo lab to cover the rest of the project. I did try to tell him that there were any number of reasons why that wouldn’t work, from the fact the photo lab didn’t have enough people to cover both their normal job and our project, to the fact that none of them were qualified to be in the areas they’d need to be in. He dismissed all this with an airy “Yours is not to reason why, Petty Officer XXXXX”.

To which I muttered “Mine is just to do or die,” with a shrug. His big mistake was assuming I had an entirely different attitude than I did, based on the quantity of work I was doing. But the truth of the matter was I really didn’t care if he screwed something up, so instead of going straight to the RCO, I just sat back down at my desk and got busy with some paperwork like nothing had happened.

The RCO had regular meetings with all the supervisors to discuss the project status and to review the logs. A few days later I was at the meeting (my primary job was to take notes) when the RCO turned to me and asked where the latest batch of photos was. Without missing a beat I looked across the table at The Lieutenant and said “Lieutenant XXXXXX ordered me to stop taking them, sir.”

The RCO was flabbergasted. “Why?” he ask me.

“He felt I couldn’t support the office and take photos at the same time.” I replied, still looking at The Lieutenant, who was now staring daggers at me.

“Is this true?” the RCO asked him.

“Yes sir. I thought the photo lab would be able to handle it, but they’ve had some problems catching up with us.” he replied.

“Everyone out,” the RCO ordered “except you, lieutenant.”

Since I was the admin weenie, my office was right next to the RCO’s, and I got to hear one of the loudest, most creative verbal slap-downs in Naval history. When it was over, the RCO called everyone back in, and announced:
a) I would resume taking the photos, according to plan, and
b) I worked directly for him and the MMCM. If someone else wanted to march me around, they needed to talk to one of those two first.

We actually got lucky, in that the missed photos could be replaced without any rework. But it could have been pretty costly, and I probably would have got nailed for malicious compliance if it had been. Instead, I got a few months of relative peace.

However, I should mention that The Lieutenant got the final laugh. When I was later sent to NAVIMFAC, I ended up working for him, and he was able to get the NCM the RCO put me in for downgraded to a NAM. I didn’t really care either way, because the RCO had already given me a much better award: When the project was over, he treated me and some of other guys to a big steak dinner out in town.