The RO Board Scandal

This is the tale of a bright young nuc ET who got to the boat about six months after me. Let's call him "Lee". Now, when other nucs generally consider you smart (and we all thought Lee was pretty damn smart) your IQ is probably closer to 200 than to 100. And Lee, brand new to the world of submarines, seemed endlessly fascinated by how everything worked. While the rest of us had hobbies like drinking and screwing, Lee's hobby was studying RPMs.

Of course, with all that studying, they had to come with a new term besides "hot runner" to describe his qual progress. He was zippping along, breaking all known records for qualification, right up to his RO board. He spent weeks studying (some would say, over studying) before he felt confident enough to ask for it. We all thought it would just be a formality... until he failed it.

He was devastated. He immediately canceled his scheduled leave and disappeared into his notes, only coming up for food every now and again. The poor guy rarely when home, and he was married, so he actually had a home to go to. None of the people on his board (or any of the other ETs) could explain what his specific weak areas were, so even Lee didn't know why the CO failed him.

A few more weeks went by, and the consensus was that he knew as much as it was humanly possible to know about twidget gear (even the officers going up for their PNEO exams were asking him for help). He had oral interview sheets from everyone back aft, and none of us could stump him. No one was surprised when his second board lasted less than an hour - it was more like he was teaching them at nuc school than getting grilled. He was smart, confident, experienced... and the CO still failed him a second time.

This time, the RO chief immediately sent Lee on leave, rather than watch him melt down. Lee was normally pretty easygoing, but the stress of the past month or so would have pushed anyone up into GTA-rampage mode. Lee came back a week later, did a quick 15 minute interview with the captain, and he was qualified. They also signed off his SRO card for good measure.

So what was the problem? If a guy like Lee could fail not one but two boards, the rest of us who still had boards we needed to finish had zero chance. We just assumed the CO had decided to improve level-of-knowledge across the board by going ultra-hardass on the nubs for a while. But I had my BCE interview with him a few days later, and he knew less about the battery than the cooks did - it was a joke.

When the truth came out (as it always does on a sub), it turned out the problem was never Lee, it was one of his fellow ETs who was also in quals. This guy, who I'll call "Ed", was a senior first class who showed up from another boat a few weeks before Lee did. Not a bad guy, but he came pre-equipped with a "fuck-it" attitude, and was as slow to requalify as Lee was fast. He was so far behind, in fact, that Lee was easily going to finish before Ed did, which should have been impossible with the head start Ed had. The infamous "they" (consisting of the RO chief, the Engineer, and the CO) thought it would look really bad if Lee beat Ed to the finish line, and thus they agreed that Lee would fail his first board, before he even walked into the room.

But then Ed had trouble with his own interview, and Lee was conspicuously ready for his second board before Ed could get himself upgraded. Without any thought to the consequences, they went right ahead and failed Lee a second time, then sent him on leave for good measure so they'd have time to finish Ed's quals first. That was the reason Lee's third attempt went so fast: they'd finally managed to get Ed through the process, and now the nub could be safely qualified with everyone's reputations intact.

You can probably imagine the effect this all had on the nucs in general and Lee specifically. Now, whenever someone failed a board, we all assumed it was just the command, fucking with them. And this experience stopped Lee dead in his tracks - he'd finished his in-rate quals, and was already halfway done with EWS when he went up for RO. Instead of getting an E4 who would have qualified EDPO/EWS in less than a year, the command got two ETs with "fuck-it" attitudes for the price of one. I don't think Lee ever qualified another watch as long as I was there.

But the really sad thing is that shit like this happened ALL THE TIME on my first boat. It was like some sort of twisted Matrix red pill: they quickly stripped away all the programming from the nuc pipeline that it was fun and exciting to be in the Navy, but when you "woke up", you were still stuck in the power plant with no hope of escape. I'll tell you why hell is so hot: it's nuclear powered, and I just know there's a qual card waiting for me when I die.