My Hitch in the Sea Cadets

I'd like to look back and say I joined the Navy to serve my country, or to hold the line against Reagan's Evil Empire, but the reality of the matter was that being a sailor was the family profession and there was never any doubt I'd be following in their footsteps. Both my grandfathers were in the Navy during WW-II, and both my parents were in practically my entire childhood. I grew up living mostly on Navy bases and being surrounded by squids; it wasn't long before I equated wearing a sailor uniform with being an adult.

Of course, I only saw the Navy through my dad's eyes; he was a PN-1 who almost never went to sea, had his own office, and had a team of flunkies working for him. Mostly what I remember are things like air shows and command picnics. He and his friends had tons of great stories about visiting far away exotic ports and (more importantly to a teenage boy) exotic women. So it should surprise no one that shortly after my parents joined the Sea Cadets I was easily persuaded to join up as well.

Most people are familiar with ROTC, which trains college kids to be officers. Well, Sea Cadets trains high school kids to be enlisted. It was kind of like a perpetual boot camp, with lots of BS watches to stand, uniform inspections every week, and a stack of rate training manuals to go through. They even made us go to boot camp over the Summer; granted, it was only for two and a half weeks, but WTF were we doing in a real Recruit Training Command at age 14?

We usually met on base once a week, and the major appeal (for me, anyway) was that the Navy more or less treated us like any other squids while we were there. Sure, that may have a negative connotation for those of us actually doing time in the Navy, but back then it was freaking awesome to be treated like like an adult and to get to do all the things Dad did. We even wore the same uniforms; the only difference was a little patch on each shoulder. Most Navy guys mistook us for the real thing, and that was just fine with us.

Even sadder was the fact that all of our "officers" were enlisted guys in real life, mostly first classes who were trying to get some leadership experience on their records so they could make chief. In addition to their normal uniforms, they also had to maintain a set of officer duds, a feat made much easier for the real officers by the fact they get paid a lot more. At least the Navy treated them like they were real officers when they were doing Sea Cadet stuff - if you were a Sea Cadet ensign, and you ran into your real-world chief, he had to salute you while you were in your ensign's uniform.

I suppose another reason to join was to get a head start on all your advancement requirements before you actually joined up. We did stacks and stacks of correspondence courses - from the BMR all the way through the 1st & chief RTMs for several different rates (a small aside: Illustrator Draftsman E4-E5 was the best one, followed by Tools and Their Uses). When you joined up, these were supposed to transfer to your real record, and you would be auto-promoted to E3 when you finished boot camp. That may have been useful if I hadn't gone in as a nuc; instead I found out all those RTMs I finished didn't apply to electricians, and all of us got E3 automatically. In fact, the only real advantage to being a Sea Cadets was that I showed up at boot camp already knowing my general orders.

But here's another thing Sea Cadets prepares you for in the Real Navy: going to mast. That's right, I actually got written up while I was a sea cadet, something I doubt more than ten other people in the whole wide world can say. And, just like most of the times I got written up in the real Navy, it was total BS:


There was a power struggle in my Sea Cadet unit which had been going on long before I joined. We were supposed to be a "ship" unit (as opposed to an airdale unit or a Seabee unit), and our CO was a black-iron BM. However, the only place we could find room on a Navy base was on a Naval Air Station, and as a result most of the officers were airdales. Our CO wasn't all that happy and wanted to move us to 32nd Street, something rest of us weren't interested in.

In all honesty, I think my parents were were trying to avoid exposing me to life aboard ship, since I'd probably be disappointed by the "real" sailors' attitudes. You think middies were bad? Imagine having a bunch of dig'it Sea Cadets underfoot who made the Hitler Youth kids look like slackers. If we'd ever gone on a training cruise, I might have got to experience the joys of an EB-green happy hat five years ahead of schedule.

To make matters worse, there was a healthy amount of infighting among the khakis over who was going to be the first "cadet" to get promoted. Since our unit was relatively new, all us kids were E-1s. There was a race on to be the first to make E-2 and "take command". Unfortunately, every one of our officers had at least one kid in the unit, so favoritism was par for the course. Thank god it was nothing like the "real" Navy, right?

Anyhow, I was kissing ass just like every other kid, trying to get ahead. I ended up volunteering for a lot of extra-curricular crap, like the color guard (we actually got to perform at a bunch of real change-of-commands, since there wasn't an official color guard on the base) and fancy drill, as well as "volunteering" in my dad's office on the weekends. If we'd had the internet back then (or even just a standalone computer more powerful than the Atari-2600), I'm sure this story would have had a much different ending. Instead, it was off to RTC, San Diego.

I was chomping at the bit to go to Boot Camp that Summer, at least until the end of the first day. Since my parents dropped me off early (were they in a hurry to get rid of me?), I got to help the CC's set up the barracks rooms and stuff. I was exhausted by the time we officially formed up the company and they asked for volunteers to fill out the recruit chain of command. Instead of waving my hand like the rest of the kids wanting to be the R-CPO, I sat down. So, in typical back-assward Navy fashion, they put ME in charge.

The next day, when I was strutting around with my RCPO pin, I happened to run into my unit's CO. I thought he'd be happy that one of his guys got promoted so quickly, but instead he kind of sneered at me and cryptically replied "You're going to find out how big an asshole I can be" and stalked off. I puzzled over this for a few moments, but it was quickly forgotten with all the other crap they ran us through.

But he didn't forget. The first meeting I went to after I got back from boot camp my parents were visibly upset about something, and there was a lot of yelling going on behind closed doors. Then they suddenly emerged, grabbed me, and hustled me out to the car. We never went back.

It seems that one of the other "officers" reported that he'd overheard me call the CO an asshole before we all shipped off to RTC. Naturally, our BM-1 "CO" was infuriated and wanted to write me up over that. Hearing this, I recalled the CO's cryptic remark at RTC, except there's no was an ultra-lifer like myself would have EVER said anything like that.

No, seriously.

I'm not kidding when I say I was "positively convinced of the benefits of a Navy career" back then; we used to walk around on base hoping to run into officers just so we could salute them, and I spent more time shining my shoes each week than I did playing video games. I'm not saying its totally impossible that I could have run on at the mouth (after all, look at all other other crap I've told you about), but the odds of me doing it back then were somewhere in the range of me getting a blowjob from Scarlett Johansson today.

I honestly don't know what all that BS was about, except that it may have been related to the fact I was set to take over as the lead Sea Cadet when we returned, something I'm sure most of our "officers" weren't crazy about. But it actually worked out for the best; rather than trying to get in with another Sea Cadets unit, I ended up joining the JROTC unit in my high school instead. It was an Army unit, and within a year they'd more or less burned me out on the whole military experience. I still ended up joining the Navy (no amount of deprogramming could have stopped that), but at least I didn't waste my senior year marching around when I should have been out drinking and trying to get laid.