Wildman
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Wildman
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OK I want to hear from all you squids & jarheads..... Is any of this true??? I just have a hard time believing it...
I just did a writeup in the Political News thread a few days ago about this very subject, and got my shit jumped pretty hard. This is pretty typical. I spent six years in an engineroom, moving all the way up to Engineering Officer of the Watch qualified. Mostly stood Top Watch at sea and Throttleman on Sea and Anchor watches.
Being at sea is hard. Manning a ship is hard. Standing a watch day in and day out is hard.
I was on Tin Cans (DD's) and a Repair ship (AR). When you look at that Carrier, remember that there are several other ships there as well. Smaller, and more cramped with smaller crews and much fewer facilities.
I'll go ahead and say it. If you aren't mentally and emotionally capable of handling this service, take your General Discharge Under Honorable Conditions, receive your VA health benefits, and quietly get out of the way. Not everyone can do it. Not everyone should do it. The job is tough enough without having to stand your watch and try to cover somebody else's watch too.
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I don't know much about bird farms. I spent five years on a 'special' ship, T-AGS class. Most Navy ships have a home port. They go out to sea for a week or a month, then come back to their home port for a week or month or whatever. We had no home port. We went to most ports on the East coast from Boston to Ft Lauderdale, then headed across the Atlantic. We would stay out for anywhere from 30 to 90 days at a time, then pull into the nearest port. We were limited by fuel and food, I think we visited every port city on the north coast of the Med, the entire UK, Norway, Denmark, and Iceland at least six times. We had about 10 books, some movies from the '50s, a chess board, and cards. No computers, phooones, TV, or video games. Or longest deployment was 130 days, when we got trapped in Arctic ice. Only one guy went nuts and we choppered him away, off the coast of Scotland. Other than that we just did our jobs. Maybe it was psychologically challenging, but it wasn't as bad as being shot at by the VC.
The longest I was ever at sea as 30 days, NOAA vessel in the Pacific. We had a good selection of movies and a fairly decent library. Email was transferred once a day over InmarSat. Ship left Pearl Harbor and sailed a zig-zag course and ended at Kwajalein. My wife was the one to have the meltdown back at home. It took a 6 minute InmarSat voice call at $10/min to fix that one...
Wildman
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While not the SAME being deployed for 12 months into a war zone isn't easy either... And since I've never been on a flat top EVER I can't comment other than what I've read about them...
My thoughts are though that these are the same types of people who I delt with over all my years either when I was in Korea or Iraq.. And due to Gulf 1 I was there for 16 months instead of 12 like I was supposed to be.
But then during ramp up and then going to Iraq I worked for over 7 months without a day off.. Granted most of my troops worked 6 days on 2 off but since I was the 1SG I never got time off...
And these claims about them running out of supplies just seemed way out in left field...
No, they could have run out of supplies. Been there and done that.
Here's the deal though. The logistics pipe is only so big going to a ship at sea. Sometimes bananas and your favorite toothpaste is going to be pretty far down the priority list. If you have the brains that God gave geese, you learn to squirrel away stuff that you think you can't live without. An extra bar of your favorite soap. An extra carton of cigarettes. What ever.
As far as water goes, the fresh water is made on the ship with desalinators. They're huge, finicky machines run by humans. Sometimes they break, sometimes they need maintenance. Sometimes the operator is a dipshit who's worked to many hours and messes up. The XO will see to it that you don't die from dehydration. You may not get two showers that day though. It happens.
One time on the Destroyer we couldn't UNREP for a couple of days because of weather. We didn't die. We did eat C-rations from the end of WW-II that the cooks scrounged up out of a storeroom somewhere. The biggest crises was running out of coffee, until we found some BIG tins of coffee in the bottom of that storeroom from the same era. Best coffee ever. Made with boiler feed water.
This is "war time" and in war time the Navy spends long months in really crappy areas of the world. That's, incidentally, the whole purpose of having a Navy and Marine Corp.
Edited to add: If you want the Navy to come home and / or get a break, land the Army ashore there and the Airforce. That's pretty much the choice. Or, better yet, everybody packs up their shit and comes home. Then nobody is inconvenienced, right? Let'm figure it out by themselves on their own.
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Wildman
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My closest I can relate with is while in Korea our Mess SGT was black marketing our food... For the first 8 months there we ate chicken or fish patties pretty much... Because he was taking all our good rations downtown and selling it to the Koreans.. Wasn't until he was caught that we finally got some decent food...
And during Gulf 1 we were locked down on base for 5 months... And this was a 200 acre base with a gym that would fit into most peoples living rooms, a rec center that manly did ceramics and a club where you could drink... We had 2 suicides and 3 attempts during the time I was there...
So yes I understand some of this...
Wildman
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Wildman
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That dude on the left has three arms.
speeding_infraction
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I guess they really will take anyone lol
Wildman
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Wildman
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Wildman
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Wildman
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