I’ve been thinking a lot about my time in the Navy since I got back from Texas last month. When I joined the Navy, I joined under the Delayed Entry Program. I had a contract, but stayed in Memphis for a pretty good while before I actually went to Boot Camp in Orlando. During that time, I worked and hung out with my friends… when they weren’t studying.
When I was in High School, I didn’t want to go to college, so I really didn’t apply myself much. I did okay, but not great, and certainly not as well as I needed to do to go to any of the great schools in places that seemed like places I would like to live… Chicago, Miami, Boston, Honolulu. So, the Navy seemed to be it for me. I mean, I was working full time, but I couldn’t afford to move out of my parents’ house, and I knew I didn’t want to stay there, so I had to do something. I figured that, if nothing else, the Navy might show me what I didn’t want to do.
I finally went to Boot Camp almost two years after I graduated from High School. Immediately, I thought that it was all a big mistake and I wanted to go home so badly! Maybe life with my parents wasn’t so bad after all. I even threatened to climb over the fence. I was in Division V, so it really should not be too hard to escape. I could see the road outside the window. If I could just get out to Glenridge Way, I would be home free, or so I thought. Instead of letting me go home, my Company Commander sent me to someplace called “sleepers”, where I was in a different Barracks than my company. I spent one night there, getting my head around the idea that if I left, my parents had already told me that they wouldn’t know me if anyone came looking for me, and that if I tried to do an admin separation for a failure to adapt to military life, I would NEVER get out of there because the Navy would do all it could to drag its feet, or anchors as the case may be. So, I decided to stay, and I returned to my company.
The next eight weeks went by in a blur; my memories like an abstract painting, a jumble of potato wedges with A-1 for lunch and dinner, cereal or waffles for breakfast, endless marching, endless cadence, endless pushups on the grinder, the ever present Navy issue raincoat looped on our backs over our belts because it was late Spring/early Summer in Florida, so every afternoon between 2 and 4, we were destined to get wet. My dad talks about my Company Commander telling him how when I returned from sleepers, I wouldn’t stop singing “Anchors Aweigh”, and I went on to be top of my company in every class we had. I don’t remember singing “Anchors Aweigh”, but I do remember that not only did I not quit, I excelled, I pushed, and I became gung-ho.
As I went along in my career, I always remembered what it was like to need that little extra help in the very beginning. I tried to extend that to other Sailors I knew who were struggling. When I was at the 11-year mark, I took on a young Seaman Recruit, an 18-year-old fresh from the plains of Texas, who found herself in her first duty station in a small town in Italy. Amanda remains very dear to me today, and it was our visit while I was in Texas that made me take a trip back down memory lane. I taught her how to budget, made her do PT up and down the Monte Orlando hill, chewed her ass when she needed it, and was there to listen when she called me at 2 AM homesick. She called me her Sea Mommy, and she was my Sea Baby. Like all things in the Navy, my Sea Baby’s time was ending and off to Cuba she went.
As the years went by, we were in touch sporadically. She eventually got out of the Navy, and I stayed in. When I retired in 2010, she flew from Texas to be at my ceremony. There were others who came from a distance to be there too, one even coming from Bahrain. Those faces, those young Sailors who, for whatever reason, looked up to me, those are the ones who made my less-than-perfect career mean something to me. I say less-than-perfect because a made a couple of mistakes along the way, one that cost me some rank. But to those Sailors, that didn’t matter. What mattered was that I didn’t quit, I didn’t give up, and I kept doing my best. Those Sailors were the highlights of my career, knowing that I made a difference in someone else’s life, but they probably don’t realize what a difference they made in mine. I daresay I got the better deal.
When Grubby died in 2021, my own Sea Daddy and his wife drove up from Charleston to be here for the service, and lo and behold, my Sea Baby flew in for just over 24 hours to be here for me. That was what the Navy meant to me. Having those friends that were there no matter what, without being asked, and for no other reason than I needed them. For a brief moment on that awful day, I went back to being that Sailor, as three generations of Sailors stood together and held each other.
That bond transcends all logic and reason, but it is the thing I miss the most about the Navy. That bond is what anchored me and held me fast during some of the worst times of my life. That bond, and the people who share it with me, made twenty years go by way too fast, but with memories and bonds that last a lifetime.
Thanks For Sharing’