I do happen to know that if you happen to write a letter to your now ex-girlfriend who sent you a Dear John letter while you were on deployment, basically telling her how worthless she happens to be, then go out and get drunk that night and decide that you really don’t want that letter to go to her, thus deciding that you need to break into the base post office to retrieve the letter, then get caught while trying to climb the fence around the post office by Shore Patrol, you only go to mast and get 45/45 (45 days restriction, 45 days extra duty) instead of going to jail for interfering with the mail (a federal offense). The best part about this story (no, it wasn’t me, just another guy on the ship) was that the letter hadn’t actually left the ship yet and he was at the wrong post office to get the letter in the first place. :)

Yeah, some of the stuff that happens in that series is kind of depressing, but it is nice to see a fuller view of life in the Navy.

I have a question that has *nothing* to do with this post, but has to do with the “Carrier” episode with the Hong Kong shore leave. Apparently, an E-4 female and an E-6 male had sex in the vicinity of the docks and the female was (and this is almost a quote) too drunk to remember if she consented or not and therefore did not file charges since she couldn’t remember. I remember that one of her friends said that she was crying afterwards.

When I was in Basic at Ft. Jackson in ‘93, they told us that per UCMJ that if the female is drunk, then it’s rape — and (in theory a capital crime). Is that still the case? A better question would be, does our discussing it help anyone?

Let’s put it this way… when I hear the phrase “Trust me” it gives me shudders, because it brings me back to when he would say that, at which point we all knew we were screwed.

Recently I watched the entire series of “Carrier” on PBS. Now, I can’t tell you if that is truly life on a carrier or not, because I was stationed on a cruiser, but the five minute segment in the fourth episode concerning the nuclear power division was spot on! Nukes (and I was one) are a completely different breed from the regular sailor, and we really could get away with stuff that the regular sailors would go to mast (i.e. UCMJ punishment) for. We were trained from the very beginning (even boot camp!) to think about what the hell we were doing, and we were allowed to call a situation screwed up if it was in fact screwed up. In boot camp we even managed to get away with it, because our PI’s knew that we were nukes in training and they would just shake their heads and walk away when we screwed something like marching up. It may have had something to do with us demanding to go back to the gas chamber for screwing things up… we hit them with reverse psychology and they just didn’t know how to deal with it. They never called us on it, for some reason… and I would have happily gone back to the chamber just to screw with them that much more.

We also had protection from our officers if we were brought up for actually thinking about things in the fleet and calling things exactly what they were. If a topside officer got all pissy because we would state something as being stupid, it would get back to our officers and they would calm the topsider down. We would catch a bit of flak from our officers, but it was better than going to mast, and we knew that they agreed.

Oh, but one thing about being a nuke enlisted… You basically make E-4 from the get-go, so you get out to the fleet as an NCO, which means squat… you are still the bottom of the barrel as an E-4 nuke, and get all of the scut work up through E-5. Only when you make E-6 do you get out of the crap work.

I really should come up with a naval version of this list, as there are plenty of naval parallels to it. :)