And Nukes Are Supposed To Be Smart
Well, my days in Charleston are numbered. I’m being transferred up to Ballston Spa, NY next week. I figured I would share one more tale (or tales, depending on how you look at it) about my time here.
–We get guys fresh out of Boot Camp on a weekly basis. Probably the most entertaining thing to do is, naturally, screw with them. Doing so becomes that much easier on the tail end of the pipleline down here because your uniform says that you’ve made it. You can get them to do all kinds of stupid crap.
For instance, we have a strict code against hazing, which is promptly ignored. Because Naval Weapons Station Charleston (excuse me, Joint Base Charleston) is also a federal nature preserve, we get a lot of wildlife here, mostly as squirrels. One common joke is to tell the new guys, known as Indockers, to salute the squirrels.
–Other crap to salute includes the torpedoes we have on base, the anchors, the screws, and the tennis balls. (The guys who go to Captain’s Mast wear bright green road worker vests, which are the color of tennis balls.)
–Indockers are often told that they need to check their sea bag for watertight integrity. To do this, they need to shove all their stuff into the bag, latch it, and then throw it into the shower for a few minutes. The bag, being made out of cotton, leaks like a sieve. Now they’re stuck lugging 75 pounds of gear to the laundry room, often involving stairs.
–My personal favorite is having Indockers take their mattress (a full-size twin mattress) to the Bowman Center to have it stenciled, because they were not issued stencils to do the exact same thing themselves. This is at its most entertaining when it involves stairs and a 500+ yard long walk. In the middle of the summer. On a humid day. In the rain.
Why do they do it? Why does it work? Go to anyone fresh out of Boot Camp and you’ll see that as long as you have rank, you can tell them anything. Naturally, being the jackass that I am, I put the new guys through the wringer at every opportunity I get because I derive joy out of other people’s misery.
And if you think I’m alone in this, you’d be wrong. Everyone gets cynical after going through the school. It’s especially fun to watch as the young sailor out of boot camp sees their hopes and dreams get leeched out of them, bit by bit; that’s another tale for another day.
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Tags: RivCA, shore stories
July 13th, 2010 at 8:45 am
Funny, my Seabag could have easily passed the watertight integrity test. Guess the quality of the construction has gone downhill recently.
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RivCA reply on July 13th, 2010 10:25 pm:
I don’t think that’s the case. As I said, you’re letting the seabag get hosed for a good few minutes. Seabags have a tight enough weave to keep rain from soaking through, as long as exposure is kept to a minimum. However, once the bag is saturated and water just keeps driving against it, something will give.
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SKD reply on July 14th, 2010 12:10 am:
Mine you would need something with more pressure than you average high quality hotel shower(stayed at a Hilton Suites on a business trip recently, highest pressure showerhead I have ever seen) or you would actually have to submerge it for a while.
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RivCA reply on July 14th, 2010 8:02 am:
That’s usually the case. Run it under the shower for about fifteen minutes. Usually soaks through, and if they have anything white, there’s a chance it will come out green from the seabag dye, but that’s unlikely.
July 13th, 2010 at 4:17 pm
Wait…. Ballston Spa is still open? I thought the only prototype left was the 626 and the 635….
Captcha: “sewerage for” – Yep, that about describes my experience of the nuclear pipeline.
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July 16th, 2010 at 6:23 pm
When I was at Shepherd, some bored green rope tried to convince me that I should salute the planes because “The pilots are officers!”
Mind you, this was a green rope, wearing ABUs (new Air Force uniform), I’m wearing BDUs (which they stopped issuing circa 2007), somehow he still thought I’d bite on that one.
There was also a rumor that if you put a reflective belt on one of the rabbits at Shepherd (rabbits big enough to catch and eat unwary airmen), you’d automatically get Phase IV privileges. Before that, when I was in Monterey, the sergeants informed us that we specifically would NOT get any privileges for putting a reflective belt on a deer. We’d only probably get hoofed half-to-death, and maybe some ticks.
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