I don't know how much the Navy has changed since I was in, or since you were, but I do remember it as a vast sea of indifference. It wasn't out to get me, it just didn't care if I lived or died.I was pretty lucky, and it worked pretty well for me, but it could just have easily gone the other way. I had to break regulations, disobey orders, and undergo extreme harassment to train myself out of the deckforce, even though I supposedly had the "right" to take correspondence courses in any rate I wanted. Only a hippy officer who was short and signed my paperwork under the table for me to get my Practical Factors in allowed me to sew on my crow.

On board a ship with a combat mission, I found that appearances mattered more than anything, and many times I watched men being pulled away from maintenance on critical pieces of gear, like radars, so they could scrub and paint already-spotless spaces for inspections. The coup de grace came when we hove to 20 miles from the DMZ in broad daylight and sent half the crew over the side on stages so we could scrub the oil off the hull and touch up a few rust spots before we went back to Subic Bay. From that moment on, I realized this was a carreerist's navy, and the officers cared more about their careers than their duty. I got a chance to tell the Captain the same during my man-to-man shipping over speech when I was mustering out. He asked, off the record, why so many good men (presumably, like me) were not re-enlisting. I told him up front, and he had no answer for me.

As a QM, I had it pretty easy, my comrades were in the same head I was, and our leading petty officer was no lifer, we did our job and did our best to remain invisible. If I had not really enjoyed my work, and if I had not really enjoyed being at sea, I really don't know how I would have made out. I can honestly say the day I learned I was getting an early out was the happiest single day of my life.