I saw a good number of cranes in my 10 years in the navy on piers around the world, some pier I can't recall in where I got a tour of the USS Kamehameha in 1990 in Florida, somewhere between New Smyrna and Cocoa beach, Jebel Ali, Perth and Gladstone Australia, Chin Hae South Korea, Sasebo and Yokosuka Japan, Esquimalt Vancouver Canada, and Pearl Harbor....
But I never looked at one and thought it looked like a giraffe.
http://mildlyinteresting-blog.blogspot.com/2019/12/giraffe-crane.html
What was your rating? I was a CTM, back in another life.
ReplyDeleteI was an MM, an ET, a QM, and did MP for shore duty.
DeleteThat's a result of not realizing that recruiters are not acting in your interest, and get paid more bonus for recruiting nukes. I was only able to get through to 1/2 way through Power School. That school is HARD, and the failure rate when I was there in 89-90 was around 90%.
So as an academic drop the CMC asked me, and the others, what we wanted from the choices the Navy offered, as MMs, we could take a different route and go ET, RM, and FT I think they were, and I looked at him, and said, Master Chief, I don't know a damn thing about the Navy except bootcamp and this school - so what do you recommend, I'll take that, whatever it is. He said, ok, go try ESM ET on subs. Lol, whatever that is Master Chief, put me down for that.
So I was sent to Groton and became an ET after being an MM for a year. I went to sea on my first sub, the 717, as an ET until it was time to re-up, or get out, and I asked the guy on my boat who did retention, whats it looking like?
He said you can't even reenlist as an ET, the quota in subs for ETs is full, but you can reenlist as a QM AND get a 4k bonus.
Well, shit, sign me up.
So, I had 8 months left onboard and cross trained and got qualled as QMOW and Duty QM, then when we were 1/2 way through West Pac I was sent to Texas to start MP academy.
So with only 6 years in, I had already been an MM, passed MM A school nuke style, passed the ET school, A and C schools, went to sea for 4 years, cross rated to QM, qualled the watch stations, and was in MP school.
Most guys were 2nd classes already, but I'd realized that you have a tough time studying all the books (Neets Mods if you recall them) to be good enough to ace the tests, and get promoted, especially in subs, where there were no openings even if you did ace tests for STs especially, and ETs were so full I couldn't even re-enlist as an ET, so there was no point in me wasting time studying to be a QM as an MP for 3 years during shore duty, I walked into the tests, filled the dots in the test, in a pattern, and walked out 4 minutes later to do something pleasant for the rest of my day off.
So I went to my 2nd sub, the 759, as a QM, but they had an thing going on in the navy to force rate convert RMs and QMs to be ETs, so there I was back as an ET.
MM, ET, QM, MP for shore duty, then ET again before my 10 years are up