Enjoyed that rather serious writing about being at sea in the Navy. I served 6 years, aboard the USS Voge (FF-1047) and the USS Julius A Furer (FFG-6). An FF is a frigate, slightly smaller than a destroyer. Here's something I saved about how to simulate shipboard life...


Run all the pipes and wires in your house exposed on the walls.

Repaint your entire house every month.

Sleep on the shelf in your closet. Replace the closet door with a curtain. Have your spouse whip open the curtain about 3 hours after you go to sleep, shine a flashlight in your eyes, and mumble "Sorry, wrong rack".

Renovate your bathroom:
Build a wall across the middle of your bathtub and move the showerhead down to chest level. When you take showers, have someone use and flush the toilet repeatedly, make sure you shut off the water while soaping.

Put lube-oil in your humidifier instead of water and set it to HIGH.

Don't watch TV except movies in the middle of the night. Have your family vote on which movie to watch then watch a different one.

For former engineers: Bring your lawn mower into the living room and run it all day long, simulating proper noise level.

Have someone under the age of ten, or the paperboy, give you a haircut with sheep shears.

Once a week blow compressed air up through your chimney making sure the wind carries the soot onto your neighbor's house. Ignore his complaints.

Buy a trash compactor and only use it once a week. Store up garbage in the other side of your bathtub.

Get up every night at around midnight and have a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on stale bread. (Optional is canned ravioli or cold soup).

Make up your family menu a week ahead of time without consulting the pantry or refrigerator.

Set your alarm clock to go off at random times during the night. At the alarm jump out of bed and get dressed as fast as you can, making sure to button your top shirt button and tuck your pants into your socks. Run out into the backyard and uncoil the garden hose.

Once a month take all major appliances completely apart and then reassemble them.

Make coffee using eighteen scoops of budget priced coffee grounds per pot, and allow the pot to simmer for 5 hours before drinking.

Invite at least 85 people you don't really like to come and visit for two months. Don't leave the house for the first month. Then take all but eight of them out binge drinking for three days. Make the other eight stand watch over the house while you're out.

Have a fluorescent lamp installed on the bottom of your coffee table and lie under it to read books.

Raise the thresholds and lower the top sills on your front and back doors so that you either trip or bang your head every time you pass through them.

Lock-wire the lug nuts on your car.

Bake a cake. Prop up one side of the pan so the cake bakes unevenly. Spread icing really thick to level it off.

Every week or so, throw your cat or dog into the swimming pool and shout "Man overboard port side!" Rate your family members on how fast they respond.

Run into the kitchen and sweep all the pots/pans/dishes off of the counter onto the floor then yell at your wife/husband/kids for not having the place secured for sea.

Put the headphones from your stereo on your head, but don't plug them in. Hang a paper cup around your neck on a string. Stand in front of the stove, and speak into the paper cup "Stove manned and ready." After an hour or so, speak into the cup again “Stove secured." Roll up the headphones and paper cup and stow them in a shoe box.

Every other night sit in a chair in front of the furnace and/or water heater getting up hourly to walk around the house to make sure it isn't on fire.

Do laundry once a week, keeping the dirty laundry in a bag at the foot of the bed.

Self righteously declare to your kids the dangers of alcohol while drinking and/or drunk.

Disassemble and inspect your lawn mower every week.

On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, turn your water heater temperature up to 200 degrees. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, turn the water heater off. On Saturdays and Sundays tell your family they use too much water during the week so no bathing will be allowed.

Raise your bed to within 6 inches of the ceiling so you can't turn over without getting out and then getting back in.

Make your family qualify to operate each appliance in your house (i.e. dishwasher operator, blender technician, etc).

Have your neighbor come over each day at 5 am, blow a whistle so loud Helen Keller could hear it, and shout "Reveille, Reveille, all hands heave out and trice up."

Have your mother-in-law write down everything she's going to do the following day then have her make you stand in your back yard at 6 am while she reads it to you.

Submit a request to your father-in-law requesting permission to leave your house before 3 PM.

Empty all the garbage bins in your house and sweep the driveway three times a day, whether it needs it or not. Announce, “Now sweepers, sweepers, man your brooms, give the ship a clean sweep down fore and aft, empty all trash cans over the fantail”.

Have your neighbor collect all your mail for a month, read your magazines, and randomly lose every 5th item before delivering it to you.

When your children are in bed, run into their room with a megaphone, shouting that your home is under attack and ordering them to their battle stations.

Post a menu on the kitchen door informing your family that they are having steak for dinner. Then make them wait in line for an hour. When they finally get to the kitchen, tell them you are out of steak, but they can have dried ham or hot dogs. Repeat daily until they ignore the menu and just ask for hot dogs.

Place a podium at the end of your driveway. Have your family stand watches at the podium, rotating at 4 hour intervals. This is best done when the weather is worst. January is a good time.

When there is a thunderstorm in your area, get a wobbly rocking chair, sit in it and rock as hard as you can until you become nauseous. Make sure to have a supply of stale crackers in your shirt pocket.

Sew the back pockets of your jeans on the front.

Every couple of weeks, dress up in your best clothes and go to the scummiest part of town. Find the most run down, trashiest bar, and drink beer until you are hammered. Then walk all the way home.

Lock yourself and your family in the house for six weeks. Tell them that at the end of the 6th week you are going to take them to Disney World for "shore leave". At the end of the 6th week, inform them the trip to Disney World has been cancelled because they need to get ready for an inspection, and it will be another week before they can leave the house.

Thank you! Your description of sailing on a Navy ship is as I remember of those long years gone by for me.

My first ship was CVS-39 USS Lake Champlain (CVS = Carrier, fixed wing, anti-submarine) and while at sea and when refueling the Destroyers (and smaller Destroyer Escorts) felt and continue to think those sailors deserved sub pay! Additionally I served on four additional carriers and STILL MISS IT - I retired from Antisubmarine Squadron 32 (VS-32) then assigned to CV-67 USS John F Kennedy on September 01, 1976 (the day before they sailed on a North Atlantic cruise while preparing for a nine month Mediterranean cruise.

For you a FAIR WIND AND FOLLOWING SEA!

Sent to me by a friend who served on Destroyers.

Dennis

I guess that I never thought about what I was doing as deeply as this fellow.

Being on those long deployments I'd get caught up in the ship's routine, not fully understanding that what were doing every day was keeping her ready for war.

The Navy is an arrangement of hardware and duties whose reality is concealed from the civilian world and also from the other military branches, save those Marines who have served on ships.

The Navy's main job is to project power and defend assets by putting to sea a fleet of vessels that go wherever the oceans flow. Being that the world is mostly covered by salt water, that's a lot of territory.

When a ship gets underway it takes itself, a little self-contained world, into a place which consists of the sea and the sky; nothing else at all: no buildings, no streets, no mountains, no valleys; no reassuring physical references whatever. There is merely the sky and the sun and perhaps the moon, with the evening stars swinging in the indifferent heavens.
The sea may change colors; the sky may cloud up; the weather may turn harsh, but there is still nothing reminiscent of the port one has departed. It is as though the waters of the Great Flood had taken everything and you are there upon your steel-plate Ark, waiting for the white dove and Mount Ararat.

Only sea travel can give an idea of the ocean's vastness. Imagine if you will that you are looking at a map of the Pacific from Hawaii to San Diego. If that distance was a meter on the map, your little destroyer would be approximately the size of an average bacterium, invisible except with a microscope. And probably never to be located, for, unlike bacteria, our destroyer would likely be the only one in that space, the ultimate needle in an aquatic haystack.

By way of reference, if you were a crewmember on board the International Space Station you would be very much closer to civilization than the crew of that destroyer, because the Space Station flies at about 250 miles above earth. With each orbit it passes close by Cleveland and Dubai, Hong Kong and Paris, near enough to see traffic on highways, boats on rivers. Your destroyer's crew will see only the occasional leaping dolphin from the first hour they leave port until the dawn of the day they spot Oahu. If they leave Hawaii bound for Sydney, they will at midpoint be closer to the center of the earth than to their destination, with days of empty, friendless water ahead and behind.

People who say they love the sea usually mean that they love it from the shoreline, a place where the ocean is very easy to love. There one enjoys the solid security of the land, and all its comforts; the ocean is a thrilling but safe thing, a caged tiger which snarls but can do no harm. The breakers which have traveled days expend their power upon the pilings of a pier or the sandy beach, dying for the pleasure of tourists.

It is, of course, very much different on the open sea. There the largest ships are thrown about like toys, and our little destroyer does not so much sail upon as through the peaks and troughs. At this point its sailors are most aware that they are owned by the ocean. In those rough hours duty is reduced to whatever it takes to run the ship in a more-or-less consistent line, and avoid injury to its contents, some of which is human flesh.

Wars are fought in these conditions.

The peacetime Navy goes about its business in the wash and spray because its business is preparing for war, and because nothing can be done about it except to forge on. A sailor does not love the ocean; he loves the sea, which is to say, the whole of the experience. The ocean to him is a moody, changeable roadway that is seldom the same two journeys in a row. The ocean is his opponent, his challenger.

Nor is the Navy sailor a match with his civilian counterpart. The civilian sailor sees the ocean as a highway for commerce. His job is to get something from one port to another. His work is to run the ship so that it will accomplish that task. The Navy sailor has the same job, but it is a minor consideration compared to the larger role of operating the ship underway, practicing war for the whole journey. In fact, ports are to Navy sailors merely places to refuel and take on stores. The destination is far less important than the journey. In the Navy, each ship is an autonomous machine practicing war everywhere it goes.

And so, when that destroyer reaches Pearl Harbor, or Sydney, or San Francisco, it has been in some phase of war status every nautical mile of the way. Civilians often wonder what the Navy does when there isn't a war. The answer to this is that there is always a war. The ship never knows a moment of peace from the minute of its commissioning to the day it is cut up for scrap. Neither for that matter, do the sailors, who have only small breaks in the ports where the ships come to pause for a few hours or days in their work.