Kossacks my age and older will remember the term Iron Curtain being used to describe the cultural and political wall which separated of eastern and western Europe during the cold war. There is another such wall between the military and civilian worlds. I call it the brass curtain. Those who have never served in the military can really get a clear picture of what life in the military can be like.
I served only two years in the US Navy. My mental problems made it impossible to deal with the kind of insanity military personel must deal with on a regular basis. I was discharged under honorable conditions due to my preexisting mental illness. I still have nightmares about it twenty-two years after I got out. In my dreams they are coming to get me to bring me back to the military. In my dreams I run away, jump into the sea and try to swim away, anything to get away. In my dreams they want to force me to go back to the ship I was stationed on. I was stationed in a bad place in the Navy.
I should start by saying that Not every command is bad and my sister, who also served in the Navy, was very happy at her duty stations in Hawaii and San diego. I did okay in the other boot camp and the two schools they sent me to. I just got set to a bad ship.
The problem was, and most likely remains, that others have control of your life. Some of these people are good people. Others are stupid people or bad people or downright monsters. They all have control. Usually more control over your life than you have. Anywhere you are stationed in the military others can have much more control of your life than you. In most places there are a balance of the good and bad people who run your life. In many places the good people have the upper hand and can control or at least restrain the bad people. On my ship the bad people were in firm control.
The first thing I experienced when I got to the ship was getting robbed. I was unpacking and several women came up and talked to me while I unpacked into my coffin locker and one of them took all of my money out of my purse while I was not looking. when I realized what happened I reported it to the Master at Arms(cops). they not only did not take any notes of even try to look into it, they actually did not bother to tell me I could fill out a form and they could partially reimburse me. They did not want the paperwork. Not a big deal really once the hazing started in.
I was somewhat lucky in that the hazing got worse after I got there. It got worse until a girl got raped as part of her hazing. I do not want to go too deep into this. It was just a bunch of mean chickenshit pranks and lots of extra work and trouble. I did learn an important lesson in it though. How to tell a good person from a bad person. I was sitting around commiserating with a few other newbies and one girl (who I came to truly dislike) said," I can't wait until I have been here long enough to do this to the newbies." A young man(who I ended up being roommates with off base) said, "I would never treat anyone like this." I had several years previous came to my own decision to try to be a good person and agreed with him. That is the difference. Every one of us goes through hard times. We all, at some time or another, are at the mercy of bad people. When a good person experiences a tragic or traumatic experience they think "I don't want anyone else to have to go through this terrible experience." Hence the crusader types like Mothers Against Drunk Drivers. Others, and I have known several, think "I can't wait until someone else suffers the way I have." It is tragic and only increases the amount of suffering in this world.
Next was what we called mess cranking. Nearly every enlisted person who goes to a ship takes their turn working in the kitchens and dining hall(mess decks). You usually work 5 am to either 4 PM (After lunch is cleaned up) or 8 PM after dinner is cleaned up and any prep work for the next morning is done. Other than the long hours it was actually pretty fun. I worked first in the scullery, where I broke so many dishes we had to do inventory three times and they sent me to work in veg prep. Here I would do my part in making a salad bar for about a thousand people and peeled hundreds of pounds of potatoes in a special machine that would tumble them around in a bucket lined with something like sandpaper. Then the Lady who ran the officers dining room picked me to work for her. She took me away from veg prep because she got to choose who worked for her. I made the salad bar for the officers and served them as a waitress. I had to wear a little waters jacket and bow tie. They ate off china and silver that I polished. It was not so bad.
After mess cranking I went back to my department. By this time my ship was in the shipyard for refurbishing. We all moved to the Holiday Inn because there were not enough barracks at the shipyard. we stayed there, three to a room, for about 7 months. We had a barge where we could sleep when on duty. While in the shipyard we usually worked 7 am to 8 or 9 pm. We had duty every four days and every fourth weekend. That is the day you stay on board and take your turns standing watch in four hour shifts. We usually worked late into the night or all night on those days. It depended on how the duty officers felt. It is a lot of hard work but not so bad really. My senior year in high school I worked nearly full time and went to school full time and so was used to long days.
The work was hard but manageable. The hours were long but bearable. What was unmanageable and unbearable was the bad guys. I do not know how else to describe them. They were in complete control of my department. They hated anyone that was not a white southern conservative. They hated the African Americans and the hispanics. They hated me for being a liberal from Los Angeles and for not being racist. they had their little cabal and they went around tormenting everyone else.
After a while they developed a pattern of choosing one person at a time for special attention. That person got the special attention until they were gone. People went awol. People went to the brig. People went to the mental hospital. Including me.
One of their favorite tricks was to make us do the same work over and over and over. We took up the tiles in my department heads office and replaced it. He did not like the color so we took it up again and replaced it. He still did not like the color and we took the floor up again. Happily, when we got to the supply department they were really angry and so to punish him they would only give us two different colored tiles. Not enough of either one to make a sensible pattern either.
The ship I was on was a Submarine Tender. We had two boat cranes, one on either side of the ship. While in the shipyard we took them apart to refurbish them. Some parts were on order. Our department head had us put the starboard side crane together with the parts we had and get it running. Then we had to take it apart and put together the port side crane to make sure we could get it running when the parts got there. Well since the port side of our ship was toward the pier, we had to take it apart again and put it back on the starboard side.
The work would not have been so bad, just a lot of long hours, if it had not been for the bad guys. We were under constant watch, constant verbal assault, constant harassment. At any time one of the bad guys could decide you did something wrong and assign you extra duty. At any point one of them might decide to play a "trick" on you. Spitting at you from the upper decks. Dropping tools and equipment near you from the upper decks. They might trip you or mess up your work. There was constant sexual harassment. Saying no to a date with an asshole only gets you extra scrutiny. To the point where you can't do anything right. And the threat of sexual violence is always present. Jokes about extreme sexual and domestic violence are a constant along with frequently being touched, propositioned, constant talk about sex with the men describing what they would do to me sexually if they had a chance.
The most frightening incident with the bad guys was one night after we had gotten out of the shipyard. I was working on the pier with a couple of guys off loading pallets of supplies onto the center line crane to be taken onto the ship. The bad guy who was working the crane would lift it up very fast and quickly swig the pallets around toward us to scare us. The problem was that he really could have killed one of us. I tried to talk to the petty officer in charge and he laughed at me. He came within inches of striking me in the head with thousands of pounds of equipment. Finally when they called a smoke break I said I had to use the head and instead went up to the quarterdeck and asked the officer of the watch to step over to the rail and observe what was going on. You see if there had been an accident that night he would have had to deal with it and had hours of paperwork to do. He put a stop to it.
The girl who was raped as part of her hazing was a friend of mine. It turned out that the two men who raped her had been going around raping and sexually assaulting women for a long time. She was the first one who reported it. About a dozen women testified at the 'trial'. It was determined that it was not really rape since she did not try to fight these two men off. Neither man was ever charged with any other attacks since the victims did not report it at the time it happened. One man got reduction in rank to seaman(private), six months in the brig and lost half his pay for three months. His wife and kids ended up homeless for a while. The other got restricted to the ship where most of the victims still lived and worked for six weeks and lost half a months pay for three months. My friend was eventually transfered to another command after some of the bad guy women broke into her locker and destroyed all of her belongings.
They lined all us women from my berthing compartment(sleeping room) on deck and said we would not go anywhere until they found out who did it. I dropped a dime on those bitches so fast they looked like they would faint. They actually had the nerve to confront me over it and try to say it was wrong to turn in a shipmate( a shipmate! after what they did to a shipmate. after what their men did to women who were their shipmates and some even their own friends). I not so calmly explained that they were not my shipmates if they were attacking my friends and if they wanted to fight me I would kick every one of their asses(I had some real anger issues back then and a bit of a reputation).
One day I was talking to a young lady who had gone awol when her mother had cancer. Who had been caught and dragged back and while under restriction had attempted suicide. She was waiting for a discharge. My mother had been given three to six months to live about a year before this time. When my mother had a stroke they only gave me three days to go see her. You see on top of everything the Navy had to throw at me my mother was busy drinking herself to death at home and was getting closer to her goal. This young lady said that if she had known that it would get her a discharge she would have faked her suicide attempt.
I took twenty five and a half aspirin. I did not take that many for any specific reason I just counted them as I took them. The nice young lady went to the medical department and told them I was trying to kill myself. they came and got me and took me to medical and gave me syrup of epicac and made me throw up. They put me in one of those wire frame stretchers that they use for rescue and loaded me in the crane bucket and lifted me down to the pier to the ambulance. The same guy that almost killed me with the crane ran the crane when I was i the bucket with the medic. A friend of mine heard what had happened and when I was in the air she leaned over the rail on the o-5 level and called out to me,"Stevie you asshole" That is all I heard. I started laughing so hard and was still laughing when we got to the ground.
When the young lady who gave me the advice was in the hospital they asked her if she wanted out of the military. She said yes and for some reason they wanted to keep her. She had to fight to get out. When they asked me I said I wanted to stay in the Navy. They recommended me for discharge. It took a little while. I was worried that they might decide to keep me after all and since I already had a diagnosis of mental illness I just went off one day and cursed out the head of my department. He said if I wanted out I was getting out. After that it was only two weeks.
Of course when you are getting out of the military there is the reverse hazing. You have a little form that you take around to about 15 different people to sign off before you go. Each person who gets a hold of that paper damages it. They tore at it, burned it, scribbled on it. crumpled it up and threw it in the garbage and later into a men's berthing compartment where I had to go get it. Then someone stole it. I had to go back to the admin department to get another one and go around to have it signed again. The head of admin was a complete asshat. One of the worst officers I ever encountered. He actually bitched me out about the form disappearing and about the condition of the form I finally turned in. He said he could make me stay if he wanted to. At this point I knew just what to say. " You might want to talk to my department head about that."
That is the reality for members of the military. They are at the mercy of luck and leadership. One might be stationed at a place where if you were not on duty it was just like a regular job. One might be stationed at a place where one is at the mercy of the bad guys.