What Is It Like To Be A Fleet Sailor?

Life as a US Navy Fleet Sailor seemed to be an amazing adventure. If any of you were sailors and served aboard a ship, you KNOW what I am about to tell you is true!  And I would bet that you vividly remember the horror stories you were told about what happened “Out in the Fleet” before you ever got there.  For those who did not have the pleasure of being a “Fleet” sailor, I will endeavor to explain the process of attaining the coveted title and what you no doubt heard about the “Fleet”.

Fleet Sailor

To be a “Fleet” sailor you had to actually have been aboard a ship.  In my case, I was an Aviation Anti-Submarine Warfare Technician and served in aviation squadrons, which also went aboard aircraft carriers.  Some would say that just making it to your first aviation command means you’re a Fleet sailor and I guess you could make a case for that, but a true Fleet sailor served on a War Ship, where horror after horror apparently happened at least three times a day, every day.

Step 1

The first step for every sailor, no matter if they are going to be a brown shoe, black shoe, deck ape, turd chaser, bubblehead, corpsman, or whatever, you had to go to boot camp.  This is everyone’s first taste of Navy life.  It is inevitable that you are told that you “Have to train the way you are going to fight, because you fight the way you are trained”, and most of the lessons they teach are written in blood.  Some sailor didn’t listen and died because he did something stupid.  In boot camp you get the impression that dozens and dozens of guys are dying out there daily writing these lessons we had to learn.  I had to wonder how many guys REALLY died learning how to fold their skivvies.

Step 2

After boot camp comes some form of training which depended on the job you signed up to do.  In my case, it was a trip to Naval Air Station Millington TN, where they taught all aviation schools.  I had 3 schools to attend; Basic Electricity and Electronics, Avionics Class A school, and Advanced First Term Avionics school.  I was there for about a year in school and we heard story after story of the apparently hundreds of sailors who apparently got electrocuted every day out in the fleet.  Most of them were electrocuted because they were wearing a watch or some sort of jewelry when working on electrical circuits.  The “Fleet” was seemingly the most dangerous place in the world.

Now, I knew that there was a grain of truth to the stories that were told, but I also realized that half of what was told was embellished or outright fabrication in order to emphasize a safety item we needed to learn.  There is no doubt that most WARNINGS in technical manuals ARE written in blood.  We were told that “Warnings” are written because someone died, and “Cautions” are because someone got hurt.  Even though I wanted to be a REAL FLEET SAILOR, I didn’t know if I would survive long enough to become one.

Life (or is it Death?) Aboard An Aircraft Carrier

The stories about what happens on a carrier at sea are the ones that scare people the most.  You would hear story after story of grisly ways sailors died, and each would be worse than the last.  You see, when sailors are sitting around telling sea stories, they tend to escalate in nature because each successive story needs to be “better” than the one before.  And by better, that means more blood and guts.

Putting the Scare in em!

I’ll close this story by telling you how I was part of an unfortunate “Scare” of the new guy in our avionics shop.  At this time I actually WAS a Fleet sailor, having completed my first deployment overseas. (I hadn’t SEEN anyone die, but we had people die on every single deployment I was on.  I guess the average was 5 or 6 people per deployment.) We would always have a large number of people in the shop at the afternoon shift change, because both shifts were there getting the pass down.  Inevitably, someone would tell a sea story, and of course all the “Old Salts” of the Fleet would chime in our $.02 to embellish the gruesome tales.  You could tell the stories were getting to our new guy, but that just made the stories get even “better”.  After a few weeks the new guy must have decided that he had to get out of the Navy in order to survive. 

Come “out” to get out

The only way you could get “out” was to actually come “Out”, and say you were gay.  This was long before the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy.  To this day, I do not believe he actually was, but he claimed it so that he could get out of the upcoming deployment to the ship, where he would surely DIE if you believe all the stories he was told.  I have no idea what ever happened to him, but he was gone the next day and we never saw him again. And the irony is that HE is now a Sea Story….