Useless Skills I Learned In The Navy
I don’t care how cool you are, everybody loves lassos.
courtesy of the author. it’s me!
I was in the Navy when 9/11 occurred. I had recently finished my initial trade training and overseas I went. I released when I came back, for reasons which would need a whole separate story, but 17 years later there are still some skills I can’t seem to forget.
In no particular order, here are the things taking up space in my head that I wish I could use for other things.
Semaphore
Ah, semaphore. Making communicators the Hula Girls of the sea for hundreds of years.
Morse Code was, and perhaps still is, a very useful tool. Most of its utility comes from the fact that it can be sent in many different ways. Those little dits and dahs can be sent over radio as audible sounds or sent visually through many means such as flashing light or semaphore.
The Navy still used visual semaphore during my tenure, although it’s not clear to me why. I have no idea if it is still in use, but there’s nothing quite as disheartening as sending semaphore to a nearby ship knowing full well there are a number of radios and other types of encrypted communications equipment currently doing the job much faster. Communication pundits will tell you that semaphore still has its place because the tactical situation may require silent communications, but you can’t hide a 350-foot war ship on the water, so it’s pretty hard to hide the flashing lights and flags coming from it.
The best part of sending semaphore was sunning on the upper decks waiting for something to happen. Seriously. Check the pic.
I haven’t sent or received semaphore since leaving the Navy. It comes up surprisingly infrequently in civilian life. But I still know every letter. I’d prefer my brain dump that bit of knowledge and store something more useful like my family’s birthdays.
The Watch and Station Bill
A war ship isn’t a recreational sail boat. It runs 24/7 and has to maintain readiness every minute of those hours. My ship had a crew of about 300 including the air detachment that flew and maintained the helicopters.
There’s a never ending list of duties on a ship. At the top level, we all need to do our actual jobs. We need to show up for work at our particular spot and work just like everyone else in the world. For me, my spot was the Communication Control Room or the Bridge — communicators work in both places. For others, their spot may be the kitchen or the operations room or the forward sonar instrument space, or some other space no human should ever be crammed in to. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
There’s a lot of duties to be done that aren’t anyone’s job. Sure, the cooks cook and the clerks clerk, but there’s nobody on-board who’s job is to clean the ship, recycle the garbage, hump loads of food and ammo around the ship and fight fires (OK, there are fire-fighters but just a few to tell the rest of us what to do). Everybody does those jobs in their “off” time. Almost every waking moment is spent doing something which may or may not have any relationship to your job.
And those are just the jobs you are forced to do. You still have to somehow carve out some time for personal stuff such as your laundry, hair cuts, and talking/emailing people back home. None of that stuff is factored into your work day.
If everyone is running everywhere to do stuff all the time, how do people get to work at the right time and place? Enter the monstrosity that only the Navy could create: the dreaded Watch and Station Bill.
There are a number of watch rotations with simple names like “1 in 4", “1 in 3 modified” or, the worst in my opinion, the “1 in 2". Operations folks, like communicators, can live in the 1 in 2 rotation for months.
Basically, the name means you’re working 1 in every X watch (“watches” are “shifts”, you civvie!). How long is a watch? That depends on the rotation. In a 1 in 2, the watches are 7 hours, 7 hours, 5 hours, and 5 hours which together comprise a 24 hour day. That’s a long day and it goes on for months non-stop, but it’s easy to understand. To become completely confused, the 1 in 4 is here to help.
Following the same formula, the 1 in 4 means you work 1 in every 4 watches. That sounds better, right? Wait for it.
The watches are:
0000-0400: Mid(dle Watch)
0400–0800: Morning
0800–1200: Forenoon
1200–1600: Afternoon
1600–1800: First dog
1800–2000: Last (or Second) dog
2000-0000: First (or Evening)You’d think this means that there’s a lot of time off. But this is the Navy so you’d be wrong. During a 1 in 4 rotation everyone ALSO works 0800–1600 in addition to their watches. If one of your watches falls within 0800–1600 great, if it doesn’t then too bad for you.
Example of a 2-day rotation: On day 1, I work the Mids, off for 4 hours and report to work at 0800 with everyone else until 1600. I then immediately go back to work at 1600 for two hours, but then I am off until 0400. That’s not too bad — I get a solid 10 hours off. That’s called “All Nighters”. Navy folk are clever like that.
On day 2, I am on watch from 0400–0800 then I have to work all day from 0800–1600 with everyone else. I get 2 hours off, then I have to report for the second dog watch and that makes for a long day. But, then bliss sets in. I don’t have to report to watch until 0800 the next morning which gives me 12 hours to recuperate. That’s called “Super All Nighters”. See? Clever.
Days 3 and 4 are more crappy and then the rotation starts all over again.
My point isn’t to instruct you on how a Naval watch and station bill works. My point is that all this stuff is still stuck in my head almost 20 years after I last had a use for it. That’s crazy.
The bowline knot
courtesy Wikimedia Commons public domain
I joined the Navy later in life than your typical recruit — mostly because I was busy being a Militia MP and going to college for years prior. When I made the change to Regular Force Navy I was just barely in my 30s and had somehow made it through life happily tying things up with infantile square knots just fine. Put your finger right there to hold this while I tie the next knot, thank you very much.
Initial military training has three basic phases for every new recruit. First, the much publicized Basic Training (“Boot Camp” for the Americans among us) of which movies and novels galore have been made. The next phase is Environmental Training which is the baseline training for your particular element (sea, air, ground). Lastly comes Trade Training which is where you learn how to do your actual specific job.
Army environmental training consists of a lot of guns and digging. Navy environmental training consisted of a lot of terminology and — you guessed it — knots. Nobody has any idea what Air Force environmental training looks like.I guess how to clean crumbs off the ready-room chaise lounges? But I digress.
I was destined to become a communicator and would have little use for knots. But, I learned the 3 or 4 knots required of me and then promptly forgot them all once I left the sea training school. All but one. That damn bowline haunts me today.
I don’t care how cool you are, everyone loves lassos. — Jon Watson
The bowline knot fascinated me. With a bowline, you can make any line into a lasso. I don’t care how cool you are, everyone loves lassos. I always knew when someone was trying to remember how to tie one. I’d overhear muttering about the “rabbit runs around the tree then into the hole”…etc. I don’t actually remember the mnemonic any more because my hands just know how to do it now. It’s burned into RAM, as my computer nerd friends would say.
I’ve been out of the Navy for almost a generation at this point; there are Petty Officers serving now that weren’t even in the Navy when I left. And my house is littered with unnecessary bowline knots. I bundle up recycling with it, I make temporary leashes with it. I tie down my hatch back with it during long load hauls. None of that is new; the ol’ childish square knot used to work just as well, but now I’m a bowline guy for no particular reason.
Careers are usually built on learning progressively more complex skills and building on them. Sadly, your brain doesn’t know what a career is and it just remembers what it wants to remember for reasons that aren’t well understood yet. We don’t have a lot of control over what it decides to store for the long term. This is why you can remember things like your high school locker combination, but not your current car’s license plate number. It’s frustrating and incredibly interesting at the same time.