Fouled Anchor Forums

[krnl]

This was passed on to me by a fellow Chief who said:
"Thought you may want to pass this along. I received if from one of my seaman the other day who made Chief last cycle. Meant a lot to me. I'm sure it's been around before, I've just never saw it."

######## Old School Chiefs #######
A white-hat, for those of you who are not indoctrinated, is an enlisted
sailor.

A Navy Chief (Chief, Senior Chief, Master Chief) is the senior enlisted of
the Navy.

Never forget this, a Chief can become an Officer, but an Officer can never
become a Chief. Chiefs have their standards!

One thing we weren't aware of at the time, but became evident as life wore
on, was that we learned true leadership from the finest examples any lad was
ever given, Chief Petty Officers. They were crusty old bastards who had done
it all and had been forged into men who had been time tested over more years
than a lot of us had time on the planet.
The ones I remember wore hydraulic oil stained hats with scratched and
dinged-up insignia, faded shirts, some with a Bull Durham tag dangling out
of their right-hand pocket or a pipe and tobacco reloads in a worn leather
pouch in their hip pockets, and a Zippo that had been everywhere. Some of
them came with tattoos on their forearms that would force them to keep their
cuffs buttoned at a Methodist picnic.
Most of them were as tough as a boarding house steak. A quality required to
survive the life they lived. They were, and always will be, a breed apart
from all other residents of Mother Earth. They took eighteen year old
idiots and hammered the stupid bastards into sailors.

You knew instinctively it had to be hell on earth to have been born a
Chief's kid. God should have given all sons born to Chiefs a return option.
A Chief didn't have to command respect. He got it because there was nothing
else you could give them. They were God's designated hitters on earth.

We had Chiefs with fully loaded Submarine Combat Patrol Pins, and
combat air crew wings in my day...hard-core bastards who found nothing out
of place with the use of the word "Japs" to refer to the little sons of
Nippon they had littered the floor of the Pacific with as payback for a
little 7 December tea party they gave us in 1941. In those days,
"insensitivity" was not a word in a sailor's lexicon.
They remembered lost mates, and still cursed the cause of their loss...and
they were expert at choosing descriptive adjectives and nouns, none of which
their mothers would have endorsed.

At the rare times you saw a Chief topside in dress canvas, you saw
rows of hard-earned, worn and faded ribbons over his pocket.
"Hey Chief, what's that one and that one?" "Oh hell kid, I can't remember.
There was a war on. They gave them to us to keep track of the campaigns."
"We didn't get a lot of news out where we were. To be honest, we just took
their word for it. Hell son, you couldn't pronounce most of the names of
the places we went. They're all depth charge survival geedunk." "Listen kid,
ribbons don't make you a Sailor."
We knew who the heroes were, and in the final analysis that's all that
matters.

Many nights, we sat in the after mess deck wrapping ourselves around cups
of coffee and listening to their stories. They were light-hearted stories
about warm beer shared with their running mates in corrugated metal sheds at
resupply depots where the only furniture was a few packing crates and a
couple of Coleman lamps. Standing in line at a Honolulu cathouse or
spending three hours soaking in a tub in Freemantle, smoking cigars, and
getting loaded. It was our history.
And we dreamed of being just like them because they were our heroes.
When they accepted you as their shipmate, it was the highest honor you would
ever receive in your life. At least it was clearly that for me.
They were not men given to the prerogatives of their position.

You would find them with their sleeves rolled up, shoulder-to-shoulder
with you in a stores loading party. "Hey Chief, no need for you to be out
here tossin' crates in the rain, we can get all this crap aboard."

"Son, the term 'All hands' means all hands."

"Yeah Chief, but you're no damn kid anymore, you old coot."

"Horsefly, when I'm eighty-five parked in the stove up old bastards' home,
I'll still be able to kick your worthless butt from here to fifty feet past
the screw guards along with six of your closest friends." And he probably
wasn't bullshitting.

They trained us. Not only us, but hundreds more just like us. If it
wasn't for Chief Petty Officers, there wouldn't be any U.S. Navy.
There wasn't any fairy godmother who lived in a hollow tree in the enchanted
forest who could wave her magic wand and create a Chief Petty Officer.

They were born as hot-sacking seamen, and matured like good whiskey in steel
hulls over many years. Nothing a nineteen year-old jay-bird could cook up
was original to these old saltwater owls. They had seen E-3 jerks come and
go for so many years; they could read you like a book. "Son, I know what
you are thinking. Just one word of advice.
DON'T. It won't be worth it."

"Aye, Chief."

Chiefs aren't the kind of guys you thank. Monkeys at the zoo don't
spend a lot of time thanking the guy who makes them do tricks for peanuts.
Appreciation of what they did, and who they were, comes with long distance
retrospect. No young lad takes time to recognize the worth of his
leadership. That comes later when you have experienced poor leadership or
lets say, when you have the maturity to recognize what leaders should be,
you find that Chiefs are the standard by which you measure all others.

They had no Academy rings to get scratched up. They butchered the
King's English. They had become educated at the other end of an anchor
chain from Copenhagen to Singapore . They had given their entire lives to
the U.S. Navy. In the progression of the nobility of employment, Chief
Petty Officer heads the list.

So, when we ultimately get our final duty station assignments and we
get to wherever the big Chief of Naval Operations in the sky assigns us, if
we are lucky, Marines will be guarding the streets, but there will be an
old Chief in an oil-stained hat and a cigar stub clenched in his teeth
standing at the brow to assign us our bunks and tell us where to stow our
gear... and we will all be young again, and the damn coffee will float a
rock.

Life fixes it so that by the time a stupid kid grows old enough and
smart enough to recognize who he should have thanked along
the way, he no longer can. If I could, I would thank my old Chiefs. If
you only knew what you succeeded in pounding in this thick skull, you would
be amazed. So, thanks you old casehardened unsalvageable son-of-a-bitches.

Save me a rack in the berthing compartment."

[gedOSCret (Gene)]

A little humor to lighten up your day!
Only an "Old School Chief" can think this fast!!!

A police officer pulls a Navy Chief over for speeding and has the following exchange:

Officer: May I see your driver's license?
Navy Chief Petty Officer: I don't have one. It was suspended when I got my 5th DUI.

Officer: May I see the registration for this vehicle?
Navy Chief: It's not my car. I stole it.

Officer: The car is stolen?
Navy Chief: That's right. But come to think of it, I think I saw the registration in the glove box when I was putting my gun in there.

Officer: There's a gun in the glove box?
Navy Chief: Yes sir. That's where I put it after I shot and killed the woman who owns this car and stuffed her in the trunk.

Officer: There's a BODY in the TRUNK?!
Navy Chief: Yes, sir.

Hearing this, the officer immediately called his captain.
The car was quickly surrounded by police, and the captain approached the driver to handle the tense situation:

Captain: Sir, can I see your license?
Navy Chief: Sure. Here it is. It was valid.

Captain: Whose car is this?
Navy Chief: It's mine, officer. Here's the registration.
The driver owned the car.

Captain: Could you slowly open your glove box so I can see if there's a gun in it?
Navy Chief: Yes, sir, but there's no gun in it.
Sure enough, there was nothing in the glove box.

Captain: Would you mind opening your trunk? I was told you said there's a body in it.
Navy Chief: No problem.
Trunk is opened; no body.

Captain: I don't understand it.
The officer who stopped you said you told him you didn't have a license, stole the car, had a gun in the glove box, and that there was a dead body in the trunk.

Navy Chief: Yeah, and I'll bet the liar said that I was speeding, too.