Recollections of a Whitehat
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 bastards who had done it all and had been forged into men who had been time tested over many years, and who had more time in the chow line 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 kids 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 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 December 7th tea party they gave us in 1941. In those days, ‘insensitivity’ was not a word in a sailor’s lexicon. They remembered lost shipmates 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 decks wrapping ourselves around cups of coffee and listening to their stories. They were lighthearted stories about warm beer shared with their running-mates in corrugated metal sheds at resupply depots, where the only furniture were a few packing crates and a couple of Coleman lamps. There were stories about standing in line at a Honolulu cathouse or spending three hours soaking in a tub in Freemantle, smoking cigars and getting loaded with cheap whiskey. If we asked what combat was like during the war, they got real quiet and said something like, “Oh, hell, it weren’t nothing.” It was our history, and we dreamed of being just like them because they were our heroes. When they accepted us as their shipmate, it was the highest honor we would ever receive in our lives. 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 and beached in the 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. And they trained the Junior Officers, too. At least enough to keep them out of hack. 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-racking 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 young, sea lawyer jerks come and go for so many years, they could read them like a book. “Son, I know what you are thinking. Just a few words of advice. DON’T. It won’t be worth it.” “Aye, aye, Chief.”
Chiefs aren’t the kind of guys you thank. Appreciation of who they were and what they did 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 when you have the maturity to recognize what leaders should be. When that happens, you find that Chiefs are the standard by which you measure all others. They had no Naval 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 United States Navy. In the progression of the nobility of employment, CPO heads the list.
So, when we ultimately get our final duty station assignments and we get to wherever the big BUPERS in the sky assigns us, if we are lucky, Marines will be guarding the streets. I don’t know about that Marine propaganda bullshit, 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 is 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 sons-of-bitches. Save me a rack in the berthing compartment.
Written by: Many anonymous sailors over many years.
Thanks, Steamer, Fluffy, Hank, Spiker, Boats, Boats, ABoats, AZ, and Ernie.