.Navy Boot Camp
The Navy of the early 1960s… my Navy… was essentially my father’s WWII Navy. The ships, customs, uniforms, and regulations were pretty much the same. However, things certainly have changed, and from what I see and read now, the Navy of 2023AD is not the WWII Navy. Evidently, within the new Navy, there are many myths about the old days, one of which I heard being advanced by a young New-Age Sailor in a television program about serving abroad on an aircraft carrier; the young sailor said, “During the 40s, 50s, and 60s, they would beat the hell outta guys in Boot Camp.” That is not exactly true.
In the old days, Boot Camp was the worst, but I never witnessed anyone getting beaten.
Main Gate San Diego Naval Training Center
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Many young sailors who served aboard the USS Tracer did their boot camp training at either the Recruit Training Center in San Diego, CA, or the Recruit Training Center in Great Lakes, IL. The author did his Basic Training at the San Diego Naval Training Center in Southern California. Upon arriving in Boot Camp, almost the first words naive young men heard when arriving at San Diego in the early ’60s was a Petty Officer cursing at them. For twelve weeks, you hardly heard a kind word. Actual physical beatings didn’t occur; at least around witnesses, they didn’t occur. But there was mental abuse every day. The object seemed to be to keep you afraid, very afraid. Remember, this was during the days when the draft was still in effect; so, when I joined the Navy after getting out of high school, I realized I would be drafted sometime soon, and being drafted meant going into the Army for at least two years, or, one could choose to go into the Navy for four years. My father had served in WWII aboard a heavy cruiser; his ship had participated in every major battle in the Pacific between 1943AD and 1944AD. My mother always said, “At least in the Navy, you get three hot meals a day, and you aren’t living in a hole in the mud.” I chose to join the Navy.
And so, I found myself with fifty other young men embedded within a Recruit Company, one of twenty or so at the SDRTC, and was confronted with my first adult deity-like figure (other than my father), a Petty Officer First Class named Miller. Petty Officer First-Class Miller was our Company Commander. Miller was a Gunner’s Mate and personified what a real sailor should look and act like. He was tough, but everyone believed he was fair (perhaps we were all suffering from a bit of Stockholm Syndrome?) However, Gunner Miller had an Assistant Company Commander, a Boatswain’s Mate First-Class whom I shall refer to as Bosun Bumlechook, who (in my opinion) probably was a sadist.
My Navy career begins.
Most notable among my memories of Navy Boot Camp is 4013!!! Company 4013 was the scrounge company. For twelve weeks, every time you screwed up, you heard about 4013. You saw them sitting alone at a separate table at mealtimes while being screamed at by petty officers. 4013 … the unclean members of the Navy who had one foot on a banana peel and the other on a general discharge. In those days, we believed that if we were discharged from the Navy with anything other than an honorable discharge, we were doomed to a life where we would be unable to get a job, and people would look at us like we had some terrible disease, which is exactly how we looked at the members of 4013. For the entire twelve weeks of Boot Camp, the threat of the Scrounge Company was held over you like the sword of Demosthenes.
During my entire time in Boot Camp, I never actually saw Assistant Company Commander Bosun Bumblechook beat anyone up, but he did take more than one young boot off into a closed-off room, and what happened there, no one ever found out. I remember asking a guy who had screwed up and had been taken into a closed room by Bosun Bumblechook what happened? The guy looked at me, all the color draining from his face, then somewhat agitated; insisted nervously, while looking about, that nothing had happened. Needless to say… I didn’t believe him, conjuring up images of rubber hoses in the back of my mind.
So, what were typical punishments when you screwed something up?
Well, Say, for example, you failed a barrack’s inspection. If that happened, Miller enjoyed punishing the entire Company for one man’s mistakes. Therefore the Company might be taken out on the parade ground and required to run laps around the grounds with their Springfield rifles above their heads; however, not just above their heads, but with the Springfield resting upon their heads. Every time you ran forward, the rifle would kind of bounce up and down and crack you on top of the head. This fun activity would continue for around an hour. Another typical punishment would be to do push-ups until your arms ached, and anyone not keeping up went off with Bosun Bumblechook for his special kind of exercise punishment. Or one of my personal favorites… Everyone would be lined up by squads and ordered to hold their rifle out in front of them. As time passed, your arms got tired, and the rifle would slip down a bit. You would grunt, sweat, and lean backward, using all your strength to push that rifle up to shoulder height while Miller and Bumblechook milled about, yelling foul curses in your ear.
Speaking of fond memories … We had a Division Officer; let’s call him LT JG Sweedlepipe. The memory of whom I despised for a decade. What a pompous little Marionette. I have always suspected he was Petty Officer Bumblechook’s illegitimate stepson. One of the worst punishments I think I remember was witnessing a “Boot” who reportedly cursed at a petty officer. His punishment was to be upfront of the morning muster for breakfast. Every morning every Company in the Division would march up in order, in front of the podium in front of the Division Headquarters’ building, and the recruit chief petty officer of each Company would request permission from the petty officer in charge of his Company to go to morning chow. Perhaps ten companies would be lined up, and the procedure would take some time. This particular morning the recruit being punished stood in front of all the assembled companies with his hat turned inside out, and each time a company would march up and ask permission to go to chow. The recruit in question was required to dip a large brush in a pail of soapy water, brush his mouth briskly with the soapy brush and shout, “I AM A FILTHY MOUTHED RECRUIT!”.
PS: I believe this is a truthful memory; however, I’m talking about things that happened sixty years ago, but, in any case, what I described is typical of the punishments we endured.
Another punishment I witnessed was… We had a chubby guy in our Company who failed personnel inspection (which usually meant you had a little brown spot on the inside of your undershirt). Lt. Sweedlepipe loved to find little brown spots on the inside of undershirts; it seemed to be his thing. The chubby guy who failed inspection was forced to stand naked in the center of the barracks in a large metal trashcan filled with soap and water in which all his undershorts and shirts had been dumped. The chubby boot had to bend over in the trashcan and wash his whites with a scrub brush, and adding to this poor guy’s humiliation was another recruit named Pitts. You see, our Company was blessed with a Recruit Petty Officer named Pitts, a frog-faced (in my opinion) thug from Steubenville, Ohio. Pitts would walk up occasionally, call the guy a foul name, and shout in his ear for him to hurry up. The poor guy was humiliated this way for a couple of hours.
In addition to all that, every week, after marching everywhere; doing push-ups and setups practically every day; and struggling with climbing ropes and such; we were required to take a classroom test. The punishment for failing the test was you would be set back one week and required to repeat that week’s training all over again. If you were in week seven of boot camp, you had to go back to a Company just entering week seven and do it all over again, then pass the test. However, the worst thing was … Before you got to another Company, you would go to 4013 and wait for reassignment. You would go into the Company with the SCROUNGES!
However … all good things come to an end,
And after twelve weeks, I was out of Boot Camp and back home for two weeks before going on to my first Naval assignment (for me, it was an Ordinance Depot in Nevada). And for the next three years, I did everything in my power to be the least military person I could be and still follow the rules. And that’s one of my fondest memories of the 1960s Navy; for the first twelve weeks, you were forced to be all military all the time, and then for the four years after that, you attempted every day to be as non-military as you could while still coloring between the lines.
And this was the enlisted man’s Navy of the 1960s.
A Tale of Two Photos:
Above is a photo (on the left, obviously posed) that appeared in Navy publications extolling the virtues of the Navy of the 1960s. All the bright young recruits arriving in San Diego and getting such a warm welcome. The bus in the photo is similar to the bus that ferried my group from the Greyhound Bus terminal in downtown San Diego to the Training Center. The author of this website arrived at the Recruit Training Center along with something like twenty-five other young guys from Southern California who had just taken the oath. However, the sailor in whites looking at the recruit’s papers was, in my case, a squat pot-bellied third-class petty officer with an unhealthy-looking reddish complexion, probably from years of alcohol consumption, and whose favorite words were Stupid-@$%# and “Dumb-B@&%$*. From the moment we got off that bus and for the next twelve weeks, no one said a kind word to any of us.
The other picture (on the right) is a posed photo of recruits at the firing range. Observe the petty officer with the dark glasses on. Notice how concerned he is with the recruits getting it right? Well, the truth is, when my Company went to the firing range—on a day in 1961—like every other day during boot camp, our Company was pushed around, intimidated, and yelled at. A petty officer went down the line, cursing—Well, like a drunken sailor—as we took up positions on the firing line. He held a large wad of cotton in his hand and dared any *&@##$@ Little Girls who needed to protect their ears from the gun blasts to take some. I was frightened and didn’t; I had just turned eighteen! I still have a hearing loss that occurred that day on the firing range because, like almost everyone else, I didn’t want to look weak by taking a couple of wads of cotton—from the bully’s hand—and putting them in my ears. My hearing has gotten worse in my older years.
Great Lakes:
The photo above (on the right)shows an aerial view of the Great Lakes Naval Training Center in the 1950s. Great Lakes has been sending young sailors to the fleet for around one hundred years. During the 1960s, there were two training centers churning out recruits, but San Diego is now in mothballs, and only the Great Lakes Center remains in operation. Enjoy!
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