This week we
have seen a few more of our new sisters and brethren pinned with the honorable
fouled anchors that entitles them to the rights and responsibilities of the
Navy Chief Petty Officer. I congratulate you and I salute you on your test,
selection and induction into this great fraternity. Not sure who the author is,
but here’s an ode to the Chief written by an old sailor from many years ago… I
hope you enjoy, as I say again congratulations to the newly selected Chiefs in
our Chief’s Mess!!!
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.
Qualified CPOs. They were crusty 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 that was 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 seagoing
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 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 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 re-supply 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 tossing' 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 stoved-up old bastards' home, I'll still be able to kick your
worthless ass from here to fifty feet past the screwguards 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 weren'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 hotsacking seamen and matured
like good whiskey in steel hulls over many years. Nothing a nineteen year-old
jaybird 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 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 let's 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
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, "U.S. Navy CPO" heads the
list.
So, when we
ultimately get our final duty station assignments and we get to wherever the
big CNO in the sky assigns us, if we are lucky, Marines will be guarding the
streets. Well, I don't know about that Marine propaganda bullshit, but there
will be an old Chief in a 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 sons’-a-bitches. Save me a rack in that
berthing up in heaven!!!
-Author
Unknown-
