TINS: Back in the days when real fighter pilots flew F-8’s, and their preferred weapon was the cannon, there was an airwing commander who fancied himself quite the critic of airmanship. While in overhead holding he espied a Crusader jock whose pattern work was not quite the thing.
As the F-8 pilot turned his go-fast for to land, CAG spoke up on Tower Freq: “Crusader off the 180, you were too wide abeam.”
To which our intrepid airman replied, in the best traditions of the service: “Bite my a**.”
In response to which the CAG replied, “I fully intend to.”
A short but exciting conversation ensued on the flight deck, in consequence of which the saucy jock was flown off the line, back to the P.I. for to cool his heels until such time as he could remember his manners.
The next day an Alpha Strike to a heavily defended target was briefed to the assembled throng. A daylight strike it was, and the chart showed a dense thicket of pins representing Triple-A tubes and SAM sites. The Intel Guy finished his pitch to a suddenly introspective strike package with the words, “It’s going to be hot work today. Sucks to be you. Any comments or questions?”
An F-8 pilot spoke up, asking, “Is there still time to tell CAG to bite our a**es?”
That’s what it took to get bounced off the line, during the Vietnam War. These days?
I would love to be able to fly the F18 and all the wonder it brings. I am so glad I got to fly the A4 and all the joys of the Navy in that era. I feel sorry for the great sticks of todays Navy for all the crap they have to tolerate. Fellows, you have no idea of what you missed.
LOL SSG Jeff, probably so–though Lex sort of bridges the divide. After all, he DID grow up to be one of the “big kids” and part of the Borg collective–a company man, no less–yet seems to have remained flexibly open to the JO point of view and to their occasional blandishments from the other side of the street. Some would say his approach provides the ideal Goldilocks perspective
(or if we want to get academic about it, the Aristotelian “Golden Mean”) that any “smooth operator” has to have to successfully navigate the political waters of today’s military–but then that’s ALWAYS been the case–just tricker today. How does that song go? “Ain’t no social breakdown–just another ‘tricky day’ for you….”
Couple of thoughts from my Glenlivet addled mind:
1. The problem ain’t “women in the service.” The problem is men+women in the service. Take out either side and the remainder does it’s job much better.
2. I don’t “know” Lex, but I’ll bet, Virg, that he wasn’t part of the problem. There are (a few) Captains and even Admirals that are still part of the good guy team. ‘Hook was a failure of leadership, but not all our leaders failed (See “Arthur, Stan” or “Dunleavy, Richard”) even if they did pay the price.
3. Virg said: “Instead, what we will get is a bunch of very competent, button-down types who keep their shoes shined and see priorities in keeping the grass from growing in the sidewalk cracks at all costs, (all very well up to a point) but are not exactly the first to raise their hands.”
We have that already – we call it the Air Force.
Nose,
Hot Tub rings a bell but can’t put a face to the name. A lot of guys (CVW-7 was still all male but the ship wasn’t and we paid for it) passing through CVIC, after a while, they tend to fade, unless made memorable by events, CONAN and me dipping in CVIC against the rules, TORCH punching through the canopy after landing and leaving his poor RIO going WTFO?, POSTAL for earning his callsign, KID, well, because he was KID…and so on.
This thread really makes me yearn for a gathering over beer and rehashing of Follies stories. Most unfortunately can’t be told here, can’t make them unatributable without the CS, but what a great night it would be.
To our Ground Services brothers above, XBrad, a lot of foolishness goes on in the infantry units, enlisted mess, I was there got it, it was funny. The MAIN difference at follies is that it is AIMED at the seniors who are almost always attending. They know to bring the thick skin. Or they don’t show up, and some don’t.
In this case, maybe, maybe the guys crossed a line. But, it’s a line I’ve seen crossed dozens of times, not by a RCH, but by a mile, in ways way more insiduous than a video of someone eating with a funny overtrack. The consequences and after actions however don’t match the offense, at least IMHO.
So when are we getting together for a beer, first rounds on me.
Claudio, I was an NCO, so a chance to snark on the heavies was pretty damn rare. The LTC and the CSM were pretty much off limits to me.
But in my time in line units, I’ve tackles JOs, struck them with fists, hit one with a hammer, and urinated on one particularly obnoxious 2LT, all without fear of incurring any UCMJ action.
I’ll grant you that Follies are somewhat unique, but the habit of skewering our seniors is by no means solely a Navy trait.
XBradTC
never implied that skewering seniors is a Navy trait. I know pretty much all services other than the Chair Force is pretty good at it…
What I was aluding to is that for Follies, the “warnings” were a constant, and so was the stretching the boundaries. Both expected, both surpassed.
When you’re slugging through a difficult line period (fly days), really no good ports in sight (Bahrain and Jerbil Alley don’t count), the only thing to look forward to was Foc’sle Follies and the trip home.
And yes, we pushed it far, from skits impersonating O-5s doing the dirty with a female Enlisted flight deck crew (that made the Skipper of the boat walk out) to the Shooters top 10 ways to know you’re “Mas^%$&ting too much on cruise (couple staff/ships company female officers walked out, first follies for them) (after that the shooters got invited to the admins) to much worse that can’t be spelled out.
BUT, I’ve also seen the BATGRU Commander pull out an O4 who was in hack for a “disagreement with a cabbie” , put his arms around him and tell him basically he’ll do okay, the admiral did okay with a similar past. I was on a different boat as enlisted snipe eons ago, when that admiral as a squadron skipper had a “disagreement” with a Snipe Warrant Officer. When said admiral saw my old ships patch on my flight jacket, he nicely asked that I don’t mention it.
So as you can see, Follies, went both ways, at least they used to. and darn they were fun.
and no one got sent home. In all my time, 20 years and 10 days, the only time I remember an officer being sent home, is when one violated the DADT policy in a rather crude way in the late 80s.
Focsle follies, never would have guessed it in a thousand years.
Nose,
catching up, I served with a number of women in the surface fleet although I never went to sea with them on warships. The very first one relieved the ROTC senior instructor at my ROTC unit while I was stashed there during summer term waiting for a slot at SWOS. She was a LCDR and continually outraged that the four of us stashed ENS failed to work hard while serving as Assistant Professors of Naval Instruction even though it was summer term and there was nothing going on. We kept trying to explain that playing doubles at racquetball with the two gunnies qualifed as hazardous duty but she wasn’t having anything to do with that. The ones I dealt with were, for instance, XOs of Destroyer tenders and staff officers and Blithe Spirits they never were. You’d find more understanding or appreciation of humor in a bag of hammers.
Lee, viz my blog. I filled out the application and paid the $50.00 application fee but they turned me down. They said I wasn’t mature enough to have a blog.
XBradTC,
If you were allowed to get away with that in your units – I’d say there existed a significant level of leadership failure at the O-3 level and above. I’ve seen plenty of knothead LTs in my 30 years and one of my roles was to minimize their impact in the unit by either “fixing” them or firing them. However, I would never allow them to be disrespected by an NCO in the manner you described no matter how hosed up they were.
If you are taking a certain amount of pride as a former NCO in your behavior towards certain J.O.s, I don’t think this was a good place to air that. I will speak for myself only, but that significantly diminishes my opinion of you. Not that it really matters I suppose. As our host has mentioned before- there is no rank in here.
geo6
I want to caveat my comment above with and only with if I were understanding you correctly.
…of course, the allegedly offended distaff (no pun intended if she was a DSO) individual will likely resign, sign a mega-bucks book and TV “movie of the week” contract, and live happily ever after. Thus, the Navy will have lost at least two officers–and that doesn’t include those who will tender resignations out of pure disgust over the situations. We’re concerned about aviation attrition (given the large bonuses)? Not likely…
Curtis, I’ll give you the 50 for a re-apply if’n it gets more Blackshoe Tin Can Sailor talk out there…
Curtis,
When you talk about the women with whom you served being humorless are you comparing them to the general population, or to that zany, madcap group of fun-loving, wise-cracking jokesters that we in Aviation admiringly refer to as “The Shoes.”??
Nose
This distasteful (pun intended) “act of leadership” or lack thereof, depending on one’s age/sex/seriousness has been noticed:
http://www.navytimes.com/news/2008/12/navy_squadronvideo_121208w/
More seriousness. I really try not to mention names too much in here unless they are 4star leadership and make (IMO I must admit) egrigious mistakes, particularly sins of omission..
Sea stories name dropping? No way Jose. I live in a glass house.
b2
My take:
There is no such thing as a “clear order” to keep things “clean and decent.” What is clean and decent to one person might be offensive to another, and a video edited to appear “suggestive” definitely falls right in the tricky grey area where it’s hard to put in one box or the other.
It seems like the RADM left the determination what what is “clean” and what goes too far to the squadron CO’s. And then having given them this authority, reneged when he didn’t agree with the decision he empowered them to make.
Hence why the Admiral needs “outside authority” to handle this. This is incident is apparently a failure of his leadership, so he’ll need someone above him to give him the ole foot-in-the-ass.
first they stop keelhauling the new guys…
it’s all downhill from there.
thank you Patty Schroeder.
Geo6,
I’ve addressed your points over at the Flight Deck.
http://www.neptunuslex.com/Wiki/2008/12/13/a-modest-defense-of-the-indefensible/
Nose,
What can I say? How many times on a duty day did you, as CDO, hear the 1MC bong aboard SURFPAC unexpectedly on a Sunday? How many times did you deliberately try to get away with striking “10″ bells on time? How often was a buddy’s hard hat filled with talcum powder while in DSRA? This was standard SWO humor for the guys. With the women SWOs it would have taken a scanning tunneling electron microscope to find even a single humor atom back in the day.
OTOH, we have been witness to several videos here at chez Lex-online, that seem to reflect well on some of our young SWO women officers so it may be getting better out there. They were dressed as snipes now that I think about it and snipes are typically well endowed with a sense of humor. Now that I think about it I wonder if the videos were originally created for focsle follies. I wouldn’t know about them since the closest I ever got to one of those things was doing a Q-Route lead through for a battle group transiting the Red Sea back in 1984. We stayed in the route we’d “swept” but the carrier persisted in staying about a mile to port of the swept channel. It was probably just their way of expressing the opinion that we’d wasted a month or more mollycoddling a bunch of semi-worthless HM-14 types aboard to no good purpose.
Oh, Jaysus: It’s Frank Flippin’ “hair plugs” Pandolfe behind this. He is all things shoe. I am so very, very, sorry TR battle group.
XTC, Roger your last and commented likewise same place. GEO6