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Reply With QuoteCertainly not. This could end up as a pissing contest.
Almost like the "time in" thread, except this is where to share your finishing rank!
Haven't gotten the time to serve yet so don't have a rank.
Post on!
I stand with Israel.
Certainly not. This could end up as a pissing contest.
Semper in excretum. Solum profunda variat.
glyn,
you're just jealous you never achieved MY rank- i am generalissimo grand marshall chief of all armies for life and commander of the realm of Astralistan.Certainly not. This could end up as a pissing contest.
or in department of defense parlance, i am O-100.
The human mind cannot grasp the causes of phenomena in the aggregate. But the need to find these causes is inherent in mans soul. And the human intellect, without investigating the multiplicity and complexity of the conditions of phenomena, any one of which taken separately may seem to be the cause, snatches at the first, the most intelligible approximation to a cause, and says: This is the cause!"
-Leo Tolstoy
War and Peace
I'm a (trainee) civilian. Still have an amount of khaki blood in my system, but that is slowly diminishing.
I must be Z-99,999,999.
Semper in excretum. Solum profunda variat.
Do you mean active or reserve rank? For instance, an acquaintance of mine was a 1st lieutenant. Prior to being transferred to the Individual Ready Reserve, received a promotion to Captain. When asked about his rank he says, "I was a Captain", usually after a pause he adds, "for three days!". Of course he puts "Captain" on his resume.
Last edited by sappersgt; 01 Dec 07, at 19:28.
Reddite igitur quae sunt Caesaris Caesari et quae sunt Dei Deo
(Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's and unto God the things which are God's)
When I finished up my National Guard and Army Reserves 7 years, I was only an E-5 and was allowed to get stinking drunk in the NCO club. But when I retired from the Department of Defense (US Navy) I had the equivilant rank of an O-4 Lieutenant Commander which often required me to eat in the Officer's Wardroom when I preferred the Chief's Mess or even the enlisted's chow line.
Around home I'm only a buck private. If that.
Able to leap tall tales in a single groan.
Junior Lieutenant
"We Shall Never Surrender" Winston Churchill
Major but think I currently hold the highest rank I have ever held...Scoutmaster!!!
And Rusty, we didn't have separate mess facilities in the Army, but I remember the NCO club was ALWAYS better than the O Club...except at FT Knox. The Fiddler's Green; now THAT was a great O Club!!!
Remember that it is the Actions and not the Commission that make the Officer and that there is More expected from him than the title. GEORGE WASHINGTON
Captain
Ah yes. I remember well that all ranks ate in the same mess hall but did have separate base clubs. Then came payday with the senior officer's first and the lowest EM of an 800 man battalion last in line.Originally Posted by Albany Rifles
The separate messes I was referring to, of course, was in the Navy. I hated the wardroom mess on the USS White Sands (ARD 20) where the C. O. (a Lt. Cdr) insisted that chicken be eaten with a fork and knife. He certainly wasn't from a patrician background as I was.
Able to leap tall tales in a single groan.
Gee, I don't know what unit you were in but I never saw this happen in any unit I was in.
In fact, we served as pay officer. And all officers by late 1970s had check to bank for pay option.
And my men always ate first...whether at the mess hall or out of a Mermite can in the field....nothing like the last of the Class B Chili Mac!
Remember that it is the Actions and not the Commission that make the Officer and that there is More expected from him than the title. GEORGE WASHINGTON
Well, I just checked your public profile and the year you were born. I enlisted in 1955 (before you were born) so it is safe to assume that military protocol in mess halls and in the pay line changed quite a bit since then.
Whether it was for better or for worse is a debate I do not want to get in to as it really makes no difference to me any more.
Able to leap tall tales in a single groan.
Gee, its been awhile since I was addressed, even metaphorically, as "Sonny"!!!
Trust me when I say we tried to learn a few things and fix them best we could!
Remember that it is the Actions and not the Commission that make the Officer and that there is More expected from him than the title. GEORGE WASHINGTON
Different services, different customs. I deployed on a WESTPAC in the mid-90's aboard the USS Tarawa. One of the ports that we stopped at was Phuket, Thailand (hmmmm....). Phuket had no pier capable of handling the Tarawa, so they dropped anchor out in the harbor and small boats lifted everyone to shore.
The first thing that happened was the PHIBRON commodore departed with his staff. Two lines were formed after that, one for Sailors and one for Marines. The Navy formed their line with the senior-most people first, i.e., their officers departed the boat first. The most junior Marine lined up first in the other line. As a young Lieutenant of Marines, I was standing pretty far back in the line, next to a bunch of Navy E-3's. Some of the comments I overheard were illuminating.
"Eagle of the Sea" eh? I was the structural project leader in the Design Division of LBNSY in charge of all structural repairs and modifications we did to her and her two sister ships (Belleau Wood and Peleliu) homeported there.
We probably ran into each other a couple of times.
Maybe not. I spent a lot of time crawling around your innerbottoms finding spots where Ingalls forgot to weld up the shell plating. Also Ingalls used the wrong kind of paint for your fuel tanks and I had to lay out access holes for the sandblasters and painters.
Also added spillage coamings and sump tanks around the waste conversion units. Never forget the inboard unit up forward that had the valves removed for repair but the toilets were not tagged out. Those brown stains on the overhead were --- interesting.
Then added coamings around the boilers because the distilling plants often cycled too much and filled up the engine room bottom flooding the boilers.
Then there were the huge counterflooding poppet valves where Ingalls welded the seachest flanges wrong and when trying to tighten the bolts on the cast valve body, the valve flange would break.
Then there were all those temporary accesses I had to design to rip out the computer consoles for the engines and install a whole new set of consoles that didn't act like HAL in 2001 Spacy Odyssy.
Can't forget the repairs for all the structural stanchions that broke loose during your Grade A shock test. Interesting to be able to look down through the deck to the compartment below.
Nor will I forget armor plating your ammo magazines. Learned a few lessons there that helped me economize on the armor I designed for the Iowas.
Also adding a one-inch thick doubler plate under your docking skeg because Ingalls designed the bottom too thin. What a joy it was trying to line up the ship in drydock directly over the plate on a windy day.
Only fun time was driving my Chrsler LeBaron aboard Tarawa in San Diego with my family and friends and riding the ship back up to Long Beach. Bellied out the Chrysler at the top of the ramp. My daughter thought that was fun, but I didn't like the sound of scraping metal. Should have taken my 4X4 truck.
Fun ships.
Able to leap tall tales in a single groan.
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