After graduating from college, I was commissioned an officer in the US Navy and selected for the submarine service. Before being sent to a boat, we had over a year of training, starting with six months of 60+ hours per week of classroom lectures and mandatory study in nuclear engineering, followed by six months of practical training at a land-based “prototype” reactor. Most people seemed to struggle with one phase or the other and I was no exception (you couldn’t struggle too much with either phase or you got booted out of the program). I found the classroom work challenging, but tractable; much of the coursework covered material I’d seen in college and I could puzzle out most of the rest. Prototype, on the other hand, required huge amounts of memorization, which has never been my strong suit. At the beginning of prototype, we were each handed a thick book with hundreds of pages and probably thousands of signatures that had to be obtained for demonstrating some bit of knowledge or skill, e.g. “draw the wiring diagram for …”, “locate all of …”, “demonstrate how to operate …”, “demonstrate how to recover from …”, on and on and on. Every system in the reactor had to be learned and ultimately we had to demonstrate we could supervise the crew in all normal and emergency conditions; at each step of the way an instructor had to be convinced to sign off on another bit of knowledge.
Four crews operated the reactor in 8 hour rotation, with one crew on leave at any time. Students were all assigned to one particular crew; we were strongly encouraged to stay overtime at the reactor to study, when we’d overlap another crew, but mostly we stayed with our own instructors. I was the only officer trainee on my crew (I think one other officer failed out part way through). There were two civilians I had known since “nuke school” who were going to be permanently based at the prototype and all of the other students were enlisted personnel. All of the instructors were enlisted (save one or two who I didn’t see on a day-to-day basis). The Navy is a pretty stratified organization, with all officers outranking all enlisted personnel, regardless of respective experience. I was never foolish enough to “pull rank” at prototype, mostly because that’s just not how I thought about things, but it became clear to me pretty early that a number of my instructors had a chip on their shoulders about officers. I encountered ribbing and hazing throughout the time I was in the Navy, and stories about ADM Rickover (founder of the nuclear Navy) are notorious, but at prototype it came across as outright hostility. Instructors never had time to do signature interviews and when they did they were brusque and abusive, sending me packing at the slightest error. I concede that I was much better when I had the time to reason my way through how something worked and much less adept at memorizing things that just were they way they were, and there is no question that, in an emergency, there’s no time to reason out the right actions; they must be done from memory and without hesitation or error. Still, it seemed to me that I was being held to a harsher standard than friends on other crews and than my enlisted classmates on my own crew. My signature count fell further and further behind my classmates and, more importantly, behind the quota needed to graduate in six months.
As I fell further behind, I got sent for counseling, first with the officer in charge of my crew and then with the executive officer and then commanding officer of the whole facility. I was not surprised that they were pretty unsympathetic to my concerns about how the instructors were treating me. I needed to work harder (I was already working twelve to sixteen hour days). I had known better than to complain, because that’s just not the Navy way, but at this point I was getting pretty depressed. I had always done well in high school, college, and Navy nuke school, but at prototype I progressively lost confidence in my abilities and it became clearer with time that I wasn’t going to make it. This wasn’t a place you could quit; you either passed on time or you were thrown out and your options elsewhere in the Navy were limited after that (at least we all believed so). I still really wanted to be a submarine officer, but I found myself wondering why I’d put myself through this. I could have gone to flight school (and Top Gun had just come out that year), but that door was now closed and I was miserable.
What could been done differently?
I don’t actually have to speculate here. About five months into things, the officer in charge of my crew came to me and said that one of the other crews had already graduated their officer students. He wanted to know if it was OK if they transferred me to that crew, ostensibly because it was more convenient for the command for some reason.
Was I OK? I was ecstatic. Within a month, I had received as many signatures as in the previous five. Frequently, one of my new instructors would flip through my book and incredulously ask how I could have a signature on some complicated system and not on any of the subcomponents and promptly sign off the entire page. It was still really tough and my new instructors were demanding, but they were fair. I did not graduate on time (which I’d not been aware was even possible), but I was only about a month behind my classmates at the next phase of training and I went on to serve several years in the submarine service.
I don’t really know why the command decided to move me, and I’m not aware that anything was done to change the practices of the other crew, but at least for me, they took action that restored my motivation.