Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
What can make you wash out of BT? If you really 'give it your all', don't screw up (and break rules, etc.) and persevere, are there still a lot of things that can send you home?
As for the E-3, I'm an Eagle Scout which I'm told qualifies me for E-3 (once out of BT, obviously. Everyone is a new recruit there!)
1. Injury
2. mental/emotional problems-some people can't handle the stress and snap.
3. Something comes up on a background check that wasn't found during enlisting.
4. positive drug test at BT
5. family tragedy-my ex-wife left the Navy right after bootcamp because her father was dying and she was the only living relative who could be with him.
6. sleep walking or other sleep disorder-we had a guy we could not wake up except to put him in a shower. Another fell asleep the instant he sat for a few minutes. you don't want to sleep walk on a ship.
7. phobia-some people don't know that they have a phobia until it happens. One guy didn't know he was claustraphobic until he climbed into the steam drum. He panicked and broke his arm before knocking himself out. He was removed from the ship for discharge.
8. unable to pass fitness test
Those are just the ones I've come across.
Don't join up to be near a woman. Join for yourself but not for someone else. You can begin study for a degree while on a ship but the ease of doing so depends on your job rating. If you work in the engineroom or fireroom, don't even bother trying. Other job ratings have better working hours and are much easier to do so. If you're meant to be together then it'll happen that you'll get married and you can get a job where she's stationed. If it's not meant to be then it won't happen.
There is no right or wrong reasons for joining the Navy.
1. A 4-year enlistment gets you a short A school and you hit the fleet as an E3. Whereas a 6-year enlistment gets you an A school and a C school and you hit the fleet as an E4. Usually rates with C schools have better SRBs and better advancement.
E3s in the Navy are the seaman gang. They tend to do the worst jobs. They will rotate cranking [being a helper in the messdecks, cleaning and serving food], they will also rotate to working parties for chipping paint and applying paint. While they are waiting for advancement they will rotate through these grunt jobs each year. Only to be in their division doing their actual job on the rare occasion.
Folks who go into the Navy with no C school, tend to spend the bulk of their time in the Navy as seamen, and at the end of their enlistment, tend to hate the Navy.
The only chance of going into the Navy and having a positive experience is to sign-up for a longer contract, get a C school and E4. By the time your contract ends you are either an E5 or an E6.
2. 'Co-Location': your career path is totally individual and unique. If you get delayed in school, anything happens to change the billets then when you do come up for orders there will be an entirely different set of orders for you to choose from. It is very unusual for 'co-location' to work out well.
Even if you get the same homeport on different hulls, you will have different deployment schedules. And likely rotating shift-work schedules when your two different hulls are in-port. Meaning that you might only get a glimpse of the other person once every few months.
If you want to be with a US servicemember then marry that person. By getting married, you will always be at their duty station. You will be setting up their home, and everytime they get off from work they will be coming home to you.
As a military dependent you are still able to work, to own a business, to pursue a career.
There is no right or wrong reasons for joining the Navy.
1. A 4-year enlistment gets you a short A school and you hit the fleet as an E3. Whereas a 6-year enlistment gets you an A school and a C school and you hit the fleet as an E4. Usually rates with C schools have better SRBs and better advancement.
E3s in the Navy are the seaman gang. They tend to do the worst jobs. They will rotate cranking [being a helper in the messdecks, cleaning and serving food], they will also rotate to working parties for chipping paint and applying paint. While they are waiting for advancement they will rotate through these grunt jobs each year. Only to be in their division doing their actual job on the rare occasion.
Folks who go into the Navy with no C school, tend to spend the bulk of their time in the Navy as seamen, and at the end of their enlistment, tend to hate the Navy.
The only chance of going into the Navy and having a positive experience is to sign-up for a longer contract, get a C school and E4. By the time your contract ends you are either an E5 or an E6.
2. 'Co-Location': your career path is totally individual and unique. If you get delayed in school, anything happens to change the billets then when you do come up for orders there will be an entirely different set of orders for you to choose from. It is very unusual for 'co-location' to work out well.
Even if you get the same homeport on different hulls, you will have different deployment schedules. And likely rotating shift-work schedules when your two different hulls are in-port. Meaning that you might only get a glimpse of the other person once every few months.
If you want to be with a US servicemember then marry that person. By getting married, you will always be at their duty station. You will be setting up their home, and everytime they get off from work they will be coming home to you.
As a military dependent you are still able to work, to own a business, to pursue a career.
Good luck
ET1(SS) G. Young
USN retired
Good advice, but I question the wisdom of a 6 year enlistment to start off with.
6 years is way too long ( IMHO) to commit yourself to a binding contract to a place of employment that you haven't even worked your 1st day at.
What if after the 1st year you decide ( as many servicemen do ) that the military is not in your long range plans ?
Many people give advice based on their experience ( stayed in 20+ years)
Many servicemen serve one hitch and get out.
I was drafted ,served 2 years, and had a great experience, ( I was lucky as I never pulled 1 day of mess cooking or sxxt detail)
However, I could never imagine having a 6 year obligation to start with.
The "6 year" obligation for Navy is what it takes to get your schools lined up right for the tech jobs.
Actually all of them are similar in that regard. If they're going to give you a complex skill, they're going to hold you a while.
When I was a recruiter, kids would get 3 years infantry, but if they qualified for and got intel, it was normally double that.
FWIW The best students I had teaching at a DOD school were Navy seamen and firemen who went to basic then to the fleet and USCG kids or Army, USAF, USMC who were reclassing. Why? They knew what it means to be a "grunt" first, before getting A-School/AIT. They knew the value of the training. The "contract" kids who came to school right out of basic lacked maturity and world-view of a kid who had been in the fleet or field.
These days, more jobs in the military are closing for "off the street" and recruiting instead from within the first term enlisted. I expect that trend to continue, and I'm all for it. Back in the day, the only jobs that did that were EOD and the various elite units, (PJs, EOD, SF, SEAL, Etc.)
Navy has some choice assignments, and I'd want to be single for every dang one of them if I were a young man just starting out.
I went for 6 going for the nuclear MM program. I made it through the first school and that gave me the MM3. Like most other students, I couldn't get through Nuke Power school. Not many could take that kind of stress of all study to be performed in class after class hours and mandatory 25 to 30 hours a week study after class and the fast pace of nuclear physics on top of that. I did avoid mess cranking until my second ship which was a flag ship and so was so top heavy that they had to change the rules so that E-4s also had to crank due to a shortage of E-3 and below. That gave me the opportunity to find out what wine that cost over $100 a bottle taste like since I had to work during one of the Admiral's diplomatic parties (USS LaSalle AGF-3 Gaeta, Italy now decom and scrapped). I left as an E-5 Machinist Mate which wasn't easy since it was about the time they combined boiler techs with MMs
Quote:
Originally Posted by marmac
Good advice, but I question the wisdom of a 6 year enlistment to start off with.
6 years is way too long ( IMHO) to commit yourself to a binding contract to a place of employment that you haven't even worked your 1st day at.
What if after the 1st year you decide ( as many servicemen do ) that the military is not in your long range plans ?
Many people give advice based on their experience ( stayed in 20+ years)
Many servicemen serve one hitch and get out.
I was drafted ,served 2 years, and had a great experience, ( I was lucky as I never pulled 1 day of mess cooking or sxxt detail)
However, I could never imagine having a 6 year obligation to start with.
I highly recommend the Sixth Fleet Flag Ship out of Gaeta, Italy. If you're not on the Admiral's staff, you have to deal with some of the Admiral's garbage but all the choice ports and the opportunity to live in Gaeta, Italy makes it all worth while. We engineers hated waiting for the brow to be laid. We had to hump the potable water hoses over the brow. What made the job bad for us was watching even the lowest ranking enlisted in the Admiral's staff in civies ready to go on liberty even before we can connect the potable water line. Ship's crew had to wait for several hours after the Admiral's staff had already left. Gaeta is a great place to be stationed. While on that ship I had the opportunity to see Gibralter, Palma, Barcelona, Monte Carlo, Malta, Venice, the pyramids of Egypt, Jerusalem, and many other places. Just on that ship alone we went to 15 countries, territories, and principalities.
Quote:
Originally Posted by caution
The "6 year" obligation for Navy is what it takes to get your schools lined up right for the tech jobs.
Actually all of them are similar in that regard. If they're going to give you a complex skill, they're going to hold you a while.
When I was a recruiter, kids would get 3 years infantry, but if they qualified for and got intel, it was normally double that.
FWIW The best students I had teaching at a DOD school were Navy seamen and firemen who went to basic then to the fleet and USCG kids or Army, USAF, USMC who were reclassing. Why? They knew what it means to be a "grunt" first, before getting A-School/AIT. They knew the value of the training. The "contract" kids who came to school right out of basic lacked maturity and world-view of a kid who had been in the fleet or field.
These days, more jobs in the military are closing for "off the street" and recruiting instead from within the first term enlisted. I expect that trend to continue, and I'm all for it. Back in the day, the only jobs that did that were EOD and the various elite units, (PJs, EOD, SF, SEAL, Etc.)
Navy has some choice assignments, and I'd want to be single for every dang one of them if I were a young man just starting out.
CRYPTOLOGIC COMMUNITY. DUE TO THE UNIQUE NATURE AND SPECIFIC SKILL
SETS REQUIRED BY SAILORS IN THE VARIOUS CT COMMUNITIES, CAREER PATHS
ARE DEFINED BY INCONUS/OUTCONUS VICE SEA SHORE FLOW. SAILORS CAN
EXPECT TO SERVE ON VARIOUS TOURS OUTSIDE THE CONTINENTAL UNITED STATES
(OUTCONUS) AND/OR ON SEA DUTY (TYPES 2, 3, 4, AND 6) DURING THEIR
CAREER. DUE TO THE UNIQUE CHARACTERISTICS OF THE CRYPTOLOGIC COMMUNITY,
SAILORS IN THE CT COMMUNITIES ARE ENCOURAGED TO CONTACT THEIR DETAILERS
FOR ADDITIONAL CAREER PATH INFORMATION.
INCONUS/OUTCONUS ROTATION FOR SPECIFIC CT RATINGS ARE LISTED BELOW AND
ARE DEPENDENT UPON BILLET AVAILABILITY AND EMERGING NEEDS OF THE
NAVY:
Location: Where laws can be ignored due to political correctness
1,111 posts, read 1,854,248 times
Reputation: 270
I Want To Join the US Navy, I Have Questions
but I have some questions:
1) Is it true that all Navy members will be required to serve 8 years and not anything less that a Navy recruiter tells you?
2) After joining will I be required to serve as a Navy recruiter?
3) Will they offer me financial aid for college?
4) I want to spend most of my time on a vessel and not be deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan. What Navy careers should I choose if I pass boot camp and the background tests?
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
I Want To Join the US Navy, I Have Questions
