No one is picking up a chick here.

MC2 Tucker M. Yates / Navy

This is a repost of a comment I left on the NavyTimes Scoopdeck Blog article about the shift in Navy Culture:
This is something that always really bothered me. For my first few years in I was stuck living on the ship which was a real drag at the time. It did force me to involve myself with all those in my shop and socialize much more with people on the ship who I normally wouldn't have spent much off time with. I was up in Bremerton, one of the few bases with an actual bar on it. We ended up many times going out and getting a bite to eat and hanging out there when there just wasn't anything else to. Sure there was a "liberty center" but to be honest if you were in Deck and it was known you hung out there, everyone had the gumption to know you really didn't have much of a life and we're seen as an outcast.

Then I got stationed in San Diego and that base is the poster-child for this article. The base club was regulated to lunch hours and was closed weekend nights. We also all lived in barracks and the camaraderie I was forming on my last ship never was fostered. It wasn't until deployment when people really started to come together and made those "shipmates for life" kind of friends.

All in all, the Navy is still tough enough to shun those who spend all their time in these "Liberty Centers". My skin would crawl everytime I walked over to the one on 32nd street to meet up with people. Getting caught in those places with your uniform is just telling the world "I have no life, and don't care".

Another angle is the rise in off base incidents. A lot of the junior sailors would run down to TJ to drink or end up in passed out on some gaslamp sidewalk. Having a base club for those living on base would give single sailors a place to unwind that the navy could monitor. Closing down on base watering holes allows Big Navy to wash their hands of the whole debate and punish sailors for screwing up out on town. CO's of ship do things like Beer on the Pier during deployments to let people unwind in a controlled environment and it works great every time. You'd think that that logic would follow to the home port, but I guess not.