And moving on...

There was quite a display today of ships out and about the USNS Mercy while she is inport Ambon, Indonesia. This is the second to last stop of the Indonesian visit during her Pacific Partnership 10 deployment. The Indonesian president was supposed to arrive for a tour of the ship but that did not happen and he departed Ambon City after a ceremony and a pretty decent display of military power and cooperation during a ship Parade. I'll try to find some pictures but nothing decent is online right now. The only decent picture was this one with the ship in background. Actually it was quite impressive and I'm sure the Indonesian people were glad to have all the tourism. I can say that after digging around there was a ton of mis-information that was put out to the people. I personally saw 3 school girls come to the Pier after tours were secured and tear up because we wouldn't let them on the ship. 

Alas, the tours were only for press and local dignitaries of course. The confusion might have been that the public was able to go to the multiple medical sites to receive important and sometimes life changing health care. Ship tour or operate on my cleft pallet.... I can see where it may have been lost in translation. As far as a marching band, I didn't know this was the 1950's and that's the best Big Navy had to offer. The reality was a pretty kick ass navy band that did everything from playing a small quartet during a dinner show to singing "My Humps" or some other vapid pop stuff that the locals most likely thought was still a #1 hit in the states.

I need to expand my sources beyond the Navy Times

Finally someone nuts up and admits things aren't so good down on the waterfront. I think this is the first time that I've heard the phrase "Run like a business" when someone is talking about the navy and haven't died inside a little bit more.

I went out on liberty the other day with someone dressed very similar to this:

Yes it's quite frightening. Just replace the the sweater vest with a Hawaiian shirt that was tight tucked and you'll get a good idea of what I was going out into the public with. Someone in their mid 20's dressing like an extra from Caddyshack. Well one of the guys out on town called him an "old soul" and I realized I haven't heard that term in a little bit. It was doubly funny because he didn't understand the joke.

Alright, my tangent is over: I like to consider myself an "Old Soul" when it comes to my view of the fleet force. Lots of tin cans floating around. Stick 2 helos on em and load up some ASROCs and you're good to go. I can't really find a fault in this logic, just more cheaper ships. I can't think of a war where the Air Force couldn't launch the cruise missles instead of a Navy Ship. It's all bells and whistles and no guns and steel. It was our MO up until the mid 90's when AEGIS hit the fan. "Smart Ships" blow up just as good as regular ones do and sink even faster with a tiny crew. This is too long a topic, I'll be here all day if I get into it. The article speaks for itself and I think any taxpayer would want to have more of these bad boys around:

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.

Good job PAO

So one of the good things about google news is that its very random and pulls news article from all the major sources so you get an unbiased selection of articles. It also grabs sites that aren't US based, so I end up on Reuters and the London Telegraph etc etc etc. I was browsing around the telegraph and came upon this slide of US and South Korea military exercises. The navy should have taken notes from BP on this one and doctored up this photo. As someone that works in similar work spaces I just shook me head and sighed deeply.

It just looks like some cool multi-screen action of tactical 21 century crap splattered over the wall. Upon further investigation we see a COMPOSE SECRET desktop and a very readable GCCS(I think) screen. Awesome. Thanks goes out to the mulitple layers of failure involving the watchstanders and watch supervisors for letting them take this picture in the first place, the Public Affairs Team who apparently has no qualms with releasing clearly labeled classified items to the public, and the chain of command on the ship for letting all this come together in one glorious are-you-fucking-kindding-me scenario.

Let's leave wikileaks alone and start with looking at some in house issues. Actually, now that I think about it most of the material that wikileaks let out was likely sourced from military personnel. I for one am a fan of releasing damnable evidence like the gun-cam of those trigger happy Apache pilots cutting down those journalists and blowing up a van full of children. Good job chopper-jockeys. I'm glad all you need is a college degree and 20/20 vision to get handed 100 ton flying killing machine and free reign to shoot anyone you fucking feel like. So I hope wikileaks keeps doing what it does as long it's whistle blowing stuff and not outing CIA agents and active operations.

But even if they get shut down we'll still have to deal with some JO pushing out pics of classified work spaces to Reuters.

NARMY

Well navytimes.com is now reporting that the missing service members are sailors. It doesn't really have any statements to back up that claim. I hope they are not right.

It sounds like the two were in the wrong place at the wrong time. It must be different on the ground, you can just take a vehicle in a war zone and just "head out" on your own. Sounds like special forces guys, something some meat head EOD guys would do. I've already known a few from base that have done stupid things like kill themselves on sports bikes and beat their wives. They let anyone that operate a light switch and swim do that stuff it seems. It's hard to criticize the community as a whole but most of the old timers were really elite and there were only a handful of Det's back in the day (pre 2000). So they could pick and choose. Same thing with the MA rate, good lord don't get me started on those egotistical bastards. You had to earn that shit before 9/11, now they just spray you with some mace, hand you a gun and a baton and give you a early 2000 model ford explorer.

All in all, I hope the Times got it wrong because no squid deserves to be dragged out of his vehicle, beaten and kidnapped when he's covering some Army guy's job filling an IA billet.

I hate the title of this blog.

I got tired of staring at the "choose your title" screen so I just threw up some words and that sounded like I was trying to take this semi-seriously. So The Modern Sailor...

It's strange because over the last few years the navy has changed so much I would get thrown out for doing the shit I've done or been involved with over the last 7 years of my career. Throwing underage house parties with my chain of command there, drunk on duty used to be almost constant, whoring about on deployment, cheating at almost everything you get graded and observed on, the list goes on but it's nothing really criminal. Just a general lack of what people call "Professionalism" nowadays. So being that Big Navy has changed, so have I had to cope with said changes and trying to conform to being a Modern Sailor.