Wow, things are different,...
You'll start out cranking in the mess, since you're not qualified to do anything else....
I never cranked in the USN, not even on the destroyer before nukedom,...
eeeach!!!
....In port you'll be placed in a 3 section duty rotation and have to sleep on the boat every 3 days because somehow immediately making a new guy miserable and tired is the way to make him qualify faster.....
Used to typically be four section duty in port on the SSN and port & stbd on the SSBN,...
I guess that could average to 3 section in port, but 3-section was synonymous with underway watchbills, and underway didn't seem to matter, except underway port and stbd, and even that had the advantage of;
if, you were stuck port & stbd underway, then, nobody messed with you for much of anything else when underway,...
....Pretty much every nuke Sailor goes dinq at one point or another because...
whatever contributes to THAT paradigm is a BIG change, it ustabe nukes rarely went dinq except for the perpetual dinqs, which was more about the person than the program,...
....That means you get no weekends off unless you count the 8 hours you spend on the boat from 0000-0800 on Saturday morning a 'day off.'.......
that is definitely not Squadron 1 in Papa Hotel in the 80's,...
nope, nope, nope,....
...The easiest time you'll have underway is on deployment (if you're on an SSN). The boat has to remain very quiet and the Eng will be busy as a mission OOD, so you'll pretty much stand watch, do your after-watch PMS which doesn't take very long, and maybe do a couple hours of training/monitored PMS a week. You might 'walk-through' some drills to stay sharp. So there's lots of down time for nukes on mission. Even as an officer, my favorite time was on mission because we didn't have a squadron staff picking a scab and requiring immediate corrective administrative actions every off-watch period. You get into a routine and there's actually time to hit the treadmill and still get 5-6 hours of sleep between watch.....
well that seems more familiar,....
keep in mind that although 1980's Squadron 1 in Papa Hotel had some seemingly better aspects to it there was this unspoken but palpable goal of being underway on nuclear power about 300 days per year, I cannot attest to that being a formal goal, but my Captain at the time sure did seem to believe in it,...
so maybe my perception is because my Captain was old school,...
work hard, play hard,...
you play in port and work at sea,...
mebbe,...
...The hardest time is ORSE workups. Many Eng's will employ Vulcans to maximize drill time. In case you're not familiar with that, Vulcans are when the day's watches are split into multiple mini-watches. So it goes like this:
0000-0600: Normal section watch (say, section 1)
0600-1000: Section 1 drill set
1000-1400: Section 2 drill set
1400-1800: Section 3 drill set
1800-0000: Normal section resume the watch (section 2)
0000-0600: Section 3 watch...
This doesn't seem so bad, except that it never ends on time. You usually go until about 2000 when everything returns to normal, and if you're the unlucky soul in section 3 then you get a whole 2.5 hours of sleep before your wakeup at 2230 to take the watch at 0000.
Then between that you'll do monitored evolutions out of your ears, lots of training, exams, and oral interviews, etc. so that you are ready to pass ORSE. As an EM the only record NR really cares about other than your PMS sheet is the battery log, hopefully you don't get that short straw....
Yup,...ORSE is hard on nukes, it's supposed to be,...
then again weapons load for nukes is pretty much stand watch or play cards,....
nice n easy,...
...Some in-port periods are worse than others - if you are doing breaker maintenance checks that require shutting down half the boat's electricity for 2 days or doing the monthly SSMG cleaning then you are going to be working a really long time those days.....
yeah, but really now,...
that's about as bad as it gets for EMs and it does not seem to have changed much,...
....Keep in mind though that NR imposes strict training requirements that CANNOT be waived no matter what the boat is doing, so you essentially lose a work-day a week to training (1-2 hours dept training, 1 hour division training, 1 hour of supervisor training when you make E-6, and a 4 hour FIDE session). So now you've got to compress the rest of the in-port routine into 4 days to meet the aggressive timeline for getting the boat ready to get underway. That means you may have to come in on Saturday or work until 2000-2100 on weekdays, depending on how your Chief wants to manage it.....
that's just sad,...
less Rickover and more Big Navy than once upon a time,...
worse yet, more nuclear Big Navy,...
a bureaucracy unto itself, finding ever more inventive ways to justify itself,....
.........It's really difficult to stay involved with healthy activities outside of work, especially when you become an angry walking zombie, but I would encourage you to try to make friends and get together to play a sport rather than drink or play video games and get fat like many nukes do.
still the saddest part of all,...
amongst the best SRBs,...
and the best pro pays,...
and the best rate advancement opportunities,...
and still chock a block full of angry walking zombies,...
some of whom just keep expanding at the waistline (or hipline nowadays) until the fat seawarrior ejector blares out:
"no more nuke for you!!!!",...
ah well,....
sic for beercourt