How I Learned About Life: Going to School In the Navy

By Edward Olsen

This book is the second in a series about how I learned some of the most important lessons in life. For me many of those lessons happened while I was in the navy. That should be understandable because that was the first time I was away from home, still in my late teens but on my own out in the world away from the comfortable and secure surroundings I grew up in.

This book covers the time period when I was still new in the navy, going to various schools before I would be of any real use. It’s not really about the navy as much as it is about the people. What people do is where you learn a lot about life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Dec 1, 2016
• ISBN: 9781365561795

Book preview

How I Learned About Life: Going to School In the Navy

How I learned About Life, 

Going to School in the Navy

Edward D Olsen

Copyright © 2016   Edward D Olsen

ISBN  978-1-365-56179-5

Forward

This book is the second in a series about how I learned some of the most important lessons in life.  For me many of those lessons happened while I was in the navy.  That should be understandable because that was the first time I was away from home, still in my late teens but on my own out in the world away from the comfortable and secure surroundings I grew up in.

This book covers the time period when I was still new in the navy, going to various schools before I would be of any real use.  It’s not really about the navy as much as it is about the people.  What people do is where you learn a lot about life.

A  School.

After boot camp was over I went home and visited all the friends and family for about a month.  And then it was off to school to learn the basics of the field I had chosen.  For me as I mentioned before it was nuclear power and there were four basic sub categories of that profession you could specialize in.  They were Electrician, Electronic Technician, Internal Communications, or Mechanical Systems.

I chose mechanical, which put me in the traditional enlisted rating of Machinist Mate, but with a nuclear designator.

Why I chose this one instead of the electronics technician one, I’m not really sure.  I don’t remember laboring over making a decision about it back then.  My father was a mechanic for the Union Pacific Railroad.  I remember seeing him work on his cars a lot when I was a kid.  I knew he was good mechanic, even when I was very young.  But he died when I was nine years old so maybe it was perhaps a little bit in memoriam of that.  I really don’t remember.  But anyway it now meant that I had to go to the basic school to learn to be a machinist mate.

Like I said before the navy had all of their enlisted career fields divided up into designations called ratings.  What they did for the nuclear power program was use four of the traditional ratings that I mentioned above but gave you a sub-specialty designator of nuclear power for that rating.  For example, I was a Machinist Mate.  Now on a traditional ship powered by a boiler system that would be someone who worked in the engine room on all the steam turbine and mechanical systems.  In the nuclear world it was very much the same except the steam to run the engines came from a reactor and not from an oil fired boiler.  It was the same for the electricians and the other ratings.  They would be trained and would work in a very similar environment to a boiler fired ship.  They would also be trained in nuclear power though which did have very important differences that we all had know about and know quite well.

Since I had chosen to be a Machinist Mate I had to go to school to learn how basic ship propulsion systems work.  For me, as I mentioned before, the part of the power plant that I had to know very well was the steam engines, turbine generators and stuff like that.  These were very much the same whether the ship was nuclear or not, so I was sent to what they called an A school.  In my case it was called Machinist Mate A school.  I think there was such a thing as a B school as well, which would have been a more specialized school I guess but I was not ever going to see one of those.  I was going to go to this A school, then from there it would be the full blown nuclear power program curriculum.  Or perhaps you might call the nuclear power training the B school.  But the navy never called it a B school.

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Machinist Mate A school was located at Great Lakes Naval Training Center in North Chicago, Illinois.  When I got there I was put up in what was called Snipe’s Castle.  It was a large barracks building where all of the propulsion plant guys lived.  Everyone in the barracks was going to some kind of school because that’s what this place was.  It was a very large navy base but there were no ships to be found anywhere.  It was basically a big school complex.  Snipe’s castle was for the snipes, which was the nick name given to people who would be working in an engine room aboard ship. 

Well when I reported to school they started us out in classrooms, teaching us how a steam powered propulsion plant was put together.  After class we were supposed to go out into the plant and trace out all the pipes.  We were supposed to learn where they went, where they came from, what they were for and all that sort of stuff.  After a few weeks, when they thought we had all the basics down, they had us go out and run some of the machinery. 

Standing watch out on the floor was the first time I had any experience being part of an operating steam propulsion plant as you might guess.  I remember this was a 600 pound steam plant which meant the steam pressure was 600 pounds per square inch.  The steam pipes were something like ten or twelve inches in diameter and all covered with a thick white padding they called lagging.  This was an insulation material that covered all of the exposed steam pipes and it was absolutely a necessity. 

When this steam plant was operating, those pipes were hot.  If I remember correctly steam at that pressure is about 500 degrees Fahrenheit.  That’s hot enough to start paper on fire by contact.  Imagine trying to be in the same room with pipes that were that hot.  Talk about a radiator from hell.  The lagging wasn’t put there just for safety reasons, to keep you from being burned by hot pipes.  It was also placed there because if these steam pipes weren’t covered with some kind of insulation the heat loss would be tremendous.  Without the lagging there would be so much heat loss that the power plant would be virtually unusable.

The first time I stood a watch they stationed me at this little condensate pump in the lower level of the engine room.  I think the point of this was to get you accustomed to standing a watch more than actually doing something productive to keep that condensate pump running.  Later on