US Naval Reserve Midshipmens School - Capstan Yearbook (Notre Dame, IN)

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'L .fm it V' tion of the original orders. Now and then mates of the deck were found to possess the two prime qualifications of a train announcer: a highly pene- trating voice, coupled with a total inability to make themselves understood. Seaman Door was soon removed from the fool's paradise hc had built for himself around the item in his orders stating that there would be no formal classwork during the indoctrination period. Sup- plied with eight textbooks Cincluding Bowditchj he quickly concluded that f'formal in the Navy must mean white ties and tails. Between times, there were periods for athletics and plenty of infantry drill. Before long, he was able to take drill even two hours of it in the rain in stride. Calisthenics, however, was a horse of another color. The first time his company did a bending exercise, so many joints cracked that the drill field sounded like a rifle range, and a salty lieutenant who happened to be standing by was moved to sing out absently, Cease firing! Seamanship, ordnance, and math for navigators l37l turned out to be the subjects of class instruction, and it soon appeared that the most rugged of these was math for navigators. There was much feverish resurrecting of badly decayed knowledge of geom- etry, algebra, astronomy, plane and spherical tif anyj trigonometry, and mechanical drawing. ln some ways, Seaman Door reflected while go- ing to formation on the double, the general atmos- phere resembled that at college, except that the men were obviously much more intent on getting something out of their instruction. There was more good humor, and less horseplay, perhaps due partly to the ever-present spectre of clemerits. Immunization f'shots, which made life hardly worth living on Tuesdays, and generally YVednes- days, too, were a major tribulation. Besides the severe muscular soreness and general doggy feel- ing which nearly everyone suffered, the faint of heart were terrorized by the most sadistic brand of seuttlebutt while waiting in the line leading into the sick bay. lf the reaction to the shots were any criterion, Seaman Door felt certain after the fifth or sixth round that he was immune to all the af- Hictions of man or beast, including ergophobia.

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and HEN Seaman NV. T. Door went on active duty October 5, several months after having taken oath as a member of the United States Naval Reserve, he found himself completely at sea, though by no stretch of the imagination can Notre Dame, Ind., be considered a port. The Navy, he discovered to his swift befuddle- ment, lives in a world of its own. Even common- place objects have diHerent names. Anything you put your feet on, for instance Cwith the possible ex- ception of a deskj is Hthe deckf' Food is chow,,, stairs are Hladdersf, walls, Ubulkheadsf, and any kind of equipment is Hgearf' One of the first les- sons Seaman Door acquired along this line was that the compartment marked ffheadn is not the com- manding oHicer's headquarters. In the Navy, everything runs like clockwork, he found. In less time than it takes to run up BAKER, bewildered Seaman Door had filled out a boat load l36l eff-'ri .II aww? , of forms in triplicate, marched to thc storeroom where he was loaded up with a complete set of uni- forms and bedding, and stumbled back to his room, groaning silently under the weight. Perhaps the second thing Seaman Door learned was the meaning of the term, seuttlebutt,,' which he concluded closely resembles what is referred to among civilians as plain ordinary fbulll. One of the strangest things about scuttlebutt, he learned fur- ther, is that the more far-fetched it is, the readier and wider acceptance it finds. After a little more experience, however, Seaman Door decided that this was not so unreasonable, at that. Life in the quarters revolved around pronounce- ments, generally unintelligible, by the mates of the deck, who rent the air at short intervals with orders to fall in, announcements ofthe uniform of the day, and sundry other ultimatums, followed in two min- utes by contradictions, followed in turn by restora-

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Captainls inspection was discovered to have a meaning not apparent to the casual onlooker, and to involve an onerous routine which got under way about 18 hours beforehand with swabbing of the deck. Seaman Door used to think that this was the only Navy term he understood, but he knew now that he had not fully appreciated its implica- tions. The bare elements of getting a room in order for inspection include, he learned: tal sweeping, Cbl swabbing, and CCH going over the floor withifinger- nails to capture any stray broom straws, or grains of sand, making up the beds according to a prec-ise formula, with somewhat less tolerance permitted in the angle of blanket folds than in solution of a navigation problem, getting the ends of an un- symmetrical towel to hang absolutely square, thorough dusting, especially of the most unlikely places, such as the crevice inside the bottom of locker doors, or any cranny that is either beyond reach or out of sight, scrubbing the washbowlg keeping the wastebasket empty and the ashtray burnished, and seeing that shoes under the bed are lined up along the shortest distance between two arbitrarily selected Cgenerally by the inspect- ing oflicerj points. Somewhat harried after the first two or three days ofliving in a hell ofa hurry, Seaman Door had come to relish warmly every second of his seven hours and fifty minutes in bed. It was with some chagrin, then, that he drew the last half of the midwatch as mate of the third deck, where he grudgingly put in two hours noting in the log his own and the roving watchls reports that all was secure, sir, and ruefully pondering man,s in- humanity to man. The bits of miscellaneous information assimilated by Seaman Door in a remarkably short-time would 38