For Sailors, a Better Life

However stormy the Navy's military and financial future may be, it now enjoys smoother sailing in one important area: morale. Though there are still some problems with drugs, alcoholism and a high desertion rate, the service has recovered smartly from the troubled early 1970s, when a series of violent racial clashes revealed an armed force at war with itself.

Today's vastly improved mood is the result of the determination of Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, Chief of Naval Operations from 1970 to '74, to bring the life of young sailors into line with that of their civilian contemporaries. He radically changed the service's restrictive dress code by permitting modish haircuts, beards and sideburns and eliminating the requirement for frequent uniform changes during the day. (This does not apply, however, to the lowly inductee, whose hair is still cropped when he enters bootcamp.) Zumwalt also revised the duty rotation system and the fleet's operating schedules to give his men more time at home with their families. He established ombudsmen and generally strengthened the machinery for redress of grievances.

Many venerable Navy traditions have simply disappeared, reports TIME Correspondent Joseph Kane, after visiting the 170,000-acre naval complex at San Diego, home to 89,200 Navy men and women (17% of the entire Navy). The grounds of the naval training center now look more like a college campus than a military base, with many sailors sporting blue denims. The hefty pay raises (a seaman E-3 makes $460 monthly in base pay, compared with $99 in 1958) mean that most sailors can afford apartments in San Diego. Petty Officer Third Class Anthony Moseby, 23, for one, can. This means that each weekday morning he is up near dawn in his beach apartment, dons his jeans, sweater and tennis shoes and drives to the base. Aboard his ship, at the bunk assigned to him, he changes into regulation dungarees and goes to work on the computers in the ship's data-processing center.

A warship docked at the base thus becomes a kind of factory where a sailor puts in a day's work and then leaves, just like any civilian worker. Single enlisted men often head for the Scuttle Butt, a lively disco bearing no resemblance to the "slop chute" E.M. clubs that former Navy men knew. The new informality is striking. According to some officers, today's sailor does not always say "Yes, sir," but may just as frequently say "Yeah," and then add, "Have a nice day."

The most extreme of all breaks from tradition is that the service now has 23,356 women in uniform. Some 20 of them are pilots and fly attack planes as well as transport and passenger aircraft. Other Navy women skipper ships. Boatswain's Mate Juanita Heaster, for instance, is based in Naples, Italy, where she captains a small vessel that ferries supplies out to larger warships. She says she gets "a thrill out of taking a boat out in the rough seas," but still feels a lack of equality. "The men think that women can't do the work," she complains. "But we do just as hard a job as the men do. We have to manhandle the supplies and scrape and paint just as a man does."

Women caused a stir when they first arrived at the submarine headquarters in Pearl Harbor. Men felt obliged to carry the women's heavy swab buckets and tool kits. But as the novelty of working with women faded, the men quit and the female sailors began lugging their own tools and filled their buckets only halfway to make them lighter.

The new morale is generally approved, but not all sailors welcome what the Zumwalt mood has done to discipline. Some senior petty officers at the Great Lakes Naval Recruit Training Center near Chicago grouse that enlisted personnel do not always stand when an officer enters a room, and that recruits in uniform smoke on the street. Officers hesitate to enforce rules because the new sailers could and perhaps would demand a lengthy explanation before following the orders. Complains Master Chief Petty Officer Charles Chambers in San Diego: "You can't tell a kid to square away his uniform any longer. In my day, you were controlled around the clock. Today they are all at the beach." Says Master Chief Petty Officer Kenneth Henry: "We can't even pull their liberty cards as punishment."

But Vice Admiral Robert Coogan, commander of the Naval Air Force in the Pacific, insists that today's sailors "are not spoiled brats and we are not mollycoddling them." He admits, however, that "there is a lack of immediate obedience. It is thus more difficult to be a commanding officer."

Instructors are having some special problems. Observes a training officer at Great Lakes: "The reading level of our recruits is often below third grade. That means the sailor can't even read a warning sign on a ship's boiler room." One reason for low levels: creation of the all-volunteer military has removed the threat of being drafted into the Army, which was for years an incentive for youths to join the Navy. This means a growing number of the Navy's recruits are young men seeking cheap vocational training or an escape from some social predicament. Only one out of 60 new sailors, according to a training officer at Great Lakes, gives "serving my country" as his reason for joining the Navy. More typical, adds Captain William Ratiff, another officer at Great Lakes, is the "17-year-old recruit who has dropped out of school, got his girlfriend pregnant, got over his head in debt with a new car and can't find a job."

All these changes irritate career petty officers. They feel that their rank and experience no longer receive sufficient respect and that the Navy, by abandoning traditions, is ceasing to be what they used to consider the "class" service in the U.S. armed forces. Many of these critics have been retiring early, a trend that could cause a serious gap in the Navy's training, management and command system. qed

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