Spending a few years of your youth on a submarine at sea is an experience not too much like anything else I can think of.
Sometimes during periods of extreme death defying danger, they make you get into your bunks with orders to be quiet, breath slow, and fall asleep. No shit.
Then, during a time of mind numbing boredom, for no reason at all, they will keep you awake for days on end. They perform bizarre drills simulating things that could never happen, during which you are required to perform improbable acts. They repeat the drills over and over again. You become an expert at spraying imaginary flame retardants, over surfaces not really burning. Then they demand that you remove every speck of debris and drop of hydraulic oil from your assigned cleaning space and shine all its surfaces to a high gloss, while the guy next to you is pushing more oil and debris into your space in a vain attempt to clean his own. Hundreds of pounds of paper towels are used up for this purpose, compacted into bales and stored away. All the while, all around you, hundreds of valves are cycling, releasing more oil and miles of ventilation ducts are blowing grit and dust into these streaks of oil, newly released in the areas you have just cleaned. Eventually the XO comes by, pronounces you unsat and tells you to start over.
My favorite part was drinking really strong, greasy, bitter coffee by the gallon and chain smoking carton after carton of cigarettes that they sold you almost for free. You quickly developed the kind of cardiac arrythmias that immediately kill you if you aren't young and healthy. The backs of your eyelids become as rough as sand paper but it's OK, you start to like the feeling and you rarely blink anyway.
Old Paul Simon songs get stuck in your head. That Mess Specialist Three, with pale skin and funny lesions, the one that fried eggs in the morning, started to like me, a lot. And you know what, I started to like him back.
Psychedelic.
The Navy Wants You, Baby!
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