The Gundecker

A lot of people start talking to a recruiter with no idea of what they want to do in the Navy. They watch movies, and then decide their job based off of what sounds cool. There’s a place for that. The world needs SEALs, after all. Ask any Fire Controlman why they picked that rate, and they’ll probably tell you they wanted to be the guy that shoots the missiles off the ship.

Well, guess what? You leave the Navy knowing how to shoot missiles. You know who needs that skillset in the civilian world? Al Qaeda, probably. Do you want to join Al Qaeda?

I fucking knew it.

So, then what should you think about when you pick your rate? Your recruiter said being a nuke is super cool, so why not just do that? Because your recruiter hates you, and he’s waiting for you to ship out so he can bang your mom.

Fret not, my prospective degenerate. I’ve got your back. Let’s talk.

Choose your rate, choose your fate.

For fucks sake, don’t pick a rate based off of staying wherever you are right now.

Just because the market for carpenters in your little ass hometown in Iowa is good doesn’t mean you should join the Navy as a Builder (BU). I speak from experience, THERE IS A 2,000% CHANCE YOU ARE NOT GOING BACK TO YOUR HOMETOWN.

I’m being dramatic, if you’re from a cool city, you might go back. But odds are, you’re thinking of what job you can get to be comfortable, or what job you can get the minimum amount of training for because you already did something like it for a while before joining.

That’s stupid. You’re stupid. You could be a master carpenter, you’re still going to go through A-school and learn the bare-ass basics with everybody else. So if that’s the case, why not learn a new skillset?

Story time: I joined the Navy as a master-at-arms (MA). My reasoning being that in my hometown in the middle of bumfuck nowhere, being a cop was one of like six jobs you could get, and I could get my foot in the door by being military police. I got lucky as fuck, because when we got classified at boot camp they actually gave me the option to convert to another rate because the wait to go to MA A-school was six months long, and I’d be waiting in Great Lakes. I don’t know if you’ve ever been anywhere near northern Illinois in the winter, but if you haven’t, you made good life choices.

After you join the Navy, you get to see places. When somebody says that, you probably think of places like Hong Kong, Denmark, Thailand, Australia, or Japan. Sometimes you do get to see those places, but you also get to see places like Hawaii, Virginia, Florida, California, Texas, Maine, Mississippi, throw a fucking dart at a map of the US and you can probably go there for some reason. We have a naval installation in Indiana. Think about that for a fucking minute.

My point being, even the mundane, semi-familiar places you go will speak to you. When you get out of the Navy, the world is open to you to go anywhere you want if you prepared.

My advice is to pick a dream job. Maybe you want to be a professional photographer, but you know it’s hard as fuck to get experience to make any kind of money. The Navy literally has a rate for that. Join as a Mass Communications Specialist (MC).

Reach out to someone successful in the field you want to get into, and ask them what skills you need to get where they are. Then look at the list of rates, the entire list, and see if any of those jobs provide some kind of background in the field you want. Odds are that even if there’s not a direct one-to-one conversion in the Navy, there’s a job where you can at least hone your skills in part of it. Want to work at a brewery? They’d probably appreciate if you knew how to procure large orders of machinery and hops (or whatever the fuck), and you can get that skillset as a logistics specialist (LS).

I dogged on the FCs earlier, but in that rate you learn how to operate and maintain complicated electronic systems. That’s a skillset you can market to an employer, but you’ll have to train yourself not to eat your own toenails.

The Navy is like its own little self-sufficient country. If there’s a job that you can think of, it has a parallel in the Navy because we need someone to be able to do that thing, just like the civilian world does. The Navy needs people able to kill terrorists, fire missiles, fight fires and flooding, and operate radar, but we also need people that can take professional photographs, repair aircraft, secure networks, set up speaker systems and phones, order food and machinery parts, prepare legal documents, or play music at sporting events.

And that’s just for the enlisted rates in the Navy. If you have a degree, you can commission as an officer and do even more shit. Or you can join another branch that has a job that’s closer to what you want to do.

Look, point is, don’t pick a rate that “sounds cool.” Don’t pick a rate that sounds like something you could get a job doing in your lame-ass neighborhood six blocks from your mom’s house. Pick a rate that achieves a goal for you, and set your bar higher than you likely have it set right now.

And if your recruiter tells you he can’t get you in that rate, then tell him you’ll come back when he can.

Also, just join the Air Force.