What It’s Like to Work With the Best of the Best in the Navy

Four recruits are huddled around a garbage can and vomiting. A few others are splayed out, breathing heavy in puddles of sweat on the gym floor. Most of the recruits are walking around, getting their breath back after the run. Some of them are talking and joking around with each other; they’re just waiting for “Chief” to come back downstairs.

Someone hollers, “Form up!” The recruits scurry to throw on their jackets and form-up in a height line. Chief Boatswain’s Mate David Chisholm stomps out onto the gymnasium floor. He’s decked out in Navy PT gear. He’s tall, slim, and at 27, he’s pretty young to be a crusty boatswain’s mate. His Navy ball cap is low on his forehead casting a shadow over his eyes as he looks at a printout in his hand. He’s shaking his head and muttering to himself.

“It’s that crap,” he says, pointing to a number printed on the chart he’s holding. “Four seconds. Four seconds. That’s what pisses me off.” He is pointing at a block on the chart that says “FAIL” in bold letters. He runs his index finger along the chart and finds another failing score. “Pushups: 35. You’re telling me you couldn’t do seven more pushups?” He points to another failing line, “Six more sit ups. Garbage. That’s the motivation that they’re going to bring to boot camp? It’s ridiculous.” He walks away shaking his head.

Chisholm is a recruit division commander, or RDC, for the Navy’s boot camp at Recruit Training Command (RTC), Great Lakes, Ill. A month ago, less than half the recruits in Division 026 passed their first boot camp physical fitness test. Chisholm knew he had his work cut out for him. So, he and his RDC partner have spent the last four weeks whipping this division into something that is starting to resemble a group of Sailors, and today, 78 of his 87 recruits passed the test. That’s a 90 percent pass rate, but Chisholm isn’t satisfied with 90 percent. He was predicting something closer to 95 percent, something closer to perfect.

“I was taught to shoot high,” Chisholm says. “If you miss, you’re still pretty high up there.”

RTC Great Lakes has a shortage of RDCs. The command needs more high-shooting Sailors, like Chisholm, to apply for the job and help turn civilians into Sailors. It’s not easy duty, and not everyone can do it. The hours are long, and the mission is a non-stop challenge, but the rewards are the kind you won’t find anywhere else in the Fleet. Leading a 90-person division looks great on a performance evaluation (eval), and RTC has the above-average advancement rates to prove it. It’s also a great way to pick up leadership and organizational skills, but beyond the professional rewards, even the hardest RDCs will admit their favorite part of the job is watching a division graduate and knowing, “I made those Sailors.”

Definitely what I enjoy most is seeing the change in the recruits,” Chisholm says. “You can’t describe seeing somebody that came here off the bus, seeing what they were like, and then seeing them eight weeks later when they leave here.”

Before a Sailor can watch his first division graduate, and before he can even don the RDC “red rope” on his shoulder, he has to get through RDC “C” School. Just to get orders to the “C” school, Sailors have to go through a detailing screening process that disqualifies three out of every five applicants. Once a Sailor makes it to the school, he becomes a “blue rope,” named for the braided blue rope the RDC “C” School students wear on the left shoulder of their uniforms.

RDC “C” School is no joke. One out of every four students washes out of the course and never earns his red rope. The “C” school is a 13-week course that teaches Sailors the kind of attention to detail they’ll need as RDCs, and it has a PT program that makes sure they’re in the kind of shape they’ll have to be in to run with 18-year-old recruits. The PT program is the main reason for the school’s high attrition rate. Blue ropes do a lot of running, and Sailors who aren’t prepared for that can end up broken.

The whole course is kind of like boot camp for senior Sailors. The blue ropes stand meticulous uniform inspections where the instructors use rulers to measure the distance between the top of a pocket and the bottom of a ribbon rack, and at the physical training (PT) sessions it isn’t uncommon to see chiefs and 1st classes getting yelled at for lagging behind in a run or practicing bad form on an exercise.

“Yes, they’ll get talked to a little bit,” Chisholm says, “but that’s also kind of good because it brings it back down home. You’re going to want to think about how you talk to a recruit, because you know what it’s like to get talked to like that again. So it’s kind of like a refresher of when you went through boot camp. So, when they’re talking down to you, you need to remember that [moment] before you start talking down to a recruit.”

• 1
• 2