Benjamin Stevens of Islesford is a sophomore at Maine Maritime Academy in Castine and has been writing about his experiences for The Working Waterfront as part of the Island Institute’s student journalism program.
CASTINE — Gunnery Sergeant George Oshana sat with us once and talked about the difference between the recruits and the drill instructors at boot camp for the U.S. Marines.
Recruits certainly experience high-stress, intense challenges during their tenure at Parris Island or Camp Pendleton, challenges that test their mettle and their endurance. But for the drill instructors, or DIs as the Marine Corps calls them, it’s worse. The DIs go through an exhausting period of less sleep, louder volumes, harder physical training standards and overall higher expectations than the recruits.
Exhaustion sets in to the point where, as Oshana described it, instructors may stand at a pivot point during marching practice, turning recruits and yelling at them for doing it wrong, and falling asleep right on their feet before realizing they dozed off.
Those of us here at Maine Maritime Academy who aren’t U.S. Marines and haven’t been drill sergeants at boot camp, whose first stint of screaming at people we’ve never seen before is at regimental preparatory training, had a serious baptism by fire waiting for us.
It was interesting to see how people I’ve been friends with for more than a year stepped up to that challenge. They showed different kinds of energy than many of us had seen in them before, and their talents for leadership and management (or lack thereof in some cases) came out quickly.
One of my friends, who seems like a very quiet and reserved person most of the time, threw back the curtain and poured out terrifying amounts of fury upon the “midshipmen under guidance,” or MUGs. Another of our staff, a fellow who enjoys having fun and goofing off, showed off an extremely tight self- discipline when it was time to work with the freshmen.
It was a challenge for me to learn how to be mean and nasty at all. I’ve never truly raised my voice at anyone in my life, and this was a stumbling block even to my application to be on the training staff. All through the summer and the week of preparation we had on campus, I wondered and thought about how to go about getting in someone’s face and yell.
The question nagged at me until about 5 seconds before we began slamming open doors and banging on bulkheads to wake those freshmen up for their first day of training. At that moment, my brain went into a very deliberate mode, and I simplified it all to raising my fist and slamming it onto the wall.
We all face challenges of one kind or another when we begin training, but administering the training presented equally numerous challenges of character and physical endurance. My voice disappeared on the morning of the third day, and I couldn’t yell and shout anymore without causing damage to my throat. This challenge had a truly entertaining but very serious solution: leaping to the far end of the volume spectrum and whispering from behind the MUGs.
RPT is designed to place large amounts of stress on MUGs, and this tool proved extremely useful to that end. After two days of training officers doing nothing but scream at them, suddenly people were whispering in their ears.
“Why are you fidgeting, MUG?”
“Stand at the proper position of attention, MUG!”
“Tuck in your shirt, MUG!”
“Are you looking around, MUG?”
The purpose of RPT as far as the training staff goes is the beginning of “providing them with leadership and management opportunities.” This is a piece of the mission of the MMA regiment, which is to “help prepare men and women for successful careers as officers in the maritime service.”
The fulfillment of that mission begins with RPT and MUG month, the training period for both freshmen and the training officers who teach them. With the responsibility of the entire freshmen class on our shoulders, we have to put our finest foot forward to teach them how to do what we do, from customs and courtesies to rules and regulations.
Leadership is important, but learning to manage the logistics of a unit’s operation is as important when learning shipboard work, military work or even business work. All of these fields hire Maine Maritime Academy graduates, and working as training officers is one way to begin learning that management. This is the purpose of the regiment of midshipmen. The process begins as a MUG and continues as training officers for many of us—which means, as Oshana taught us, stepping up to an even bigger challenge than the MUGs undertake and taking the lead.