Hooked
By MICHAEL LEAPMAN AMAN who joins the Navy at sixteen will be over twenty-six before he can afford to regret it; nine years is now the minimum term of service for which a sailor can engage, and time served as a junior- (under eighteen) is not reckonable.
Now if young man decides after a year or so in the service that he does not like his job, that the life does not suit him, there is nothing he can do about it save to desert or to sit back for ten frustrating years and await his release. A docu- ment he signed, at eighteen, impulsive and inexperi- enced, is binding.
It is a fact that a good many men who have Signed for regular engagements do not like the Navy and feel they could do better 'elsewhere. It is both easy and mistaken to dismiss this, as do many senior officers, as a 'barrack-room grouse,' a spontaneous unthinking reaction to be scorned.. Many of the dissatisfied have intelligence, energy and ability that is'not being exploited in the ser- vice; many are family men who want to settle down.
Consider, then, the man who has not 'bought himself out,' and who leaves the service, as a majority do, after his initial engagement. If he is lucky he has learned a trade. If he has not he must begin a new career at an age when most people would be starting to derive some financial benefit from the experience or apprenticeship of their early twenties. He cannot expect a large Wage, and he probably has a family to support. Had he been able to quit the service five years earlier he could by now have achieved a sound and comfortable position. Many, indeed, find their age too great a handicap and, unable to find a good job 'outside,' re-enlist. Back in the fold, they pay dearly for their waywardness, entering at one rank lower than that in which they left. A Petty officer, for instance, would rejoin as a lead- ing hand and go near the bottom of the roster for advancement, which in some branches may mean a wait of up to three or four years before he regains his former seniority.
It is fantastic that a contract entered into in a flush of enthusiasm at sixteen or eighteen should be so irrevocable as to shape and often ruin a man's entire subsequent career; especially since the sanctity of the agreement is by no means mutual and the Admiralty can, at any time, ter- minate the man's engagement and discharge him, 'services no longer required.'
One man told me that when he was eighteen he had 'a craze' for the Navy so strong that, irresponsibly, he signed for twelve years. Now, four years later, he wanted to get married, but felt he could not do so while he was liable to spend anything up to two years at a stretch away from home. (In this respect he was more conscientious than most. The service offers attractive financial inducements to married men—that is why so many sailors marry young and why so many of their marriages collapse.) By denying himself the traditional naval relaxation of continuous exces- sive drinking, he had managed to save enough money to buy a discharge; but his application was refused because he had more than three years to serve, and he is still a re- luctant, unmarried sailor.
The fact that such stern And morally dishonest measures are deemed , For these reasons the naval engagement struc- ture needs reviewing. A sensible policy would be to allow any man to withdraw from his obli- gation, with nothing to pay, at twenty-one or after two or three years' service, by which time he should know whether it is or is not the life for him. The risk that costly training will thereby be wasted applies equally to many civilian trades and will have to be taken—a dissatisfied man must anyway be of limited value, and the Army and the Air Force have found their three-year engage- ments an economic proposition. Moreover, given a little better treatment and certain elementary reforms of procedure—the modification, for in- stance, of boring and futile ceremonial parades— there is every reason to believe that a majority would decide to stay on for a naval career. After all, as a memorable commander told us soon after we joined, 'Not only are you getting the finest life a chap can lead, but you're getting paid for it, toci.'.
'And like it,' he might have added, 'because you're stuck with it.'
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