Hacker News Reader

Comment by ChuckNorris89 | Hacker News Reader

>But everyone learns other crew members' weaknesses and ruthlessly exploits them if necessary.

This is literally my worst nightmare. Highschool bullying 2.0 except with no escape. I know for sure I'm not military material.

View on HN

It's really not that bad the majority of the time. However, you train yourself not to have a reaction to stuff... because if you are particularly offended by {extreme porn, seeing penises, people criticizing your favorite team, taking "your mom" jokes to heart} that's an easy button for someone to press if they get bored.

Submarines are pretty unique places in that every person is pretty critical in an emergency. So while it can be brutal at times, it's also pretty collegial.

How do fights and conflicts work out? Surely under the stressful conditions of a sub, people have conflict. And keeping that conflict hot can't be good for everyone. Are the personality types less prone to conflict, or is there some general way it gets resolved?

Oh, there's definitely conflict. I'm a pretty calm guy but I got in a pretty memorable screaming match with the senior most enlisted guy on the boat. But most everyone has incentives to work it out - its to no-one's benefit if people are so hung up on something they can't do their job. In my case, because of that screaming match I really earned that guy's trust (and actually my whole watchteam's trust).

You do end up getting a spidey-sense for when it's too much for people, though. That quickly gets escalated to the CO/XO and people get transferred off the boat. (That's rare, though.)

This somehow reminds me of the Antarctic environment, where in Bellingshausen station one person found another's 'weak spot' - telling him the endings to the books he was reading. This eventually resulted in a near-fatal stabbing.

Again, it's not that way in general or I would have heard about it. Frankly, I'm appalled that an officer would tolerate and engage in this kind of behavior. Maybe it's a fast attack thing. In that case, I'm very glad I was on a Boomer.

I was a shy, socially awkward type when I enlisted--definitely not military material. The experience did me a lot of good. For the first year or so I was a target of relentless bullying, but slowly I learned how to stand up for myself verbally, and got better at not attracting negative attention in the first place.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com