What have I done?

Published 12:53 am Tuesday, November 3, 2026

By Jack Miller / Contributing Columnist

I woke up this morning feeling very nostalgic; I’m missing my time in the Navy again.

I have written quite a bit about my time at sea, but it was my days in boot camp that were on my mind when I woke up.

I joined the navy in 1955 as a seventeen year old boy, not giving the navy a lot of material to build a man out of because I was only 4 feet, 11 inches tall and skinny enough if I sucked in my stomach you could see my spine.

The transition from civilian to a boot sailor was not an easy one and there were a lot of the new recruits who had a rough time. What made boot camp a little easier for me than it was for some however, was that two of my best friends joined the navy with me, and we supported each other through the rough times.

Even with their support however going from a child’s world to the no-nonsense adult world of boot camp was a shock akin to going from a warm bath to a tub filled with ice. The phrase “What have I done” filled my thoughts several times a day the first week.

The thing about bootcamp as anyone will tell you who has gone through it, is there is a lot of difference in what is considered the navy way and the way you have always done things, and the time given you to learn the navy way is as short as your drill instructor’s (DI’s) patience.

Watching a DI make a grown man cry as he chewed him out one day sped up my learning curve quite a bit. The hardest thing to learn for a lot of us recruits was the language of the navy; the toilet was now called the head, a staircase was called a ladder, a door was a hatch, food was chow, and the dining room was the mess hall. You never said left or right unless you were marching, that was now port and starboard. Time was different too, 0600 was 6 a.m. and 1800 was 6 p.m., and saying the civilian version of these things would get you push-ups. Whistling was also frowned on in bootcamp, at least it was by a Chief Boatswain’s Mate who came to the barracks one night when I was on barracks watch. I was happily twirling the company’s keys and whistling loudly and did not see him walk up beside me. I nearly fainted before I could snap to attention, and deliver a shaky rendition of the phrase we were taught to say when a member of the training group came to the barracks.

The old Chief used a lot of colorful language explaining to me that while the barracks might be in order, I was not, and most of all he said that only Boatswain’s Mates, and something I can’t say here whistled in the navy. He then made me do push-ups so I wouldn’t forget. I managed to survive boot camp however, and I even stayed around long enough to retire with 22 years in the Navy. I also managed to add a little height, and more pounds than I liked before I was discharged. I still miss the life of a sailor and the sea. A lot of years have passed since that first week of bootcamp, when I asked myself “What have I done?” Today I know what I did and I would not trade the experience for anything.

Jack Miller is a longtime Sedalia resident and former radio news reporter.