It doesn’t have to make sense

When I was young and figuring out how to use my brain, I became fascinated with logic and was intensely frustrated when I encountered things that did not make sense. Then I joined the Navy and learned that reason and logic are desirable but not strictly necessary.

My training in Officer Candidate School probably was intended to make us adaptable and resilient. We were taught to march down the right side of the street and then suddenly were ordered to march on the left. It was not uncommon for the loudspeaker to announce a change in the uniform of the day as we were running out of the barracks for the morning formation. So I learned to cope with uncertainty and concluded that capricious nonsense was normal in the Navy.

On coastal patrol in Vietnam, we were required to check the papers of every junk we boarded. The papers were written in Vietnamese. None of us could read Vietnamese but we dutifully checked the papers every time. Yep, they’ve got papers.

When I led boarding parties I was instructed to have a pistol in my hand while supervising my team. Then we got orders to fill out a form for each junk we boarded, so I had a pistol and a clipboard. This presented a dilemma: what to do with the pistol while filling out the form. Ask the Vietnamese to hold the gun while I write? Not a good idea. So we assigned two officers to each boarding party: one to hold the gun and the other to fill out the form. During my first cruise to Vietnam I read Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 and understood it perfectly.

Fortunately, the Navy has people who counter official nonsense with clever pragmatism. When my reserve center had a shortage of lodging for weekend reservists, the commanding officer came up with a solution. “We found an unused building on the base that’s equipped with bunks,” he said. “We cannot use it officially as a barracks because that would require spending money we don’t have to bring the building up to code. But your guys can sleep there if they want. Just don’t call it a barracks.”

My retirement from the Naval Reserve was true to form. I submitted papers in August to retire in November. In September I was notified that as a superannuated senior officer, I would be reviewed by a continuation board and forced to retire if deemed useless to the Navy. I’m already retiring, I thought, so this doesn’t affect me. In November I officially retired: My paperwork was in order, they rang the bell and blew the bosun’s pipe, and everybody saluted. In December, however, I received a certified letter notifying me that I was AWOL for missing my reserve meeting and might be kicked out of the Navy. Finally, in January, I received a letter congratulating me that the continuation board had approved my retention in the Navy. This made no sense at all but, hey, my pension checks are arriving.