The Navy has a relatively small set of words that is
supposed to define your values while serving in it. Honor, courage, and commitment is something
that is preached from the very get go regardless if you are an officer or an enlisted
person and they follow you throughout our career. Those values are part of our creed, are in
every school house, and are displayed somewhere at every command I have ever been
to. The beauty of those 3 words is that
they cover so much of your daily life and they seamlessly interact with each
other to really become one big statement.
You can’t just have honor because having honor requires you to have the
courage to do so and the commitment to having it at all times. Conversely, if you have made the commitment to
being committed to something, it will certainly take courage for you to stick
with your honor and follow through with it.
The bottom line is you can’t have just one without the other two being
right there.
With that being said, each individual entity in the Navy
will probably have its own values that it wants to instill into its
sailors. For example, the nuclear Navy
has the additional values of Understanding, Formality, Anticipation, Teamwork,
Procedural Compliance, and Ownership.
While not as seamless as the Navy’s big 3, these additional 6 values
speak volumes as to how important it is to operate nuclear reactors. You must understand how the system will
respond when you mess with it, you must anticipate those changes and take
action to prevent casualties which will usually require teamwork to do so. As serious as operating a reactor is, it goes
without saying you should do so with the utmost due diligence and formality (no
games on it), follow the procedures (since they were written by the people that
designed the thing), and take ownership of your plant. Additionally, there is the unofficial motto
of the nuclear Navy – integrity. Above
all else, old Hyman G. Rickover wanted to ensure that anyone that touched a
nuclear reactor had integrity. This
again rolls into the other six values.
The fact is without integrity, the other six will not exist.
Time on board a submarine is littered with
examples of people acting with integrity and without it. I have messed up on many occasions and I had
plenty of opportunity to cover my tracks to prevent anyone outside of a few people
from finding out (especially the chain of command). With that being said, at no point did I take
any action other than the one that upheld both the Navy‘s and the nuclear side
of the house’s values. On the other
hand, there are several people sitting in the civilian world with bad conduct
discharges because they decided they wanted to forge some maintenance records when no one was looking
vice taking the 15 minutes to do the maintenance. Integrity lapses simply aren't tolerated. Having integrity and doing what is expected
of you no matter what the consequences are is something you just have to accept
and do. One of my least favorite phrases
out there is the saying, “integrity is like a bank, you only have so much to
use.” To me, that saying goes against
everything that integrity stands for.
You either have it or you don’t!
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