[Milsurplus] buncha RBOs on board USS Tenessee 1943

[Gordon Smith]

At 01:55 PM 5/17/2020, Hubert Miller wrote:
>I received a few agreements with my comments on the shipboard radio 
>operator role.
>Of course, I am referring to commercial merchant marine.
>I have read a half dozen books now, memoirs of former merchant 
>marine radio operators, and those
>will definitely give you mixed feelings about that job. Along with 
>the romance of visiting exotic places
>there were a lot of crew members who were kind of "off", unstable, 
>and maybe alcoholic. It seems to
>me the job was a "sufficient" but not necessary element for becoming 
>an alki. I have also known three
>former ship radio ops. One went from this to becoming a college 
>physics professor, one finished a
>career and seemed to have turned out well, and one was a downhill 
>alcoholic. So my observations are
>no kind of reliable measure.

HI Hue,
I can verify that there was a subset of Merchant Marine crew members 
who were "off". I was a Naval Officer in the early 90's and I had an 
officer acquaintance who had graduated from the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy.
He was a really outstanding guy who regaled us with stories about his 
limited time in the Merchant Marine Fleet. His stories were a bit 
crazy and, in some cases, borderline illegal acts. He got himself a 
US Navy Officer
commission and left the merchant marine service because of the 
craziness. Some good people are in the Merchant Marine service, but 
some very crazy (and I mean that literally) ones were in it also.

73, Gordon KJ6IKT