Happy Veteran’s Day weekend to veterans everywhere across the world. Thank you for your service.
What follows is an interview with Chad, my husband, baby daddy, and veteran. I asked for this interview to indulge in the true meaning of Veteran’s Day. Also, I linked one of his favorite scenes from Curb Your Enthusiasm when Larry idiotically refuses to thank a soldier for his service. This might help elucidate his off kilter humor.
A little background on Chad
He grew up in Philadelphia, PA the oldest of two sisters and a brother. His mother was among the first female partners in a prestigious Philadelphia law firm. His father was an entrepreneur, and passed away from cancer when Chad was 25.
Chad attended Catholic school, one year at The Peddie School, a boarding school in Hightstown, NJ, and Valley Forge Military Academy—which he hated.
After his navy tours and deployments, he returned to Annapolis as a teacher (shore tour). In September 2015, I moved to Annapolis for work. Must’ve been fate. We met in October 2015 and married 9/1/19. We have a daughter and 3-footed dog.
He is in the reserves until 2027, when he will retire after 20 years. His rank is 0-4 Lt.Cdr.
Chad is mischievous, silly, incredibly intelligent, occasionally obnoxious, generous, loving, and committed to his family. Thank you, Chad, for your service.
Rachael: Why do you take so much pleasure collecting free coffee and donuts on Veteran’s Day?
Chad: Because it’s my day.
R: You cringe when you’re thanked for your service. I’m sure every single person who served you a free cookie or drink thanked you for your service.
C: Everybody likes free stuff, Rachael. Throws up his hands.
R: Why does being thanked for your service make you uncomfortable?
C: It doesn’t make me uncomfortable, it’s just not a thing I—I don’t know, it’s the duality of feeling like this [military service] is a path I’m on, but maybe shouldn’t have chosen. Especially the more I learn about geopolitics and everything else, I wonder how everything would’ve been different if I gone to UPenn instead of the Naval Academy. What would my experiences have been, you know?
R: So is that like a reminder to you when someone calls it out and thanks you?
C: I think part of it is I never identified as a veteran. Like today at the car wash, which is the best deal by the way, $30 car wash for free, they did a very good job. There was this geezer dressed in his army captain uniform, so you know the first thing I did? I showed him my ID, and I made him salute me. He was like 86 or something.
Laughs.
R: Why did you do that?
C: Because he was a captain! No, I didn’t do that! But I thought about it. I would’ve said hey captain, ahem—pantomimes a salute.
R: That would’ve been very arrogant. Laughs.
C: So yeah, it’s the duality of not identifying with it. Two things can be true at the same time. I can be a veteran and not identify as one, you know what I mean?
R: What would it mean to you to identify as a veteran?
C: I don’t know, I feel like patriotism has been appropriated by the right, that patriotism is now something that the far-right has basically taken over. It’s ridiculous, it’s what the Nazis did in the 1930’s. If I had to do it over again, I wouldn’t have taken this path.
R: You hate wearing your uniform in public. When you walked your sister down the aisle in your dress-whites you couldn’t get to the men’s room fast enough after the ceremony to peel it off. You went to such lengths to tweet Southwest Airlines criticizing their priority boarding for service members only if they are in uniform.
C: It makes you a target. A target of terrorism. That’s a fact. You show up in an airport in a military uniform and you’re a target.1
R: What brought you to the Naval Academy instead of West Point?
C: I liked the uniform better. Laughs. No, I just thought the Academy was more prestigious than West Point and West Point reminded me of Valley Forge which I despised.
R: Since West Point reminded you so much of Valley Forge, which you hated, but it was still the same institutional structure. How do you reconcile that you hated Valley Forge but still aspired to attend the Naval Academy?
C: It was a few things. Going from Peddie as a junior and not fitting in as an overweight kid, to a Catholic school where I didn’t know anyone and just played video games, and then going to an all boys military school—not doing the normal things kids are supposed to do like hanging out with friends. I was not raised that way. I didn’t have a lot of friends as a teenager. I had all these different environments and didn’t know how to associate with girls and everything else. The summer going into my senior year of high school, I read The Lords of Discipline by Pat Conroy, which is about the Citadel [military academy in Charleston, SC] and I really associated with the main character and the sense of camaraderie that I missed.
R: Did you think you would fit in better at the Naval Academy due to your mixed background?
C: Yeah because having all those sea changes and there were some things I liked [about the military]. At Peddie, I was known as this hard core kid from military school and they thought I was crazy, the angry military kid, which at the time, it probably did seem threatening because Columbine happened the same year. In some ways I let other people define me. My friend, Matt, went to the Naval Academy, so I think that played into me making that decision.
R: Were you a good officer?
C: I didn’t take being a midshipman very seriously until I was an officer. I definitely tried. I had my shortcomings but overall my leadership style is much more casual. The younger me [25] was not a good leader because I was so insecure and didn’t understand who I was and what my place was. I got frustrated with enlisted officers. I was much better as a staff officer interacting with admirals than I was as a first line manager interacting with direct enlisted in my command.
R: Which is kind of what you’re doing now as a sales director at Microsoft selling software to the Department of Defense.
C: Correct.
R: Tell me one of your scariest or wildest experiences in the Navy.
C: This would have been January or February 2009 and we were in the Persian gulf. I was still an ensign. This was before captain Philips when the pirates were raiding the Gulf of Aden, so we had set up a counter piracy mission and we found pirates. Our ship—we were on a cruiser, there’s a picture of it in my office—launched in the direction of the pirates because they were going to board a cargo ship, we got a distress call. We launched our helos—every ship has 2 helicopters—we launched both and they circled around the Somali pirate boat. I was a visit, board, search, and seizure officer and so we practiced for this. I boarded a RHIB and we lined up and captured about 13 Somali pirates. I had a huge bowie knife.
Modern U.S. Navy guided-missile cruisers perform primarily in a Battle Force role. These ships are multi-mission Air Warfare (AW), Undersea Warfare (USW), Naval Surface Fire Support (NSFS) and Surface Warfare (SUW) surface combatants capable of supporting carrier battle groups, amphibious forces or operating independently and as flagships of surface action groups. Cruisers are equipped with Tomahawk cruise missiles giving them additional long range strike warfare capability. Some Aegis Cruisers have been outfitted with a Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD) capability.
R: What was the excitement for you personally, like how did it feel? Were you scared? Excited?
C: It was exciting at first and then you saw them and kinda felt bad for them. We went through and saw these skinny guys with distended bellies. The leader had a 1992 Dallas Cowboys jacket which, chuckles, was completely inappropriate in 2009 in the middle of Somalia, so we thought that was funny, but we felt bad for them. I didn’t feel fear because they weren’t a threat.
R: What was your active role in that?
C: I was the second of two officers. The lead officer was a JG in the first RHIB. I was in the backup RHIB which provided cover while they searched their ship, which was a small little dingy. I don’t remember if we both carried the prisoners—we swapped positions—but basically these guys were not gonna fire at us. They had a helicopter circling above them pointing a bunch of huge guns, they were probably scared shitless. It was interesting.
The Rigid Hull Inflatable Boat is a high-speed, high-buoyancy, extreme-weather craft with the primary mission of SEAL insertion/extraction and a secondary mission of marine interdiction operations. The RHIB is also used by U.S. Navy sailors for visit board and search operations at sea.
R: What was the search and seizure; what was the navy looking for?
C: They had weapons and were caught trying to board a cargo ship in the open water, international water, so we arrested them. We put them in a makeshift jail because we don’t have jails on ships. They were transported to Kenya for prosecution. I don’t know what happened to them after that.
R: What does it mean to command a ship?
C: Command is a very definitive term. I never commanded a ship. I was an ensign, so my path—if I had stayed in the navy—was to command a ship. You have to learn all the systems and how to do your job and the basics of piloting the ship, giving commands—the ship does not drive itself. It has different watch teams that do everything from man the propulsion to manage engineering.
R: So it sounds like a commander is the boss of the ship.
C: Correct, well the CO is the boss of the ship. The captain is the boss but when the captain is not on deck, you have to have someone to command the ship which falls on the junior officers.
R: Has serving in the military and Iraq affected your personal views and politics?
C: Yes.
R: How so?
C: I went from a republican family and then to Valley Forge, hardly a seat of liberalism. I was very supportive of President Bush going into Iraq because as a kid you trust adults and you don’t think they are stupid. I remember Bush called it the “axis of evil” which is so simplistic but I tuned it all out. Especially after 9/11 because everyone was so angry and we were looking for targets which got us into the war in Iraq. I was super supportive of being in Iraq and freeing them, which is so imperialistic. At the Naval Academy we were all supportive of our troops in Iraq even if we didn’t understand what was going on there. I remember seeing all the [names of] the dead. My freshman year, we started writing the names of all the dead on the walls in Bancroft Hall. It just got to be too many—thousands and thousands of dead Americans. I was like, ok capturing Somali pirates is cool, but I want to do something bigger. I remember going to Iraq and thinking I wanted to do something for my country because I didn’t feel like I was doing anything to serve my country while all these people were fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. So then I go to Iraq and I’m like, this sucks, they don’t want us here, they’re only firing at us because we’re here, this is just really stupid. I saw the fraud, waste, and abuse, and the millions and millions of dollars we spent on infrastructure for the Iraqis who did not want us there. It made me start questioning the government. I’d always questioned authority, but it was Iraq that made me change my politics. It made me lean more democratic even if I couldn’t say the word yet. It wasn’t something I could unpack at the time intellectually. It took me years to unpack it. It took working for the governor of Maryland [Gov. Martin O’Malley—D] to realize I aligned much more with democratic views than republican.
R: What advice would you give Academy alumni that are current active duty members planning to separate the navy and join the civilian job market?
C: I talk about this a lot. I would say a few things. The first job you get after leaving the military, you’re probably only going to have 1 or 2 years, so just be prepared for that. No matter how much you think “this is going to be the perfect job,” know that something like 90% of vets leave their first job within a year or two.2 Don’t expect that just because you went to the Naval Academy, it’s going to guarantee your check has been written. I have heard that so many times in my life. I have fallen for that. I felt that because of the work I put in the Academy, that society owed me something. Maybe goes back to why I love free stuff because a little part of me believes society owes me something. Laughs. When my first job ended I had no idea my value and my worth so I basically took the first job I could find which was not a fit. It took me a while to pivot into a skill set that allows us the life we live now. I would basically say that if you’re not happy [at work] for the same reason you left the military, you should continue looking. I have a lot of friends who stay in their first job and hate it.
R: How does one know their value going into job 2, 3, 4 while reconciling your “check has not been written?” How do you find that balance?
C: I think there’s a part about being humble which is hard for men in their 20’s because they are incredibly arrogant and ambitious. Or reading Mika Brzezinski’s book Know Your Value.Chuckles. The answer is you don’t. My mother was an attorney so she couldn’t really advise me. It would have been better to have an older male role model to help guide me. I may have planned a little better. I might’ve said, you know what maybe I need to get my MBA. I got my shore tour coming up [a period in a non-deployable command] instead of going back to Annapolis [to teach], maybe I should get an MBA.
R: By the time you separate from the navy, our daughter will be 6. What do you want her to know about you as a naval officer?
C: Nothing really, it was just something I did and now I’m doing it for financial security for her—and you.
R: So you don’t want her to know anything about your time in the navy?
C: No.
R: But she will want to know where Ariel lives.
C: The mermaids live in Atlantis with King Neptune. Next question.
R: What were your observations of how women were treated in the Navy?
C: I wouldn’t want our daughter to go to the Academy, the way women were treated there.
R: Which was how?
C: Well, we used you call them WWUBAs: women with unusually big asses. I just think it was very sexist, but my generation of males was questioning how to define their masculinity. That was when Tucker Max was at his heyday, the male pickup artist guy. I don't really want to talk any more.
R: Ok. Just a couple more questions, or just make your answers shorter.
R: Why was it different in Annapolis than on a ship?
C: There is a very fine line that officers don’t fraternize with enlisted. The navy is very particular about that—you do not fraternize.
R: I want to thank you for participating in this interview—
C: Arent’ you going to ask me the most important question?
According to a study by the Syracuse University Institute for Veterans and Military Families, 44% of veterans leave their first post-military job within the first year, 65% after two years.
The Earthly Kitchen is a free reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a subscriber. If you purchase from any of my affiliate links, I may receive a small commission at no additional cost to you.
