They also have steak and hot pasta, eggs that aren't green, showers, barber shops and chicks. Buttons, lots of pretty buttons. Some fellas actually prefer the accommodations to being home.

It's them submarine dudes I pity the most. Stuck in a beer can with no windows.

But no one worries about the weather. It's very consistent, no matter how far you travel.

Probably don't worry much about the weather on an aircraft carrier either. Those boats are humongous. My Dad was on a destroyer in WWII and he told me how bad it got when they got hit by a typhoon in the Pacific.

My dad was on an LSM, and he said that was a bad place to be in a storm.

I was on an LST once, has cranes on each side of the bridge to load and offload cargo. Some squid told me they are designed to break free and fall off into the ocean if the ship rolls more than 40° with the idea being the ship would roll back the other way and drop the other one and make it less top heavy.

We were rocking and rolling in the Pacific one night, not sure how close we came to losing the cranes but I bet it was close.

Lots of pansies puking that night.

Dea

Dead on Halloween Run. The stipend was never enough to cover anything after uniforms replacement, etc. my family often provided me with 200-300 a month to cover incidentals, etc.

Well I doubt when the rules defining amateurism were written that they considered the service academies. So exemptions. I get the feeling you don't like exemptions but it seems to work.

Not at all. An exemption is for some kid that has a job in the community or at the bookstore or Uncle Joe's barber shop.

When these men and women sign away years of their life to serve the nation that isn't an exemption. The fact that they get paid is irrelevant, what gets lost is the commitment, the sacrifice, sports and "amateur status" takes a back seat. If you don't understand then nothing I can say will help you.

This I know to be true. There are limitations on how much they work, how they get paid, how much they get paid, what time of year it is, etc... and the employer has to fill out a bunch of paperwork for the NCAA. Obviously, the armed services thing is a whole different animal I would think.

More times than not, these guys don't do much work anyhow. They kind of just show up for a couple of hours a day, stay out of sight, and eat popsicles .. Occasionally you get one that likes to work though.