As an enlisted man, you get to where you can call anything ‘sir’.
>> As an enlisted man, you get to where you can call anything ‘sir’.
It was a little different in submarines. The “O”s had to qualify — and we enlisted guys signed off on ‘em. Made for a different relationship.
As the saying went, one E to another: “Don’t call me ‘sir’, my parents were married!”
I was an E-3 walking back to the barracks from the exchange at the Norfolk NOB. It began to rain and rather than have my glasses get wet, I took them off and stowed them in my jumper pocket.
A pickup truck came down the street and I squintingly made out that the driver was wearing khakis and was probably an officer. Just to be safe, I made the beginnings of a salute.
But the pickup was closing pretty fast, and with the salute three quarters of the way to my brow, I recognized that it was not an officer driving the pickup, but a chief petty officer.
Rather than render a salute, I quickly finished the gesture by scratching my cheek.
The chief, however, was under the full assumption that a salute was being essayed and out of courtesy endeavored to return mine. But then he saw that I was not in fact saluting, and made every effort to terminate his salute-in-progress, the result of which caused him to missteer his pickup and engineer the beginnings of a vehicular mishap.
Quick of response in a dire moment he was, though, and wrested control of the swerving machine sufficient to miss the stationery objects in his erstwhile path and resume a wobbly course down the street.