There are two kinds of sailors in the Navy. The ones topside — the ones who work in the daylight, who see the ports and the sunsets and the spray off the bow when the ship is in a sea state — and the ones below, the ones who live in the mechanical heart of the ship, who can tell you the temperature of every space they work in because they’ve spent their entire deployment in spaces that are either dangerously hot or pervasively loud or both. On Labor Day, when America pauses to honor the people who do the work that keeps everything running, it’s worth remembering what that work looks like when the work is keeping a United States Navy ship at sea.
The Snipes
Enginemen, Machinist’s Mates, Boiler Technicians, Gas Turbine Systems Technicians, Electrician’s Mates, Hull Technicians — the rates that live in the engineering spaces are collectively called snipes, and the name captures something real about their existence. They operate in the spaces below the waterline, in the heat of the main machinery rooms, in the bilges, in the auxiliary machinery spaces where the pumps and generators and valves that keep the ship alive are located. A snipe on a steam-powered ship knows heat in a way that other sailors don’t — the kind of heat that is a working condition and a constant hazard simultaneously. A snipe on a gas turbine ship knows noise. All of them know the particular culture of the engineering department: the pride in keeping the plant running, the contempt (affectionate, usually) for the people topside who take the ship’s propulsion for granted.
Engineering is where the ship’s survival lives. The propulsion plant, the electrical plant, the damage control systems — none of it runs without the people who maintain it and operate it around the clock. When the engines fail, the ship is dead in the water. When the electrical plant trips offline, everything stops. The snipes prevent those things from happening, and when they do happen — because on a ship, things break — the snipes fix them. That work is invisible when it goes right and catastrophic when it goes wrong.
The Deck Apes
Boatswain’s Mates — BMs — are the deck apes, and they wear the title with pride. They are the sailors who work on the weather decks: handling lines during mooring and getting underway, operating the anchor and chain, maintaining the ship’s hull and rigging, standing the conning watches that require a physical feel for the ship as well as a knowledge of the rules. A BM knows knots the way an engineer knows valves. They know the sound the anchor chain makes at different stages of letting go, the feel of a mooring line under strain, the sequence of actions required to rig a replenishment station at sea when the supply ship comes alongside and the two ships are making fifteen knots a hundred feet apart and the fuel or stores need to be transferred without incident.
The deck ape’s world is topside and physical. In bad weather, they’re on deck when everyone else is below. In port, they’re the ones handling the lines that hold the ship to the pier. The work is unglamorous, the recognition is modest, and the skill required is significant. A ship with a competent boatswain’s department feels different from a ship without one — steadier, better handled, more confident in the evolutions that require seamanship rather than technology.
The Other Rates Nobody Thinks About
The culinary specialists who turn out three thousand meals a day in a galley the size of a closet, working in heat and on a schedule that doesn’t accommodate the ship’s motion in a heavy sea. The yeomen and personnelmen who manage the administrative machinery that keeps six thousand lives organized. The hospital corpsmen who are the first and sometimes only line of medical care for an entire crew at sea. The postal clerks who handle the mail that connects the crew to home — a responsibility that, in any earlier era of naval history, would have been recognized as essential to morale in a way that “postal clerk” doesn’t quite capture. Every rate on a ship does something that the other rates depend on, and the ship functions because all of it is done.
What the Work Costs
Naval service asks working people to do their work in conditions that no labor movement has ever been able to address — at sea, away from family, in spaces that are too hot or too cold or too loud or too cramped, for deployments that last as long as the Navy needs them to last. The sailors who keep a ship running through seven months in the Indian Ocean are doing work that deserves acknowledgment, and Labor Day is as good a day as any to provide it.
The work that keeps a Navy ship running is the kind of work that defines a generation of service. If you’re looking to honor it, The Ship’s Store carries collections for the ships where that work got done — cruise shirts, license plate frames, and more.