Before they get to the Navy, recruits at Naval Training Center Great Lakes first must negotiate Battle Stations—a series of high-pressure scenarios that re-create real-world catastrophes and operations to test their teamwork, leadership skills, and creativity.
The first evolution in the 12-part, 12-hour boot camp final exam requires Navy recruits to respond to general quarters—leaping from their racks and properly donning their battle dress—in seven minutes. And it's all uphill from there. The facilitators who run Battle Stations make sure of it.
Beginning usually between 2100 and 2200, when recruits have had just enough rack time to get comfortable, Battle Stations puts these young men and women through a series of scenarios they must negotiate while under fire of sorts from facilitators, time limits, and each other. The exercise debuted in 1997, cobbled together from an idea and several acres of plywood, as the final exam boot camp had been crying out for, to hear folks at Naval Training Center Great Lakes tell it. The Navy needed a challenging, team-building exercise to link everything recruits learn during their nine weeks at the center.
"Battle Stations is where we tie it all together in a high-stress, fatigue environment that forces our recruits to come together as a team," says Rear Admiral David Polatty, Naval Training Center's commander. "We got letters from sailors on the Cole who said that when they heard the explosion [of the terrorist bomb set off while the ship was refueling at Aden on 12 October] they immediately remembered what they'd learned in Battle Stations. In my opinion, that validates the program right there."
Now up and in battle dress, the recruits are told that in a real emergency at sea they would be expected to dress and report to their duty stations—wherever they might be—in the same seven minutes they were just given. Then they are reminded they are on a mission, "Just as surely as George Washington was on a mission at Valley Forge or your predecessors were on a mission at the Battle of Midway," as one facilitator put it.
Recruit division commanders who establish a solid record of success training recruits can opt for duty as facilitators. They follow recruits through Battle Stations, brief and debrief their charges before and after scenarios, lay down the law, and make sure nobody gets hurt.
After a safety briefing, recruits double-time into the night air, starting the first of many miles they will cover during the exercise. Scenarios are scattered across Recruit Training Command, and recruits must run to several different buildings and use a tunnel to get across a state highway that bisects the base. This seemingly inefficient layout is a good way to keep the pressure on, facilitators say. If scenarios were set up in a logical order, there would be too much hurry-up-and-wait time.
The first Battle Stations consisted of six scenarios in six hours and was conducted mostly in a drill hall. Portable obstacles were rolled into the hall and recruits moved through the scenarios in round-robin fashion. It worked, but there was a lot of waiting and running around the block. It was, however, a substantial improvement over the Physical Readiness Test, which to that point was the closest thing boot camp had to a final exam.
"I feel like I missed something when I went through boot camp in 1980," says Master Chief Darryl Mullen, Battle Stations Department master chief from 1999 to June 2001. "When I graduated, I knew how to fold my underwear properly. This teaches teamwork and innovation. It's also the best job I've had since I've been in the Navy."
Exercise scenarios either are taken directly from Navy history or have Navy history grafted onto them during the pre-evolution briefings that set up the events. It makes sense, of course, to train recruits to respond to realistic threats—if a situation happened before, it can happen again. And perhaps as important, the historical briefings link the recruits' efforts to the proud tradition they are about to join.
The second event in Battle Stations, for example, is the Shaft Alley Rescue Scenario. Recruits use Miller boards (stretchers) to transport a wounded sailor (actually a 180-pound dummy) through the Confidence Course, an obstacle course used during boot camp. The event is linked through its briefing to the aftermath of the attack on Pearl Harbor, during which sailors had to carry hundreds of wounded shipmates up from the bowels of their crippled ships, crawling over, under, and through debris while trying not to make their charges' wounds even worse.
It's a difficult exercise made more difficult by the fact that the dummy can't tell the recruits when they're doing something that hurts. It's easy to lapse into treating the dummy like a dummy—but the facilitators watch closely.
"We did poorly" on the exercise, noted Seaman Recruit Anthony Bizzell, a 20-year-old Bronx native who joined the Navy ten days after he got married because it looked to offer a future for him and his family. "We didn't work together as a team."
Petty Officer Rogelio Velasco, one of the facilitators who ran Bizzell's unit, the Kilo unit of Division 197, through Battle Stations, agreed. "Worst of all, if that dummy had been a real shipmate, he would be dead by now. He was depending on you, and you let him down."
The young men of Kilo did much better on their third stop, the Mass Casualty Scenario. This evolution requires recruits to find injured sailors in a post-attack environment and drag them to safety through a maze of tunnels, open corridors, and obstacles, all of which are either dark or illuminated haphazardly by strobe lights. The soundtrack of rending metal, explosions, and screams is deafening. The set is large, and the course includes many blind turns that force recruits to double back. It's tough, and the simulated chaos could rattle the steadiest nerves.
Mass Casualty's maze of tunnels recently was altered and the soundtrack changed to reflect the attack on the USS Cole (DDG-67). Originally designed to resemble the explosion at the U.S. Marine Corps barracks in Lebanon in 1983, the set still has the gravel on the floor, which wouldn't be encountered on a ship. But nobody's in a hurry to remove it because, well, it makes the scenario dirtier and more difficult.
"Most of the things we use in Battle Stations came to us at essentially no cost to the Navy," Master Chief Mullen explained. "We get stuff through the DRMO [Defense Reutilization and Marketing Office, which sells off surplus items] or inactive ships. Through normal evolution, the facilitators get bored and come up with new additions for the scenarios or completely new scenarios. They can be pretty imaginative."
Most Battle Stations scenarios are set up in Building 1312, now known as the Battle Stations building. In 1997, the former clothing-issue facility had been condemned by base authorities. Early facilitators got the building back up to code and received approval from the Great Lakes Fire Department to put it to use. Then, with castoffs from around the Navy and a forest of plywood, they built the minimalist stage sets that are the backdrops for Battle Stations. It's surprisingly simple, but facilitators keep the pressure on and provide the urgency that the fake smoke and blank walls can't. Plans are in the works to build a virtual-reality Battle Stations by 2007, possibly with help from experts in the theme park industry.
Sometimes the simplicity lulls recruits into thinking their tasks are simple, too. The Kilo recruits, for example, did well in the chaotic Mass Casualty Scenario but tripped up during Stores On-load, which is comparatively mundane. The exercise begins with a briefing on the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, when U.S. ships had to deploy to Cuba as quickly as possible to establish a naval blockade. To simulate loading stores onto a ship, recruits move dozens of pallets and steel containers filled with sand from one room to another, up and down ramps designed to mimic pier-side environs. The evolution should be completed in 11 minutes. The Kilo group required 16 minutes, and they bickered among themselves while they did it.
Seaman Recruit Guy McPherson, a 22-year-old Jamaican immigrant by way of Philadelphia, quiet for most of the night, stepped up to the plate during Stores On-load. Taking the clipboard from the team leader, who had volunteered for the position, McPherson took over, directing his fellow recruits to finish the job properly, if not as quickly as the facilitators would have preferred.
"He wasn't doing the job and I knew I could do it better," McPherson said of his snap decision. "They tell us to take the initiative, so I did. It feels pretty good."
Most of the recruits who go through Battle Stations will never have to deal with an actual mass casualty situation. Nor are they likely to have to repel boarders, abandon ship, or crawl through a superheated scuttle, all of which are represented in different scenarios. But they will have to use other skills. "Eighty percent of those sailors will have to get under way immediately someday," said Captain Edward Gantt, commander of Recruit Training Command, "and they'll have to load the ship so they can proceed as soon as possible. That's when they'll need the teamwork skills and the efficiency we teach them here in boot camp.
"Unless they're unlucky enough to be caught in combat or in a fire at sea, they may not be pushed to Battle Stations level again," he continued. "But the more you train in peace, the less you'll bleed in war. We can't pick and choose which of these recruits will be the unlucky few who have to face real-world catastrophes ... so we can't afford to err on the conservative side. Battle Stations is a worst-case scenario."
Other Battle Stations exercises include the Emergency Sortie Scenario, which replays the rush to get ships out to sea in 1989 as Hurricane Hugo headed for Charleston Naval Base in South Carolina. Recruits hurry through line-handling procedures on the mockup USS Marlinespike, one of two seamanship trainers at Great Lakes.
The Repel Boarders Scenario uses the marksmanship trainer to tell the story of Medal of Honor recipient Petty Officer James Williams, who earned two-dozen medals in eight months in Vietnam, many for riverine battles in which he was greatly outnumbered. Recruits don gas masks and fire laser-equipped M-16 rifles at targets. If their aim is poor, they "die."
In the Investigate and Rescue Scenario recruits have to find and retrieve two colleagues in a room filled with foggy, toxic fumes. A spill of xylene, a cleaning solution, on board the USS Holland (AS-32) in 1992 provides the him
The Forrestal Escape Scuttle Scenario is one of those creativity-on-a-shoestring scenarios for which Battle Stations is known. It is based on the 1967 bombing of the USS Forrestal (CVA-59) off Vietnam, during which sailors had to crawl through an emergency escape scuttle made red-hot from nearby fire. In the Battle Stations version, hot water is pumped through the scuttle-an oversized porthole-to safely simulate the situation as recruits help each other through. The first version of the scenario was a wooden contraption on wheels now used as a demonstrator.
"Whenever I think I've seen all the creative solutions to the Battle Stations scenarios, I'm proven wrong by somebody who comes up with yet another genuinely enterprising answer to a difficult problem," Master Chief Mullen said of the program. "Of course, that goes both ways. Whenever I think I've seen the dumbest solutions, well.... That's how the recruits learn."
In the Magazine Flooding Scenario recruits must pass several stacks of three-inch round shipping cases through a small hole and stack them in another compartment. The scenario is based on the actions sailors took to save their ammunition after the USS Tripoli (LPH-10) struck a mine in the Persian Gulf in 1991.
The Iraqi attack on the USS Stark (FFG-31) in 1987 is the basis for the Shipboard Firefighting Scenario, played out in the firefighting trainer.
Recruits must jump off a high platform into the center of the swimming pool, float together with an inadequate number of life preservers, and climb into a raft in the Abandon Ship Scenario, replicating the story of the survivors of the USS Indianapolis (CA-35), sunk by a Japanese submarine in 1944.
When it's all over, about 1.5% of men and 7.5% of women fail to make the cut the first time around, sometimes because of serious lapses, sometimes because they racked up three strikes for relatively minor errors. Most take another shot at Battle Stations two days later. Very few make the same mistakes twice. Nearly 97% of the 163,000 or so recruits who have attempted Battle Stations passed it eventually.
Those who finish Battle Stations are rewarded with a huge breakfast and a long nap. Much more important, however, at the "ballcapping" ceremony—the 12th and final scenario—they are able to trade in their "Recruit" caps for new ones that say simply "NAVY." Tears are common at the ceremony, which includes videotaped congratulations from Admiral Polatty and Captain Gantt, along with stirring images of Navy life set to a soundtrack that includes the National Anthem and the Lee Greenwood tearjerker, "I'm Proud to Be an American."
"I'm hurting," Seaman Bizzell said after the ceremony, "but I can go home and tell everybody that I've accomplished something. They can't tell me I'm a quitter anymore. Not after this."
Mr. Flink covers Naval Training Center Great Lakes for the Chicago Tribune. He also has written for various defense-oriented publications, including Navy Times and Naval History. Mr. Flink is scheduled to join the (slim) ranks of male military spouses in October and is pretty sure that the experience will warrant an eye-opening essay after a year or two.