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An RCC has only eight weeks to get 80 recruits in shape and in step. That’s the easy part of wearing the red rope. The hard part is getting to know them, teaching them to find the best in themselves and in their fellow recruits, seeing them graduate, and then doing it all over again.
A story is told about a legendary recruit company commander (RCC) who hobbled when he walked. In one version the difficulty is a stiff knee; in another it is the wearing of a built-up orthopedic shoe. The CC showed recruits how to walk, however, and consequently all who were in his companies marched with an identical limp. Where and when these limping companies of recruits passed in review is uncertain, but if the story is apocryphal, the moral is real. Sailors walk as their recruit company commander walked.
The first Navy text which incoming recruits see is the Bluejackets Manual (Naval Institute Press). This “recruit bible” introduces them to their CC:
. . an outstanding leading petty officer who is intimately familiar with instructional techniques, principles of leadership, and administrative procedures. The CC instructs you in military and physical drill and shows you how to keep yourself, your clothing, equipment, and barracks in smart, shipshape condition. While you’re in RTC [Recruit Training Command], as far as you’re concerned your company commander is the most important person in the Navy.”1
This pronouncement may seem frightening to recruits, but it is a strict mandate to company commanders. The Navy’s selection process for recruit company commanders ensures that those who are chosen recognize that with their authority comes responsibility and accountability. For CCs, the “Red Rope” is a symbolic reminder that one- man leadership is a contradiction in terms. As retired Navy Admiral Arleigh Burke has said, “There is one requirement that is absolutely essential: to be a good leader you must have good followers.”2
Leading a recruit company is likely one of the most integrally complex challenges the Navy offers. Even the Navy’s most advanced weapon and communication systems cannot compare with the complexity found in the merger of 80 individual personalities into a single unit. The experience of leading recruit companies cannot be duplicated. One must do it to understand what it is like. It is a kind of Navy leadership unlike any other.
Any concept of leadership implies a relationship with followers. The classic dilemma is: “I must follow the people; am I not their leader?” James MacGregor Burns, in his monumental book, Leadership, defines leaders as those who “induc[e] followers to act for certain goals that represent the values and the motivations—the wants and needs, the aspirations and expectations—of both leaders and followers.”3 Throughout the recruit CC selection and qualifying process, the Navy emphasizes educational rather than coercive leadership. The Enlisted Transfer Manual states:
“Recruit training duty is one of the most important and demanding jobs in the Navy, requiring the highest caliber of leadership skill, maturity, and devotion to the Navy and its mission. The RCC’s impact upon the recruit, at this initial stage in his/her career, cannot be over-emphasized. It is essential that only top quality, highly motivated individuals be assigned to this challenging duty. Therefore personnel assigned to RCC duty must be physically and emotionally qualified (i.e., fully capable of maintaining control of their emotions in stressful situations) to train recruits.”4
Moreover, the emotional maturity of Navy leadership is not necessarily guaranteed by an individual’s age or rating. Retired Navy Captain Kenneth G. Schacht, writing about the Navy Code of Conduct, pointed out that:
“In some cases, it does not matter what the leader’s rank is, but rather his actions. For example, following the sinking of a U. S. Navy ship in March 1942, a number of survivors were jammed into a small lifeboat with many others clinging to its sides. After the usual chaos, order was restored when a seaman first class spoke out authoritatively, suggesting all the wounded
should have a position inside the boat, while the others alternate their positions. No one, officers and petty officers, objected. Although he had only a few months of active sea duty, this young man was a leader.”5
According to a recent executive officer of RTC, San Diego, Commander M. J. Evans, volunteering for RCC duty is not a criterion in selection, either. Initial selection is based on the service records of petty officers (E-5 to E-9) demonstrating 36 months of outstanding performance. These individuals are then formally interviewed by their respective commanding officers or executive officers. If they are recommended by their commanding officers and their command medical officers, they become eligible for transfer to RTC duty. Those transferred to a recruit training command, however, must have at least 36 months of obligated service remaining in their current enlistment, or in the case of those having more than 15 years service, must agree not to request retirement or transfer to the Fleet Reserve within 36 months following selection.
Petty officers reporting for duty at RTC as prospective RCCs will undergo more than three months of further screening and specialized training before they may be allowed to wear the red aiguillette, the RCC’s distinctive badge of authority and responsibility. During this time they will also continue to meet the RTC standards for physical fitness and military appearance. RTC requirements for CCs are more stringent than those for general instructor duty.
Failure to complete the specialized requirements for RCC duties, whether because of physiological or psychological limitations, will not affect an individual’s career advancement. There is no official need to put square pegs into round holes. Training recruits just is not for everybody in the Navy.6
Navy instructors, including RCCs, are required to complete the Instructors Training School, Basic (IT-Basic) study course. This program includes 140 hours of classroom and laboratory instruction in writing learning objectives and lesson guides, evaluating instructional methods and materials, identifying the factors which promote and inhibit learning, and practicing skill and knowledge teaching to groups. Completing the IT-Basic curriculum raises a Navy instructor to the apprentice level.7
Acquiring a master’s proficiency in the Company Commanders School requires about 220 hours of application of the principles learned while in Instructors Training School. Prospective CCs study and rehearse the disciplines of recruit training. Besides attending seminars on customs, ceremonies, history, and traditions of the service, they must review the basics, such as folding and stowage of clothing and maintaining barracks sanitation.
Under the expert direction of experienced CCs, these candidates become proficient in drilling with rifle, saber, and guidon. They learn how to spot uniform and barracks discrepancies at a glance and how to read body language. They also learn how to evaluate good followers and how to size up prospective recruit leaders, because the measure of mature leadership is in making those followers into leaders themselves.
A constant admonition of the Company Commanders School is ‘‘Know thyself.” Through classroom study of the behavioral sciences, and through self-analysis and peer evaluation by classmates and staff, prospective CCs relate their own personalities to the combined roles of leader, manager, counselor, and helper which are common to all CCs. They must determine and become comfortable with their own unique styles of leadership and learn to project them firmly and consistently.
The “bible” that RTC presents to CCs is the Company Commanders Guide. This massive how-to handbook is indispensable. The manual addresses hundreds of possible contingencies, for example: Should a death in a recruit’s family occur during his training at RTC, his CC has a non-transferable obligation. His responsibility to the command—and to the recruit—is to make sure that the recruit has sufficient emergency leave and adequate pay, that a dress uniform is furnished, and that travel arrangements are made, including transportation to the airport. This often means the CC will personally drive the recruit and ensure that he is on the correct flight. The Guide’s lists of contingencies are not all so detailed, but the principle is clear. The responsibility of the CC, in all circumstances, is to do what is best for the recruit. This may account for the notion accepted by nearly every recruit—that his company has the best CC in the command.
Few Navy jobs produce the number of stresses that are inherent in RCC duty. Dealing with them is a vital concern. The Company Commander School curriculum emphasizes the “Three C’s” of stress management: coping, cooperation, and change. It points out that stress has positive as well as negative effects. It can be pleasant and curative; or it can be unpleasant and disease-producing. Stress cannot be avoided, but it is important to be aware of
danger signs such as irritability, depression, inability to concentrate, migraine headaches, non-specific anxieties, and the urge to run, hide, or cry. Coping, for CCs, means knowing how to adapt to physical and emotional demands and how to use the support available from staff personnel. “Hold” assignments, scheduled between companies, provide a change of pace and allow the CC to recharge his physical and mental energies.
After graduating from Company Commanders School and being awarded the Red Rope, CCs have their first official contact with recruits. This final learning period, “shadowing,” allows new CCs to instruct on-the-job under supervision, for a period of four to six weeks before they take over their own companies.
As the responsible leader of a recruit company, the CC will be called to account by higher authority if things go wrong; as the effective leader, he will make the decisions; and as the psychological leader, he will be the symbol of Navy leadership. His followers will become uneasy if he shows weakness, ignorance, sickness, or fear.8 They will expect the impossible from him and demand that his leadership be, at least, charismatic.
At first look, RCCs may pretend to see their charges with extreme levels of dismay. “Eighty kids from an orphanage,” is the way one CC put it. Another added, “All with emotional problems.” In reality, CCs are sympathetically aware that the recruits’ initial meeting with their CC and their peer group produces real culture shock. They are given the “recruit haircut,” forced to give up their leather jackets and cowboy boots, and are put into a bamlike room where they will live and sleep with 80 strangers from diverse backgrounds. Suddenly beds are “bunks,” walls ure “bulkheads,” and floors are “decks.” The newcomer may feel trapped in a nightmare, wandering through alien ierritory, stripped of his distinguishing marks of identity.
One CC observed that he feels a wry empathy for the °ccasional recruit who seems destined to fall out of step. He recalled that after having been enrolled in the Company Commanders School for several weeks, his class was given a simulated recruit seabag inspection—a search for unauthorized materials. When a copy of MAD magazine was found hidden in his clothing he could only sputter to the inspecting officer, “It wasn’t in there last night. Sir.” He realized that he had been “sabotaged” by the instructors on the school staff, and has since taken that same lame excuse from his recruits with a slightly smaller grain of salt. If a chief petty officer can get zapped, then why not a seaman recruit.
Chief Machinist’s Mate C. T. Baker, formerly assigned to the San Diego RTC’s evaluation team, believes that the quality of excellence a company achieves depends upon the amount of quality time the CC provides. When recruits feel that their CC is making that extra effort for them, they try to give all that he asks of them. Sometimes, the recruits’ efforts can get turned in the wrong direction. Baker recalls making a midnight inspection of a barracks after feeling a nagging suspicion during the day that things just were not right. He found all the bunks ready for inspection. Comers were square and covers were taut. All the recruits, however, were sleeping on the deck. Their explanation was that there was insufficient time to prepare the barracks properly at reveille and that putting their sacks shipshape the evening before morning inspection could earn the company an extra star. The misguided practice was knocked off immediately.
On another occasion, Baker had found the bulkheads in his company’s barracks dripping wet from condensation that had accumulated during one of San Diego’s infrequent cloudbursts. He instructed his recruit master-at-arms to get paper and have the bulkheads wiped down before the inspection party arrived. Baker returned to the barracks minutes before the inspecting officers and found the bulkheads wiped dry but smeared with black ink. The recruits, aware of the high cost of toilet tissue, had wiped the bulkheads down with old newspapers.
Chief Warrant Officer T. D. Kovar, now on his second tour of RCC duty, noted that a common trait for all his companies was their obsession with shortcuts. They studied in the showers after lights out; they tried to shine shoes in the dark. If allowed, they would sleep in their working uniforms, and when that was disallowed they took off dungaree shirts without unbuttoning them and put them on like jumpers, saving the seconds required to button them in the morning. CCs observed that when an adjacent barracks was vacant, guards had to be posted to prevent recruits from using the adjacent shower and toilet facilities. In the recruits’ view, the more they used the neighboring facilities, the less they would soil their own.
Another CC interjected, tongue-in-cheek, that the recruit haircut should be blamed for such behavior. In his opinion, the loss of hair and the subsequent chilling effect of cold air on the bald scalp had a tendency to freeze the recruit’s mental processes. In support of his hypothesis, he pointed out that by the time the hair had grown back in two or three weeks, the bizarre behavior seemed to have ended.
Yeoman First Class T. M. Hall claims that he has spent more time in “boot camp” than in the Navy. He served four years as a CC and graduated ten companies. Hall states that a peak experience in the training program occurs when the CC knows that he is leading an outstanding company. It surfaces when the recruits begin to show esteem for each other and start to boast of their company’s capabilities, rather than their own. They individually take on responsibility for all the company, and support, rather than ridicule, their peers who are slower runners and weaker swimmers. They adopt the “can do” attitude.
Similarly, according to Hall, a CC must never act toward a recruit in a manner that might lower the individual’s self-esteem. The purpose of training, in Chief Petty Officer Kovar’s view, is not to lower the men into lockstep conformity, but to allow each man in the company the opportunity to gain the recognition and esteem of his mates. The recruit petty officers have this company recognition. So does the “Romeo” who always gets the most letters at mail call.
Kovar describes a ploy he has used to help the introverted individual who seems to be in need of a morale boost. Kovar has the man “volunteer” for assignment as keeper of the “company trophy.” Initially, the volunteer suffers a moment of dismay when he finds that he has taken on the chore of shining the barracks trash can. But the man invariably enjoys the recognition and takes to the task with elan. The trash can does become the company’s trophy and its keeper has found a mission in keeping it gleaming and in protecting it from misuse.
The first visible milestone in company bonding occurs at the end of the first week when recruits see their first achievement scores. Their company’s standing is seen in relation to all the other competing companies’ scores. Whether the company’s rank is low or high, the ranking acts as a motivator. The high scoring company, as well as the low scorer, tries harder.
The high point in bonding is the Sports Saturday of the third week. With a cookout and team competition against rival companies, recruits hear their CCs cheering them on, rather than just telling them what to do. The release of pressure on that morning is explosive. In psychology as well as in physics, greater energy is created by releasing pressure than by confining it. The Sports Saturday furnishes a motivating force which lasts—with the help of a few nudges from imaginative CCs—for the duration of training.
When CCs are asked what has helped them most in training recruit companies, their answers follow a common theme: a supportive wife; a patient girlfriend; or as a wag added, a girlfriend who lives out of state. One chief petty officer said, “Each time I take over a company, I tell my family to think of me as being in WestPac [the Western Pacific].” Another CC said, “My company was graduated last Friday, and the men were given weekend liberty. I knew that some of them would be back in the barracks on Saturday morning, so I came back to the base. My wife didn’t appreciate it, but the recruits who were in the barracks certainly did.”
The CCs are aware of their sometimes overly paternal attitudes toward their recruits. There is an unspoken agreement at RTC that no CC will criticize another’s men. One CC even recalled how he had once “lost his cool” when the mother of a recruit in his company made disparaging remarks to him about her son. Another CC said that his great joy was to see his companies go. He also admitted to going on board Navy ships frequently in San Diego to keep in touch with his former recruits and to check on their progress.
Career Navymen are also aware of a negative aspect of RTC duties. Years away from the changing technologies of one’s rating can mean the loss of proficiency in essential knowledge and skills. However, as one CC explained, he could spend a year afloat as a division chief and despite his best efforts might not be able to see improvement. On the other hand, in just eight weeks with a recruit company, the change is likely to be spectacular.
CCs agree that the counseling aspect of their duty is a stressful responsibility. It can range from advising an educationally qualified individual to change his career path from enlisted to officer, all the way to that of helping the recipient of a “Dear John” letter forget about going over the fence. CCs counsel the miserably homesick, the malingerers, and the neurotics. Conversely, they must convince highly motivated men, at times their recruit petty officers, that it is necessary to ease up. Recruits have trained with 105° fevers, or stumbled about on badly blistered feet to avoid losing more than three days of training— which would cause them to be held back and reassigned to a following company. For some men, the emotional trauma associated with losing their company is far greater than the physical pain of enduring a fever or injury.
For the more outstanding CCs, the training of recruits may take on the aura of a calling. They return for second and even third tours of duty in RTC. When Chief Warrant
Officer Kovar came to RTC in 1974, he was a signalman second class and 22 years old. Now on his second assignment as a CC, he is convinced that the job offers both the greatest challenge and the highest personal satisfaction of all Navy billets.
Recently retired Master Chief Hull Maintenance Technician R. E. Littlemeyer completed three tours of duty in a recruit training command. He explains that CCs are required to perform a multitude of training activities beyond that of the basic Navy training. There are special units such as the Crack Rifle Team, the 50-States Flag Team, and the Drum and Bugle Corps which require dramatic and musical skills and coaching from CCs. The recruits in these special units must also meet the academic and physical training required of all recruits. Moreover they will, during their recruit training, represent the Navy in public Performances at celebrations, and in civic parades. The critical demand for leadership and unit cohesion is intensified in these special groups since a 40% personnel change takes place each week.
CCs also fill “hold” assignments—when not leading recruit companies—as instructors in the RTC’s Company Commanders School, in the classroom instmctional program for recruit training, and in the Apprentice Training Program (an extension of recruit training which is required °f those who do not have prior assignment to a service school). The Apprentice Training staff conducts separate Programs for seamen, firemen, and airmen who go directly from RTC to fleet and air commands. Still other CCs are assigned to retraining and remedial tutoring for recruits held back from their companies. CCs also have track and swimming coaching duties since recruits must develop these skills prior to graduation.
Outstanding CCs are assigned to evaluation teams that rank the performance of companies in competition. They recommend the companies for stars, flags, and other coveted honors. Another example of a “hold” assignment is that of submarine-qualified Chief Machinist’s Mate John h- Jones, who is now assigned as an instructor in the
Recruit company commanders often teach more than the basics. The Apprentice Training staff conducts programs for seamen, firemen, and airmen who go directly from RTC to fleet and air commands.
Naval Veterans Retraining Program.
The prevailing opinion among recruits interviewed that each of them was led by the best CC on the base was held not only by the recruits who were successfully meeting their training objectives, but also by those who had failed. Recruits who were unable to adjust either physically or emotionally were inclined to rationalize numerous circumstances for their inability to live up to Navy expectations, but none suggested that poor leadership by their CCs was a contributing factor. This admiration for CCs displayed by men in outgoing units awaiting medical and administrative discharge is supported by men previously separated from the Navy who keep in touch with friends still in the company. They write to them and more often to their former CCs.
Without question, “Graduation Friday” is a day of anguish for CCs. Their companies on that day do it all themselves; the CCs can only watch them pass in review. As one CC reported, when he stands to salute his company as they pass in review, the whole eight weeks of training passes through his mind’s eye. He recalls the 0330 reveille, the 88-hour work weeks, and the 600 miles he marched with them on the grinder. But the real trauma for the CC is putting his recruits on the bus which will take them from the RTC to their new commands. If the CC does not then have moist eyes and a lump in his throat, he has not really been a true company commander.
Recently a chief warrant officer of some 30 years service walked with this author across the drill field at RTC, San Diego. Several new companies were just beginning to leam how to march. We could see the desperate looks on the faces of the CCs and the struggles of the new recruits to get in step with their leader. The officer stopped for a moment, and then, as if he were talking to himself, said, “You know, I can’t even remember who my first commanding officer was, but I’ll never forget my recruit company commander.”
'The Bluejackets’ Manual, 20th Edition (Annapolis, Md: Naval Institute Press, 1981), pp. 6-7.
2Adm. Arleigh A. Burke, USN, (Ret.), All Hands, April 1984, p. 7.
3James MacGregor Burns, Leadership (New York: Harper and Row, Publishers, 1979), p. 19.
*Enlisted Transfer Manual, NavPers 1590 C, 10.07.
5Capt. Kenneth C. Schacht, USN, (Ret.), “Reflections on the Code of Conduct,” Proceedings, April 1982, p. 35.
6NavPers 10909 C, 10.0731.
7Course Mission Statement, Project Plan for Group-Paced Instructor Course (A- 012-0011), 1983.
8Dr. Eric Beme, MD, The Structure and Dynamics of Organizations and Groups (New York: Grove Press, 1966), p. 105.
Chief Colvard joined the U. S. Navy in 1936 and served in one cruiser, two battleships, three destroyers, and three command ships. He retired in 1956 and taught in the San Diego, California, area from 1958 to 1982. He earned a master’s degree in education and counseling at San Diego State University in 1960, with a thesis on naval enlisted leadership.