Military Disobedience

Submitted By marele329
Words: 1396
Pages: 6

During my 9 years serving in the United States Navy, there were many occasions where I witnessed some type of disobedience from either enlisted personnel towards an officer or even officer to officer, honestly it was quite normal; especially when it comes to one individual having more power over the other even though they both have the same rank but the other would have more time then rank. When the undue stress of being in the middle of a war zone is involved sometimes people can lose their composure and cause a situation that they really had no control over, for example an argument over control, and the fact that one person who didn’t get the promotion but the other did; therefore causing a person to be very jealous and all the person is doing is striking out.

When we talk about different ways of using power we need to consider that the military uses not only a chain of command but also a code of conduct that usually guides each and every move we make. That being said, there are still those that choose to do things their own way, for example; those that have drinking problems, or those with domestic problems that end up going AWOL which stand for absent without leave, you also have the individuals that never report to work on time and need a little motivation. Usually a higher ranking individual who is responsible for this person who is not conforming to the code of conduct rules will use a tactic of power to put an end to the individual’s issues and set him/her straight. Coercive power is the answer to this puzzle, all the higher ranked person needs to do is create some kind of punishment for this to do to maybe motivate the individual to straighten up or the punishment next time won’t be so easy.

Believe it or not, in the military the rules are very different than those in the real world, what I am referring to is that honestly; there are no rules. Most of what happens especially when it comes to a disgruntle member is simply to fix the problem. If fixing the problem refers to making that disgruntle member work their but off in the bath room scrubbing toilettes then that is what’s going to happen, it’s all about the imagination of the person giving the orders, plain and simple. In the real world you need to worry about each and every person’s rights.

I’m going to give an example of a personal experience of mine that happened in the middle of the Adriatic Ocean with myself and my supervisor AK1 Bacsafra; I was transitioning from one job to another because I was hurt with a back injury from loading bombs on F-18’s during the war in Bosnia. My new job required me to do a lot of running to deliver messages and making sure I didn’t forget to get the numbers right on the ledger to keep track of the spending for the troop, like boots and jackets. Like I said I was hurt really bad, I had a slipped disk, but that didn’t stop them from making sure I got my job done. So I was kind of giving my new boss a hard time and he didn’t like it much, after all I was just a pee on who usually doesn’t get heard. Well my boss was tired of my attitude and he offered me to meet him down stair to talk with him about my problem, I was really interested in knowing what he had in mind so off we went. When we reached our destination he turned around a started taking of his shirt, I wasn’t sure why until he turned around and told me that from this moment on he is not my boss and that he is just another guy on the boat. I was confused, until he asked if I wanted to take a swing at him. He was ready to knock my head off just because I wasn’t willing to move as fast as he wanted me to move while doing my job. He explained a little about what he expected from me and understood if I seemed a little lost or not sure of what to do, considering all I knew was to load bombs and my new position would take some getting used to. After that meeting with my boss downstairs, we ended up becoming best friends; we have been in contact with each other