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Posted by Fran Kent
on October 13, 2007, 5:54 pm
207.200.116.195
In the unlikely event that any of you old men should be called to active duty, you would be puzzled by some of the rating badges you might see, and by the absence of others. There are no more signalmen, Roy, nor any radiomen: both have been overtaken by technical progress, their skills made obsolete; we now have information systems technologists (explain that to a young woman in Brooklyn). The gunner's mate survives, but why he's called a gunner's mate is a puzzle; he now has less to do with guns than missiles. And there are no more ship's cooks; there are culinary specialists. All sorts of new ratings have been created, including legalman, which suggests that the court martial hasn't been discontinued.
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