I’m going to have to ask my brother if he felt that way about the subs he worked on.
I can’t say every person feels that way. But I have talked to enough veterans, served myself, read enough accounts to know that it is an extraordinary common thing.
People are human. Any young man who volunteers or is drafted is going to hate being on a floating hunk of metal at times, and would do or say nearly anything to get it over with and be back home with his loved ones and friends. I don’t think I have ever known a sailor who didn’t feel that way at some point. I felt that way myself on more than one occasion, and I can only imagine the exponential negative feeling it must have been for men who were drafted, put on a ship, and didn’t see their home for several years, in terrible, uncomfortable hot or cold environments with the threat of death hanging over your head. As another poster referenced, the acronym “FTN” was not an unknown or rare thing to hear people say or see scrawled somewhere.
But, at the same time, most men are young, and those years are transformative years. I only did one tour and got out, didn’t want to do it for the rest of my life. But, even at the time, and in retrospect most clearly, I recognized that I got far, far more out of my military service than they got out of me. I saw things and learned lessons I never, ever in a million years would have seen or learned if I had got out of High School and gone right to work or into college. Never. I would not be the person I am, I would be someone completely different.
And I am grateful beyond words for it, because my outlook on life is quite different. Even today, 35 years later, there are times when I go down to the 24 Hour store on the corner to buy something at 1:00 AM, and...it pops into my mind: “It is good to have the freedom to do this. To do what I want, to go where I want to go.”
When you are on a ship or in many parts of the military, you become acutely aware of that limitation, that your life does NOT belong to you. You CANNOT do what you would like to. And that’s the way it is.
Even apart from men who have served in the terrible crucible of actual combat on a ship, who develop a special bond with their shipmates that withstands the test of time, men still form a bond. For most of you, you are young. You pull into port in a place you have never been or seen, and you get to experience the world in a way many people simply don’t, and you do it with people who are your friends at the time. And you form a bond, and the ship is there, like a giant, unseen presence, but there nonetheless. You have to be back on it at a certain time, and you are drawn back to it, not because you WANT to go back, but you have to. And you come aboard, and there is that “ship smell”.
You could blindfold me and put earplugs in my ears, take me on a stretcher onto a ship in a dead flat calm, so there is no way I could tell you where I was being taken, and I could tell you I was on a ship. It is the smell. It is a distinctive combination of steel, paint, rust, oil, fuel, and many other smells, including human smell. Those all mingle into a smell that just isn’t found anywhere else. (I am not saying it is a “good” smell, I am saying it is distinctive.)
And when you get back to your rack, and you climb in, and pull that stupid blue curtain around you (if you are lucky enough to have been able to trade around to get enough to string together into a real curtain, not one that simply blocks your lateral sight for a couple of feet) and the sound of the ship, the announcements over the 1MC, the noises of sailors walking by, it all mixes into a...home of sorts. It isn’t home with your family, but...it is a lot more comfortable than being wet and cold on some circling liberty launch that cannot get you on the ship because the water is too rough. So the ship acquires a...for lack of a real word...personality of some kind.
Some feel it more than others, and many don’t feel it until some years later, but some felt it acutely as they were in the water or on another ship watching a ship burn, roll over, and go down. But they feel it. You can see it in their eyes when they get a chance to visit it again (if they are lucky enough to do so) or in just talking about it.
A great deal of it is nostalgia. But then again, what in life doesn’t have an element of that when you get older. If you don’t get that, you probably don’t have a heart.