If you join the military, you have to go through boot camp.

While boot camp is designed to be tough, it shouldn’t make you suicidal.

In today’s story, one Navy recruit is bullied by the petty officers who are in charge of training.

When he ends up in the hospital as a side effect of the bullying, the Navy Chaplain gets revenge on the officers.

Let’s see how the story unfolds…

Say Goodbye to Your House and Your Retirement

This one is not technically my revenge, but some revenge I got to see up close and take joy from.

The background is most of the story so this will be a little long.

Trigger warning for self harm.

I was in the Navy and stationed on the submarine base in Connecticut.

Meet Bill…

I had a friend I met in boot camp and we were in the same class for our A school (Navy job training)

We’ll call that friend Bill.

Now Bill wasn’t the most physically fit guy. He was short, kind of chubby, and wore glasses.

However Bill was really smart, and as the sonar technician he was meant to be he would’ve been amazing.

He had a pragmatic way of looking at things I really valued in a friend and I know it would have made him successful if he had made it out to the fleet.

Here’s the deal with some of the petty officers…

While in school we had a couple of petty officers that were tough.

They somehow convinced themselves they were super soldiers despite the fact that our jobs in that field are really nerd centric.

You get picked for that job because of your math and computer skills, not your lift number.

Still they were both all about being fit and working out all the time.

The petty officers bullied Bill.

We would do physical training 3 times a week and while most of us could keep up, Bill often fell behind on runs or didn’t quite meet what these two idiots believed to be the standard.

To be clear, Bill did pass the minimum requirements for fitness, he just didn’t go as extreme as these guys.

(Side note for other Navy vets, he got the MCPON coin for how hard he pushed himself at PT the day he visited.)

The end result was that they would constantly berate and belittle Bill.

They’d call him fat, lazy, and everything else, They’d tell him he should unalive himself, you name it.

They were always on him despite him passing his assessments.

Now Bill’s physical and mental health are suffering.

At some point, Bill pushed himself too hard and injured his knee.

He told these petty officers he was injured and had been seen by the doc on base.

The doc had put him on light duty so the knee could recover.

He had the paperwork to back it up.

They elected to ignore that and threaten him with kicking him out if he didn’t do the workouts.

So Bill kept pushing himself, injuring himself more, and his mental health degraded the whole time.

Bill decided to talk to the Chaplain.

In my time in the Navy you didn’t get mental health services really, the only person to talk to like that was the Chaplain.

For those who don’t know, the Chaplain is the religious leader, usually a pastor/priest/rabbi that has signed up as a commissioned officer.

Our Chaplain was the sweetest little woman you ever met, but as a Chaplain she held the rank of Captain (high ranking officer).

So Bill set up a meeting with the Chaplain to talk about things.

The petty officers convinced Bill to cancel his meeting.

When Bill informed the petty officers he would be missing class the next day for his Chaplain meeting, they yelled at and berated him more.

They called him a wimp, useless, not fit for the Navy, and everything else you can imagine.

They convinced Bill he was being weak and the Chaplain wouldn’t care about his issues, that nobody would care.

They promised to make life even harder if he didn’t show the next day.

So he cancelled his meeting.

He got a call from Bill that night.

Evidently, bad luck hit and that night his girlfriend was also breaking it off with him.

(She wasn’t worth his time or money but he couldn’t see that)

That night I awoke to a 3:00 AM call from Bill.

I couldn’t hear anything and I asked several times “Bill you there? Are you ok?”

It wouldn’t have been the first time that I got a drunk dial from one of my friends after a hard day like Bill had.

Sailors have been known to drown their sorrows a bit.

Eventually I figured it was a butt dial/ drunk dial and hung up and went back to bed.

I still regret that decision.

It was much worse than a drunk dial…

The next day, the truth came out.

Me and a couple other friends got calls from Bill’s now ex-girlfriend informing us he was in the hospital because he slit his own throat.

Turned out a few of us got that 3:00 AM call, but Bill couldn’t speak at the time and was kind of out of it due to blood loss.

We finished what we had to do on base and rushed over to the hospital.

The Chaplain wanted revenge.

As we got there, the Chaplain was on her way out and we passed her in the hallway.

She spoke to us briefly to say that Bill would be ok, and she wouldn’t forget this.

I have never seen a look on someone’s face that so accurately depicted raw unfiltered rage.

It took us all by surprise because she was such a small, sweet, and personable lady.

But the look in her eyes, you could just tell she wanted someone to pay for this, she wanted revenge and we all knew she wore the kind of rank that could get it done.

Bill’s glad he survived.

We visited Bill who could barely talk but he told us the story of what had happened, what he was thinking at the time and how glad he was it didn’t work.

Apparently it was cold enough that the blood clotted on the outside of his neck and made a kind of patch that kept him alive long enough for the EMS to find him and get him to a hospital.

The Doctor said he missed his carotid by about a millimeter.

The Chief wanted to talk to him and his friends.

A week went by and we hadn’t heard anything until we got called in by the Chief of the training command (the boss to these petty officers).

He said he wanted to check on the rest of us and make sure there weren’t any other issues with these guys he wasn’t aware of, and that we were all ok.

I let him know about an chewing out he gave me a few months back, that I was really set up by these guys and they had lied to him.

My friends cited a couple other examples of their own with these guys being generally horrible dishonest people.

I don’t think it mattered, I think their fates were already sealed and we were being asked for more ammo to bury them with.

He went to talk to the Chaplain.

The next day they were nowhere to be found and we were introduced to new instructors who would be taking over our training permanently.

After class, I decided to stop by and asked the Chaplain what happened.

She told me she had never been more disgusted by the actions of a sailor than these two guys who convinced someone NOT to come see her.

She teared up a bit regretting that she didn’t get the chance to help Bill before he made his attempt.

In her mind, it was these two that precipitated and enabled Bill’s attempt.

Here’s what the Chaplain did…

So on to the revenge:

The Chaplain told me she went to the Admiral in charge of the entire base, and demanded their immediate discharge.

He granted it.

Both petty officers were immediately processed out with dishonorable discharges.

I can’t remember the exact charge I heard they cited for it, but I know the Navy has a way of selling BS on paper when they want a certain outcome.

Especially officers at that high level.

The consequences of getting dishonorably discharged are severe…

So basically they get no VA benefits of any kind, got kicked out of the base housing they lived in, and could probably only find work at a gas station or under the table stuff somewhere.

Also I know from someone else who got the boot that the Navy only pays for a single bus ticket to get you back home, not your family or any of your belongings.

When you have a discharge like that, no company with DOD contracts is allowed to hire you.

That includes McDonalds because they have stores on bases throughout the country.

Taco bell, Subway, etc. none of them will give you a job.

They can’t and they don’t want to anyway.

The petty officers lost a lot.

So I don’t know where these guys went or what become of them, but I know their lives were irrevocably ruined.

One of them had about 18 years in, so he was 2 years from retirement and lost it all.

The other was at about 12 years, so he also lost a lot.

Wherever they are now, I’d be very surprised to hear they’re making more than minimum wage.

Everything turned out alright for Bill.

As for Bill?

Well he made a full recovery, he got a full medical discharge.

Which is an honorable discharge that meant E5 pay for the rest of his life, full benefits, and a referral to a counselor in his home state once he got back there.

All paid for by the Navy.

We lost touch over the years but I did see on Facebook he got himself together, became a police officer, and got married.

Those petty officers were horrible bullies!

I wonder how many people they bullied before they finally got called out on it.

Let’s see how Reddit reacted to this story…

This reader thinks the officers probably never rebounded.

The bullying needs to stop!

This person can relate to Bill’s situation.

Perhaps it wasn’t really revenge.

Here’s the perspective of someone with a military background.

That Chaplain wasn’t messing around!

And well she should not have been.

If you liked this post, check out this story about an employee who got revenge on a co-worker who kept grading their work suspiciously low.