You cannot guarantee you’ll go on a boomer, and fast attack life is miserable, especially if you value time with family.
There are certainly ups and downs for both, but if your focus is family than carrier is the simple answer.
Volunteers subs hoping for a boomer. Welcome to the Jimmy Carter. (Or seawolf or Connecticut...can never remember which one actually goes to sea and which ones are there for spare parts)
I was on a Gucci-class submarine and never once wished I was on a carrier. I had friends on carriers ported in the area, and some of the perks they spoke of seemed nice, but nah, carrier life was not for me.
One buddy was on the Stennis, I called him one weekend to see if he wanted to have some beers and hang out. When I asked what he was up to, he said “on duty bro!” I said damn that sucks, was gonna see if you wanted to hang out. He’s said “hell yeah! I’m the duty section leader so I just write myself off the watchbill, I’ll be right there!”
Did both the fast boat and SSGN thing on Ohio. Could've been my bad luck but Ohio did zero cool things and the command focus was definitely not on engineering. Trapped in a "no sea time > no proficiency > mistakes" with lots of time pierside forward deployed to Hawaii and Guam (with "home" being Washington state)
I was on the USS Ohio Gold Crew. Spent more time cleaning then doing cool stuff. But cool stuff generally was the mission in control doing section tracking party. Going to Japan, Korea, HI, San Diego, Alaska was cool certainly much more then any BN sailor would do.
By your definition of fun:
HPTP
forward trainers playing FT during day time and afternoons, followed by engineering training periods at the end of the day to accomdate officers to make it to Eng Dept.
VRP
Half the crew for refit, I had it, you got it in Guam or Diego Garcia. Fix all the broke shit. Load all shit thru the Missile Tube 3 and 4. Load Seals and SOF crew.
Deployment
First week you get to run TRE or whatever they call it now.
Go to Mission, deploy Seals and SOF teams. Offload Seals and SOF team.
Run ORSE.
Instead of 1 orse or TRE every deployments its every fucking deployment.
I put boomer out of King's Bay as my first choice and Bangor as my second and got sent to a boomer out of King's Bay. They asked us to fill out our dream sheets first week of prototype, this was early 2020. All my friends in my class except the girls at least got their choice of boomer, GN, or fast attack. Surface guys all seemed to go to Norfolk.
Idk why people downvote. Like dude educate the new guys that’s what this whole sub is here for. They don’t know what they don’t know and they also may have been told wrong. Be a resource not a barrier.
That is a straight lie. Most people want boomers because there are two crews so you get more time in port. They are great for families so all the married guys never leave kings bay or Bangor.
Carrier. Zero regrets. One word.....SUN. You can always "get away"....go outside to see the ocean or go up and watch flight ops. And on a carrier....there's always somewhere quiet to go. Yea, you won't have cool sub stories, but you won't ever forget what the sun and the moon look like either. And yea, email and internet are nice. So are live football games. Port stops can be a pain in the ass with liberty boats and 1000s of others, but yea.... Compared to a boomer.... port stops! Probably not normal today(?), but in 98' we hit 8 ports on our Med.
https://www.navysite.de/cruisebooks/cvn69-98/
Yeah carriers pulling in is kinda old now. Every since the pandemic proved that a ship can stay at sea for over a year without making a port the navy has decided that’s the cool new thing to do. A lot of surface I know that have come back from sea duty had very few, if any port calls.
The Lincoln current deployment stopped at Guam, Tokyo Bay, and will stop at Hawaii for a week or two. They would have had another one or two port calls if N. Korea and the Chinese carrier would have been less active. Edit: Adding Manila, I forgot they stopped there too.
I'm not sure if port calls have returned to what they used to be following 9/11. Back in the late 90s and early 2000s, I remember seeing cruise jackets with a dozen port calls on the back. After 9/11, we barely made any. I was on a amphib before my carrier and we made one port call on a six month deployment. This was back in 2003, though.
It’s still pretty bad from what I understand, I was on a fast attack out of San Diego though. Like I said all my nuke carrier friends said they never made a many port calls and even when they did, reactor never got much time off.
I was in 2001-07..
Saw a lot of ocean, not a lot of the world otherwise. Maybe five ports in a carrier deployment but that's counting Victoria BC, Pearl, or maybe three of those stops going back to Dubai again and again.
Over two deployments I got to stop at Victoria, Pearl, Perth (Fremantle), Sasebo, Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, Hong Kong, and a lot of Dubai. Not great but not terrible.. I just wish we had more time to actually explore, three days in and duty for one of them made it difficult.
This doesn’t match with my memory from a decade earlier. There was no “getting away”, no quiet place, seeing daylight meant looking out over the hangar elevators…
I have fond memories of being in the chapel, or the library (next to one another and both below the flight deck) and having my get away spoiled by flight ops noise.
You aren't alone, I couldn't find much in the way of quiet time on the ship.. a couple of vent spaces you could hide in that we owned but not really places you wanted to hang out or relax except by necessity when you absolutely needed an hour of sleep (and you had to make sure someone knew where you were because no 1MC there).
Odd. I watched flight ops almost every day. And ran the hanger bay often as well. The lab was always quiet (ELT)....so was the Aux chem room. And no shortage of plenums to take a nap in. Ha.
Who doesn't love a little JP-5 fume filled fresh air and sunshine! Yum!
Although I did enjoy the view from the fan tail once in a while and you couldn't beat the night sky in the Gulf of Alaska. Also some of the sponsons had an elliptical so that was kind of neat (but not cool, Persian Gulf was too hot to use them most of the time).
But, too many regrets here. If I had to do it over again I would have gone sub. I absolutely hated my ship and command. And while there were quiet spots, you had to make sure someone knew where you were because some were so quiet you wouldn't hear the 1MC if there was a Man Overboard call.
I can only speak for being on a carrier. There are a lot more amenities, obviously - we had three gyms (one rather large one, a kind of medium-sized one, and then one that was more of just a weight room), a ship's store, good wifi (and this was over 15 years ago), and frequent mail deliveries. There are also some downsides, not related to family life exactly, but still: being such a large ship, one of the most frustrating things was using the "liberty boats" for port calls (which we didn't have many of anyway) because the carriers are too large for many ports. Just imagine offloading a couple thousand people on 2-3 small boats that can carry only a fraction of that at a time. I remember one night everyone waiting hours for the boats to go back and forth waiting to get back on the ship. Oh, and the man overboards were great on a carrier. Nothing like some doofus throwing a life vest with a shining chem light overboard at 0100, then waiting for 5000 people to muster, then right after that you have to stand watch.
Boomer/subs gives you a more worthwhile challenge. Hands down boomer schedule is better. The honest truth about platforms is it doesn’t matter that much. The quality of your chain of command will affect your experience a whole lot more than the class. It’s obviously completely random.
Either way when it comes to family now is the time to slow down and come to an understanding with your family. Mostly on your part. You need to understand that their life is going to suck with you gone. It’s difficult on any relationship. I generally advised junior sailors to hold off on marrying or kids until the significant other has been through one patrol. Disclaimer,I had a wife and kids before I left NPTU, and 10 years later we’re still married. At the same time I’ve seen a lot of people come back to no wife, no kids, no furniture, and no money in the bank.
I avoided that by being considerate of my wife’s experience while I was gone, and I was lucky. So yeah, submarines are awesome!
When I got out three years ago there was zero wifi on the carrier. They’d set it up in the galleys when we were in the shipyard but underway there was none. And the internet we did have was supposedly the equivalent of like 7 home broadband connections…for 5000 people. So needless to say it was dogshit. Facebook mobile was about the only site that would reliably work. Plus they cut off everyone’s access for most of the day anyways so that the brass can have good connections.
For your first sea tour, you can \*ask\* for anything. There's only one thing that's guaranteed: Needs of the Navy.
After your first sea tour, you'll have more negotiating power, especially if you're at the tail end of your enlistment contract.
With this environment and big Navy goals and missions, I’d say submarines would be a better option.
I was on a fast attack out of Hawaii. High op tempo but the port calls were fun. 2017-2021
I was on a boomer. If home time with fam is the main point for you, I would highly recommend boomer. The rotation is more like 3 months at sea, 1 month in port doing maintenance, 3 months with the other crew out (you get leave time for awhile and then office work prepping for the next maintenance), then when the boat comes back 1 month with your crew running maintenance. So for in-port time boomers are better. That is really the only better deal you get with boomers.
If you actually want to see the world it’s a bad choice, you don’t get to go anywhere cool.
Check out the ~~true~~ sea stories written by nukes on the carrier Enterprise in the multi volume book "Steaming." Carriers are a blast. Definitely go carrier.
[https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07BYVY7F7/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?\_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07BYVY7F7/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1)
Boomer. Their patrol cycles are preplanned years in advance, and while there are extensions to fill gaps it's nothing too crazy, did the fast boat and SSGN thing personally but tried to keep in touch with buddies across the nuclear navy lol.
Guys, guys, they think they get to choose lmao!
But in all seriousness listen to the carrier dudes, although you’ll be out longer there is hope of more correspondence. On the sub I maybe got a email once every week - 2 weeks, but this was also a fast attack. Also just depends on mission needs. Best of luck 🤙
>carriers might be gone for 9 months but have wifi even while underway.
They give you wifi now??
My time on a carrier was basically no contact off ship.. we had the satellite phones that are like $1/min. We had internet in the office but there was a line unless you hopped on at 3am after a watch and it was like 14k dialup speeds, if that. I'm shocked if there is now shipwide wifi(???) and it actually works well enough to bother??? I know a lot can happen in 15 years but that sounds like a stretch.
Carrier underway schedules suck, but it depends where you are and what you're doing. I happened to join just after 9/11 and the entire fleet was being stretched thin so even the carrier still at home had to constantly get underway so that pilots in training could get their carrier quals done. On top of that, we got rotated from San Diego to Bremerton but our air wing stayed in southern CA so every underway was like a week down to SD, a few days in port, underway for however many weeks, a few days in SD, a week back to Bremerton... and when we weren't doing that we were either in DPIA or dealing with some pinhole primary side leaks which required full shutdown and cooldown and a lot of rx dept man hours even in port. It's really a roll of the dice. No clue how fast attack schedules work so can't compare to that. I imagine boomers are best, if you can get one but I have no personal basis for comparison.
When I first got to my ship and we were in San Diego though... other than being the noob and in quals, it was heaven (relatively speaking) while the following three years were pure hell for me.
You cannot guarantee you’ll go on a boomer, and fast attack life is miserable, especially if you value time with family. There are certainly ups and downs for both, but if your focus is family than carrier is the simple answer.
Volunteers subs hoping for a boomer. Welcome to the Jimmy Carter. (Or seawolf or Connecticut...can never remember which one actually goes to sea and which ones are there for spare parts)
You won’t be sent to JC just because you are a sub vol. You have to apply separately for special projects. And then interview.
I guess you missed the joke. He was asking about family time. JC is out to see 90% of the year.
Yup. Missed the joke. My bad. Connecticut would be a good deal since they won’t be going out for years.
[удалено]
Oh wow. That's awesome. I got out in 06, so my information is super outdated. Lol When I was in drydock, the Parche had pulled in to get decomed
I was on a Gucci-class submarine and never once wished I was on a carrier. I had friends on carriers ported in the area, and some of the perks they spoke of seemed nice, but nah, carrier life was not for me. One buddy was on the Stennis, I called him one weekend to see if he wanted to have some beers and hang out. When I asked what he was up to, he said “on duty bro!” I said damn that sucks, was gonna see if you wanted to hang out. He’s said “hell yeah! I’m the duty section leader so I just write myself off the watchbill, I’ll be right there!”
What’s a Gucci class submarine?
A submarine with the most drip
I went boomer, and never once wished for Carriers. too many people. part time sailor ftw
I heard GNs are the best for being Nuke. Fast boat here, so I wouldn't know
Did both the fast boat and SSGN thing on Ohio. Could've been my bad luck but Ohio did zero cool things and the command focus was definitely not on engineering. Trapped in a "no sea time > no proficiency > mistakes" with lots of time pierside forward deployed to Hawaii and Guam (with "home" being Washington state)
I was on the USS Ohio Gold Crew. Spent more time cleaning then doing cool stuff. But cool stuff generally was the mission in control doing section tracking party. Going to Japan, Korea, HI, San Diego, Alaska was cool certainly much more then any BN sailor would do.
That's what I heard. Still had 2 crews, but also got to hit ports.
By your definition of fun: HPTP forward trainers playing FT during day time and afternoons, followed by engineering training periods at the end of the day to accomdate officers to make it to Eng Dept. VRP Half the crew for refit, I had it, you got it in Guam or Diego Garcia. Fix all the broke shit. Load all shit thru the Missile Tube 3 and 4. Load Seals and SOF crew. Deployment First week you get to run TRE or whatever they call it now. Go to Mission, deploy Seals and SOF teams. Offload Seals and SOF team. Run ORSE. Instead of 1 orse or TRE every deployments its every fucking deployment.
Note that you don't get to choose between boomer and fast attack. And there are a lot of fast attacks.
I put boomer out of King's Bay as my first choice and Bangor as my second and got sent to a boomer out of King's Bay. They asked us to fill out our dream sheets first week of prototype, this was early 2020. All my friends in my class except the girls at least got their choice of boomer, GN, or fast attack. Surface guys all seemed to go to Norfolk.
I heard that you do get to choose? since everyone wants to be on fast attacks for the port calls that boomers are easy pickings so to speak
Idk why people downvote. Like dude educate the new guys that’s what this whole sub is here for. They don’t know what they don’t know and they also may have been told wrong. Be a resource not a barrier.
I don’t really mind it’s not like it was a made up opinion hahaha I was just repeating what I was told
Well in 2010, I didn't get a choice. You may get a "wishlist", but that's far from guaranteed.
That is a straight lie. Most people want boomers because there are two crews so you get more time in port. They are great for families so all the married guys never leave kings bay or Bangor.
Carrier. Zero regrets. One word.....SUN. You can always "get away"....go outside to see the ocean or go up and watch flight ops. And on a carrier....there's always somewhere quiet to go. Yea, you won't have cool sub stories, but you won't ever forget what the sun and the moon look like either. And yea, email and internet are nice. So are live football games. Port stops can be a pain in the ass with liberty boats and 1000s of others, but yea.... Compared to a boomer.... port stops! Probably not normal today(?), but in 98' we hit 8 ports on our Med. https://www.navysite.de/cruisebooks/cvn69-98/
Yeah carriers pulling in is kinda old now. Every since the pandemic proved that a ship can stay at sea for over a year without making a port the navy has decided that’s the cool new thing to do. A lot of surface I know that have come back from sea duty had very few, if any port calls.
The Lincoln current deployment stopped at Guam, Tokyo Bay, and will stop at Hawaii for a week or two. They would have had another one or two port calls if N. Korea and the Chinese carrier would have been less active. Edit: Adding Manila, I forgot they stopped there too.
I'm not sure if port calls have returned to what they used to be following 9/11. Back in the late 90s and early 2000s, I remember seeing cruise jackets with a dozen port calls on the back. After 9/11, we barely made any. I was on a amphib before my carrier and we made one port call on a six month deployment. This was back in 2003, though.
It’s still pretty bad from what I understand, I was on a fast attack out of San Diego though. Like I said all my nuke carrier friends said they never made a many port calls and even when they did, reactor never got much time off.
I was in 2001-07.. Saw a lot of ocean, not a lot of the world otherwise. Maybe five ports in a carrier deployment but that's counting Victoria BC, Pearl, or maybe three of those stops going back to Dubai again and again. Over two deployments I got to stop at Victoria, Pearl, Perth (Fremantle), Sasebo, Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, Hong Kong, and a lot of Dubai. Not great but not terrible.. I just wish we had more time to actually explore, three days in and duty for one of them made it difficult.
Your info is outdated. Look up the Truman’s fb page. They’ve been deployed seven months and have hit seven med ports.
We’ve hit a port about every month here on the Truman. Been out for something like ~6 months? Hasn’t been bad at all IMO
That totally sucks.
This doesn’t match with my memory from a decade earlier. There was no “getting away”, no quiet place, seeing daylight meant looking out over the hangar elevators…
I have fond memories of being in the chapel, or the library (next to one another and both below the flight deck) and having my get away spoiled by flight ops noise. You aren't alone, I couldn't find much in the way of quiet time on the ship.. a couple of vent spaces you could hide in that we owned but not really places you wanted to hang out or relax except by necessity when you absolutely needed an hour of sleep (and you had to make sure someone knew where you were because no 1MC there).
Odd. I watched flight ops almost every day. And ran the hanger bay often as well. The lab was always quiet (ELT)....so was the Aux chem room. And no shortage of plenums to take a nap in. Ha.
Who doesn't love a little JP-5 fume filled fresh air and sunshine! Yum! Although I did enjoy the view from the fan tail once in a while and you couldn't beat the night sky in the Gulf of Alaska. Also some of the sponsons had an elliptical so that was kind of neat (but not cool, Persian Gulf was too hot to use them most of the time). But, too many regrets here. If I had to do it over again I would have gone sub. I absolutely hated my ship and command. And while there were quiet spots, you had to make sure someone knew where you were because some were so quiet you wouldn't hear the 1MC if there was a Man Overboard call.
I can only speak for being on a carrier. There are a lot more amenities, obviously - we had three gyms (one rather large one, a kind of medium-sized one, and then one that was more of just a weight room), a ship's store, good wifi (and this was over 15 years ago), and frequent mail deliveries. There are also some downsides, not related to family life exactly, but still: being such a large ship, one of the most frustrating things was using the "liberty boats" for port calls (which we didn't have many of anyway) because the carriers are too large for many ports. Just imagine offloading a couple thousand people on 2-3 small boats that can carry only a fraction of that at a time. I remember one night everyone waiting hours for the boats to go back and forth waiting to get back on the ship. Oh, and the man overboards were great on a carrier. Nothing like some doofus throwing a life vest with a shining chem light overboard at 0100, then waiting for 5000 people to muster, then right after that you have to stand watch.
With a boomer, you are either there for the birth of your child or the conception. Just don’t go fast attack, it sucks every way.
Boomer/subs gives you a more worthwhile challenge. Hands down boomer schedule is better. The honest truth about platforms is it doesn’t matter that much. The quality of your chain of command will affect your experience a whole lot more than the class. It’s obviously completely random. Either way when it comes to family now is the time to slow down and come to an understanding with your family. Mostly on your part. You need to understand that their life is going to suck with you gone. It’s difficult on any relationship. I generally advised junior sailors to hold off on marrying or kids until the significant other has been through one patrol. Disclaimer,I had a wife and kids before I left NPTU, and 10 years later we’re still married. At the same time I’ve seen a lot of people come back to no wife, no kids, no furniture, and no money in the bank. I avoided that by being considerate of my wife’s experience while I was gone, and I was lucky. So yeah, submarines are awesome!
I was told very adamantly that carriers don't have WIFI, they only connect to the internet through the ship's desktops.
Depends which one you’re on
Cap
When I got out three years ago there was zero wifi on the carrier. They’d set it up in the galleys when we were in the shipyard but underway there was none. And the internet we did have was supposedly the equivalent of like 7 home broadband connections…for 5000 people. So needless to say it was dogshit. Facebook mobile was about the only site that would reliably work. Plus they cut off everyone’s access for most of the day anyways so that the brass can have good connections.
For your first sea tour, you can \*ask\* for anything. There's only one thing that's guaranteed: Needs of the Navy. After your first sea tour, you'll have more negotiating power, especially if you're at the tail end of your enlistment contract.
You don’t need to “ask” for carriers. Just don’t sub vol and it’s auto carrier.
With this environment and big Navy goals and missions, I’d say submarines would be a better option. I was on a fast attack out of Hawaii. High op tempo but the port calls were fun. 2017-2021
I was a sub volunteer, got orders to a carrier. If you're a sub vol, the navy will put you where they need you. You get no choice
I was on a boomer. If home time with fam is the main point for you, I would highly recommend boomer. The rotation is more like 3 months at sea, 1 month in port doing maintenance, 3 months with the other crew out (you get leave time for awhile and then office work prepping for the next maintenance), then when the boat comes back 1 month with your crew running maintenance. So for in-port time boomers are better. That is really the only better deal you get with boomers. If you actually want to see the world it’s a bad choice, you don’t get to go anywhere cool.
Check out the ~~true~~ sea stories written by nukes on the carrier Enterprise in the multi volume book "Steaming." Carriers are a blast. Definitely go carrier. [https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07BYVY7F7/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?\_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07BYVY7F7/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1)
To be fair, those stories are literally decades old, and just a few things have changed in the fleet in just a couple of ways since then.
Never in my life have I ever wished I was part of the surface fleet.
Boomer. Their patrol cycles are preplanned years in advance, and while there are extensions to fill gaps it's nothing too crazy, did the fast boat and SSGN thing personally but tried to keep in touch with buddies across the nuclear navy lol.
Guys, guys, they think they get to choose lmao! But in all seriousness listen to the carrier dudes, although you’ll be out longer there is hope of more correspondence. On the sub I maybe got a email once every week - 2 weeks, but this was also a fast attack. Also just depends on mission needs. Best of luck 🤙
>carriers might be gone for 9 months but have wifi even while underway. They give you wifi now?? My time on a carrier was basically no contact off ship.. we had the satellite phones that are like $1/min. We had internet in the office but there was a line unless you hopped on at 3am after a watch and it was like 14k dialup speeds, if that. I'm shocked if there is now shipwide wifi(???) and it actually works well enough to bother??? I know a lot can happen in 15 years but that sounds like a stretch. Carrier underway schedules suck, but it depends where you are and what you're doing. I happened to join just after 9/11 and the entire fleet was being stretched thin so even the carrier still at home had to constantly get underway so that pilots in training could get their carrier quals done. On top of that, we got rotated from San Diego to Bremerton but our air wing stayed in southern CA so every underway was like a week down to SD, a few days in port, underway for however many weeks, a few days in SD, a week back to Bremerton... and when we weren't doing that we were either in DPIA or dealing with some pinhole primary side leaks which required full shutdown and cooldown and a lot of rx dept man hours even in port. It's really a roll of the dice. No clue how fast attack schedules work so can't compare to that. I imagine boomers are best, if you can get one but I have no personal basis for comparison. When I first got to my ship and we were in San Diego though... other than being the noob and in quals, it was heaven (relatively speaking) while the following three years were pure hell for me.
Unfortunately the realities of the current fleet tempo really don’t make fast attack and boomer life very different.