Training Officer
Uss Curtis Wilbur (Ddg 54)
Yokosuka, Kanagawa, Japan
- As the training officer, I managed all of the training requirements for the ship. A US Warship has a lot of very technical equipment on it, all of which must be maintained to ensure that it is going to work when it needs to. That means that there must be technicians that are properly trained. The navy has certain requirements, for example, I was required to have four trained technicians that could work on our large 5" gun. If one of them was chosen to rotate to another command, I would learn that, and then work with the navy schoolhouses to schedule and send another sailor on the ship to the school to learn to be a technician. I had a giant excel spreadsheet with over 180 training requirements on it that I tracked every day. When I got to CURTIS WILBUR, we had 84% of our requirements completed. When I left, we were at 94%- My ship was stationed in Japan, but a lot of the schoolhouses were in the continental US, so in order to send the sailor to the 5" gun school, I would have to fly him home. I had a yearly budget of $500,000 that I could use to fly sailors home. I would have to submit my budget request a year out, and then ensure that I got all of my requirements completed while staying inside that budget. - Also, a US destroyer is capable of conducting lots of different missions. The navy breaks them down into 21 different warfare areas (surface warfare, navigation, flight operations, etc.). We are required to certify in each area every two years. It was my responsibility to track where each of those warfare areas were in that two year period, and if one of them was going to expire soon, I would work with the inspectors to schedule the next inspection. Each area had a separate officer in charge of them, so I worked with all of them to ensure they were maintaining all of their requirements, and would help them prepare for their next inspection.-I also stood multiple watches including Command Duty Officer, which is the senior officer onboard in port.