Ahoy Shipmates!

Continuing on with your Naval education we bring you another installment of MSW’s Navy Word of the Day.

Your comments and suggestions are always welcome.


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If you have comments or questions please post them here.

Thanks!

My nephew is looking at being a corpsman when he joins the Navy this fall.

Gator

My Reserve unit is about 50% corpsmen. very easy to go up in rank until HM2/HM1. If you get the "marine HM" designator (8404 and/or FMF,) you are basically guaranteed multiple OUTCONUS deployments. We have folks who have done 2-3 one-year tours in the last 6 years (again, we are talking Reserves). A great opportunity for the hard chargers.

All Nurses and Doctors are officers in the Navy as are the Dentists. Almost all of these are USNR, not regular USN. Not sure why that is because they are on duty just like the regular Navy

Basically comes down to cost to the Navy/DoD. Costs a lot less money to "hire" medical personnel (and PhDs) as adult reservists via Direct Commision, ie, AFTER they have completed 10+ years of schooling. You can then deploy the reservists (short or long term) instead of paying a long term active duty billet. Also, many active duty personnel have been sent OUTCONUS, mostly to Germany to cover the medical mission there (Army ran out of people), so they are using Reservists as "backfill" in Naval Hospitals.

Kenny - Good luck to your nephew! One thing to consider down the road, is to stay as a Reservist post active duty, and have the Navy pay for College/Nursing school. He can then apply for a Reserve Nurse Corps commission (as an example). We have 2 LCDRs who started active duty as HMs for several years, got their degrees, got a Nurse Corps commission in the Reserves, stayed a few years and now are retiring (20+ years). Whats the advantage? Their military retirement pay is at the LCDR level, and when you factor in the active duty years, well mate, thats a few 350 kits + PE per year

sorry the lenght of the post! cheers, James