You want to know what I love about the Navy? (In retrospect of course, there's lots to love.) The swearing. Possibly the foulest, crassest, most vile speech on the planet is made available as a staple, right alongside the scrambled eggs.

I understand that George Carlin used to tell a joke about some list of words that you could never say on network television. The way the joke went, he would recite the words, and everybody laughed, precisely because you couldn't say them. And he had! (Gasp. Laugh.) Having uttered the 5 or 6 unutterables, he put himself so far beyond the pale, that it was a shock to the system.

The people who laughed at George Carlin had a network television frame of reference. If it didn't fly with Ozzie & Harriet, it wouldn't fly with them. If Mork & Mindy found themselves put out by the language, or the difficulty, or the situation, chances were good that these same people would be troubled.

In the Navy, a sewage main once opened in the overhead of our bathroom, depositing a two inch deep layer of raw human waste into our bedroom. In the Navy, you visit people who eat fermented duck embryos for enjoyment. In the Navy, working for thirty-six hours isn't uncommon, and you should anticipate no special attaboys. Your hands will be cold, you will be wet, tired, uncomfortable, thirsty, hot, and filthy; you will be able to fall asleep on an eight-inch wide I-beam, you will know men who urinate in their beds out of laziness, and you will be thrown up on at least once or twice. (Otherwise, how will you know that you've had fun?) You will clean things that are repulsive, and then eat pringles off of the floor. You may be beaten with a fire hose, you might swim through garbage, and you will see a side of humanity that that you probably wish you hadn't.

All of the cursing, swearing, and expletives that are deleted from our lives here in Suburbia, are the elements of a life that has long since lost its delete key. Shipboard speech is symptomatic of a shipboard frame of mind. Shipboard speech is born out of a raw and unvarnished existence. The life that deletes that speech, is the life that has whitewashed over elements of humanity that really aren't far from Suburbia. Every time we neglect to drop a well-placed F-bomb on some moron who desperately needs it, we rob them of a valuable experience.