How Navy Officers Are Trained At The Grueling 13-Week Officer Candidate School | Boot Camp

This is not boot camp. These are future Navy officers going through their initial training in Officer Candidate School, where they will be accountable for the lives of the crew they command aboard their ship. Business Insider followed Class 01-TAC-26 at Officer Candidate School over 13 weeks, following their progress through different phases of training to find out how this demanding program transforms civilians and prior enlisted sailors into Naval Officers. Every year, the Navy produces about 1,900 new officers who graduate from OCS at Naval Station Newport, Rhode Island. A Naval Officer is ultimately a leader. Every Naval Officer is going to have sailors that they're responsible for, people that they need to take care of, and programs that they need to manage. It's imperative that once they get through this training, they get out to the fleet ready to hit the ground running and ready to go start leading and running programs. All Officer Candidates must be U.S. citizens, at least 19 years old, meet the Navy's physical requirements, and hold a four-year college degree. Some candidates are prior enlisted. So I've been in the Navy just under five years now. Going from enlisted to officer, I felt that I have adequate experience to give to the Navy and give to the country. So I joined in 2014 as an intelligence specialist, and I would like to be that type of leader that my enlisted members can look up to and say, hey, if my ensign or my lieutenant or my commander isn't afraid to do it, I'm going to do it as well. I'm Indoctrination Candidate Kornhoff. I'm from Atlanta, Georgia. I'm 24 years old, and I'm here at OCS to become a warfighter. What caught my eye was you're wearing a Dale Jr. shirt on day one. What was the story behind that? Was that just the first thing you grabbed out of the dresser, or were you trying to like make a statement? I'm a massive star car racing fan. I've been a fan for a couple years now, and my college internship, what I was originally going for before I went into the military was actually to be a motorsports journalist. But I realized money's not so great in racing. They say that if you want to become a millionaire, start with a billion dollars and start a racing team. This is your knowledge bag. This has everything that you need in it. Indoctrination phase of OCS is week one to week three, where we teach them discipline, attention to detail, and spirit of corps. During the indoc phase, their privileges are minimal, right? They always have their rights, but as far as, you know, those things that we see as amenities in life, they do not have those. First Tuesday is their first event of Officer Candidate School, where the students are introduced to the class team, myself, the two class officers, and the recruit division commander, and we give them expectations. Our mission is to train each one of you to become a United States Naval officer, an officer that lies, cheats, or compromises. At Navy OCS, the first phase of training is led by a Marine, a tradition dating back to the 1940s. For this class, it's Gunnery Sergeant Pedro Guerrero, a Marine Corps drill instructor who's trained 12 Navy OCS classes. They're a drill instructor. They play a big part in the creation of discipline and bearing in this place. This event right here is going to be the first one that we've identified candidates that we think are going to struggle here. It's a wake-up call. They know where they are after this day. Staff members circle the room, calling out mistakes and zeroing in on anyone who falls out of line. If they find a candidate that's making an exercise incorrectly, they will flag the leadership, and the leadership will pull that candidate and get him further evaluated in the back of the building. And at that point, they make a decision whether the person has failed the event or not. We have offered numerous videos online of the experience here and what we expect physically. Between the recruiters and the internet, we expect that you should show up here and have a little bit of physical fitness in you. However, this is a training command, so we will take people's sons and daughters and get them to the standard that they need to be at. You don't know what's coming next, and you can't anticipate it. So once we finished with K, we exited the building and then we came to the pit here in Nimitz. It's about militarization. It's about just introducing them to the things that they're not used to. I think when we came into the sandpit, it became a bit more challenging. Not that many breaks between exercises. A lot of instructions and directions coming to you from different directions. It's a little intimidating, but that's the part of the curriculum. They try to break us down. What are you supposed to do every time you pass a staff member? Did we do that over there any time? I'm going to hold you accountable. Scream, I serve. Now you're going to find your daggone canteens without opening your daggone mouth. Scream, I serve. Why did you drink water while everybody is still waiting for daggone to drink water? Because I didn't want to be wrong, sir. Mine wasn't empty, sir. You just decided to be individual, huh? I messed up, sir. I know you messed up. That's why you were there. Scream, I serve. I serve. Unfortunately, I made a mistake and drank water when I was not supposed to, and that caused me to get a little bit of extra training. Leg lifts, now. Leg lifts, I serve. Leg lifts. All the way up, all the way down, I serve. The instruction was, if your canteen was empty, to fall out of the formation so you can fill it up. I had about two ounces left, and I did not want to be wrong, so I said to myself, let me drink this little bit of water so my canteen could be empty, and I was not supposed to drink water during that time. I call them an individual because everybody else is thirsty. We're all thirsty, and we're all hungry, and we're all going to do it together as a team. This is what we're here for, to be natural warfighters and to be the tip of the spear, so every workout that we do is leading us in that direction. 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. And you, you're going to grab your thing on canteen, and you're going to go fall back in formation. Scream, I serve. I serve. Go run, sprint now. I serve. Thank you, sir. Oh, you're looking at me right now. I serve. Get in the pit right now. I serve. Sprint. Good morning, sir. So, we had to learn our lesson, and I promise you, we learned it, sir. Be honest with you, the sand pit was kind of fun. It woke me up. It really showed me, all right, I'm here. This is what I signed up for. I'm in the sand pit to go and be a leader in the United States Navy. It hurts. It's tough in the moment, but afterwards, you think to yourself, wow, that was rewarding. When I say why, we Dagon will think about that in our Dagon freaking brain housing group, and remember to keep pushing just a little bit more. Scream, I serve. I serve. If that why is as important as you say it is, then that why is going to take you a very, very long way here in the next 13 weeks. Scream, I serve. I serve. You understand that? Yes, sir. You understand that? Yes, sir. I speak about the why because we all joined the military for different reasons. If you just remember the why when you start feeling tired, then at that point, you're going to be able to just push a little more. What you are going to do right now is you're going to go back upstairs. You are going to hygiene. That means you are going to use soap and water to wash your Dagon body. Scream, I serve. I serve. One, two, three. Two, seven. One, two, three. Two, eight. Two days after first Tuesday. Are you turning around right now? Aye, sir. The candidates report for their initial strength test. But even this early in training, some candidates didn't make it. Currently, we started at 126, and we are down to 122 right now. According to the schoolhouse, one candidate was excused to fly home for an emergency. While the other three were pulled from the course due to medical reasons. Medical will assess them and ensure that they are physically fit to come back into training. They will not fall back into my class, but they will fall back into the next class to start all over again. Are you ill today or no of any medical condition that may prevent you from participating any physical activity today? The test assesses the candidates physical readiness before they continue training. Each candidate must meet the Navy's minimum requirements in planks, push-ups, and a one and a half mile run scored by age and gender. I was told I was coming to Officer Cannon School in November, so since then I've been trying to run a lot, at least two to three miles every other day. I personally felt very confident because I had put in so much work. I've been preparing for this program for about a year. It's hard, but it's a fun type of hard. Pushing yourself to that next level, that's what a lot of the people here are about. They want to be pushed to that next level, they want to push each other to that next level, and they want that challenge. Seven. I did maybe 15 to 20 less push-ups than I could usually do because we've been beat pretty hard the past couple days. We had no failures for the run time, which is usually where most candidates struggle. It's the run. I think I came in physically prepared, but you can always be more physically prepared. My name is Maddie Martin, and I am from Lansing, Michigan, and I'm 21 years old. I've wanted to join the Navy since I was little. I grew up in the Navy. It's pretty much all that I've ever known, and I just always knew that I wanted to serve. Before coming to OCS, I did not have any real swim experience. I never took any formal lessons. It wasn't anything I was very interested in, but I knew that I would have to prepare. In week two, the candidates are introduced to the combat pool for the first time for third-class swim qualification. Third class is an entry-level course to get into the Navy. Everybody has to go through it. It's a basic water survival. Whichever hand you want, you're going to grab your nose. Opposite arm across your body, grab your tricep, bicep. Candidates have to swim 50 yards using one of the four Navy-approved strokes. Freestyle, breaststroke, sidestroke, elementary backstroke. I practiced for about a month, two months. I talked to family members and friends that were good swimmers, and I had them show me. I spent a lot of hours in the pool before coming to OCS. Initially, getting into the water, you know, it was just a slide in. It was simple. I was feeling okay, but I kept looking over at the tower. I knew I was going to have to jump off that. I'm not very comfortable in water, and I've never jumped that high. The intensity increases as candidates are expected to jump from a 10-foot platform. You're trying to emulate an abandoned ship, so you have to be ready to get off immediately. First, I want you all to close your eyes or pick a spot on the floor or wall, something that is not moving, so you can focus. Picture the water moving in the pool, and the smell of chlorine in the air. They call it warrior toughness. A lot of it is rehearsing in your mind what you want to happen in order to get your mind and your body in the right frame to attack what you're about to do. When I got there, I thought, it's only about 10 feet. It doesn't look that daunting, and it's a whole lot more daunting when you're actually up there and your toes are on the edge. You know you're about to fall off. It had me a little bit dizzy, I'll say, and I was not expecting that. It was my turn, and I was standing at the bottom of the ladder. As I was going up the ladder, I was feeling a little uneasy. My heart was racing, but I was able to mind over matter and just take that step and cross my ankles. It was a big victory for me. I was worried about how long it would take to come back up in the fall, but as soon as I surfaced and the instructor said, you're good, you can get out, I was ecstatic. I felt very good for the rest of the swim and fall after that, because I knew that that was going to be my biggest hurdle. We can teach everything but the tower. I can't teach you to have the strength and courage to step off the platform. Once the entire class has taken the jump, they immediately advance into two floating tests. The first, an unassisted float for five minutes. You don't think five minutes is a long time until you actually have to do it for five minutes. Floating on your back, it's a lot harder when you don't really float that well. For the final test, candidates must successfully fill their coveralls with enough air to keep them afloat. So what was so difficult about the coverall exercise was it's a pretty heavy suit once you jump in the water. I'm a small person and the jumpsuit that I was in was a little too big, so the legs, I wasn't able to kick my feet properly. So it took me three tries before I was finally able to do the motions that I needed to to get the bubbles in my coveralls. I was very happy that I passed that event. You know, I remembered all the work that I put into being able to do the swim qualification test. For me, school, it's what I've done my whole life. OCS is just a whole different caliber. You know, you're up at 0400. They're putting you into uncomfortable situations that no other organization in the world can do. My name is Evan Larson. I'm from Chicago, Illinois. I'm 22 years old. I just graduated college and yeah, now I'm right here at OCS doing more school. How long have you known you wanted to join the Navy? I've known for a long time, probably around high school is when I knew, but my parents were never comfortable with the idea. You know, they've seen news stories about Houthi rebels shooting missiles at ships. That most certainly concerns them. To me, however, that seems rather intriguing to be the tip of the spear and be in the fight. DRO prepares these candidates in the fleet because it teaches them teamwork. It teaches them attention to detail. It teaches them spirit of corps. When I tell my classes, you know, make it look sexy, is I want them to think about themselves when they're executing these movements. Make it have pride in what you are doing. No one here wants to look ugly at no point, so I want them to think while the command is watching them, make it look sexy for the world to see them. Your salute is going to be done at four to six paces away. In week four, candidates move into the academic phase. The academic workload has been pretty substantial. It comes at you real fast. To that zero, because I'm in single digits. We're adding an additional stressor of the academics. You're now working not just the body, but also the mind. I'm using the two to one. No, because this entire thing. A major part of OCS is learning your strengths and weaknesses and developing yourself through the academics, through the physical, through the military instruction, the militarization. They go through the cyber fundamentals, division officer fundamentals, naval history, engineering and weapons, and navigation, which is ultimately their final for OCS. It's not so much the difficulty of the material, but just that they're trying to get you to learn so much in such a short period of time. It's a device that measures angles between objects, more specifically, things like celestial objects, things like that. Candidates spend about a week learning each subject and failing the final exam will require the candidate to roll back into the previous class and retake the course. It is all the information that we believe a young officer coming in should enter the fleet with that baseline of knowledge. It's full go. You know, I was joking around with my roommates the other day that we spend more time in the classroom than we do sleeping. It's way different than college because in college you have all these distractions. Here, it's all work. You wake up at 4 30, you're PTing, then from the rest of the day, my mind is almost exclusively on work. I had family in the military. My grandfather was a Navy NFO, U.S. Navy NFO, on the P-3 Orion aircraft, and that's exactly the designator that I'm going for, NFO, so I'm sort of following in his footsteps. Good morning, Senior Chief. Good morning. I'll be touching your uniform for inspection. Do you understand? Yes, Senior Chief. So, what is your 6th General Order? Senior Chief, first, just playing my last 6th General Order of the century is, I see if a van pass onto the center, it will be easily all orders to the commanding officer, command duty officer, officer of the deck, officers and petty officers. Now you see a sailor walking in, and they have two red stripes on the table of the dress uniform. What would it be? Senior Chief, it would be a fireman. In week six, the candidates don their khaki uniforms for the first time and undergo a rigorous inspection. So, we're measuring everything. We're taking a look at their garrison covers. We're measuring their rank tabs. We're looking at their ribbons, if they're prior service and have those. We're looking at belt buckles. We're looking at how shined their shoes are, how well they ironed their clothes prior to the inspection. We want to see if they're able to set the example for the sailors out in the fleet, because ultimately their sailors are going to be looking at them to set the standard. Chief, my 11th General Order is to be especially watchful at night. We're testing the confidence of the candidate. Those things are going to apply when they get out to the fleet. If captured, I will make every effort to escape and aid others to escape. I will accept neither parole nor special papers from the enemy, Chief. No, Chief. Aye, Chief. Indian Company, fall out. The purpose of the fire trainer is mostly to teach them the basic on damage control, but mostly on the firefighting side. For me, there were certain points where I was like, this was kind of a little bit too much. Like, it's really tight in the mask. The mask is fogging up. I don't actually know what's sort of going on beyond my immediate vision. We want them to feel the pressure once they're fighting fire so that when they get into that scenario, at least they can recall back on what they went through here. This is pretty unique. Like, a couple months ago I was at school and now I'm learning to fight a fire. You know, none of my friends back home are doing this stuff. But before they step into the fire trainer, the day starts with classroom instruction. First one is just basic fire chemistry. The types of fires you usually see on a ship in the Navy. After that, we go through damage control organization for the fire teams. Each assignment, what they're responsible for, and then we go through their PPE, their personal protective equipment. How they put them on, how to take them off. They do the inspection, make sure it's good to go. Once you get your FPG on, you're going to keep your pant legs unzipped. After that, we get dressed up into their PPE. We cross them over to our trainer. Today, I'm going to be teaching you about hose handling procedures. Instructors demonstrate techniques the candidates must use to effectively fight different fires they may find aboard a ship at sea. You can properly release. First step. Second step. Third step. I got it! First thing we're going to check is your gauge. Want to make sure it is above 30. Extend your arm. Make sure it is not caught in your straps. Getting that mask on, getting used to breathing off of something that only giving you air when you're asking for it, it's a bizarre phenomenon. It was probably the biggest learning curve. We got two deck fires simulated for classic Bravo fires as the fuel type fires. And then we got two smaller fires for our portable extinguisher type fires. This is the coolest thing. This is unreal. I can't believe I'm doing this right now. I can't believe I'm breathing and it's making this cool noise and there's smoke. I mean, I wouldn't know if it's realistic, but it gave me a really raw sense of like the feeling of what it's like to be there. The main thing I was thinking in that fire trainer with respect to if I had to lead sailors through this is I better know what I'm talking about. Your choices, especially as an officer and in general, have a lot of weight in a situation like that. The next day, the candidates board the USS Buttercup, a mock ship that recreates the experience of a damaged hull. The candidates must work together to patch. Everybody needs to have a baseline level of knowledge to save the ship. This training, I think, is very similar to the fire trainer. You're sending people in to go under that water to go towards that rushing water that's coming out of the pipe. These are people's lives. It's the entire ship that's at stake and it teaches you a lot about just the entire thing coming together. I need my jubilee patch team. We have two ruptured fire mains. Where are y'all? All right. It's going to be a three-tack, five-nine, tack zero, tack FEMA. We're having to go underwater and your body is floating upward. You have to hold onto something to stay down. It's a lot harder than you think it would be once you get down. For naval officers to get this kind of experience is extremely important. It kind of gives you that somewhat realistic feeling of what it's actually like to combat damages on board a ship. Red team will consist of one cruiser, one DDG, one VP. So the event going on behind me right now is what we call a war game. It is a military simulation to simulate wartime events and to try out strategies, see what works, see what doesn't work in a way that doesn't actually incur losses. We pit them against each other. They are put in charge of a realistic notional naval force and they have to match their resources and abilities against a set of objectives and against an adversarial forces resources and abilities. Two major international maritime powers are in dispute over control of the Green Sea. Although Blue and Red are not in direct conflict, Red is currently conducting military operations disrupting trade routes. Tensions have greatly escalated. The objective they're working towards mirrors real-life naval strategy. They're not just coming out guns blazing trying to destroy everything in sight. Their goal is to control maritime choke points, to maintain freedom of the sea, to support the economic pattern of life in a contested area that can mimic certain real-life situations. So let's say I go out there, I successfully roll to shoot this to shoot a missile at this guy. They have senior candidate officers who are helping keep the game moving. Five or six on both. That is neither. My gosh. The Red fighter is dead. Let's go. And Blue team gets another two points. Our strategy was more or less non-existent. That is another two points for Blue for shooting down aircraft. The current score is negative eight Red to eight Blue. There are a lot of different facets to the game. It being our first time playing it, we did not have a great idea, at least I did not have a great idea of what was going on. We've made a lot of mistakes so far, but I guess that's kind of the nature of war. In my role as the air wing commander, I felt like more of an advocate for using our air resources. Let's assert, let's use the jets, let's send them out. They've got a long range, and let's try and hit some of their assets. We hit some of their assets, but ultimately all of our F-18s have been shot down as of right now. I guess I'm not doing a great job. I am not doing a great job as the air wing commander. They don't have a lot of time to make these decisions. They also have to, as quickly as possible, synthesize a lot of information and stand by their result. The next day, students muster around 4 a.m. to begin their culminating event, battle stations. It makes them apply their education from the academic platform and then also the physical aspect and puts it into one evolution that allows them to not just push themselves and exercise those new muscles, but it also allows them to focus and really work on teamwork and that internal leadership aspect. Pain, in my opinion, is a privilege. When we're gone from this world, we're not going to be able to feel that pain and emotion, and it's my belief that we earned the right to be slayed and to go through what we went through today. Candidates spend about eight hours enduring various physical and mental challenges. The team that has the fastest time will get to have the relay championship belt. Shiny. Everybody say, ooh! Every time you make something competitive, you're going to bring out the best in your people, and you're going to make them push themselves a little bit further. You get out of it what you put into it, and I woke up this morning and I was ready to do it. I knew it was going to be fun, and I just needed to push through. So, we got Jimmy Deans. I love these things. Some people hate them, but my favorite box chow, and then we got the peanut butter bar, the best bar they have as well, and we got oranges for the vitamin C. You ready for what's coming up? Yeah, we're looking forward to the fire trainer, wet trainer. Those have been a lot of fun in the past. Yeah, looking forward to going back. We should already have food, so you are all going to die. So, that scenario is December 7th. It's 1941. We're getting ready pretty much for Pearl Harbor for this scenario. It's a shaky one, but it's realistic, and unfortunately, during this time and where we're at now, anything can happen at any point. When you have the fans going and the fire roaring, and then you have a helmet and all sorts of protective gear on, it becomes a lot harder to hear the people around you, hard to communicate, hard to just know what's going on and what needs to happen. Let's go moving. Let's go moving. I've seen multiple fires. I've seen multiple floods. I've seen multiple toxic gases. It's never easy. It's never easy. There's always going to be stress implementing. You're always going to have someone talking to you. You're always going to have someone yelling at you. So, we try to implement the stress to let them know that you're going to have to do this job regardless of your stress or not. What is this? Give me some. So, for the wild hose, we simulated that we had a shipmate that got hit inside the department. So, we had to shut off that water. This evolution is for them to take what they've learned and execute and to show that not just to the staff and to the Navy, but to themselves that they are capable of doing those things. We're going to kill the pool, right? We're going to do whatever they require and ask you to do, right? And we'll go each out, finish up the day successfully. And then, if you do that, what are you going to be at the end of the day? The most challenging aspect of today was definitely the combat pool and the abandoned ship demonstration. So, all the evolutions, I'd have to say the funnest one was jumping off the platform in the pool in pitch black. That was pretty intense. In the combat pools, students jump off a 10-foot platform once again, but this time in complete darkness. I was, I'm not going to lie, I was pretty scared. Once they're in the water, they swim to a raft, carrying their shipmate, playing the role of an injured crewmate. Things never happen when it's opportune. So, in the pitch black, they need to be able to abandon ship, get through the water, get into that life raft, and then have full accountability for themselves and their sailors. Tug of War is just a fun event for them to do. It, once again, is that class building aspect. They're about to go into a phase of training where they have to count on each other and they have to be there for each other. We lost both of our tugs, but it was fun to strategize and get one last push together as a team before we kind of disperse out into our individual billets. Once Battle Stations is complete, the candidates are pronounced candidate officers and receive their billets, or jobs, for the final phase of their training. Applied Leadership. Real Commodore is going to be Marupo. It feels like a weight is off your shoulders to be behind all the classroom stuff, all the real hard physical things, and I'm really just looking forward to passing down the knowledge, expertise that I've gained here onto the classes below us. In this phase, the candidates step into leadership roles at the schoolhouse for two weeks. In a couple of minutes, the senior officer candidates are going to come out of this building in front of me, and we're going to basically be supervising them. So as you can see, they're pretty self-sufficient. They're forming up perfectly, just as they are, as they normally do. I mean, you can see they're like perfectly formed up right now, not requiring a whole lot of instruction. They've been at this for eight weeks now, so they know what to do. They're singing cadence, which is great. They're marching. So yeah, this is exactly what you're going to want when you're transiting from place to place on board a train country. My role as a candidate officer is dealing with the personnel issues and the accountability for the indoctrination candidates, the most junior class currently at OCS. So basically, the main thing that I'm going to be doing right now is updating the daily muster with the roles from RLP this morning. There's a couple that have to come off the list. Admin as an officer in the United States Navy is a massive part of your job, and it's very vital. It allows you to track maintenance to make sure that the ship, the aircraft, the submarine, any type of vessels that you're working on are able to perform at its peak. And you can't achieve those things without having the paperwork behind it. And also I'm dealing with student control, which is with any kind of admin issue. I'm basically like the middleman. It's a wide array of issues that candidates will come up to me about. And you chop off one issue and then five more take its place. So it can get extremely, extremely busy. And then on top of that, you've only had the job for a week and a half, two weeks. So you're trying to figure out what is your responsibility? Who do you go to for certain issues? Working with in-docs, it's really one of the hardest areas to work in as a candidate officer. But when you accomplish things and get things right, which isn't always the case, unfortunately, because it's a learning process. But when you do, it's very rewarding, I would say. Another thing that has been pretty big for me is that I'm not really very well-versed when it comes to using Excel. So it's been a big thing learning how to use Excel from scratch. I've used it before, but not very extensively. And then now I can make an Excel document, a basic one, no formulas or anything like that. But just being able to work with it has been a good lesson. Do you expect Excel to be a tool in your Navy belt? Eventually. Eventually, that's what I was thinking. Not maybe this soon. In Counseling phase, my official bill title is Jock Ops. What does that stand for? Junior Officer Candidate Operations person. Yeah, that's me. So what I'm doing is I'm putting together, currently I'm trying to put together a schedule for next week. They have wet and fire trainer. So I'm putting together the groups and figuring out what days they're going to go, so I can get my people working on their box chow, transportation. Is this kind of what you anticipated, joining Officer Candidate School? There's actually not a whole lot of information about the later phases of Officer Candidate School. So this was a bit of a, this was new information. I didn't know that this was going to happen. But from the start, when they started talking about what I needed to be by the time I left OCS, I knew that they were going to have me do something like this. Do you enjoy admin work? Do I enjoy admin work? It's a lot of work, but it's very rewarding. So as much as it may be draining in the moment, once I see the finished product and I see the results of my work, I love it. Do you feel like this is harder than some of like the physical aspects of the training you did earlier? For me, yes. Yes, it is much harder. In what ways? It just, this is harder than the physical aspects because it takes a lot more focus and brain housing space. You know, for the physical stuff, they teach you just lock in, don't out, push through, just keep pushing. All you have to do is keep moving. But here, you have to not only keep moving, you have to know where all the other moving parts are and work around them. There's just a lot, a lot more to keep track of. My parents are coming around to the idea that I am here and I have made this decision to serve my country. Particularly, my dad is increasingly supportive of it. Before I came here, he gave me a book on character, and I think that's his way of showing me that he respects me and my desire to come here and try and better myself as a leader, and that means a lot to me. Welcome to Class 0-1 TAC 260 shift selection. This is an incredible opportunity for the individuals who are coming through as SWOs, right? They're one community walk here that get a hundred percent say where they go next. Candidate officers designated as surface warfare officers, or SWOs, select the ship they will work on for the next two to three years. Those are the individuals that are always going to be on ships. They're the ones who are helping run all of those departments and making sure that the ship functions properly. And the highest ranking class member gets the first choice. Everyone thinks that the platform they've been on is the best platform, and so of course you get a lot of different inputs. I had the opportunity to choose from a lot of great ships, but I chose a destroyer out of San Diego, USS Russell. I'm quite excited and proud to have finished first amongst the SWOs, but also I would like to add that we all finished really close. It was a really tight margin separating us all, so it's not that I was exceptional, it's that everyone here was quite exceptional. Today is the day we've all been waiting for, OCS class 0-1 TAC-2-6 graduation day, and it's it's a great day. I'm excited to welcome our 101 newest graduates into one of the most challenging and fulfilling careers, that of a naval officer. It's just great seeing them men and women just become naval officers, and seeing them from in-doc phase on week one, and who they become today, and what got these hatches. Once the student graduates from OCS, they're given the title of ensign. An ensign is specific to officers. It is the O-1 for the Navy and for the Coast Guard. A lot of stress has been lifted, but then now the pressure of getting out to the fleet and having to perform for real. Well, it's been a long time since I've been getting shaved bald with a Dale Earnhardt Jr. shirt on. I feel like a completely new person, and I have a foundation to be a leader. With an improved amount of confidence, I feel like I can, I have tact to deal with people. At the same time, my problem-solving skills have increased as well. My father, first thing he said was, your uniform looks sharp. They said I carried myself different, I spoke to them different. After today, I, thank goodness, I get to go home on some OHARP duty until January, and then I start supply school. It was a little bittersweet. I know for my mom and my dad, seeing me in a uniform for the first time was special. I could see, like, maybe a little tear in my mom's eye. You know, a little bit of pride, a little bit of nervousness for what's all about to happen. As someone who's given them all the tools I think they need to be successful, now I'm sending them off into the fleet and hoping that they take these skills and everything and perform to the best of their abilities.