I don’t know a whole lot about being in the military. Based on all of the movies and television shows I’ve seen, though, I’ve assumed that mouthing off to your superior officer is not something that’s done.

Not if you’re bright, anyway.

OP was working on a nuclear powered ship as part of a fairly small crew.

I was stationed aboard a ship during the first gulf War. It was a nuclear powered ship (important later) and so we had ‘regular’ crew (corpsman, navigation, fire control etc.)

And then we had what was affectionately call ‘f—– nukes’. These were engineers and folks who ran the nuclear reactors. Everything was by the book for them, and they were either incapable of, or not allowed to think outside of regulation.

Medical was a small department, so when we had duty, there was only one corpsman on-board. At 1900 (7pm) we had to report for ‘duty head muster’ where we had to report that our department was all secure to the Duty Officer Of The Day.

One day, his commanding officer called him onto the carpet to ask him a question.

So after one of these musters the commander who was in charge that day called me to his stateroom.

He didn’t like me anyway, so I figured he was just trying to make my life miserable for a while.

He was a f—– nuke.

I get to his stateroom, and there are a couple other f—– nukes there with him, and he says “Petty Officer ******, I’ve noticed that you always address me as COMMANDER and never by SIR.”

I stood there for a moment trying to figure out where this was going. Finally he asked why.

OP answered it, perhaps with a bit too much enthusiasm.

I took a moment to ground myself, looked him straight in the eye, and said “well COMMANDER the UCMJ (uniform code of military justice) clearly states that I must address you as sir or by your proper rank. The way I was raised, the title SIR is reserved for those you respect.”

He just stared at me as I stood there. He then dismissed me.

As I walked out the door I said over my shoulder….

“Have a wonderful evening COMMANDER!”

I wonder if Reddit thinks this guy was super brave!

I guess there’s a precedence for this sort of thing.

Apparently this time Hollywood got it right.

This guy’s dad would have been on OP’s side.

This person was on the side of the f—– nukes.

They figure the commander deserves at least a little credit.

This was very well scripted.

I’ll give him that.

If you liked that story, check out this post about a group of employees who got together and why working from home was a good financial decision.