One thing I think most civilians do not understand about the life of an operational military member, their immediate support units, and first responders is that there is no “work-life balance.” You don’t get to check “home” at your front door and do the same with “work” when you’re done for the day. For brevity, I am going to lump all three of the above categories into the term “service members.”
Firefighters, for example, are often on a 1 in 3 schedule where they have no weekend. This means they’re present at the station for a full 24-hour shift, sometimes with an 8-hour work day bracketing either side if it’s in the middle of the week and the department is small enough. Recent studies have shown that it can take up to four days to recover from a lost hour of sleep and over a week to fully recoup sleep debt.
With that in mind, how do you think the mental and physical health of an otherwise healthy adult would be when their sleep is interrupted or outright deprived once every three days? I was a volunteer hose dragger in college, and even as a volunteer, there were busy weeks where I had to tell our chief I was going to turn my radio off for a day or two. He encouraged it because he knew the dangers of being a zombie on a fire scene. Volunteers with flexible work schedules would sometimes come in to stand a workday for the full-time guys that were getting run ragged. It was a very small department with three full-time guys on shift and two day workers under the chief. The full-timers treated it like an extension of their homes.
Now apply this sleep cycle information to someone living aboard a Navy destroyer or carrier where their “home” is the shelf their bed sits on. That’s it. That’s all the personal space they get with the separation between work and home being a curtain. If the op-tempo is high enough it may be 36 or more hours before they see that bed. Literally sleeping in their offices, ready rooms, or whatever convenient out-of-the-way compartment is readily available. How do you think their mental health is going to fare after a few months of this?
My experience aboard a Coast Guard cutter wasn’t much better or more relaxed, despite having shorter patrols. For reference purposes, Coast Guard cutters come in three basic flavors, black, red, and white.
Black hulls are buoy, construction, and river tenders. They’re mostly focused on legacy Department of Transportation missions that keep waterways navigable. It’s hard and dirty work that will make even the smallest of Coasties ripped after a tour. Look up “heat and beat” competitions or the Dirty Jobs segment Mike Rowe did, if you doubt me. It’s long days of dangerous, dirty, manual labor in staggering heat or below-freezing conditions.
Red hulls are the icebreakers. They are deployed the longest and operate in the most environmentally dangerous conditions: water that will kill you in minutes from cold, and ice that will crush a person like a peach under a tire. They also operate in sea conditions that make even the saltiest of sailors sick.
The white hulls are focused on everything not covered by the other two types: law enforcement, national defense, search and rescue (SAR), etc. They are also called the “White Needle of Death” because they have a reputation for killing careers, marriages, and motivation.
Here is a very real scenario:
While on routine patrol in the eastern Pacific, an MK2 (mechanic) on watch in the engine room can be part of the boarding team or boat crew “on deck,” standing by for a case to drop. When the law enforcement alarm sounds, that MK2 breaks away from their watch, changes from coveralls to tactical gear, then gets into a pursuit boat to go do a boarding in moderately rough seas 40 miles away from the cutter. They may have to do this after already being awake for the previous 18 hours. Law enforcement pursuits can last that much time or more, depending on circumstances. They may have to shoot out the engines of the boat they’re pursuing.
Imagine trying to shoot the engine off a motorcycle, while riding a motorcycle of your own that someone else is driving. Both bikes are swerving down a bumpy, potholed, road in a rainstorm. You’re authorized to shoot the engine, but not the occupants of the other motorcycle. You must focus on the shot so you can’t watch to predict the turns and bumps. Lastly, you’ve been awake for 22 hours and haven’t eaten in 12. Don’t miss.
Meanwhile, back aboard the cutter, the MK2’s watch rotation is now short a person, and everyone who was previously enjoying their downtime has been bumped up one slot, throwing off an already damaged sleep pattern. When the MK2 comes back into the rotation, it’s with just enough time for a shower and a three-hour cat nap.
This can happen to mechanics, radio techs, boat drivers, electricians, corpsmen ... There isn’t a job specifically set aside for shooting out engines at 0237 in rough water in a rainstorm at the end of a 20-hour day.
The above scenario isn’t the case for most enlisted members aboard a white hull. Not everyone can be a law dog in their spare time. However, everyone else is immediately affected by that one MK2 being pulled from watch to do the law enforcement mission. And it’s not just the MK2, it’s the other four to six people that accompany them on that boarding mission. In particularly busy patrols, a second pursuit boat can be launched to capture yet another “go fast” smuggler, further stripping the crew of manpower and sleep. More recently some of the ocean-going buoy tenders have been coopted to work law enforcement patrols off the coast of California, so not even the black hull crews get to escape the grind. I suspect as we expand into the polar regions again, we will start seeing law enforcement work among the new red hull fleet as well.
There is just too much to do and not enough hands to cover the work. If someone gets sick or has to be flown home, resources get even tighter. Sometimes the officers and chiefs take a hit too and they’re stuck on a 1 in 3 rotation where they’re on watch every other eight hours. You start sleeping in your clothes, at the table at chow, if you stand still for too long. You forget simple things like your birthday or basic daily routines. When there’s a shipboard emergency or another law enforcement case, the adrenaline dump sharpens you to a deadpan professional and you’re good for maybe another 10 or 12 hours before you need another cat nap. Sharp or not, you’re still noticeably degraded from what you would be, had you been properly sleeping.
It is a weird place to be when you are too damn tired to care about your own death. When you look over at the Lieutenant Junior Grade or Chief and see the same bleary-eyed resignation in their posture and hear it in their commands. It’s what I imagine a ghost ship to be like; all the noises of shipboard life but no chatter or banter.
Added to these operational stressors is the fact that while aboard the cutter, you never leave work. There isn’t a commute to help you decompress or wake up. There isn’t a beer waiting on you in the fridge for you to swig while you kick off your shoes and fend off the dog. Hell, the shower might not even work and you’re back to wet-wipe baths at the sink. At any given point in your downtime, the phone in your berthing area could ring and you’re back on watch or armpit deep in a mechanical failure of a critical system. There is no going home after a bad day to sleep it off. There is no reprieve.
I don’t say all of this to complain or make the argument that puddle pirates have it as bad as the infantry. For drawing the same paychecks as the rest of the military, we have it pretty good. We are rarely shot at, for example, and nine times out of ten our food is decent. I mention the workload and lack of sleep to highlight the fact that most civilians do not understand how much their daily routines set them apart from the operationally focused service members.
In all likelihood, no one is going to wake them up two hours after they’ve gone to bed to tell them they have five minutes to be in the office to work a shift, because their coworker got tasked with something else. They aren’t going to be expected to do their job proficiently while averaging 4 hours of sleep every 24 for a week or two straight. No one is going to tell them mid-way through dinner they have to go put on a gun and chase down four tons of cocaine in a rainstorm at sea.
The difference between the average civilian and an operationally focused service member or first responder is the balance between work and life, between operational tempo and sleep. It’s not a lifestyle, it’s a “workstyle” with life on the fringes. Having met emergency medical staff over the pandemic years and seen that dead glaze in their eyes, I suspect they are much in the same boat.
There is more and more data pointing to the relationship between mental health and sleep deprivation. A person breaks down fast when they get too far into sleep deprivation without time to recover. Humans need a balanced sleep cycle, they need downtime away from work. There is growing evidence that even moderate stress over the long term can have the same effect as a high-stress single event.
When you see the statistics on veteran suicide and homelessness, keep in mind that these individuals may not have had balance for a long time. It takes the structure, discipline, and support you typically only find in the military to cope with the pressure of never being able to leave work, of never really being able to put down the mental and emotional burden of a continually higher-stress job. When veterans leave that structure and support it can go badly. Personal discipline will only take you so far.
Between 2018 and 2023, I had fourteen different jobs, some in parallel because they were part-time, while others were curtailed due to COVID shutdowns. And some because I fell back into the ragged sleep patterns of cutter life and got myself fired when I showed up to work looking and performing like I’d been drinking for three days. I hadn’t been—I couldn’t really afford beer, never mind hard alcohol. Only two of those jobs lasted a full year. It was hard to admit that I was one of those veterans who didn’t transition well to civilian life, that I’d been institutionalized. I didn’t even have the self-discipline to regulate my sleep, let alone my PT routine.
It’s often quoted that for every year a person is in the military or works as a first responder, they’ll need that many months to adjust to life outside. In reality, it’s probably closer to three or four. So, if you know a recently separated veteran who’s having a hard time of it, cut them some slack or offer to shoulder some of their burdens if they’ll let you. If you hire one fresh out of the service, keep in mind that they are not going to be your typical employee and may need some time to adjust. They’ve just gone from having many of their day-to-day needs met without much thought, to having to manage it all on their own. From having the support of teams of people with shared experiences to being alone in a crowded room.
It’s not an easy change to make overnight.
