[Sailor Steve]

I spent eight weeks in boot camp just to learn how to be a baby sailor. I spent sixteen weeks in RM 'A' school just to learn how to be an apprentice beginner radioman.

During World War Two the US Navy rushed beginning officers through a three-month training course (hence the nickname "Ninety-Day Wonders"). After that if they went to on-the-job training if they joined the surface fleet, where they had to learn every junior position, serving as comm officers, ops officers, signal officers and engineering officers. After that they might become the XO of a destroyer escort, or of a supply ship, and after a year or more of that they might actually command something.

Potential submariners had to go to a special submarine school, where they not only had to master every system but also had to pass intense rigorous physical training, including spending a lot of time in the water learning to swim properly and to escape from a sunken submarine.

Then they would find themselves in a junior position on an actual sub, and it might take years, if ever, before they became a captain.

In every group there are young men who "have what it takes", and there are certainly some here. But no video game, however realistic they make it, is going to show who they are.