US Marine Corps - The Black Vault

The First Thirty Years 43
SHORE DUTY AND LOVE
Ensign Turner twice was an applicant for postgraduate work at the School
of Marine Engineering while in the West Vi~ginia. As hoped for by him:
I have a bare chance to get something pretty good this Fall and we want to
be ready. I have a chance to get detailed to the School of Marine Engineering,
a graduate school held at Annapolis. And as it is for two years, and all of it
ashore, naturally we are anxious to go if possible. Then after that, if I do well
enough, after one more cruise at sea, I may be able to get the detail permanently
and never go to sea again. It is something that I am very much interested
in, and I am getting to the point where I am tired of being a sort of
parasite, but want to do something real; I want to have a part in the real
progress of the world, to have my work more constructive than destructive,
as it is now.lle
Ensign Turner buttered his second request for postgraduate engineering
instruction with a statement that he had had 13 months and 15 days of
engineering duty in his four years since graduation, and with commendatory
letters from his Commanding Officer and other officers served with in the
West Virgi~ia, Prebie, Milwaukee, and Active,
This yen for perpetual shore duty under the guise of being an engineer,
unfortunately for the Japanese, did not live much beyond the honeymoon
period.
The first of his 1908 classmates, Harry B. Hird, the “five striper” at the
Naval Academy, to be ordered to the Postgraduate School was ordered in
1912 for instruction in marine engineering, and became an ‘