Engineer Officer, USS Boone

In this chapter the author describes reporting for duty as Engineer Officer aboard USS Boone and being the only minority officer assigned for his entire tour. References are made to the negative perceptions of Black officers throughout the Navy, as documented by the CNO in national news sources and described by the author based on personal experiences of blatant disrespect, resource denial, extraordinary measures to obtain equal treatment (discrimination spreadsheet), equipment casualties, fires and explosions, and a debilitating hostile command climate. This chapter presents a time when the author was set up to fail and then held accountable for those failures. These overwhelmingly negative experiences culminated with the author nearly quitting from sheer exhaustion and mental fatigue in the weeks following the ship's scheduled Persian Gulf deployment