Ami Burns – Advice for those wanting to join the Submarine Service

Be confident in your abilities. I always say, you know, you walk onto a platform as a grey person so even if you might not be the most competent or the most intelligent, be keen as mustard and just try your hardest, that is all people want to see. If you’re, people say if you’re gash, you know, it doesn’t matter as long as you try hard and you know, we can see that. If you come in and you’ve got the wrong attitude, you know, you come in and you think that you should be spoon fed information and, you know, this entitledness, it is just not well received so come in, be keen, have faith in your ability whatever level you come in at and you will be welcomed with open arms, you really will.

I think you need to be really quite mentally resilient, or willing to improve your own mental resilience, you know. You might not have it now but just understand that it is, it is not easy, it is really, really difficult. It’s difficult physically because the long days, it’s difficult mentally because you’re away from your families, without contact from you to them, or sometimes without contact at all, depending on where you’re operating, so if you, you know, half of the battle is being accepted into the brotherhood and it’s not that they’re not accepting, it’s, they just want you to come in and do your job to the best of your abilities but to make that easier, you need to understand that it is going to be mentally tough and it really is mentally … the hardest, toughest guys will cry at you at some point, in the maintenance period, on the Patrol, because it’s hard and if they don’t cry at you as their Boss, they’ll go home and probably cry at their families because it’s really, really difficult.

It’s not impossible though, you know, nobody’s … everybody’s still doing it, everybody does it every day, it’s just something I would be hyper aware of and you’ve got to do it for the right reasons and be bought into a bit of mental toughness.