Behind every great warship is a junior sailor with a mustache, a beanie that may or may not get him yelled at depending on the weather or the hour, and a belligerent streak that toes the line between humor and masochism.
We give you the E-4, the everyman of the U.S. military. In this case, he is an operations specialist aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln proudly, nay, fearlessly standing watch with a vibrant patch on the right sleeve of his jacket that practically screams “Take a look, fucker.”
And if you were to take a closer look at the photo, released by the Navy on Aug. 31, here’s what you’d find:
The sailor is wearing both a unit patch for the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, which was in the Middle East at the time the photo was taken, and a petty officer third class rank insignia that has been, shall we say, redesigned with a little ol’ razzle-dazzle and a skeletal samurai, emblazoned with his tribe: ‘E-FOUR MAFIA’.
In military ranks, E-4 refers to the fourth pay grade among enlisted troops. Enlisted personnel make up the bulk of the U.S. military, with the bottom four pay grades (E-1 through E-4) accounting for 50% of the total enlisted force. In some services, E-4 is the last pay grade where promotion is largely based on time in grade. For other services, it’s the first rung in the noncommissioned officer ladder, for which you compete with your peers for each rung upwards. But across the board, becoming an E-4 marks a special moment in time where responsibility and irreverence are on equal footing: You’ve been in long enough to have deployed a time or two and you have (probably) become competent at your job, but you’re likely still on your first enlistment and treated as a kid by everyone with real authority above you.
Those in this grey zone are widely referred to as — and call themselves — “the E-4 mafia.”
As a result, the E-4 mafia is also, occasionally, the bane of existence for staff noncommissioned officers who spend far too many days having to answer questions from higher-ups about what the “troops” did over the holiday weekend.
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As for who this Lincoln sailor is, not much is known beyond him being an operations specialist, which the Navy describes as “plotters, radio-telephone and command and control sound powered telephone talkers” in a ship’s Combat Information Center.
But his identity doesn’t really matter. He could be any sailor, soldier, airman, guardian or Marine, and really, any of us who have since gotten out but fondly remember the days of caffeine and tobacco-fueled junior-enlisted life, back when we learned to take pride in powering through the daily hardship, and the occasional bullshit, that comes with service.
Whoever he is, whatever he is doing currently — probably standing watch — the E-4 mafia is represented.