Training For General Quarters
Preparing a crew (and passengers or embarked troops) for GQ is just as important as carrying out a real one, and is tantamount to carrying it out successfully. It cannot be left to the imagination that anyone will know what to do, where to go, what not to do or where not to go upon hearing the claxon sound for GQ, nor is there a such thing as "too much" preparedness. The very nature of any emergency dictates that it can happen any time, any place and with anyone present or in charge. As such, numerous drills are a normal part of a crew's life, and often become monotonous, but are still necessary. Timing for having the ship "at" GQ is essential, from the moment it's sounded until the captain is informed that the ship is secure. If one crewmember is unaccounted for at the assigned battle station, that department head cannot yet report 'all hands present and accounted for', thereby rendering the entire ship 'not at' GQ. During a drill, a certain time period is pre-arranged wherein missing personnel are considered officially unaccounted for, and the department head reports readiness with X number of persons missing, reason unknown. In a real-life GQ situation, however, that would be a luxury, and the urgency to secure the ship and have it ready for action creates a different set of circumstances. During drills, certain personnel are purposefully detained from reaching their stations and/or certain GQ-essential systems are purposefully shut down to test the crew's ability to work around such difficulties. Training drills must be run at various times of day and night, various days of the week, and introduce various scenarios that mirror any potential threat. Following each drill, the leadership is responsible to analyze response-time, readiness factors, suitability of the crew under stress, etc, and continually perfect any discrepancies. It is equally important to communicate to the crew how well they have done in the areas where they excelled, without causing false confidence.
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Famous quotes containing the words training, general and/or quarters:
“They’ll bust you in the lobby. You look like a training poster for the narc squad.”
—John Guare (b. 1938)
“It has been an unchallengeable American doctrine that cranberry sauce, a pink goo with overtones of sugared tomatoes, is a delectable necessity of the Thanksgiving board and that turkey is uneatable without it.... There are some things in every country that you must be born to endure; and another hundred years of general satisfaction with Americans and America could not reconcile this expatriate to cranberry sauce, peanut butter, and drum majorettes.”
—Alistair Cooke (b. 1908)
“He stood, and heard the steeple
Sprinkle the quarters on the morning town.
One, two, three, four, to market-place and people
It tossed them down.”
—A.E. (Alfred Edward)