United States Navy

The United States Navy enters Charles Cullen’s story as both an imagined refuge and a formative institution. After his mother’s death and the collapse of the home he knew, enlistment seems to offer a ready-made identity: a uniform, a role, and a route out. Instead, the service brings him into an enclosed world of orders, hazing, and repeated humiliation. The book traces how that experience remains present after he leaves, not as a simple explanation for his later actions, but as a recurring pattern of powerlessness and control.

The Promise of a New Identity

After his mother died, Cullen did not want to return to school or to the house where unfamiliar men came and went. The Navy’s recruiters offered what looked like a way forward: an identity and a uniform, complete with white shoes, trousers, belt, and hat. Cullen imagined the service as comparatively passive and safe, even as he pictured death at a distance. His private distinction was that he need not die, though he could. He signed up for electronics-technician training, expecting the order and apparent shelter suggested by the recruiter’s promise.

His assignment put him aboard the submarine USS Woodrow Wilson, servicing its sixteen Polaris nuclear missiles. The work and setting did not match the escape he had imagined. Cullen tired of the routine, disliked electronics, resented taking orders, and found months underwater with rough men intolerable. The Navy thus supplied an identity in outward form, but not the secure belonging he had hoped it might provide. In the book’s account, the uniform marks a promise that the experience itself steadily frustrates.

Hierarchy, Hazing, and Discipline

Cullen’s difficulty adjusting was not presented as a single clash with one superior. Tour after tour, he occupied the vulnerable position of the new sailor, mocked by older men and then, as the cycle turned, surrounded by newer recruits. The pale young seaman acquired the nickname “Charlie Fishbelly” and became a dependable target. He was quiet, friendless, and poorly equipped to read the social rules of Navy life; when he bristled at teasing, dropped his eyes, or muttered, his reactions drew further attention. The book describes the insults escalating until even other new sailors joined in.

The pressure also took the form of formal punishment. Cullen repeatedly tried to cancel his six-year contract, but his efforts brought reductions in rank and pay for refusing orders and behaving increasingly strangely. A separate episode made the service’s disciplinary language literal: after a drunken shore leave, he woke with his bare feet badly sunburned and swollen. He was forced into dress shoes and given aspirin for what the Navy called “damaging Navy property.” The incident links bodily suffering to institutional discipline: his injury is treated as damage to property, while the pain itself receives little attention in the account.

The Final Year and Repeated Suicidal Gestures

Cullen’s last year was spent above the waves, mopping latrines and drinking whenever he could. When alcohol ran out, he turned to Listerine or cleaning fluid. On January 13, 1984, he drank from a bottle and reported to the sick bay aboard USS Canopus, telling the medic, “I drank some poison,” and that he did not feel well. It was his third suicide announcement since joining the Navy and his third ambulance trip to the Charleston Naval Hospital’s psychiatric ward.

The book distinguishes these gestures from an intention to die. Cullen had been taught in Catholic school that suicide was a sin and feared purgatory; he could make himself sick without taking the final step. The narrative connects illness with the attention and care he felt otherwise unable to secure. In this sense, the Navy episodes continue a pattern already established before enlistment, but they also show how little the promised new identity had altered his underlying distress. The service is the setting for repeated crises, not a cure for them.

What Remains After Discharge

The Navy’s influence does not end with service. In the account of his later work, Cullen recognizes that his military experience has translated neatly into civilian jobs: he takes paid franchise shifts, performing repetitive tasks in uniform, from restocking and cleaning to mopping floors. The resemblance is pointed but limited. His civilian uniforms differ in color and purpose, yet their requirement recalls a familiar structure of assigned work and outward identity. The book presents this as an irony of transition: leaving the military does not mean leaving every pattern associated with it.

The emotional echo is more severe. Later, as a nurse observing patients and colleagues, Cullen recognizes the helplessness he had felt in the Navy, where veteran sailors hazed newcomers and each new group eventually passed the treatment along. That recollection places military hierarchy beside the earlier violence and instability of his home life. It does not establish the Navy as the cause of his later crimes; rather, it shows how he interprets one setting of powerlessness through another. The institution matters to the narrative because it gives his sense of being acted upon a concrete history, while also showing that the uniform and the role never resolved it.

Narrative Significance

The Navy is one episode in Cullen’s life, but the book uses it to develop recurring contrasts between appearance and experience: the clean white uniform and the humiliations beneath it, the promised identity and the isolation of the man wearing it, the official language of property damage and the injured body. The service offers an orderly escape from a chaotic home, yet its enclosed routines and social hierarchy reproduce forms of constraint. Later work retains the uniform and the repetitive labor while changing the institution around him.

This history supplies context for Cullen’s recurring attention to helplessness and power, not a justification or a complete psychological explanation. The Navy’s significance lies in the way the narrative places it among several environments in which he feels exposed, mocked, or unable to act—and in the persistence of those memories after he has left. The service’s promise of a new self remains visible, but so does the failure of that promise to provide lasting safety or belonging.