I started in radio communications. You deal with satellite communications, high frequency communications and a lot of secure communications being onboard a ship. We have to scramble a lot of our signals, pass information, intelligence over to the other commands and so while they decipher it and pass it along to their boss and so.

Say we're sitting on board a ship. How does this signal get from the ship over to the shore command? How do they find out what we talking about? And after reading the publications that they had on board the ship, it really dawned on me how everything works and what they taught us in A School, putting two and two together. . . electrons and protons and all, how it all comes together.

Once I got in Radioman A School, all this stuff started coming hand in hand with what I learned in high school--I put that knowledge to use and I started learning about basic electricity, how that ties in with Ohm's law and all that. It [the science learned in high school] really plays a big part in our job because if you don't understand Ohm's law or don't know how to calculate certain things mathematics because our job details - deals with a lot of mathematics on antenna wave lengths and everything. If you [don't] know how to calculate the formula on how long a wave is or how far you are from a shore command and how much power or output you're putting out, you can burn up your lot of equipment out there.

I didn't think much about it when I was going through high school, but now I wish I had paid more attention back then because it [what we studied] plays a big part in our lives today.

The subjects I studied in high school I thought would be very important--back then I didn't think they were important, but now physics, calculus, geometry, algebra, and they helped me out a lot once I joined the Navy and stuff. And everything that I do in my communication field right now deals with mathematics, algebra, trigonometry, geometry, and physics.