2 A line officer (or otherwise termed “officer of the line”) is a military officer who is trained to command a warship, ground combat unit, or combat aviation unit.” The term has roots in “the 18th- and 19th-century British naval practice of employing sail-powered warships in line formations that maximized the effectiveness of side-mounted cannons. The ships were called Ships of the Line, and their commanders were termed line officers” (emphasis supplied).

My Service in the United States Navy

I was sixteen years old when Pearl Harbor was attacked on December 7, 1941. That Christmas I listened on the radio to the grim news that my heroes—U.S. Navy and Marine aviators holding Wake Island—had fallen to a ferocious Japanese onslaught. I wanted to fly and fight too, but by the time I got to Primary Flight training with my battalion in the summer of 1945, the Bomb had been dropped and we were all demobilized. Most of us went back to college on the G.I. bill.

As an American I was glad the war was over. As a fledgling naval aviator, however, I was deeply dejected that I had not taken part in what I assumed was the greatest aeronautical contest of the century.

I went on to have a 20-year career in the navy, and I have often said that everything I am and everything I have accomplished I owe to the United States Navy. It turned out that I had three distinct periods of naval service, each one associated with a different war. My focus during World War II and the Korean war was solely on aviation: studying to fly, flying itself, and then studying flying some more.

In 1954, as the cold war intensified, I was appointed to the Test Pilot School (T.P.S.) at Patuxent River Naval Air Station (N.A.S.), Maryland, where I was T.P.S. Class 13.
Line School at the Navy Post-graduate School in Monterey, Calif., followed. (You can find a more complete treatment of my life as a naval aviator in For Spacious Skies: The Uncommon Journey of a Mercury Astronaut, my autobiography, available in libraries or through Amazon.com booksellers.)

My third period of naval service (1959–1969) overlapped with my astronaut career at NASA, which also saw me intermittently in and out of my parent service, the Navy. In my capacity as a military test pilot, I was first chosen for and seconded to a young civilian space agency— the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). But more often I would be active in the Navy’s equally exciting effort underwater, (Sealab. I took part in Sealab 1 (1964), commanded Sealab 2 (1965), and helped to plan and conduct Sealab 3 (1969).

You can read more about my career in the Navy by clicking on the buttons to the right.  —Scott Carpenter

1 The Naval Post-Graduate School (NPS), located in Monterey, Calif., is not just for Line Officers, but also for Staff Corp (Supply Corps, Medical Corps, etc.) and Restricted Line Officers as well, even though most Line Officers worth their salt would much rather stay active in their field than sit in a classroom. This was certainly true of Scott, who would have preferred to stay in the cockpit and spend his entire career flying—if the Navy had permitted it.
Eventually, though, senior wing-wearing officers look around their community of aviators and pick up-and-coming junior officers, like Carpenter, who have leadership potential. They decide that’s the sort of individual who should be groomed for a bigger view and consequently have them detailed to NPS for a graduate-level education. The fact is that if a Line Officer really hopes to be promoted beyond Lieutenant Commander (O-4) he needs a postgraduate degree. Most were awarded to active Line Officers at Monterey in Carpenter’s time; now many are granted degrees from the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, Industrial College of the Armed Forces in Washington, D.C., or the other services’ graduate schools and the joint services school in Norfolk, Virginia.—ed. note, with thanks to Mark Helmkamp.