Capt. Philippe ‘Phil’ Julienne

USNS John Lenthall

I was born to French parents in New York State, so I’m a U.S. citizen. My parents moved back to France, and I was raised on a farm. When I finished high school in France, I had the choice of going to college or emigrating. I came to the states and joined the Navy two or three weeks after I got here. I wanted to be a seaman.

I did three years in the Navy as a quartermaster working mostly on replenishment ships. One day, a Military Sealift Command ( MSC) ship came into port, and I met with the captain. I joined MSC in 1978, right after I got out of the Navy.

Civilian mariners have changed a lot since that time. They used to be a much more eclectic group than they are today. It wasn’t a regular job where you expected a regular salary. It was more of an adventure. You made good money, but you had to work hard. Most of those types of people have filtered out. Back then, it was just after the Vietnam War, and a lot of the people who went to sea were people who didn’t fit in.

People who go to sea basically have two personalities: One of them is their professional one, but at the same time, when they’re at home, they may have different interests. I’ve worked with people who were musicians or retired university professors. You have varied backgrounds, and I like to find out who they are. On this ship we have 83 crew members.

For the last two years, I’ve been doing relief jobs. So I go from ship to ship. I’ve been on five or six ships over the past two years. Three of them were deployed, but I was only on them for about two or three months at a time in the Persian Gulf. When I’ve been over there, we mostly replenish U.S. Navy ships, but we’ve also replenished some British ships and French ships.

We’re the duty oiler now, providing underway replenishment support to Navy combatants off the East Coast. We’re basically Monday-Friday or Saturday, and then we come in for the weekend. We’re hit pretty hard during the week. Mostly we work in the evening or early morning because the Navy needs to be trained for nighttime underway replenishment. I’d say I’m at sea easily eight months out of a year.

Being away from the family is one of the hardest parts of this job. If you could have your family on board the ship, that’d be perfect.

Once we deploy, we are augmented by a Navy detachment to take care of security. You can’t worry about it too much, because that would keep you awake at night. You can plan on a lot of things, but you still don’t know what’s going to pop up, so you kind of have to relax. When you’re transiting the straits, sure, something could happen. You don’t know. You have to pay attention, but nothing has happened so far.