KEYPORT — When the commander of the Naval Undersea Warfare Center Division Keyport sent an invitation to the Herald for a representative to attend a media day, I readily accepted more as an excuse to get out of the office than to complete my military edujumacation. Yes, it’s “edjumacation,” not education.

Being a former grunt and proud of it, the Navy represented a bunch of squids while the Air Force was the pretty boy branch of the service. Marines were, well, just a little smarter than dirt, but not enough to be an infantryman in the Army.

However, seeing a C-130 gunship light up the sky during a live-fire training exercise quickly gave me a religious appreciation for the fly boys’ ability to level hostile forces well in advance of my light colonel and myself moving into place with the rest of our 400-soldier strong battalion.

From that point on, I became a strong believer in the idea of combat air support whenever it became available, but the Navy was still a bunch of doughboys eating donuts out in the ocean while the real men did all the work.

After the end of my military career in 2002 and a series of construction and other odd jobs, I found myself in the bottom of the USS Abraham Lincoln helping rewire the whole thing.

All the sailors I saw going on and off the ship appeared out of shape and in need of a nice long walk of the 25-mile kind up and down every last hill on the south side of the DMZ in Korea, and the capabilities of the technology available remained a mystery.

All I knew was that my diminutively structured body had to play Plasticman and pull kevlar-coated wire up and down the halls of that tin can as it stayed in dry dock.

However, my Aug. 30 visit didn’t get off to exactly an exciting start as my perception remained one of a desk jockey sitting on a carrier deck out in the ocean or playing a Gameboy in a submerged tin can.

How often do ya’ll fire live torpedoes, I asked, knowing that happens about as often as the Kingston ferry isn’t delayed on a Sunday afternoon. Once in a great while I was told.

As a grunt, if you can’t make it go “BOOM” on a regular basis, what’s the point in playing with dummy torpedoes, I thought as I muddled my way through the tour.

However, Reid Johnson of the Collaborative Test and Evaluation Center got my attention when he mentioned integrated battle simulations involving Fort Lewis and McChord.

While he and his crew don’t make anything explode or ring out with deafening noise, they help teach officers and non-coms the capabilities at their disposal for subduing the enemy threat, whether it’s in Iraq or Afghanistan or Korea.

By bringing all the components together, they make life easier for my brothers-in-arms who need to know that they’ve got some big guns at their disposal as the Navy can actually make things go “BOOM,” and save a grunt or two.

With that knowledge in-hand, now I can look at all the sailors in Kitsap County with a little more respect because even a grunt can understand that they, too, have a job to do.