Basic Training

Kevin St. Onge enlisted in the Navy as a high school senior in 1983 because he didn't want to go to college, he wanted to learn construction, and he wanted to get out of Bedford, Mass. “It was a small town,” says St. Onge. “I wanted to get away and learn something at the same time. It suited me for exactly what I wanted to do. ... I credit that time with a lot of where I am now.” Indeed. Today, he is the production manager for Thomas Buckborough and Associates, a residential designer and builder in Concord, Mass. The skills he uses now—estimating jobs, coordinating trade contractors, expediting, and keeping jobs on schedule—are essentially the ones he learned as a 19-year-old in the Seabees.

“I was in charge of a crew,” he says. “It was a pretty important role for a young person. I had a lot of responsibility at a very young age.”

And he did get out of Bedford. His battalion was based in Port Hueneme, Calif., and he also went to England and Spain.

The best part for St. Onge about the Seabees, though, was the people and the camaraderie they shared. “I have a picture on my wall of the guys I worked with,” he says. “They had me covered, I had them covered. It was an unspoken thing.”

When Carl Loescher was a student in the architecture school at the University of Oklahoma, he heard stories about a former dean, Bruce Goff, who was a Seabee. He thought the program would give him valuable construction knowledge and signed up through a program called Sea Air Mariner.

MISSION CRITICAL: Seabees provide vital troop support by building and maintaining roads, bridges, and other infrastructure (above, in Iraq). Inset, a crew takes a break from a 1987 project in Rota, Spain. Kevin St. Onge (front row, second from left) says that the Seabees gave him “a lot of responsibility at a very young age.”

He took a semester off from college and went through active duty boot camp, followed by 13 weeks of construction school. He then went into the Navy Reserves and finished his degree. He's been in the Reserves since 1992. Today, when he's not working as an architect for Denver-based Village Homes, he teaches basic combat skills to Seabee battalions being deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan.

Loescher says he has benefited greatly from the skills he learned in the Seabees. “When I go to job-sites, when the [supers] find out I'm in the Seabees, they give me more respect,” he says. “Usually, when architects come on the site, superintendents think we're the crazy people who don't know anything.”

He's also learned valuable leadership skills, such as mentoring associates.

“The main difference in the civilian world,” Loescher says, “is that you don't yell at [employees] and tell them to drop and give you 20. Sometimes I wish I could.”