Photo By Petty Officer 1st Class Christopher OGrady | Machinist Mate 2nd Class Ashlee Leroy the Special Programs training petty officer, and...... read more read more
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Meet Machinist Mate 2nd Class Ashlee Leroy! She’s the Special Programs training petty officer, and a Recruit Division Commander (RDC) at Recruit Training Command (RTC), the Navy’s only boot camp.
The Special Programs department is where injured recruits go for rehabilitation to return into training. This can be a trying time for recruits and their motivation.
“It’s a different environment for them,” Leroy said. “They go from a training environment where they go from reveille to taps. It can be very disheartening for a recruit to go from that environment to getting set back for injuries.”
The rehabilitation process can be a lengthy process for recruits, sometimes taking an extended period of time.
“You get good recruits who through the rigorous training we do here get held back from something like shin splints,” she said. “My job is to make sure I keep them motivated, that I push them to help keep them in the game.”
A tactic Leroy uses for this is something that recruits first get introduced to when they start their journey here at boot camp -- their hard card.
“There’s a page in the recruit hard card where recruits write down their reason for joining the Navy,” she said. “We all have our reasons for joining, and it’s important to keep them motivated and remind them to take it all one day at a time.”
Leroy learned this lesson from her own personal experience out in the fleet.
“At my first command, I had a severe injury that set me back from earning one of the top qualifications at the command as a fireman,” Leroy said. “I was in a cast for three to four weeks and I wasn’t allowed to do maintenance which held me from getting the qualification.”
It was from that set back, however, she learned to take on just as big a roll, work center supervisor.
“I allowed my injury to work to my favor instead of fighting it,” Leroy said. “I had this shift of looking at my set back as a way to push forward instead of a reason to stay down. As work center supervisor, I learned how to lead in the maintenance instead of physically doing it. It was because of that, when it came time for me to do it, it came a lot easier.
This resilience from her set back helped her get through one of the hardest C-School’s in the U.S. Navy, RDC C-school.
“If it wasn’t for that injury teaching me to learn the ‘how to do things’ before ‘doing things,’ I probably wouldn’t have gotten through C-School,” she said. “I’m very much a busy body in the sense that I have to be moving and actively doing something. That injury helped me learn to take a step back from things and tell myself to learn the how before I put being an RDC into practice.”
That is the lesson that Leroy wants to impart to all her recruits, the strength behind the setbacks.
“The thing I try to bring to the recruits is, ‘How can you use your injuries to your advantage?’” Leroy said. “Later down the line, things will come up in the fleet, are you going to be prepared? Or are you going to be unprepared because you decided to sit on your injuries instead of finding a different approach?”
| Date Taken: | 05.12.2023 |
| Date Posted: | 05.12.2023 15:39 |
| Story ID: | 444679 |
| Location: | GREAT LAKES, ILLINOIS, US |
| Web Views: | 376 |
| Downloads: | 1 |
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