Sarah Kanowski

Technically, you outrank the sailors, but everyone in the Navy knows that you outrank no one.

You're a snotty because you're so pathetic that you wipe your snotty nose on the sleeve of your jacket.

Well, I got told that on the first hour on board.

So I was piped, which means an announcement was made, midshipman Tate, XO's cabin.

And I'm thinking, oh, I thought I was going to be hidden away amongst the 230 people on board.

Maybe I'll do some of my navigation training while I'm going up, but I'm not going to do anything real.

And I get to the XO's cabin and he's busy.

He's prepping a warship for war.

And he gives me about two minutes of his time and he says, I'm joining blackboarding team.

The second thing he says is, go get a will.

because it's going to be very risky.

So blackboarding team, it started to become clear to us in the coming days, was a team made up of 14 men, mostly qualified special forces soldiers, which I was not yet.

And our job would be to do essentially night raids on ships that were coming out of Iraq.

And there had been an embargo put on Iraq since Gulf War I. It had become lacklustre.

It had become quite corrupt as well.

But as soon as 9-11 happened, our mission was pretty clear, like within 12 hours of what was going to happen.

Ground troops were going to Afghanistan.

Maritime forces would go to the Persian Gulf and enforce that sanction or that siege to the letter.

That became clear to us as we went up and we learned what it would mean to do night raids on a ship in the Persian Gulf at one in the morning.

And what it means is we're either going to be taking that ship by helicopter.