During his appearance on WINCLY, Chuck Palumbo spoke on how being in the Navy prepared him for a career as a professional wrestler. Here’s what he had to say:
I did four years in the Navy. Making that transition from, I say, a citizen or a civilian to an enlisted military person, it’s a big transition. Obviously, you go through boot camp, then you go out and you do your job. I enlisted late ’91, at the time still living in Rhode Island. I wanted to go out to California, and that was my ticket out to California. Join the Navy, sent me to San Diego for boot camp, after boot camp in San Diego, they set me up to Central California, the San Joaquin Valley area base called Lemoore.
To back it up a bit, they sent me to school first. I was an aviation mechanic. Having the mechanical background, it worked. So became an aviation mechanic. They sent me to my first squadron. I started working on the F-18. At the time, it was the C and D models. That squadron decommissioned, then I went down to San Diego. You know the movie Top Gun?
I was stationed at that base, Miramar, and what I would do was six months a year, my squadron would be stationed there, and then the other six months, my squadron would fly out and we would stay on the USS Carl Vinson, which is a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier. And I would go out to the Gulf for six months, work on that. I worked on the flight deck as a plane captain, then we come back at the end of that six-month deal, be home for six months and then go back out.
You can listen HERE.
Credit: WINCLY.