“Ms. Cook, who became an upholsterer and spent the rest of her life quietly on dry land (though she remained a close friend of Mr. Fairfax), lives outside London.” “He’s always been a gambler,” Ms. Cook, 73, recalled by telephone on Wednesday. “He was going to the casino every night when I met him — it was craps in those days. At 13, in thrall to Tarzan, he ran away from home to live in the jungle. He survived there as a trapper with the aid of local peasants, returning to town periodically to sell the jaguar and ocelot skins he had collected. He crossed the Atlantic because it was there, and the Pacific because it was also there.
He made both crossings in a rowboat because it, too, was there, and because the lure of sea, spray and sinew, and the history-making chance to traverse two oceans without steam or sail, proved irresistible. In 1969, after six months alone on the Atlantic battling storms, sharks and encroaching madness, John Fairfax, who died this month at 74, became the first lone oarsman in recorded history to traverse any ocean. In 1972, he and his girlfriend, Sylvia Cook, sharing a boat, became the first people to row across the Pacific, a yearlong ordeal during which their craft was thought lost. (The couple survived the voyage, and so, for quite some time, did their romance.) Both journeys were the subject of fevered coverage by the news media. They inspired two memoirs by Mr. Fairfax, “Britannia: Rowing Alone Across the Atlantic” and, with Ms. Cook, “Oars Across the Pacific,” both published in the early 1970s. Mr. Fairfax died on Feb. 8 at his home in Henderson, Nev., near Las Vegas. The apparent cause was a heart attack, said his wife, Tiffany. A professional astrologer, she is his only immediate survivor.

The spouse of a Sailor is considered to be a dependent whether or not the spouse works. It doesn’t matter how much the spouse makes, either. “Dependent” is an official term, rather than a description. Sorry for not making that clear enough.

Increasing the pay of all Sailors across the board is one possible solution, but of course it would require our tax dollars. On the other hand, the Navy is not a business, and pay is not dependent on qualifications or performance for the simple reason that if all service members are not doing their jobs extremely well, then people sooner or later will die, whether it’s the Soldiers, Airmen, Marines or Sailors on your team or the civilians you’re trying to protect. I do wonder how different DoD pay is from other non-profit organizations where volunteer workers are paid subsistence wages. I frankly don’t know.

After reading “Handouts for Husbands” in Singled Out, it seems the civilian world does make special arrangements with married employees, whether or not its for retention. One other interesting point you brought up is about job turnover. Turnover can have a major impact in the civilian world. In the military, turnover of everyone in their current job (from the President on down to the Seaman) will absolutely occur, and amelioration of its impacts is constantly considered. In Part 2, I do give my thoughts on how that turnover can have also a beneficial effect in the evolution of the organization.

If it’s essentially impossible to support dependents upon a an enlisted sailor’s salary, then perhaps the pay of all sailors should be increased across the board, rather than just paying the married sailors more. Or maybe the spouse of a sailor could work too.

And if the spouse worked, there’d be no dependents, unless there were children. In which case we’re talking more about families with children vs families without, and not couples vs singles.

And I can’t help but notice that this isn’t consistent with practices in the civilian world, where they (ideally) pay you based upon your qualifications, how well you perform, and how much in demand your skills are. Job turnover can have a major impact in the civilian world of work too, but they don’t make special arrangements with married employees to keep them on.