Best duty station we ever had. Freshly married, we scraped together spare change to buy a condo and made 16% profit in two years, learned to SCUBA dive, and made a lot of long-term friendships. I even went to class a couple days a week. NPS threw the best Navy balls I can remember, and I think it had to do with the scarcity of O-6/flag attendees.Anyway I suspect the real purpose of NPS is to make us have children. I, and it seemed that nearly every one of my married classmates, had their first (except the ones having their second) child at NPS. (Remember La Mesa housing Nords? We called it fertility hill)
La Mesa was guaranteed to give you at least two of the three: a dog, dependents, or a divorce.
Our first week there we went to a baby shower in one of the octoplexes. (It wasn't unusual for an octoplex, four duplexes surrounding a grassy courtyard, to have well over a dozen kids playing in there.) Spouse and I, both being O-3s, naturally headed for the beer keg and the sea-story competition. Halfway there a flying wedge of officer's wives cut mine out of the herd and took her away for an interrogation. I didn't see her for almost 30 minutes.
Next Monday a surface nuclear officer sidled alongside and asked "How much radiation do you guys get exposed to on those subs, anyway?" (10-20 millirem a month underway, maybe 30-40 during inport maintenance. No big deal.) He said "Hunh" and moved on to other topics. However I got the same question about six times that day from various non-submarine officers.
I told the story when I got home-- spouse had a confession. The other spouses had mercilessly harassed her about her child-bearing plans (presumably including me) and just when she was going to catch up to the power curve. Unused to this line of questioning she finally cracked and blurted out "We're waiting until he recovers from his radiation exposure!"
DINKS were not looked upon favorably at NPS...