Another Great Day at Sea Read online

  ‘You know in a football game when a guy goes down the crowd goes all quiet and when he gets up again and they can see he’s not hurt too bad they cheer? When this guy went down they started counting him out like a boxer. And when he got up they threw stuff at him.’

  I looked out of the side of the bird, down at the carrier—the bird’s nest, I suppose. The deck was busy with brightly dressed people strolling in a line that stretched from one side of the boat to the other, as if they were on a tightly organized cruise ship. And then we were past it and there was just the blue ocean and the sky-grabbing thump of rotors again.

  7. As per producer Lew Grade’s line about his critically panned box-office flop Raise the Titanic: ‘It would have been cheaper to have lowered the Atlantic.’

  24

  Right after landing I was back in Flight Deck Control where Ron was presiding over the bustle of activity from his chair—which he promptly vacated and offered to me. I am the kind of person who, if staying with friends, will always take the best seat in the house, the sofa with the best view of the TV or in the middle of the hi-fi’s cone of sound. But I had the good sense to decline this offer, not to sit and swing around in Ron’s chair like I was Gene Kranz. I just stood near it, taking care not to blow any money by inadvertently touching or putting anything on the Ouija board.

  ‘So,’ I said. ‘Is this true about you retiring?’

  ‘Absolutely. I’ve been doing this for twenty-eight years. This is my seventh carrier. I have an absolute passion for being out on the flight deck, moving aircraft and, maybe this sounds too patriotic, doing it for freedom. But yeah, it is coming to an end for me.’

  It was the mark of the man that he could say this without a hint of . . . I was going to say ‘regret’ but I remembered that moment in Chariots of Fire when Eric Liddell is asked if he has regrets about dropping out of the race (because he’s a devout Christian and won’t compete on a Sunday) and he replies, unhesitatingly: ‘Regrets yes. Doubts no.’ Maybe Ron had neither and that was how he’d got to where he had in life. But what lay ahead for him?

  ‘I have very young children and I feel it’s my duty as a dad now to go home and raise my children in a good moral Christian manner.’

  ‘You mean home-schooling?’

  ‘Yes. We want to be the influence on our children. We didn’t want the public [i.e., state] schools’ playgrounds to influence their character or their values or their morals. Our curriculum is based on Christianity and God. I’m not bashing public school—by no means—but we’ve gotten so far away from where this country was founded. It was founded on Christianity. The separatists who left England left for a reason, so they could be free and practise Christianity based on God. And we’ve taken so much of that out because of today’s politics. You can’t even say the Pledge of Allegiance in schools anymore. My kids do that.’

  Ron said this in the same evenly impassioned way that he described the workings on the flight deck. He wasn’t saying it in a crazy way at all, but he still sounded a little crazed to me. And the plan seemed preprogrammed to blow up in his face. You don’t have to read Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son to see that this is the kind of upbringing practically guaranteed to turn your sons or daughters into atheists, converts to Islam or just zonked-out acidheads. But—you see, this is the benefit of doubt—maybe it could work, maybe these kids would turn out to be upstanding, good Christian folk who would home-school their own kids too . . . And who was I to say there was anything wrong with that? I still felt I should engage with Ron about his idea of what the US was and was meant to be.

  ‘You know, we’re here,’ I said, without knowing exactly where we were. ‘We’re I don’t know how many miles from Iran. Isn’t the essence and greatness of the US—as opposed to a theocracy like Iran over there—that you have freedom of religious belief and practice, including freedom not to believe in anything at all except that freedom?’

  ‘Absolutely.’ (A favourite word of Ron’s; I had never met anyone who was able to make the word ‘absolutely’ sound so . . . absolute. When he said ‘absolutely’ he meant it, absolutely.) ‘I totally support that—that’s the beauty of the US. The right of free speech, being free. But I think we’ve gone so far left of that that we’re not seeing everything in an equal manner. We—my wife and I—go by what this country was founded on, what we stood for. It was founded by people from all other nations, black and white, all the different religions. And the fact that we can all come together, that is awesome. But we also need to respect what this country was founded on. I am a firm believer in Jesus Christ as my saviour, and God, and that’s what we wanna base our curriculum on.’

  Nothing Ron said was surprising. A few years previously I’d read an essay by Christopher Hitchens called ‘In Defence of Foxhole Atheists’ in which he pointed out that ‘unexamined extremist Christian conservatism is the cultural norm in many military circles.’ Ron was willing to fight and die for the Constitution, and I, lacking the clarity and argumentative zeal of Hitchens, was not sure about the extent to which his beliefs were at odds with it. What was clear and not at all surprising, however, was that these spiritual beliefs did not exist in an ideological and political vacuum.

  ‘I think we have gone overboard with what government was first designed for,’ said Ron. ‘The purpose of government was, number one, to protect the country with a strong military—it wasn’t all about the free hand-outs. Not to support the people in terms of putting food on the table—that isn’t what it was designed for. I have a lot of other opinions about that.’

  ‘About Obama’s health-care reforms, for example?’ I said.

  ‘I’m outraged,’ said Ron, but although he was outraged his voice did not become raised, and he continued to speak with the smile that had animated his face throughout this and our previous conversation. ‘Look at my family. I have five brothers and sisters all struggling. Up in New Hampshire, near the Canadian border. Three of them are contractors, working for themselves, building houses. Their medical care is simply when they have an emergency they go to the hospital and pay for it out of their pocket. Now they’re gonna be forced to get health care and if they don’t it will be imposed on them, they will have a fine or even go to jail. You’re forcing people to do things now. This is a free country. You have choices. You have a choice to get an education or not. You have a choice to get a job or not. But to be forced to get health care . . . ’

  There was quite a lot to disagree with. Like the line about getting an education or not. A lot of people joined the Navy precisely because they couldn’t choose—couldn’t afford—to go to college. So they were obliged to choose the Navy. And while Obama’s health-care reforms provoked intense indignation among other crew members I spoke with, one of the Navy’s inducements to join is excellent medical care for people otherwise unable to afford it. I am not a confident debater—and I was not there to debate anyway. So I asked Ron about the next phase of his life, if he thought he’d have trouble adjusting from the all-consuming intensity of his current . . . job? The word hardly did justice to how he spent his days.

  ‘My whole life I have had a title. I’ve always been a flight-deck guy. I’m an officer. I have a rank. I’m the aircraft handling officer. When I retire that’s all gone. And I’ve been doing this fast-paced high-excitement job. Yeah, so I have a big challenge ahead of me and I trust that the Lord has a plan for me. I hope he does.’

  Our talk came to an end shortly after that—the birds would soon be launched and recovered—leaving me to reflect on my meeting with Ron. He was patently a good man, a man you could trust with your life, your wife, your car, the defence of your country—anything—but a little frightening nonetheless. Ron was the nearest thing to a zealot I had ever met, but my time on the ship meant I was encountering an America I had not come across before, an aquatic version of the Midwest and the Bible Belt South. In spite of what the Bish had said when he showed us round the chapel, it was hard to resist the conclusion tha
t this was an intensely religious ship, with its fair share of people who, by my standards, were religious nuts. Take Ensign Newell, whose only bit of weirdness, you might have thought, was his fanatical devotion to that moustache of his. When I mentioned to him that I thought Ron was a zealot Paul announced that he was one too! Paul had devoted his life to Christ—and was a spectacular advert for doing so. He was a great guy, super-efficient at everything he did, always stepping up to the plate when I couldn’t think of any questions to ask during interviews, unfailingly providing extra information about anything at all that I needed explained. And then, whenever we were on our own, we’d just be bantering back and forth in the way that guys do, talking about women (though not in the way most guys do: ‘God’s most beautiful creation’ was Paul’s preferred appellation). Still, it took a while before I could broach the subject of something he did before every meal: quickly and silently lowering his face to within a few inches of the plate with his hands either side of his head as though in a state of complete despair.

  ‘I can relate to that,’ I said one lunch-time. ‘I feel the same way about the food myself. But now I know you better, I realize that you’re asking God for the strength to face the ordeal of eating this slop.’

  ‘I’m actually praying for your atheist’s soul,’ he said.

  ‘A fault was reported on that phone line over a hundred years ago,’ I said. ‘These days you won’t even get a dial tone.’

  It was fun, joking around like this, but although I was as zealous in my anti-faith as Paul was in his belief I would be lying if I did not confess to a slight chink in my armour of nonbelief. In bed at night I had gone from listening with pleasure to the pre—Lights Out prayer to . . . not joining in, exactly, just concentrating along with it as a way of bringing the day into some kind of focused conclusion. Heavenly Father . . .

  25

  The person explaining the part played by ordnance and showing us around one of the magazines on the boat was Lieutenant Commander Dave Fowler from North Florida, just south of the Alabama state line. He was in his mid-forties, with hair buzzed close up the back and sides (i.e., he had the same haircut as almost all males on the boat who weren’t shaven-headed or bald). He’d joined as an enlisted man, made chief petty officer in ’96 and was commissioned in 2000.

  ‘Ah’ve had a blast,’ he said.

  ‘So to speak,’ I said. The truth is that Dave was still having a blast. He seemed like he might explode with efficiency and zeal. He reeled off bomb types and missile names, smart bombs that could be dumbed down and dumb bombs that could be smartened up. Whatever you wanted a bomb for, chances are he could get one to do it. He had bombs that could climb down a chimney like Santa Claus, beam back footage of the contents of your living room and then blow the place to kingdom come, leaving the surrounding neighbourhood shocked but otherwise unscathed. He introduced me to his colleague Jim who had an obvious biological advantage over Dave: shaven-headed and huge, he was actually built like a bomb; didn’t work in ordnance, he was ordnance. As for Dave, he was a movie star, Jim told me.

  ‘That true, Dave?’

  ‘Well, back in 2000 when Ah was on the USS Belleau Wood Denzel Washington came on board to shoot Antwone Fisher and they opened up some of the parts to the active duty that were on board and Ah went up and read for a part and Denzel picked me for the chief master-at-arms.’

  ‘Why’d he pick you?’

  ‘Ah think he lahked mah accent.’

  ‘I bet,’ I said, holding my Dictaphone a little closer, to make sure I captured it properly.

  ‘Anyways, they shot it and now Ah know why the movies are so perfect when we see them because they shoot the same scene over and over and over again. We did it so many tahms Ah ended up with three words. “Stand at attention.” Ah shot the scene with James Brolin who played the CO. Friend told me Denzel got mad because James Brolin kept screwing up his lines so we had to do it over and over. Most of it ended up on the cutting room floor but that friend of mahn said, “You don’t realize what you just did.” “Hell, Ah just shot a little scene for a movie.” “No, you had a major speaking role in Denzel Washington’s directorial dehbut. There’s people out there in Hollywood who would kill to have that oppuhtunity.” Ah could be in the Screen Actors Guild if Ah so choosed. That was mah fifteen seconds of fame. Ah’ve had people come up to me and say, “Are you the guy from that damned Antwone Fisher movie?” ’

  ‘Great story,’ I said. Then, looking crestfallen at my Dictaphone: ‘Shit, the tape didn’t work. Would you mind saying that over again?’

  Bear in mind that my accent was every bit as unusual to Dave as his was to me. To him it was the very sound of uptight En-glishness, reinforced by a resolutely unsmiling English face. He looked for a moment as if he really might explode and then there was laughter and shoulder thumping all round. It was a classic long-fuse, delayed-action English gag.

  ‘He got you there!’ Jim boomed.

  ‘He really did,’ Dave conceded.

  Now it was time to get serious and descend into one of the actual magazines—I’d thought that’s where we were already but it was just some kind of anteroom. Like potholers of the future, we climbed through hatches only big enough to take a big man down vertical ladders.

  ‘OK,’ said Dave when we had completed our descent. ‘This is where the rubber meets the road.’ How Americans love places where the rubber meets the road! He was right, of course, the rubber met the road here, but this was not the only time and place on the carrier where such a claim was made. The rubber seemed to meet the road all over the ship. But then America is the place where the rubber dreams of meeting the road—and vice versa. Certainly the rubber doesn’t meet the road with anything like the same frequency or enthusiasm in England. In many ways England is the place where, rubber-and-road-wise, never the twain shall meet.

  There were bombs and bomb parts stacked up everywhere. It was an IKEA of munitions—conveniently located not in the outskirts of the ship but in its basement—with everything stacked neatly in parts, ready to be assembled without the aid of wordless instructions, incomprehensible diagrams and missing vital components.

  Everything looked like it weighed at least a ton. The sense of order was equal to that of the explosive threat that neatness had been designed to counter. Keep it neat and ordered and lethality can be rendered harmless. Chaos is threat. Mess is danger.

  ‘This is one magazine out of thirty-four,’ Dave explained. ‘Book says we should be able to eat off the floor of these magazines, so they need to be kept scrupulously clean. We spend a lot of time cleaning and inventorying. We are a hundred per cent accountable for every piece of ordnance we have in here. We’re constantly inventorying all the time. Right now we’re doing a major re-set in preparation for going home, going back through, inventorying everything. Day check is doing all the inventorying, night check will go through and support what day check needs to get done. As you can see, bombs are packed in there real tight. I’ve got magazines with missiles and ancillary equipment where you can’t get a sheet of paper between two things. So it all needs to get laid out and inventoried.’

  I was reminded of those times—they happened once a year—when my dad had to work through the weekend, stocktaking. After he died—this was when I was back from the carrier—we cleared out his drawers and found boxes of staples he’d smuggled out of the workplace and squirreled away at home thirty years previously, in anticipation of some rainy stapling day that never quite came. Dozens of boxes of pencils too.

  As Dave talked a number of ratings in red shirts—mag rats as they are known—were manoeuvring bomb parts on trolleys across the room. Some of the shirts had IYAOYAS stencilled on them.

  ‘What does that mean?’ I asked.

  ‘The aviation ordnanceman’s motto is “Peace Through Power: We Are the Arms of the Fleet,” ’ Dave said. ‘But because of the close-knit camaraderie of the red shirts that is probably more visible than any other rate that’s in the N
avy someone came up with the slogan IYAOYAS: “If you ain’t ordnance you ain’t shit.” ’

  Paul said he’d been aware of this camaraderie throughout his time in the Navy. It was acknowledged by everyone.

  ‘Why is that?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, look at the environment,’ said Dave. ‘When you’re working with the multitude of live ordnance we got here, if a fire were to break out . . . Each one of those is a five-hundred-pound weapon, each one of these is two hundred fifty pounds of explosive filler. So one skid . . . I’m looking at fifteen hundred pounds of explosive filler on one skid.’ (The thing I had called a trolley was a skid, clearly.) ‘Once that goes up and goes boom it’s a chain reaction—this thing’s gonna go off like a Roman candle.’ This seemed to understate things. A Roman candle was, by comparison, harmless, decorative. ‘That’s the way we bond together. Everybody’s got to look out for one another. We can’t do anything in here by ourselves. We don’t even enter a magazine by ourselves. Everything is done in a minimum group of two. Normally we’re in groups of five or seven. Our weapons-builds go anywhere from seven to ten personnel working together.’

  Those were the day-to-day practicalities. The underlying thing, he said, ‘is that the rules we live by are written in blood.’

  Disney, the embodiment of the fighter pilot’s ethos of solitary glory, had said the same thing. These claims to a heritage of blood competed with but did not cancel each other out. The communal spirit of the boat was fostered by each department taking specific pride in its unique contribution. The closer this contribution came to danger and the unleashing of violence, the more pronounced the pride became. It was all about how close you were to the tip of the spear, to the tip of the tip.