Another Great Day at Sea Page 11

  Jim picked up where Dave had left off, further embellishing the IYAOYAS creed.

  ‘If a plane’s not carrying ordnance it’s a dang pleasure craft. If we didn’t have ordnance this boat would just be a floating platform for a bunch of fancy, overpaid video guys putting on an air show.’

  There was even competition within your group to express derision of rivals—as a way of confirming your loyalty to your peer group. ‘If it’s a two-seater it’s just someone in the back seat going “Wheeee . . . !” ’ Ah, so there was agreement with Disney on that score.

  ‘And if it’s a single-seater without ordnance it’s just another unscheduled airline,’ said Jim, breaking off this momentary alliance with the pilots.

  ‘You can fly fast and track somebody. But when you’ve flown fast and tracked them what you gonna do then?’ asked Dave.

  ‘You’re gonna blow the living shit out of them!’ I said, getting the hang of things.

  ‘If you got ordnance,’ boomed Dave and Jim together.

  26

  On the carrier, aside from working out there is not a lot to do after work. That expression ‘after work’ is a little misleading in any case since, for many crew members, there is no such thing. Fourteen-hour days are not unusual. And some of the sailors spend their spare time studying—which is what students call work. Then there’s the problem of where to go after work in a place that is essentially a giant workplace. Films are shown most nights on the big TV screens in the mess halls but Halloween had had a horrible effect on the scheduling:

  Friday, October 28th: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre

  Saturday, October 29th: The Exorcist

  Sunday, October 30th: Halloween

  Perhaps now, with Halloween out of the way, we’d move on to better films. Naturally, I would like to have guest-curated the films shown on the boat but no one asked me to get involved. Perhaps they feared an inappropriate programme of Tarkovsky and Antonioni when in fact I would have chosen films with a nautical theme, a special season of British Second World War films called something like ‘The War at Sea: A Tribute to John Mills’. Or a week of submarine films . . . But then it’s possible that, after six months at sea, they’d already screened every maritime film ever made, had lost track of the number of times they’d sat through Das Boot, Master and Commander, The Poseidon Adventure, Titanic . . .

  Apart from watching movies, people in the mess halls, most evenings, were just hanging out, playing cards or dominoes (popular with the Latinos) or sitting quietly. Unlike social life in pubs, restaurants and parties, the American naval variety lacked the essential ingredient that fuels the ascent from tentative initial exchanges to vehemently expressed opinions, to outpouring of affection, muddled thinking and eventual fisticuffs: alcohol! We’ve all been to parties and dinners where one or two people are not drinking but a party where everyone is off the sauce? Shit, you might as well convert to radical Islam and get intoxicated—git the high—on that.

  Just as I’d assumed there would be Ping-Pong tables and badminton courts on board so I’d also hoped that there would be bars. Or at least a bar. That’s where I pictured myself hanging out after playing Ping-Pong, getting stories from tongue-loosened sailors like an old-fashioned Fleet Street hack, running up a tab and claiming it all on expenses back at the beach. A single day on board was enough to disabuse me of this fantasy; the idea of allowing booze on the boat seemed insane—though I gathered that British and Australian ships did permit a certain amount of drinking.

  It wasn’t just that there was no booze—there were none of the trappings or decorations of alcohol, none of the things that make you want to linger in bars and pubs. This was not life as we know it or want it, where drinks at six or seven p.m. signal the transition from the working day to leisure time, to being free to do whatever you want (get fucked up!).

  So there we were in an environment unconducive to carousing, watched always by armed security guys who kept an eye on things, making sure nothing got out of hand either competitively (dominoes is a potentially explosive pastime), argumentatively or romantically (the ‘Rules to Live By’ were prominently displayed).

  The nearest thing to a bar was the Lone Star Café, a Starbucks concession serving decent coffee. It looked OK but whenever Paul proposed we go by it was closed or the opposite of closed in that the line was too long, or it was too late in the day for me to drink coffee without frying my brain. If, on the basis of my two-week residency, I ever get asked to design a carrier I’ll create more places like this, places that look properly like bars, cosy red-signed environments with lots of neon so you can feel like you’re in an episode of Cheers and enjoy a mirage of life back home.

  Everyone talked of missing their families. If these guys were to be believed their families were the only things they missed about life back on the beach. No one said they missed restaurants or bars, meeting up with friends or going out to parties and nightclubs. But even though people on the boat had kids when they were young and got married even younger, plenty of people on board must have been childless and single, must have missed hanging out with their friends, going out and getting drunk, picking up girls—or boys—and having casual sex. And what about other things: windows with views, trees, weekends, going for a drive, sitting in a park reading a book, access to online porn, buying groceries from a stall at the market, trying on clothes in shops, walking home at night as it’s about to rain and getting to your door just as it starts pouring? No one mentioned this stuff—because they could not bear to? Because the torment of missing these things was so great that they could never be spoken of?

  On the way back from one of my fruitless expeditions to the Lone Star Café with Paul and the snapper I bumped into the woman from the hangar deck with the luminous eyes and the ex-Marine husband. It was not the first time this had happened.

  The story that I’d been told about two brothers serving on the same carrier for seven months without ever running into each other might have been a nautical urban legend. The carrier wasn’t that big and, in the course of a day, one ran into a lot of people—or I did, at least. My days, admittedly, were rather different from most people’s in that they involved tooling round the ship with Paul, meeting and greeting as though I were actually being groomed for some nonexistent mayoral office: Hi, how are you? What are the things about the ship that really concern you? I understand. These are exactly the things that concern me. I hope I can count on your vote. It was not just that I ran into a lot of people; I kept running into a lot of the same people. Not because I was confined to the business-class or officers-only section of the boat but because that’s the way it happened—that’s the way life happens.

  In particular I kept bumping into the woman from the hangar bay. Maybe I ran into other people from her work detail or section as well, but I was only conscious of bumping into her. Her eyes always seemed to have a special I’m-happy-to-see-you glow about them, which may have been no more than a reflection of the extra wattage that seeing her always brought into my own eyes. I’m not deluded—there was no reason on earth why, with her ex-Marine husband and kid at home, her eyes should have lit up at the sight of this aged civilian (old enough to be her father, with probably five or ten years to spare). No, no reason at all. She was one of those people who have that extra glow but the fact is that I kept running into her and these meetings constituted one of my daily or bi-daily highlights.

  27

  Sunday night. I was deeply asleep, my ears were stuffed, as usual, with wax earplugs, but the announcement on the Main Circuit was clear, loud, unignorable.

  ‘Man overboard, man overboard.’

  The next bit was clear to everyone on the boat except me: something about muster stations. Immediately there was a tramping and rumble of feet and then, again:

  ‘Man overboard, man overboard. Time: plus one.’

  The human voice—not prerecorded or automated—was calm and authoritative, a perfect combination of urgency and zero panic. N
ot knowing what else to do—it was probably a drill in any case—I just lay there. Another minute passed.

  ‘Time: plus two.’

  Then Paul knocked on my door.

  ‘Is this a drill?’ I asked, hiding, naked, behind the door.

  ‘No, this is the real thing. But best just to stay in your stateroom.’

  ‘Time: plus three.’

  I went back to my rack, that lovely life raft, while everyone else hurried to wherever they were meant to be. There was nothing to do except think of being the person alone in the dark ocean. Better, in a way, to die with others as the Titanic went down, or on a merchant ship after it had been torpedoed by the wolf pack.

  ‘Time: plus four.’

  I lay on my rack, hearing more footsteps on the stairs, listening to time pass. I remembered Cowper’s ‘Castaway’—‘Of friends, of hope, of all bereft, / His floating home for ever left’—and Golding’s Pincher Martin: ‘He didn’t even have time to kick off his sea boots.’

  Rescue boats, presumably, were being lowered and launched, swimmers readied.

  ‘Time: plus five.’ And then: ‘The following individuals report to the quarterdeck with your ID card. From Combat Systems: ET3 Denny; from Supply: ET2 Luskin, AD3 Smith; from Air: ADAN Fletcher; from Ops: OSSN Lucas . . . ’ I lost track of the names, perhaps ten or a dozen of them, the unaccounted for, the missing.

  ‘Time: plus six.’

  The list was repeated with a few names added and a few removed until, after this brief interlude of expansion and contraction, it began inexorably to shrink—six names, then five—as fate converged on fewer and fewer people:

  ‘The following individuals report to the quarterdeck with your ID card. From Supply: ET2 Luskin, AD3 Smith; from Ops: OSSN Lucas . . . ’ It was like listening to the ball rattling round a roulette wheel, waiting to hear where—on whom—it would land.

  Time continued to pass, to mount with no increase or diminution of either urgency or desperation:

  ‘Time: plus eight.’

  Nothing to do but lie on my rack, comfortable—dry and warm—in the knowledge that I was not drowning, that I was accounted for, that my number was not up, that my time had not come.

  Then, sounding distinctly irritated (but immediately recognizable as the man who each day proclaimed that it was another great day to be at sea): ‘From the bridge of the USS George Bush, this is the Captain. Hey, anyone throwing anything over the side of this ship needs to stop right now.’

  By ‘Time: plus eleven’ the list of the missing had shrunk to just two: ‘The following individuals report to the quarterdeck with your ID card. From Supply: ET2 Luskin, AD3 Smith.’

  Lying in my rack. Alive.

  ‘Time: plus twelve.’

  ‘Will the following report to the quarterdeck with your ID card. From Supply: AD3 Smith.’

  So that was it. If there was a man overboard it was AD3 Smith for whom time was not increasing but counting down, running out. One person out of five thousand.

  At ‘Time: plus eighteen’ the Captain came on the Main Circuit again:

  ‘A float coat has been picked up. We have a complete and full muster of all hands on board. We’ll look into the float coat issue and will secure from the mustering portion of the man overboard.’

  So Smith had turned up. Everyone was safe, present and—the phrase had never seemed so caring—accounted for. I lay on my rack. The sound of accounted-for footsteps resumed outside, in the corridors of the living, up and down the stairs of the breathing. There were no more announcements. Time resumed its usual unaccounted-for passing.

  28

  At breakfast next morning, with my knack for idiotic pleasantry, anchored in zero knowledge, I remarked that accounting for every one of the five thousand crew in eighteen minutes was extremely fast. In fact it had been a slow muster and should have been done in fifteen minutes. Oh.

  One of the reasons it should have been done more quickly is that these man-overboard alerts were not as uncommon as might be supposed. On one ship a dissatisfied pair from maintenance had thrown float coats or ChemLights overboard on three successive nights as a form of protest. On another there had been a suicide: someone wrapped himself in chains from the flight deck and jumped into the ocean. (So much more of a death, somehow, than Virginia Woolf stepping into the Ouse with a pocket full of stones.)

  ‘Like the Jonah in Master and Commander,’ I ventured. (For some reason I was desperate to have my say this morning.) The body was never found but a note had been left. Another would-be suicide had a change of heart. As soon as he hit the water, he went into the survival drill that he’d learned in boot camp (taking off his boots and trousers, tying the legs and inflating them over his head), survived three hours in the water and found himself in deep shit when he was eventually picked up after a night—to say the least—of profoundly mixed emotions. (Which wise-ass philosopher said he was in favour of suicide on the principled grounds of people’s right to make mistakes?)

  Emboldened by the coffee, by the relative success of my Master and Commander remark (it had been neither applauded nor ridiculed) and by the generally relaxed vibe, I ventured another ex cathedra observation: namely that it is quite hard to fall overboard by accident. And this time I got it right! It is. Unless you’re blown overboard by jet blast. That can happen: a blast of scalding hot air with the force to blow you off your feet and over the side, a fifty-foot drop and then an unspecified amount of time in shark-and-jellyfish-infested seas: for the accident-prone adrenaline junkie that must score pretty high.

  29

  The man overboard scare was representative of life on ship in several ways.

  An exceptional event was dealt with by the meticulous application of endlessly rehearsed routine. So frequent are the rehearsals—and so seriously are they taken—that the distinction between practice and ‘the real thing’ (as Paul called it) is all but irrelevant. (Even to ask the question, as I did, is a sign of being an outsider: a waste of time, which, the announcements made clear, was absolutely of the essence.)

  Also: there is never a dull moment. But this translates into: there is never a moment’s peace, no guarantee of a good night’s sleep. There is never a dull moment, and yet life is an endless succession of dull moments (the idea is to make even the most unexpected emergency a matter of routine), especially for those sweeping the decks, or cleaning, wiping, washing, shining. Day after day, for seven months.

  This was confirmed when I accompanied two of the security guys, Chris and Myrl, on their rounds. They looked pretty mean, biologically disposed and militarily programmed to cut no slack, to listen indifferently to lame-ass excuses before getting down to the serious business of meting out punishment. (Chris in particular—I say ‘Chris’ but, in truth, I am struggling now to remember who was who—had the look of a sausage that had been fried without being pricked, with the attendant risk of bursting.) That’s how they seemed at first but in the course of our time together I came to see that their facial expressions were part of the uniform, something they put on each day prior to going to work.

  We started off where I’d first seen them, in the mess hall, empty now because it was being cleaned. The tables and chairs constituted a single hinged unit with seats angled up over the tables—to facilitate cleaning—like the wings of jets on the flight deck. From there we went on a tour of the nooks and crannies where people stashed alcohol, and the linen cupboards where they had been caught making out.

  ‘We know all the sneak spots,’ Myrl said. ‘Sometimes we find two couples in these remote places.’

  ‘Two couples? Wow! There are swingers on the boat?’

  ‘I mean two people, excuse me. A couple.’ It seemed more likely that we would come across not double couples but half couples: solitary crew members who were not even looking for a spot to jerk off but who just wanted a place where they could be on their own. Chris and Myrl—who spent more time together than a married couple—understood this need.

&nbs
p; ‘The only time you get any privacy is in the head or in the rack,’ said Chris. We came across a fire extinguisher whose tamper-proof thing had been tampered with. We checked out a refuelling sponson which, as Myrl said, was ‘another popular sneak spot.’ That said it all. Even the places where you hoped to get some time with your secret sweetheart or on your own were ‘popular’.

  We plodded around. There was nothing much going on, nothing out of place, but this was to be expected. It was only when the ship pulled into port that Chris and Myrl’s jobs got interesting—in two quite contrary ways. The boat had to be guarded because this was when it was most at risk from terrorist attack. And you had all the sailors coming back drunk. They were encouraged to have just one drink an hour (which, in writerly circles, sounds like taking the pledge) and the Navy encouraged them to come back on the ship rather than spend the night ashore—with all the attendant possibilities of having much more fun and getting into lots more trouble. So if they could follow proper procedures, if they were sober enough to ask permission to come aboard, and not meander too much, that was fine.

  Chris and Myrl were young guys—twenty-seven and twenty-three respectively—who had wanted to be cops; but both said several times that they were here not to bust their shipmates but to help them out.

  ‘The difference between any of us and being behind bars,’ said Chris (who, I repeat, might have been Myrl), ‘is one bad day.’

  Our patrol had been uneventful in the extreme. As so often with Navy life boredom seemed the worst enemy but even worse than boredom—so much worse that it was unthinkable—was the idea that it might be pointless. All the drills, the redundancy and patrols and the checking—you have to put out of people’s minds the idea that anything might be a waste of time, that any of it could be skipped. This it turns out is surprisingly easy, for a carrier—or any military institution—exists in a state of constant potential threat (of accidents or attack) and it’s only by making the responses routine that these threats can be dealt with calmly when they are realized. So a successful deployment in which no lives are lost and no one is seriously injured resembles nothing else so much as an endless series of dress rehearsals for a performance (a real fire, say) that is less dramatic than any of the simulations leading up to it. Day in day out, people toil away, making the rounds on the boat that is going round and round in a bit of sea, on a planet that is also doing its rounds. W. H. Auden said that poetry makes nothing happen, and much of what happens on a carrier is dedicated to turning the boat into a poem (another reason for the renaming suggested earlier?), to making sure that nothing happens. So round and round we go (just as I’d gone round and round in the helo a few days earlier) with Chris and Myrl doing their bit, scouting out sneak spots and linen-cupboard liaisons, not expecting to find anything and glad, in a disappointed sort of way, when they don’t. Along the corridors, around the catwalks and up and down the stairs they go, chipping away at the days of this vast and orbital deployment, getting one day nearer to going home to see the year-old daughter who is keeping in step, doing her bit (though in one direction only), growing one day older.