Another Great Day at Sea Read online

  37

  I saw Harvey the next morning—the morning of the Steel Beach Party—in one of the walkways not far from our corridor. I had strayed from my normal route and was unable to find the Ward Room. He gave me directions but, as with his story over dinner, I couldn’t follow what he was saying. I asked him to keep it simple because I was stupid.

  ‘I hear you. Kiss,’ he said. ‘K-I-S-S: Keep It Short, Stupid.’ He gave me the simplified version of where to go and then, before we parted, added: ‘Don’t eat too much cuz we gonna feed up your skinny little ass pretty good.’

  Ensign Newell and I got up on deck at about ten thirty. The boat was completely still, as idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean. So still I wondered if it was anchored. (Was that possible? Could the chain reach that far, all the way down to the oozy bed of the Arabian Gulf?) The planes were all parked down the front half of the boat. Tables and chairs were set out so that the deck—which looked way bigger than it did when flights were operating—was like the terrace of a seaside café. A sound system had been set up. A DJ was on the decks and on the deck, playing rock in the shadow of the island.

  There were already a lot of folks up there, half of them out of uniform, in shorts and Ts, many of them queuing for steaks. Not that everybody had the day off. Strolling through the metallic tangle of parked F-18s I saw that quite a few jets were being worked on by mechanics, which made me wonder if, in the course of the day, I might bump into the bright-eyed woman from the hangar deck. Beyond the planes the very front of the deck was deserted. The ocean was a calm blue as if it had come out in solidarity with the ship, had declared today a no-wave day. Overnight the USS George Bush had become the best cruise ship in the world with a view of the sea unimpeded by guardrails—just angled nets to catch you should you wander over the side of the ship.

  By the time I returned to the barbecue area the line of sailors waiting for steaks stretched right along the stern of the boat and for thirty yards along the starboard side. Paul and I got in line behind a woman wearing a pink USS George Bush T-shirt which, as long as you did not inspect it too closely, could have passed muster at a trance party. It didn’t matter that we were in a queue; it was more like everyone was just conversing in linear formation. People who had finished queuing were sitting at tables and chowing down, or just sitting on the deck, chowing down. Everywhere you looked people were chowing down or waiting to chow down on Harvey’s steaks. Nowhere else on the Arabian Gulf were so many people chowing down on such huge quantities of steak. When we got to the grills I could see Harvey himself, poking and rolling his steaks, not ripping anyone’s lips off.

  Paul and I found room at a table with a couple of his friends from the Reactor Room and an ordnance chief I’d not met before. He’d been in the Navy for fifteen years and, unprompted, offered up the simplest explanation as to why he—and almost anyone else—had joined up.

  ‘Young enlisted or young officer, it was the best option we had at the time,’ he said. ‘For some people there’s the pull of patri-otism or a career but they’re in a minority. For the rest it’s just the best option at the time. That hasn’t changed and won’t change.’

  Like everybody else he was tucking in to his steak with gusto while I just picked at mine, not chowing down on it at all. It was too obviously what it was: an undisguised lump of meat; there was nothing wrong with it other than that—and the fact, of course, that there was no beer to wash it down with. It was extraordinary, in a way, that there could be a party like this without a keg in sight, just bath-sized troughs filled with ice and soft drinks, Cokes and waters. The lack of booze meant that there was nothing here a militant Islamist could complain about—except, I suppose, women having a good time and wearing shorts. Maybe the music too. The DJ played a heavy country stomp and a whole bunch of sailors—black and white, men and women, in coveralls, uniforms or shorts—started line dancing. Oh, it was just tremendous. I asked a guy at the table what we were listening to.

  ‘ “Copperhead Road” by Steve Earle,’ he said in astonishment, as though talking to the only person on the boat who didn’t know this. I’d heard of Steve Earle but, somehow, had never listened to his music. And I’m glad I hadn’t because there couldn’t have been a better first time and place to hear this big-bellied hog-call of a song than here with these kids all lined up and kicking out their limbs as though the Gulf was just a big ole lake in a militarized patch of rural Texas.

  Everyone piled their trash in cardboard boxes the size of kids’ play pens. At the box for metals a young female rating collected the tabs in a box because they were made of a different, more valuable metal than the rest of the tin. It was like Burning Man again in the way that people always tried to pick up any bit of stay trash that was blowing about the place.

  Spotting a brief lull in the queue for steaks I snapped a couple of prongs off my fork, broke my knife in two and went up to Harvey with my paper plate.

  ‘Excuse me, Harvey, I wonder if you have any metal cutlery?’

  ‘Why’s that, limey?’

  ‘Because my steak was so tough that it actually bust my fork. And the knife too,’ I said holding up the evidence. ‘So I figure that if I’m going to get to make any inroads with all this meat I need some heavy-metal reinforcement.’

  Before he had a chance to rip my lips off, I added: ‘Just joking with you, Harv’ and gave him a big smile. Unsure if he was in the market for jokes I walked quickly away and tossed my leftovers, plate and cutlery into the appropriate cardboard bins.

  A football (American) appeared and was chucked around. Hip-hop was on the sound system. Racially I’d expected the day to be more . . . well, not segregated of course, and not like gangs in a jail, but more cliquey than it was. From where I was standing—next to one of the older crew members, stocky, late forties in grey T-shirt, shorts and a baseball cap, tucking in—it seemed like a model of racial integration. Oh, and that oldish guy I was standing next to, I realized, was none other than Captain Luther! He had a lot on his plate—coleslaw, steak and bun—but I took this opportunity to ask about the party.

  ‘If you help them create good memories they’ll forget a lot of the bad stuff.’

  ‘Well, you’re creating a great memory for me today,’ I said. I meant it too. The Captain told me about another great day—a day even greater than the routinely great days at sea—earlier in the deployment in the form of a Swim Call when everyone could jump off the side of the boat—or off one of the elevators at any rate—and splash around in the ocean.

  ‘Tombstoning!’ I said. ‘I’d have loved that!’ Obviously I’d have been more than a little self-conscious about being the skinniest and second-oldest guy on the boat but I’ve always loved jumping into deep water from safe heights—does it count as tombstoning if you know the water is deep?—and I’m guessing they’d have checked to make sure there weren’t any sharks in the vicinity before OKing the Swim Call in the first place.

  ‘But tell me,’ I asked the Captain. ‘Where do you stand in the spectrum of naval commanders? I mean, are you progressive, forward-thinking, liberal—or more or less typical?’ He didn’t hesitate.

  ‘I’m an old-fashioned forward thinker. Mission first, people always. We’re on a warship so certain things have to be the way they are. But every sailor on this ship is a volunteer. They gave something up to be here. So we have to give ’em something back. A lot of it is just standard leadership. Eat after they eat, sleep after they sleep. Never give them an order if you don’t understand what it’ll mean they’ll have to do.’

  Not surprisingly, he didn’t have much time or need for books on management—‘We live leadership every day’—but he mentioned a story from a book called The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. ‘Two men in the forest are cutting trees. One keeps working all the time. The other takes a break every hour but at the end of each day he’s always chopped more wood. The other guy asks him how he does it. Because every time I take a break, he says, I sharpen my axe.’


  A football was flying through the air towards a lunging group near us. ‘Better make sure that ball doesn’t land on me,’ the Captain called to one of the jumpers. I was curious to see what would happen if it did land in his coleslaw—but it never did and never would. Nobody was going to let that happen. They were chucking a football around but an axe was being sharpened. I thanked the Captain for his time and wandered off. It was the least I could do, a small courtesy: spare him the trouble of having to start a sentence with the words ‘Well, I should be . . . ’

  Having wandered off I wandered straight back because ‘Sweet Home Alabama’ was on the sound system. This was destined to be one of the big hits of the afternoon—but it got mixed, halfway through, into another track so I wandered back to where I’d wandered back from. I bumped into Paul and together we spotted Admiral Tyson, also in shorts and T-shirt, down on the catwalk talking to a couple of guys playing guitar and banjo. Taking advantage of the fact that she was just hanging out, I asked about the pre-Navy days, when she was an English major. For some reason—my fault probably—the conversation turned to writers we didn’t like.

  ‘Well, I don’t want to throw anybody under the bus,’ she said. ‘But I never really got on with James Joyce.’ As in my previous meeting with her the admiral managed—that marvellous southern drawl of hers played a part—to convey a special warmth and intimacy to what she was saying so that a negative literary judgement seemed more like a reminiscence about that ole Jim Joyce, a somewhat eccentric neighbour whose fondness for puns, wordplay and telling everybody about his dreams had put an easily tolerated strain on everyone’s patience.

  After the admiral wandered off the guitar and banjo players played a duet, sweet and fast but dragging a railroad of sadness behind it. Paul and I spoke to them about a bluegrass band we all liked, the Steep Canyon Rangers from North Carolina. Then we wandered off also.

  It really was like a festival, strolling round and coming across people doing their thing, some of them high-ranking members of the US Navy, some of them just chatting or playing music, and one of them completely on his own, in the sun, snoozing in a deck chair at the very front of the boat. He was like a lone figure in an Edward Hopper painting. I had no idea what he did on the ship but it’s possible that he had a job that meant he rarely got to see the sea and sky. And whatever job he did it was certain that he never got silence—or space—like this to himself.

  On our way back towards the island Paul introduced me to a tall, square-shouldered black guy dressed—incongruously on this holiday—in full uniform. He had a lot of medal ribbons on his chest, including—Paul explained—the Navy and Marine Corps Medal, awarded for saving a life.

  ‘What did you do to get that?’ I asked.

  ‘We were driving home, my wife and I, and kids,’ he said, standing at ease. ‘Matter of fact, it was Thanksgiving Eve. There was a woman in a car alongside, unconscious at the wheel. She went into a diabetic coma. So I did what I guess you would call a cowboy move, a stunt-man move. Rammed the side of her car into the guardrail because she was unconscious and that was the only way to stop the car. I stopped the car, administered first aid to her, my wife called an ambulance and the rest is history.’

  ‘Goodness me,’ I said—an expression I hardly ever use.

  ‘Yeah it was somethin’. But I do believe that any one of the individuals on this deck woulda did the same thing. In the position I was in I took the opportunity to say, “OK if it was my mother, my daughter or me I’d want someone to do the same thing.” ’

  ‘And you got the medal.’

  ‘Yeah I got the medal but the highest honour I got was the son saying thank you because that’s the only mother I have. That was higher than any medal.’

  My own mother had died four months earlier. That and the sure knowledge that I was talking to someone you could trust with your life made my voice catch in my throat when I said, ‘Could you remind me of your name?’

  ‘I’m Clinton Stonewall III, from Birmingham, Alabama.’ Was it possible to cram more history into a name and a one-line answer?

  ‘So where were you when they were playing “Sweet Home Alabama” just now?’ I said, relieved to have something flippant to say.

  ‘They were?’

  ‘Well sort of. But they only played half of it.’

  ‘That woulda made me upset because I’d have wanted to hear it all the way through.’

  We had drifted over to the edge of the boat. Stonewall gestured at the ocean.

  ‘Every morning when I get up I look at that water before we start flight ops. But that’s the most amazing thing because water has a cycle, right? When it gets hot it evaporates, goes up to the sky, turns into a cloud, becomes precipitation and comes right back down again. You know that’s the same water that Noah sailed on? That Christopher Columbus sailed on. And guess what? This day I’m sailing on that same water. I’m a part of that cycle. And you know we have a lot of technology up here. Man, this is the most powerfullest ship on the face of the earth. But that thing right there, that is power, it’s beautiful, it’s grace. And I’m inspired every time I see it.’

  ‘And you know where those clouds end up?’ I said. (I meant metaphorical ones; there was not a cloud in the sky.)

  ‘Where?’

  ‘England.’

  ‘Ha ha. Right. I can believe that.’

  The reason Stonewall was dressed so smartly, I discovered now, was not so that he could strut around showing off his kick-ass medal collection. No, later in the day he was being promoted and he hoped that I would come along to see the ceremony. I said I certainly would—but where was it being held? Taking advantage of the no-fly day, it would take place here on the flight deck, after the party which was already winding down. A lot of people had gone below deck. Tables, chairs and the remaining bits of trash were getting cleared away. Soon the big boxes of garbage would be taken away, the deck would be hosed down and everything would revert to normal.

  The Steel Beach had become a flight deck—in nonflight mode—again by the time I went back up for Stonewall’s ceremony. It was late afternoon, still light. Stonewall was standing in front of the island, being promoted from Lieutenant to Lieutenant Commander. A couple dozen people were there to witness the ceremony. One of these was the Captain, out of his shorts now, back in his flight suit. Stonewall’s old ranking insignia were removed by two people and the new insignia secured by two others. Another ranking officer came up and read out the oath which Stonewall III repeated line by line. They met each other’s eyes. After this Stonewall asked a friend to come up and say a prayer. When the prayer was over people asked Stonewall to say some words. The sky was ablaze with holiday light. A strong breeze was blowing. He stood there immense, smart and proud.

  ‘I wanna say thanks to everybody for coming out, for finding time out of your busy day today. But this is not my day, it’s your day. Look what you did. Look what you did. You put oak leaves on me. And I tell you now, I wanna thank each and every one of you, especially those who kept me upright and squared away. Thank you so very much. You know, I was reading the other night: on October 9, 1901, a young man was born into the world, name was Arleigh Burke, Admiral Arleigh Burke. He joined the Navy without a high school diploma. He’d had to drop out of high school and support his family because of the flu epidemic. But he still pursued his wish to join the Navy, he got a congressional appointment to get into the Navy—and the rest is history. I look at stuff like that. What if he’d said, “It is what it is”? A lot of people use those words as a token of giving up. What if he had said it? Forget about it. I’ll just give up and look after my family. If he’d said, “It is what it is,” then a lot of things we do today would have never been able to happen. What if the Wright brothers had said, “It is what it is”? We wouldn’t have aircraft carriers, we wouldn’t have aircraft to launch offa these things. I wake up and I go to sleep with this conviction every night, not to let it be what it is. I want to change, I want to be that
change. And I thank each and every one of you.

  ‘You know, it’s not an AV clip here, it’s camaraderie, it’s the pride that we instil in each other and that pride goes a long way. I’ve been doing it now for twenty-one years and I tell you what, I thank each and every one of you. I love that shirt there, by the way,’ he said, seeing the message stencilled on the yellow jersey of one of the guys in attendance: ‘No weapon formed against us shall prosper.’ ‘ “No weapon formed against us shall prosper.” ’ The guy wearing the jersey then turned his back so that Stonewall could read out loud what was written on the back: ‘ “Believe that.” Yeah, believe that! Because it’s not business, ladies and gentleman, it’s personal. You know that. I didn’t put out to sea with five thousand business associates. I put out to sea with family members. And everything we do, whether it’s up here on the flight deck, on the second deck or the seventh deck, I tell you right now, whether it’s getting these catapults ready, serving in the meal line, whatever it is you’re doing, it’s all for me. You got my back. And I got yours. I tell you right now, Arleigh Burke was also quoted as saying, “Loyalty up and loyalty down.” If you expect loyalty from your subordinates then you better show loyalty in return. Which means if you’re a leader out here you need also to be a servant. The bottom’s a reflection of the top. If you don’t look good I don’t look good. I think Vidal Sassoon had it right when he came out with that.’ Stonewall had to pause here to let a wave of laughter die down. ‘And if I’m looking good here today it’s because of you. It’s because of you.