Another Great Day at Sea Read online

  ‘And this goes on all night?’ I yelled, repeating as a question what I’d just been told.

  ‘Round the clock. It’s an aircraft carrier. We’re sort of in the business of flying aircraft.’

  ‘Is there still a spare bunk in your room?’ I said, not knowing if I was joking. I was torn between relief at having my own room and anxiety about what having my own room entailed.

  ‘You’ll get used to it,’ said Newell. That’s where you’re wrong, I wanted to yell back. The essence of my character is an inability to get used to things. This, in fact, is the one thing I have grown accustomed to: an inability to get used to things. As soon as I hear that there’s something to get used to I know that I won’t; I sort of pledge myself to not getting used to it. There wasn’t time to yell all this; we had to complete a bunch of forms be cause, like a man driven mad by people in the apartment upstairs playing thrash metal, I was going right back up to the source of the racket, to the flight deck.

  With the paperwork taken care of we stopped off for a safety briefing at the empty ATO—the ATO shack as it was always known—where we were handed cranials and float coats again. The shaven-headed duty officer showed us a plan of the deck, emphasized the importance of sticking close to our escorts, of doing exactly what—and going exactly where—we were told. All pockets were to be buttoned or zippered shut. No loose bits and pieces that could fly away. I could use a notebook and pen but had to make sure that I was holding on to them firmly, not pulling them in and out of my pocket the whole time. And watch out for things you can trip over—there are plenty of them. Any questions?

  Loads! But there was no time to ask them. We trooped back up the narrow stairs to the catwalk and were back in the silent world of the flight deck. The empty sea glittered like a brochure (‘Ever Dreamed of Holidaying on an Aircraft Carrier?’). The sky was a blue blue, greasy with the reek of fuel (something the tour operators didn’t publicize). And there was something dreamlike about it: the cranial silence, for one thing, gave the visual—already heightened by the pristine light—an added sharpness. It wasn’t just that the aircraft carrier was another world—the flight deck was a world apart from the rest of the carrier. And everything that happened elsewhere on the carrier had meaning and importance only in terms of what was happening here. Take away the flight deck and the planes and all you’ve got is a very big boat.

  There was a lot to take in—or not to be able to take in. Like the size of the flight deck. How big was it? Impossible to say. It was as big as it was. There was nothing to compare it with. Well, there were people and jets and tons of other equipment, but there was nothing bigger than it—except the sea and sky which always serve to emphasize the lack of everything else. So in tangible, physical terms the carrier was the world and, as such, was all that was the case.

  I was not the first writer ever to set foot on an aircraft carrier. One of my predecessors had been hauled up by a sharp-eyed editor for fiddling his expenses. Such things are not unheard of in journalism but this time the editor had him banged to rights: claiming taxi fares during the period when he’d actually been on board the carrier.

  ‘I know,’ said the journalist. ‘But have you seen the size of these things?’

  I’d heard another story, about two brothers working in different sections of the same carrier who didn’t set eyes on each other during the seven months of their deployment. It didn’t matter whether stories like these were factually correct: the truth to which they attest is that carriers are big. Big as small towns. Big enough to generate stories about how big they are.

  The flight deck is not only big; it is also overwhelmingly horizontal. That’s what the carrier has to be: a pure and undisturbed length of horizontality, one that remains that way whatever the sea pitches at it.

  The teams in their colour-coded jerseys and float coats reminded me of a time I’d visited the Chicago Stock Exchange with the traders in their colour-coordinated blazers on the dealing floor, all gesturing and clamouring in a repeated daily ritual that made perfect sense, the consequences of which were potentially catastrophic. Here too the functions of each team were clearly differentiated from one another according to a colour code I did not yet understand—except for the brown shirts. We were on one of the most technologically advanced places on earth but the guys in grease-smeared brown jerseys and float coats, draped with heavy brown chains, looked like they were ready to face the burning oil poured on them from the walls of an impregnable castle. The combination of medieval (chains) and sci-fi (cranials and dark vizors) didn’t quite cover it, though; there was also an element of the biker gang about them. All things considered, theirs was one of the toughest, roughest looks going. No wonder they stood there lounging with the grace of heavy gun-slingers about to sway into a saloon. Every gesture was determined by having to move in this underwater weight of chain. I couldn’t keep my eyes off them. They weren’t posing. But in this silent world everyone is looking at everyone else the whole time, all communication is visual, so you’re conscious, if you’re a guy with a load of chains hanging from your shoulders like an ammo belt, that you’re the fulfilment of some kind of fantasy—not a sexual one, more like a fantasy of evolution itself. And they weren’t swaggering; there was just the grace that comes from having to minimize effort if a task is to be properly done, especially if a good part of that task involves standing around waiting with all that weight on your shoulders.

  The air was an ecological disaster. It was hot anyway, and the heat reared up from the deck, dense with the fumes of jet fuel. Whenever a jet manoeuvred towards the catapults or back to its parking slot or to the elevator there was a wash of super-heated wind, like Death Valley with an oil-gale blowing through it. We were in the middle of the sea and it smelled like a garage with fifty thousand cars in it, each suffering a major fuel leak.

  Critics argue that the First Gulf War and the invasion of Iraq were all about America’s insatiable need for oil. What did we need this oil for? To sustain our presence here, to keep flying missions. The whole enterprise reeked of oil. Planes were taking off. The fact that cranials insulated us from the ear- and sky-splitting noise emphasized the tremendous forces at work. There was an acute sense of thousands of years of history and refinement—the refinement of the urge to make war and the need for oil in order to do so—converging here.

  The purpose of an aircraft carrier is to carry aircraft. Launching and recovering planes is, as Newell had drily pointed out, the name of the game. As a plane prepared to take off, a woman in a green jersey, perched on the edge of a kind of manhole, signalled to other members of the ground crew. Others in green and red signalled to each other with absolute clarity. Everyone was in contact, visually, with everyone else but the jets were the centre of attention, and the pilots flew the jets. All eyes were on the jets. The pilot was the observed of all observers. There was no room for anything even slightly ambiguous. There was a guy near the front of the aircraft, keeping low, making sure he didn’t get sucked into the jet intake, and two other guys almost behind the wings—the final checkers—each crouched down on the heel of one foot with the other leg stretched out in front, also keeping low, making sure they weren’t hit by the jet blast. How Pina Bausch would have loved to have gotten her hands on this scene! And thank God she didn’t! (Same with Claire Denis whose film Chocolat ends with a lovely sequence of the gestural language of African baggage handlers and whose Beau Travail gazes longingly at the bodies and ballet of soldiers in the French Foreign Legion.) For the beauty of this performance was inseparable from its setting and function. The elaborate, hypnotic choreography on display was devoted entirely to safety, to the safe unleashing of extreme violence. Violence not just in terms of what happened hundreds or thousands of miles away where the planes were headed, but here, where the immense forces required for launch were kept under simmering control.

  Up until a certain point a plane can be touched by members of the ground crew. Then the JBD (Jet Blast Deflector) comes up behin
d the plane. The plane goes to full power—it is only now that one appreciates that the plane, prior to this moment, has been idling, dawdling. The wing flaps are jiggled. Final checks. Thumbs-up between the pilot and the last two members of the ground crew who scurry away, staying low. The plane is flung forward and in seconds is curving away from the end of the carrier, over the sea. In its wake there is a wash of steam from the catapult tracks. After a few moments the catapult shuttle comes back like a singed hare at a greyhound race. A minute later another plane from a neighbouring catapult blasts into the sky.

  With the first part of the launch and recovery cycle completed there was an interlude of quietness, though even during the busiest times there had been a lot of hanging about; at least one of the coloured-castes of crew were lounging about in a state of relaxed alertness. John Updike asks, in one of his books about art, if there is such a thing as an American face. I don’t know, but looking at the guys on the flight deck, unfaced by cranials and vizors, persuaded me that there is such a thing as an American walk. Even overweight cops have it: an ease and grace, a subdued swagger. It used to be identified mainly with race—a black thing—but now it seems a cultural and national quality.

  Through the dazed silence we walked towards the stern of the boat to better observe the planes landing, past the side of the island where a sign warned, quite reasonably:

  BEWARE OF

  JET BLAST

  PROPELLERS

  AND ROTORS

  All of which were gathered here in great abundance. Over this warning, like the sign of a giant casino, was the white number 77. There was much to see, lots of it on an enormous scale—but my escort was always tapping me on the shoulder, pointing to hoses, pipes, hooks, chains and other small things that could be tripped over.

  We could see the planes high up in the blue distance, plane-shaped specks coming round in an immense circle. As they approached the carrier their wings were all the time tilting slightly, first one way and then the other, adjusting, compensating. Three arresting wires—thick as rope but thin and wiry in this context—were stretched across the rear of the deck. On the port side of the boat, very near the back, the landing signal officers—all pilots themselves—communicated detailed refinements of approach to the pilot.

  The planes thump down and then, rather than slowing down—as one might reasonably expect—immediately accelerate to full power in case they miss all of the arresting wires and need to go round again, as had happened to us on the Greyhound: a bolter, in the argot. If the hook catches then the arresting wire snakes out in a long V and brings the plane to a halt. The dangers of the operation are numerous and evident. The plane can crash into the back of the ship, slide off to port and into the sea or—worse—slide starboard into the island, people, tow trucks and other parked planes. Every variety of mishap was featured in a book I’d been looking through on the flight to Bahrain: Clear the Deck! Aircraft Carrier Accidents of World War II. Unused missiles would shake loose from under wings and be launched into the island. The force of the landing would be so great that a plane already damaged by gunfire would break in two, the back half snagged by the arresting wire while the front part barrelled on down the flight deck. In the worst crashes the plane would become an instant fireball but—and this is what rendered the book engrossing rather than simply horrific—it was often impossible to tell what would happen to the pilot. The plane comes crashing down and, amid the flames, the pilot scrambles out of the cockpit and rolls down a wing to safety. The plane smashes into pieces and the pilot walks away, shaken but otherwise unhurt. But a relatively innocuous-looking crash results in his being killed instantly, still strapped to his seat.

  The metaphor that kept coming up in pilots’ accounts was that landing on a carrier was like trying to land on a postage stamp (one of the guys I met later on the carrier would use exactly that phrase). Which takes some doing, of course, but if it’s daylight, with a steady wind, perfect visibility and the sea flat as a pond it looks fairly routine. But then you throw in some variables: a storm, cross-winds, rain and pitching seas so that looking through the Plexiglas of the cockpit is like being on a trawler in the North Sea. Or maybe one engine’s gone. Or both engines are gone. Or you’re blinded by gunfire, unable to see anything, taking instructions from a plane on your wing and the LSO, nobody raising their voices, just ‘Right rudder, right rudder’—until the last moment when the LSO shouts, ‘Attitude, attitude, attitude!’

  You can see footage of this stuff, along with a lot more escapes and disasters—recent and vintage—on YouTube. A plane that seems on the brink of stalling, almost vertically, right over the carrier, somehow takes wing again. A malfunction means the navigator has partially ejected and so the pilot has to bring the plane in with his colleague riding on the remains of the cockpit as if at a rodeo. Hearing the LSO yell, ‘Eject! Eject! Eject!’, pilot and navigator obey instantly, only to see their plane gather speed and fly gamely into the distance like a horse whose jockey has fallen at Becher’s Brook.

  If all goes as planned, the plane comes to a halt, the tail hook is raised, the arresting wire is released and comes snaking back, helped on its way by crew members who prod it along with brooms to discourage it from even thinking of taking a break. Within seconds it’s back in place, kinked and quivering somewhat from the strain of its existence—understandable in the circumstances—but otherwise ready for the next tug of war with an F-18.

  2

  We trooped back down the stairs, took off our float coats and cranials. In the course of my stay I moved constantly and quickly between the numerous levels below the flight deck, often barely conscious of where I was (didn’t have a clue most of the time), but the difference between the flight deck and everything below was absolute. It was like entering the dreamtime up there, a martial realm of the supersonic, where the sky gods G and Negative G had constantly to be assuaged and satisfied. Launch and recovery may have been organized as they were in the interests of efficiency and safety but it was a religious ritual too—a ritual from which it was impossible to return as a non-believer or sceptic even if one didn’t understand exactly who was doing what or why (actually that qualifier binds it more tightly to traditional religious ceremonies).

  Now it was time for another, more ordinary ritual: lunch in the Ward Room reserved for commissioned officers. My anxieties about what life on the boat would be like had not been confined to whether I’d have my own room. I was also worried about the scran, the scoff, the grub. I’m the worst kind of fussy eater. I don’t have any allergies and aside from seafood I don’t have any generic objections to food types, but I have aversions and revulsions so intense and varied that I struggle to keep track of them myself. I grew up hating all the food my parents cooked, was always being told I didn’t eat enough to keep a sparrow alive. That’s probably why I’m so skinny, why I joined the lunch queue with some trepidation. Trepidation that turned out to be entirely justified. It was all revolting. The smell of cooked meats and the jet fuel they were cooked in made me heave. There were salads, yes, but with lettuces represented and disastrously symbolized by the iceberg they were deeply dispiriting. I’m not a principled vegetarian but I was on the look-out for a cooked vegetarian option which I found in the form of spaghetti with tomato sauce. It was almost cold while it was in the serving containers. By the time it had sat on a cold plate for thirty seconds and I had sat down with the snapper, Newell and some friends of his from the Reactor Room, any residue of heat had gone. It was not a pleasant pasta but at least its unpleasantness was all in the moment of consumption; the unpleasantness did not turn into the gag-inducing aftertaste of the big meats. A veteran of assignments in the world’s most troubled and least appetizing spots, the snapper tucked in with gusto. He was hungry, the snapper, and he was adaptable. For dessert I had a couple of plums and a yoghurt which, coincidentally, was plum-flavoured though it didn’t really taste of anything. It wasn’t much of a meal but the sparrow had been kept alive, the wolf from the door.
I had got through lunch but I was already—after just one sitting—calculating how many more meals I would have to get through in the course of my stay.

  3

  After all I’d heard about the size of these carriers I’d assumed there would be an abundance of facilities. Ping-Pong tables—and the prospect of a table-tennis league—were such a cert that I’d actually brought my paddle with me. Badminton seemed likely and, though this might have been a tad optimistic, I even had hopes of a tennis court. The reality is that a carrier is as crowded as a Bombay slum, with an aircraft factory—the hangar bay—in the middle. The hangar bay is the largest internal space on the boat. It’s absolutely enormous—and barely big enough for everything going on there.

  Just past the hatch through which we entered a dozen men and women in shorts and singlets, all plugged into their iPods, were pedalling away on exercise bikes or running on treadmills. It was like stepping into a future in which the technology of renewable energy had advanced to the point where their efforts powered the whole ship. There was even a statue of someone running: George Bush Sr., of course, in flying suit and kit, scrambling for his plane back in the Second World War when he was a Navy pilot. Fuel tanks were hung from ceiling and walls. Every bit of space was utilized in the same way that my dad, on a smaller scale, maximized space in his garage (never trusting me, as a result, to park his car there after I’d borrowed it). The planes were nuzzled up close to each other. Mechanics were clambering all over them, with special soft moccasins over their boots to prevent damage. Each of the planes had a pilot’s name stencilled just below the cockpit where, in the Second World War, Japanese flags or swastikas would indicate kills. But the fact that Dave Hickey had his name here did not mean that it was Hickey’s plane for his exclusive use (which made me wonder what the point was of having his name there at all; I mean, when you write your name on the milk carton in the fridge of a shared student house you do it to indicate that it’s your milk, that it’s not for anyone to take a big gulp of or to pour over a bowl of Crunchy Nut Corn Flakes just because they’ve got the munchies).